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This post has all the ingredients of an old man tilting at windmills or rosy retrospection and all that, but at least I have backups! That is to say, I’m not alone in lamenting the state of cinema today and dreaming of other cinematic realities.

This post is based on an ongoing discussion I’m having with my good friend Igor da Silva Livramento, fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.

Both Igor and I agree that cinema today – especially mainstream, mass-produced US-made films – rarely has anything of value to demonstrate. It’s once again, a living example of what happens when art is industrialized.

Cinema Today: More Superheroes, Less Thinking Individuals

Igor: the new Superman film is just as shit as every other Superman film has been. Well, it was directed and (co-)written by James Gunn, what the hell did I expect? His filmography is subpar. These days, I can stand much better a 1940s classic, but not so much a 2010s manic, 15-seconds-max-per-shot insanity-inducing pile of clichés.

Even watching trailers for older films makes me more emotional than anything out today. I mean, just watch this trailer for The Maltese Falcon, an adaptation of Hammett’s great novel. It moves me; the theatrical acting, the static camera (not swaying everywhere, making me dizzy).

But even later, if you watch a trailer from e.g. The Ordinary People, you’ll notice the theatricality was there, the intensity, the structured plot, the not so obvious story, the character development.

Finding good cinema has been a quest for me. To some degree, it is a quest for films that go against the grain, to use W. Benjamin’s phrase. Think Bergman’s Scenes of a Marriage: it’s utterly soul-crushing, but the ending, though not entirely unexpected, still fights off clichés. It’s a very tense story, but without the usual tension from action films or thrillers; just the clear ruin of a marriage portrayed for our eyes and ears. Whatever is there to see, it’s not cliché. This gets to me.

The only-apparently Mundane: Where Meaning Lies

Chris: Indeed, I fully and unreservedly agree about the devolution of cinema. It’s very rare to see anything of quality nowadays, especially US-made. Everything, from the cinematography to sound to acting to scripts is just an endless circlejerk.

The Ordinary People is excellent in that it has a meta- quality: People don’t realize – and this applies to literature as well as cinema – that there are vast universes of meaning in the most apparently mundane, “ordinary” life encounters.

But no, we must have superheroes, and larger-than-life plots (done and sequeled to death), and hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted for special FX. And as you rightly mentioned, scenes are but a few seconds long (with ridiculously overused panning having sound effects for each camera motion) because the audiences have been conditioned to have the attention span of an amoeba.

Interesting that you mentioned Bergman, whose Persona I recently watched. Though it had a discernible plot and evolution, at the same time it fiercely resisted a canonical interpretation. This is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article, which should give you an idea how wildly symbolical it was:

According to Professor Thomas Elsaesser, the film “has been for film critics and scholars what climbing Everest is for mountaineers: the ultimate professional challenge. […] Critic Peter Cowie wrote, “Everything one says about Persona may be contradicted; the opposite will also be true”. […] Michaels summarized what he calls “the most widely held view” of Persona: that it is “a kind of modernist horror movie”.[…] Film scholar Marc Gervais has suggested several possible interpretations: “a metaphor of the subconscious or unconscious”, “one personality consuming the other”, “the fusing of two personalities into one”, or “the different sides of the same personality fleetingly merging”. Gado suggested that Persona was “an investigation of schizophrenia, a story about lesbian attraction, or a parable about the artist.

There are even Gothic interpretations of Persona, seeing vampiric elements in it – the homoerotic tension between the two women certainly augments this approach. But personally, I like Bergman’s own take on his film the most of all, as he “hoped the film would be felt rather than understood”.

It’s a weird film, its weirdness coming from the apparent – and probably only apparent – unsuitability of certain scenes and inserts here and there. For instance, the film begins with a series of seemingly random inserts, fleeting scenes of various things, and among them for a split-second a clear image of an erect penis. This would be outrageous in today’s puritan world, but not so in 1966 (and outside the US). I wonder if it’s not censored in many countries, even today (perhaps especially today).

Another example: a scene where the two female main characters talk and one of them narrates a long, detailed story about a casual-sex encounter, indeed a foursome, with graphically narrated details. Somehow it “felt” that this scene (a masterfully constructed scene, with long shots not interrupted by cuts and a focus on facial expressions) didn’t make sense in the context of the film – there was a sort of voyeuristic quality to it, it didn’t feel entirely realistic in terms of the character in question.

I mean, picture a very ordinary young woman, engaged to be married, suddenly talking about fucking strangers and coming again and again. However, once you begin to reflect on the experiences portrayed, everything falls into place, albeit on an abstract level. It’s just as Bergman said it: This is a film not to be understood but to be experienced.

A definitive plus of Persona is that it’s fairly short – if I recall correctly something like 80 minutes. Rarely do we see such laconic expressions nowadays; that’s also something I fucking hate, films lasting 180 minutes.

Quality Cinema Today: International, not Mainstream

Igor: I’ll try to give Persona a watch, but I’m verging towards simpler films these days. Think Close-up, by Abbas Kiarostami. A quiet film, plenty of dialogue, deals with moral and ethical questions, extremely human. A human film, indeed.

It has only one music track, by the end, something I hardly ever witnessed; most films go on with music at every moment. Hence: a quiet film. Rhythm and pacing do not feel meticulously crafted, but I suspect they were. It plays almost like a documentary, which is a film, which is a documentary, which…

Chris: I love Kiarostami’s films. I haven’t watched Close-up, but a quick glance at its Wikipedia page makes me suspect I’ll like it, as I’m a sucker for self-referential stuff. My favorite of his films was hands-down Taste of Cherry. It’s characterized by this peaceful urgency, as there’s a man going around Tehran trying to find someone to drop dirt on him after he’s killed himself – or, if he has changed his mind, help him out of the grave.

I also liked The Wind Will Carry Us, describing some journalists’ journey to a remote village where they want to make a story about the funeral rituals there, but the granny whose death they went to witness just refuses to die. Kiarostami has also made a film set in Japan – with Japanese actors – called Like Someone in Love. Perhaps a click below the other two, but still great.

Art, Attention Span, and Education

Igor: I feel we’ve grown too reliant on spastic stimulation with films. Cinema has become a spasm audiovisual session. That can be used to great effect, think Converge’s music video for “Aimless Arrow”. But that’s not how Hollywood has been using quick cuts. No, no. They use anything from 5 to 15 seconds, then cut, rinse and repeat.

What for? To keep the audience engaged. Why? Because smartphones’ endless scrolling has hijacked our neurological systems to such a degree, that we became addicted to quick spikes in dopamine, instead of just paying attention. This kills me deeply, because focusing attention on a single task for a long time was one of the very few biological traits that differentiated humans from other animals.

We’re fucked over far deeper than we suspected. This affects teaching and education more than it affects many other areas. Yes, it affects learning in general, but educational institutions are defined by their role as places for teaching the younger generations, and having a place where they can be under supervision until their parents get free from work to care for them again.

Students can’t read any more, because reading is an inherently slow activity, due to its very nature. Languages are like geological structures, they move just a bit faster than evolution, but not much faster than that. Which means languages are the most affected by the current situation.

Language and the Lack of Variety

This is alarming to another degree: the same areas that understand and work with language in our brains process morality. That is to say, they are responsible for thinking about other people’s behaviours, simulating their inner and outer realities, at least to some degree, regulating our own behaviours in terms of rules (both learned, implicit, explicit, expected, etc.).

Reading much does not equal reading well. That’s a hill I’ve been standing on since my adolescence, when I first understood this through my own reading experience. I’ve tried to explain and promote it ever since that occurred to me, but to no avail. No one cares, people retreat to the same pseudo-argument that “the kids are reading, at least”, which is the same as feeding someone bread and butter at every meal, and claiming “they’re eating, at least”. Falsity through and through.

I feel the same with films and music: we need variety, breadth and depth of experience to enrich our very souls, to enlarge our repertoires, allowing us to better experience other such art forms, and to better grasp them. Even to rank them, if we need to.

Hypocrisy and Moralism

As you mentioned from Persona: for a fleeting moment, an erect penis; much later, a dialogue about explicit sex. A film from the late 1960s. Now, we live in such a sanitized society, we can’t bear to imagine how audacious a director would be to do such things. And all sorts of moralistic discourses shoot from all sides (like an orgy!) trying to control whatever detour we make.

Think how all the “to protect the kids!” discourse is used to “cease and desist” any and everything the right-wing disagree with, while their reverends and priests still molest kids, while their “papa, mama, and kiddo” homes still abuse their wives and children at every level (semiotic, physical, even environmental, etc.).

Chris: Your metaphors on language and geology as well as “kids are reading, at least” are spot on, 100% right on the money (no pun intended). The truth is, we live in the era of quantization and checklists. If the “kids are reading”, someone can check a box off the list and pat themselves on the back. It’s the era of hypocrisy, after all.

Because what else does the “protect the kids!” paradigm show us, but that George Carlin was right when he said that politicians traditionally hide behind three things: the flag, the bible, and children.