Thoughts on the future of film
Those
keeping abreast of the recent news will have seen that several major cinema
chains have announced plans to close theatres in the US and UK indefinitely.
This is due to a resurgence of infections related to Covid-19. Cineworld was
the first to fold, while Odeon will be cutting its opening times to weekends
only. Elsewhere, VUE is currently assessing its situation, but the outcome is
potentially bleak. Each of these decisions will result in tens of thousands of
job losses as well as a reduction in the number of screens available for new
films.
Combined
with the news that the latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die, has had its
release date pushed back to 2021, with many other large franchise films
following suit, the cultural discourse is starting to wonder if there'll even
be a cinema left by the time these tentpole films are able to be
released.
Weekend
[Jean-Luc Godard, 1967]:
The
Guardian have published several articles on this recently, each of them speaking
to a greater concern facing the future of cinema than the necessities around Coronavirus
or social distancing. In the first, Time to try harder – James Bond has
no licence to kill the film industry, Britain's worst film critic Peter Bradshaw
effectively blames the producers of No Time to Die for potentially destroying
the cinema as an actual medium, writing:
"But
the other question is: who is to blame for the Cineworld debacle? Big
blockbuster movies are routinely nicknamed “tentpoles” for a reason. They keep
the whole big top upright. The announcement is that the new James Bond film, No
Time to Die, will come out next spring (a transparently vague and unreliable
promise) having been already delayed from the spring of this year. It is
enraging that Eon (the Bond producers) have lost their nerve so spectacularly,
pulling the movie on which the industry had been relying – the big-screen
exhibitors that have been supporting and nurturing the 007 franchise since the
60s."
Other
articles followed. Can the 'awards-bait' movie survive
the impact of coronavirus?, From James Bond to Marvel: can
Hollywood survive a year without blockbusters?, and more recently, Tenet didn't just fail to save
cinema – it may well have killed it for good, in which Guy Lodge (no idea!) blames the underperformance of the latest
Christopher Nolan movie for killing cinemas.
To
paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of cinema have, historically
speaking, been greatly exaggerated. As early as 1967, ground-breaking filmmaker
and firebrand of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, ended his controversial
social satire Weekend (1967) with a title card declaring "Fin de
cinema." (See above.) Since that time, several other filmmakers, from
Peter Greenaway and David Cronenberg, to Martin Scorsese and Bernard Rose (among
others), have declared cinema to be dead, or at the very least celebrated the
end of theatrical distribution in favour of home cinema viewing. In each
instance, the cinema, as a collective experience, has continued to flourish. Or
has it?
If one
thing is consistent throughout the discussion on the future of cinema from The
Guardian and elsewhere, it's the idea that the survival of cinema, as a
tradition, depends on the success of huge franchise movies or films that cost
over $100m to produce (and another $100m to promote.) As far as longevity and
diversity of the medium is concerned, this model of business was never going to
be tenable. There was always the possibility that the bubble would eventually
burst. Covid has only quickened what was already inevitable.
Histoire(s)
du cinema: Chapter 1(b) - Une Histoire seule [Jean-Luc Godard, 1988]:
If the
modern cinema has become a place where only the biggest, loudest, flashiest of
films with the most colossal of budgets can find purchase, then what happens
when those films can no longer be distributed or even produced? Then, the
industry dies! If you've banked all your success on a single horse and then the
horse can no longer run, you've not only failed yourself, you've also exposed
the lie that it was ever a proper race to begin with. For the race to be genuinely
exciting and engaging, it needs to be open to all participants, not just a
single, safe bet.
At one
time, the cinema was a place where blockbusters and sequels could sit alongside
serious dramas and genre films that were aimed at an adult audience. For Every
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) there was a Dances with Wolves (1991) or The
Silence of the Lambs (1991). For every Batman Returns (1992) there was A League
of Their Own (1992) or Basic Instinct (1992). Small, character-driven films
like Ghost, Pretty Woman, Home Alone and Driving Miss Daisy were among the
top-ten biggest hits of 1990, while Jurassic Park, Sleepless in Seattle,
Indecent Proposal and Cliffhanger were among the top ten hits of 1993. In each
instance, these were original films made without any obligation to create a
franchise. Even the Disney blockbusters from this period were effectively
stand-alone entries: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King
(1994), Toy Story (1995), etc. Three decades ago, independently produced,
low-budget, auteur-driven films like The Crying Game (1992), Pulp Fiction
(1994), Clerks (1994) and Trainspotting (1996) could go on to become a breakout
success, impacting and enlivening the cultural discourse as much as the bigger
blockbusters. These days it's more difficult for independent films to become
sleeper-hits, although it's not impossible.
In
recent years, the audience for serious, slow-moving, introspective drama has
largely gravitated towards television and streaming services, where story and
character-driven content has found a new home. Putting short-term profits above
longevity and legacy, Hollywood allowed the cinemas to become, as Martin
Scorsese described them, like a theme park attraction. This assessment makes
sense, in principle – the cinema has always been about spectacle: from The
Arrival of a Train (1896) and The General (1926) to 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) and Fist of Fury (1972) – however, it also illustrates how little the
cinema means to audiences who have come to see it as little more than a vessel
for escapism.
The
cinema, as a sensory, audio-visual experience, is powerful enough to transform
and transport; to reveal and explore human emotions, psychology, politics,
history, as well as genuine expression and experimentation. Relatively recent
films like The Tree of Life (2011), The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013), Goodbye
to Language (2014), Horse Money (2014), The Lighthouse (2019) and others, aren't
just great cinema because of their storytelling and characterizations alone, they're
great cinema because they translate thoughts and emotions into sounds and images;
they transcend the parameters of time; they enliven and even infuriate the
senses. To go into a darkened space and to see these films projected within a
pool of light, makes us forget our sense of time and place. It allows us to
travel between worlds, ideas, and emotions. And yet these films are never seen
as the lifeblood of cinema, nor reason enough to preserve it. Somehow, we let
the cinema be reduced to a level of illustrative text.
Goodbye
to Language [Jean-Luc Godard, 2014]:
Whether
it's optimism or wishful thinking, everyone assumes Covid will eventually go
away. Films are being pushed back to 2021, some even to 2022. But there's no
guarantee that Covid will ever go away, at least not without a successful
vaccine to safeguard against it. Next year we could still be in the same
situation, with even less blockbusters and hundred-million-dollar franchise
films being produced to fill the eventual slots. New films are still being
produced, many are in production at this moment in time, but how many of them will
see the inside of a cinema in the conventional sense?
While
the short-term prognosis is bleak, I think the cinema, as a medium, will ultimately
persevere, even if it has to die before it can really be reborn. While cinema
attendances will continue to fall – with more and more audiences choosing to
watch films at home and from a safe distance – I think there's an engrained
part of us that still hopes to experience a work collectively. What we might
see is a rise of a "grassroots" cinema; a "virtual" cinema;
a "pop-up" cinema shared between friends and families, or by local
communities. A cinema where people come together to watch films projected onto white
walls, or onto hung blankets; or films screened in outdoor spaces. The cinema
can be anything we want it to be.
