In a new essay on Federico Fellini, published in the March 2021 edition of Harper’s Magazine revered director Martin Scorsese talks about his fear that streaming services are “devaluing” cinema by reducing films to “content.”
Look, I’ll listen to and pay attention ANYTIME Martin Scorsese wants to wax poetic about state of cinema. He’s been putting out quality work for over five decades. He knows what he is talking about. Respect. I see his point and I agree with it and disagree with it. Same argument, different year, rose colored hindsight. These concepts are all about how you think of them.
On the one hand I’m sympathetic to his point of view – the viewing experience for both television and movies has fundamentally changed for a lot of people because of streaming services and binge watching, and the big Hollywood studios have mostly withdrawn from the mid-budget movie realm. I can see how that’s a real bummer for some movie buffs.
On the other hand though, directors like Scorsese who make movies that are critically acclaimed, financed and distributed by major studios, and box office hits have always been rare. I’m really, really skeptical that there was ever a point in time that movie-going audiences and major studios cared more about Fellini and the French New Wave than about whatever popcorn entertainment was leading the box office.
And while there might be fewer auteurs who are household names (among film buffs; again I am extremely skeptical that the majority of the megaplex patrons have ever heard of Fellini or any of the other great European directors), it has also never been a better time for films made by marginalized peoples that tell stories Hollywood is uninterested in. Are there studios out there willing to spend $40 million on high-brow art films? No, and that’s sad. But Netflix, Amazon, etc. have, by spending a little money on a lot of different films, most likely greenlit a lot more films from people of color, queer people, and immigrants in the last five years than the major studios have.
I thought movies had primarily been a mass-produced entertainment-like product since they were first invented, and any resemblance to Art™ was purely coincidental.
There’s no such thing as “artistic value”
All content is art, and value is subjective.
All art produced within a capitalist framework has to exist within that framework. That doesn’t make it not art. Novels, music, whatever else are all produced within capitalism’s framework too, but that doesn’t make a lot of them not art.
Times change; businesses change. Making movies has always been a business – if Scorsese’s films had consistently lost money, he would have had far fewer opportunities to make them – and the business model has changed, as business models always do. Some things are lost, some things are gained. You can regret what was lost, but “things were better in my day” is the very essence of the old man shouting at a cloud. I think there should always be preserved the means to show film prints, but I’m grateful for digital and streaming platforms, for offering greater access to content that otherwise would not be seen outside of the occasional museum or film festival retrospective.
–Dagobot
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