Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See - Hardcover

Rosenbaum, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556524064 ISBN 13: 9781556524066

Verlag: Chicago Review Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Is the cinema, as writers from David Denby to Susan Sontag have claimed, really dead? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, films are better than ever—we just can’t see the good ones. Movie Wars cogently explains how movies are packaged, distributed, and promoted, and how, at every stage of the process, the potential moviegoer is treated with contempt. Using examples ranging from the New York Times’s coverage of the Cannes film festival to the anticommercial practices of Orson Welles, Movie Wars details the workings of the powerful forces that are in the process of ruining our precious cinematic culture and heritage, and the counterforces that have begun to fight back.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jonathan Rosenbaum is a film critic for the Chicago Reader and is the author of Moving Places, Placing Movies, Movies as Politics, and Dead Man. He is a frequent contributor to Film Comment and Cinéaste. He lives in Chicago.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is a film critic for the Chicago Reader and is the author of Moving Places, Placing Movies, Movies as Politics, and Dead Man. He is a frequent contributor to Film Comment and Cinéaste. He lives in Chicago.

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Excerpt

Is the Cinema Really Dead?

[The] early nineties have not been as encouraging as the early seventies. ... It is not as easy now to believe in the medium's vitality or its readiness for great challenges. So many of the noble figures of film history are dead now, and who can be confident that they are being replaced?.... The author sees fewer films now. He would as soon go for a walk, look at paintings, or take in a ball game. [1994]

It has become harder, this past year, to go back in the dark with hope or purpose. The place where "magic" is supposed to occur has seemed a lifeless pit of torn velour, garish anonymity, and floors sticky from spilled sodas. Forlornness hangs in the air like damp; things are so desolate, you could set today's version of Waiting for Godot in the stale, archaic sadness of a movie theater.... This is not just a lamentation that movies are in a very bad state. Rather, I feel the medium has sunk beyond anything we dreamed of, leaving us stranded, a race of dreamers.... [1996]

I still look at movies the same way today that I did [at the time of the New Wave], but I know it's not the same world, exactly. Even if we enter the theater the same way, we don't go out the same way. [Question: How is it different?] Less hope.... [1996]

Cinema's hundred years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories, and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. This doesn't mean that there won't be any more new films that one can admire. But such films won't simply be exceptions; that's true of great achievements in any art. They have to be heroic violations of the norms and practices which now govern moviemaking everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world ? which is to say, everywhere. And ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, will continue to be astonishingly witless; already the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative filmmaking, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art, in the hopes of reproducing past success. Every film that hopes to reach the largest possible audience is designed as some kind of remake. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the twentieth century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art. [1997]

It is perhaps too late to lament the disappearance of the foreign film from a major place in our culture. After many depressing conversations, I have found that younger moviegoers, reared on little but American movies, imagine that mourners for the foreign cinema are talking about some fool's paradise of zinc counters and cappuccino, a pretentious refuge for bearded losers and solemn girls in black. "Cinéastes" ? isn't that what they used to call them? It is worse than useless to tell such moviegoers that Bergman and Kurosawa, Antonioni and Fellini, Godard and Truffaut ? to name just the most obvious figures ? defined our moods in late adolescence, enlarged our sense of romance and freedom and passionate melancholy as well as the expressive possibilities of movies, and that their influence was so pervasive that Bonnie and Clyde as well as the careers of Woody Allen, Paul Mazursky, Robert Altman, and a host of other American directors would not have been possible without them.... One must quickly add that the current French, Italian, German, and Japanese cinemas are but a remnant of their former selves, and that the new movies from China, Russia, Finland, and Iran, however fascinating, cannot replace the old masterworks in excitement and glamour. "Where are the great foreign films now?" a friend asks, by which he means that he refuses to feel guilty about not going when there are no masterpieces to see. He has a point, but even when a good French movie opens here (like Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie, in 1996), it's hard to scare up much of an audience for it. [1998]

    One could cite other recent texts voicing the same sentiments, butthese five representative samples ? drawn from four highly respectedwriters whom I'd prefer not to identify right away ? should suffice. Iwon't identify them just yet because I'm interested primarily in whatthey're saying, not who they are. Their striking similarity in tone andposition tempts one to conclude that they all swim in the same water,which further suggests that they must be right to some extent.

    But are they? Or, more to the point, can they be right? The firstquotation laments our lack of confidence that "the noble figures offilm history ... are being replaced" and the fifth is equally morose:"the new movies from China, Russia, Finland, and Iran, however fascinating,cannot replace the old masterworks in excitement andglamour." But if I complained that no messiah has come along in twothousand years to replace Jesus, that we haven't yet found adequatesubstitutes for Brueghel or Shakespeare, that no novelists have comealong lately to fill the gaps left by Proust and Faulkner, and that nojazz musician since the fifties has displayed the genius of CharlieParker, would I be saying versions of the same thing, or something different?A replacement implies a duplication, or at least an equivalent,rather than something new. Furthermore, since Jesus, Brueghel,Shakespeare, Proust, Faulkner, and Parker may not have been adequatelyappreciated in their own times, anyone who came along to"replace" them probably wouldn't be adequately appreciated either.

    Maybe the first and fifth quotations are implying that, rather thaninsufficiently recognized "noble masters" or "masterworks," we lackmasters and masterworks period ? and that, unlike most of our historicalpredecessors, we're fully capable of rooting them out and recognizingtheir merits. But how do we root them out? Only a tiny fractionof finished films actually arrive in theaters, and if we're talkingabout foreign-language films in this country, we're talking about lessthan one percent of what gets shown commercially; very few criticsnowadays ? including the four represented above ? are likely to seeall of these. If the handful of foreign films that open here, the eliteless-than-one-percent, were the absolute best that's being made ? whichautomatically assumes that "the best" equals the most commercial ? thenwe might have the basis for making such a generalization.But what evidence supports that belief beyond wishfulthinking? Are we confident, for starters, that distributors see all thepossible candidates? And that they have such impeccable taste thatthey would recognize the best films as a simple matter of course? Orthat the best films, even if they saw them and recognized their merits,are invariably commercial propositions worth investing in?

    Still, it's the usual role of critics ? bolstered by such adages as"Cream rises to the top" (even if it takes a few centuries for someonelike Jesus) ? to make such pronouncements. To put it bluntly, we moreor less have to make such sweeping generalizations from time to timeif we expect to be listened to. To some degree, we all have to assumethat we have some idea of the value of what's being produced in a givenart form, even if we prove to be wrong in the long run, because toassume otherwise is to abnegate all responsibility about such...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Chicago Review Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1556524064
• ISBN 13: 9781556524066
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 234
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar