Artificial Intelligence

The Current Cinema

A recent video posted by Insider, How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming, gets to the broken heart of my problem with the current blockbuster cinema, and helps to explain why the directed-by-committee focus of the modern Hollywood franchise film is so frequently devoid of originality, imagination and risk.

Focusing on the work of previsualization company The Third Floor, Inside preface their video with the following description: The Third Floor is one of the world's top visualization studios and has worked on 19 of the 23 installments in Marvel's "Infinity Saga." From previs and stuntvis to techvis and postvis, The Third Floor's work on Marvel movies runs through the entire production process. The first previsualizations of a Marvel film can begin well in advance of its release date, often before the screenplay is fully finished. Find out how Marvel visualizes its movies years before filmmaking and how this practice has helped the MCU rise its position of box-office dominance today.

The video goes on to explain that "previs" frequently occurs before directors and cinematographers have even been hired, meaning the job of a filmmaker hired to helm a Marvel movie is less about directing than merely recreating what has already been rendered as 3D, computer generated animation.

How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming [Insider, 2021]:

You could argue that this process is merely the modern, 21st century equivalent of the storyboard, and to an extent you would be correct. Many filmmakers, from Alfred Hitchcock to the Coen Brothers, have been known to rigorously storyboard every shot in their films prior to the production process. But the difference here is that Hitchcock, the Coen Brothers and others would sit down with a storyboard artist and translate their ideas to the page. They'd then work with cinematographers, production designers and members of the art department to turn that storyboard into a facsimile of reality.

With previsualization, it's not necessarily the traditional filmmakers that are designing and directing the movie, it's teams like The Third Floor, who are creating demo versions of the film and in the process making many of the creative decisions that inform the finished work. As one of the quoted sources in the film puts it, [the previs team are] "literally an additional director/writer/editor on the movie." With this in mind, why are we still crediting directors with the success of these films?

How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming [Insider, 2021]:

The uniformity of Marvel's cinema is not really a surprise at this point. That they're produced by committee is self-evident. A film like Black Panther (2018), aesthetically, looks a lot like Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Captain Marvel (also 2019), and very little like director Ryan Coogler's previous films, Fruitvale Station (2013) and Creed (2015). This is because the actual job of directing these films has already been done prior to the director coming on-board. This is why Marvel's cinema feels rote and homogenous compared to earlier, auteur-driven superhero movies like Batman Returns (1992), Unbreakable (2000) and even The Dark Knight (2008).

As one of the contributors to the Insider film puts it, "All a director has to do is be an avid viewer of their own movie," which in other words is a total dismissal or rejection of the role of the director as a creative or artistic individual, reducing it to little more than an arbiter or brand guardian.

For those that enjoy Marvel's movies as escapist spectacle, this is hardly concerning. Most audiences don't care about the role of director and aren't going to see these films for their expression of personal art, politics, or ideology. But what does it say about the role of the film critic? Marvel movies are frequently the most critically acclaimed blockbuster films released. When we have a generation of critics not just rejecting but actively ridiculing a work of personal, auteur-driven cinema, like Glass (2019) by M. Night Shymalan, then falling over themselves to praise directors for work they didn't even create, and films that were put together by artificial intelligence, like those by Marvel, then the future of cinema as anything less than a corporate, committee-driven enterprise, is seriously at risk.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: On contemporary cinema: Superheroes and the denial of humanity [11 October 2020], The Film Director as Superstar [15 August 2020], The Current Cinema [09 January 2020], The Popular Cinema [22 June 2019]

The Film Director as Superstar

Or: The death of the author auteur

The title here refers to the 1970 book by Joseph Gelmis. I haven't read it, but I saw the cover used on another blog site, where it was being discussed in relation to a quote by Bernardo Bertolucci, and the image captured my attention immediately. The book, as I understand it, is a collection of recorded interviews with a number of high-profile filmmakers that had emerged during the post-war period. Brian de Palma, Robert Downey, Andy Warhol, John Cassavetes, Lindsay Anderson, Arthur Penn, Roger Corman, Richard Lester, Mike Nichols and Stanley Kubrick, among others.

The cover is fascinating because I can't tell if it's a painting or a sculpted model. I want to assume it's the latter, but I'm probably wrong. Chalk it up to my waning eyesight. However, certain elements of the image, the lighting on the hands, the texture of the jeans, the weight of the viewfinder and the perspective of the little director's chair, all have something more tactile and physical about them than a two-dimensional painting.

The Film Director as Superstar [Joseph Gelmis, 1970]:

I think there's something inherently arresting and exciting about the book covers from this particular period. Books published by Penguin and Pelican, specifically during the late 1960s and early 1970s, are always interesting and evocative in their design and illustration. I remember when I went to university, I'd spend hours in the library browsing the shelves of old books that had been collected from the decades before I was born. Books that had lived, that had been enjoyed, that had notes penciled into the margins by previous generations; books that in every sense of the word had a story to tell, their covers barely held together by sellotape yellowed by age.

To this day, if I'm looking for book recommendations, I'll browse old cover art online and become captivated by the presentation of a particular book, then find myself intensely disappointed when I find its more generic looking, modern-day incarnation.

Collage of old Penguin publications [John Greenaway, flickr.com, 2010]:

Many of these covers, and others, speak to me. Every one of these books looks like a must-read.

The cover and, I assume, to a large extent, the subject matter of Gelmis's book, mark it out as a relic to another time. On one level, its cover, no matter how captivating or "cute" it might appear, is a reminder that the history and legacy of the cinema was in many ways colonized by white men. White-male critics elevating the work of white-male filmmakers, often to the detriment of marginalized filmmakers from other backgrounds and persuasions. The director on the cover could have been modeled on Gordon Parks, Satyajit Ray, Agnès Varda, Ousmane Sembène, Marguerite Duras or Akira Kurosawa, all of whom were either superstars or on the road to becoming one.

However, a certain image, epitomizing what a film director looks like, had already been established during the early silent cinema, with figures like Erich von Stroheim, D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, King Vidor, Charlie Chaplin, Josef von Sternberg, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, many of whom continued their respective careers into the post-war cinema, adding to a collective shorthand for what a director was, looked like, or did. For the film culture of the 1970s, still enlivened by the then-recent innovations and provocations of Stanley Kubrick, John Cassavetes, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and others, it must have been a difficult legacy to break away from.

And yet the book is also a relic in the sense that the director, at least as far as the mainstream cinema is concerned, is no longer a superstar. On the contrary, if directors during the post-war years were elevated via an engagement with the auteur theory into cultural "brand names" that could sell a movie to an audience as sufficiently as any Hollywood star, then the modern cinema, existing as it is side-by-side with serialized content, short videos and so-called "prestige" TV, is more preoccupied with companies and studios, be it Disney and Marvel, Netflix and Amazon, Warner Bros. and A24.

The franchise mentality that now infects all discourse surrounding the cinema means that the corporate brand has been elevated above the individual. Nobody cares who directs the latest Marvel superhero movie, or the next Fast & Furious sequel, or the next Star Wars or Jurassic Park spin-offs. This is because the vision of the director is no longer that important. When safeguarding the integrity and fandom of the IP and delivering content that will satisfy the largest number of viewers without causing offence or disappointment, the director becomes little more than a franchise custodian. A brand-guardian that exists to follow the instructions of the studio bosses, the test audiences, and the major theatre owners. They work to translate the studio-approved text into studio-approved images.

Fellini Satyricon (1969) vs. Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

[comparative collage created by the blog author]:

The director as superstar, as brand, as "auteur", replaced by the studio as brand, as author. Can you imagine a modern-day filmmaker being afforded such a level of cultural reverence that their name features not just above the title, but a part of it?

Tenet (2020) vs. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

[comparative collage created by the blog author]:

Christopher Nolan is one of the most acclaimed and successful "auteur" filmmakers currently working, but even after generating billions at the box-office, his name barely carries the same promotional weight as Kubrick's.

Perhaps a sequel to Gelmis's book could be called "The Film Director as Dependable Journeyman", or perhaps less sympathetically, "The Film Director as Cog in the Corporate Machine." Something that would express explicitly how undervalued the role of the director, not as superstar, but as artist, has become in the twenty-first century.

It's a shame too, as we're now at a point in the history of the medium where the diversity of voices working in the English-language cinema is becoming richer every year. There are directors as varied as Steve McQueen, Dee Reese, Barry Jenkins, Jordan Peele, M. Night Shyamalan, Cate Shortland, Andrea Arnold, Ava DuVernay, Jon M. Chu, Greta Gerwig, Melina Matsoukas and Ryan Coogler among others, but in most cases these directors aren't dominating the discussion the way Hitchcock, Spielberg and Tarantino did. Instead, they've been forced to either sell out, to assimilate, to become subservient to the brands and the studios, or their work gets released onto Amazon or Netflix and becomes just another bit of product to be discovered.

Superheroes

Or: why no one is waiting for The Avengers to save the day

If one positive is to come out of the current Covid-19 crisis, at least from an entertainment perspective, then let it be a total and utter disillusionment with the prevailing "superhero" cinema that has dominated the cultural discourse for the past twenty years.

At a time when real heroes are stepping forward to keep our societies from grinding to a halt or descending into outright anarchy, how are we meant to thrill at the adventures of a bunch of rubber-clad cartoon characters who routinely save the planet by destroying large chunks of it?

Characters like Batman and Iron Man – intellectually gifted billionaires with questionable politics who respectively fight crime and extraterrestrial threat, but have no inner-lives, at least nothing that is in any way human or believable – or characters like Superman and Wonder Woman – who aren't even human, and as such teach us nothing about the sacrifices and hardships that real heroes face every day.

These caricatures, lionized in contemporary art and entertainment, would be completely ineffectual against the current issues facing humanity.

Marvel's The Avengers (Avengers Assemble) [Joss Whedon, 2012]:

In movies, when "The Avengers" or "The Justice League" save the world from some mad warmonger, or quell an extraterrestrial invasion by firing a blue beam of light into the sky, they routinely leave cities destroyed, businesses lost, and lives disrupted and upturned. Because these films, and by extension the comic books that inspire them, are devoid of reality and depth, we never see the cost of this destruction.

We don't see the businesses that failed because employees were unable to go to work. We don't see the resultant economic recession that hangs over our lives for the next two decades like a black cloud. We don't see the medical staff and emergency services stretched to capacity and having to deal with the fallout from these "superheroes" and their collateral damage. We don't see the death, the grief, the public mourning. We don't see the aftereffects of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. We don't see the low paid but undoubtedly "key workers" that must risk their health and wellbeing to go to work each day, while the end of the world spectacle rages all around them.

What we get instead is hero worship directed towards the rich and privileged. Fictional characters who can only save the world against contrived and unnatural disasters that will literally never happen.

The real heroes aren't Iron Man or The Incredible Hulk, they're not Wonder Woman or Captain Marvel, and they're certainly not the Hollywood phonies that get paid $20 million a movie to stand in front of a greenscreen and play pretend. These people aren't saving the planet. They're self-isolating in their mansions, consoled by their wealth and celebrity, happy to sit this one out while the people that will never make half a million dollars in their entire lifetime risk life and limb to support us.

Behind the Scenes - Avengers: Infinity War [Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018]:

Photo credit: @Russo_Brothers

The next time you see a movie about some alien Übermensch, billionaire vigilante or genetically modified super soldier, ask yourself why we're not seeing our key workers depicted in the same manner. Why do we hold these ridiculous characters to a higher cultural esteem than any of the following?

All hospital staff, from doctors and nurses, surgeons and ward clerks, to cleaners, porters, security teams, IT operators, catering staff and more. Every one of them is vital to keeping our hospitals and emergency services running. Bus drivers, train drivers, delivery drivers, ambulance crews, police officers, firefighters, shelf stackers, checkout workers, cleaning operatives, funeral arrangers, coroners, childcare workers, farm workers, fruit and veg pickers, pharmacists... these are some of the lowest paid and denigrated jobs in society, and yet they're the absolute lifeblood of our society.

Absolute nobodies, like Josh Brolin, Robert Downey Jr. and Gal Gadot, or any other Hollywood celebrity playacting for a living, can accumulate a collective net worth of anywhere up to $100 million, while those who work for our emergency services get paid around 14-15k a year, and our cleaners and supermarket workers draw a minimum wage, if that! It's disgusting.

Yes, these films provide escapism, which is a necessary opiate from the oft-crushing realities that we face, however, this particular sub-genre of films has been allowed to proliferate to the detriment of stories about real heroes and the real challenges that we, as a global society, have encountered.

The Current Cinema

A Question of Aesthetics?

Avengers: Endgame [Joe & Anthony Russo, 2019]:

Image credits: Larry Wright @refocusedmedia [Twitter] / Marvel Studios