This is not a hateful rant but a love letter to Cinema, lamenting the good old days.
These past few years have been quite revelatory to me about movies I watch and the cinephile nature beneath me, the reason for the revelations and insight was not due to watching many films but the lack thereof. In my younger days of moviegoing and even watching films that were decades older than me there was an expression of love for not only the characters on screen but the movie itself, to leave after was a sobering experience as the world seemed too unusual before. Nowadays this feeling is exceedingly rare, do not conflate the feeling of wanting the next part of the movie asap with this feeling as both are highly different.
To speak of the death of cinema is quite impossible if not for the age of content and the constant franchises. The word content is not just an insult to describe an artist’s work used as an industry-wide standard but the yearning for a time when movies were special in and of themselves and had a shred of individuality along with a distinctness of a signature by an artist hidden in them. Cinema has been lost in a sea of content and is often contorted by the recommendation algorithms that govern it, they are vicious but docile in nature as they have the main purpose of hooking you for as long as possible by suggesting things based on your watch history, a comforting sense of calmness as the content grows more undifferentiable from each other, but what does that do to the art of the cinema and based on the data what the algorithm seems to do is suggest a return to the familiar with breezy sitcoms like friends and the office dominating recommendations. But I understand that commenting on the recommendation algorithm is a bit snobby as everybody needs comfort food. But what I know is that the best recommendations I have gotten are by curated lists and suggestions.
This also leads and correlates to my next point the franchise problem, for cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences. Cinephilia tells us that the Hollywood remake of Fincher’s "Fight Club" cannot be as good as the original. But due to the rise in inflation of the expectations of profits caused by movies, it has been hijacked from the creators, making mid-small budget movies impossible.
To bring a more personal taste to this essay let’s talk about Indian Cinema, it has been a bit different from what you’d expect. It was primarily about escapism and it still didn’t make it bad. There was still nature of amazingness and beauty in it from just the sheer presence of Amitabh Bachchan, and Madhuri Dixit. There was a certain excitement in watching these movies, as the set locations in DDLJ were beautiful, but they would just be plain landscape shots if not for the chemistry between SRK and Kajol.
The movies by Priyadarshan, and Rohit Shetty like Hera Pheri, Hungama, Bhool Bhulaiyaa, Golmaal, etc., all had a certain sameness to them. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else. Commercial cinema across the world has settled for creating derived and bloated filmmaking by using recombination of tropes in hopes of achieving the past successes.
Previously Cinema was supposed to be a revelation of sorts, aesthetic emotional, and rational revelations. It was about the characters involved and their complex and paradoxical natures. It was about confronting the unexpected and unknown on the screen and in life. it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarged the sense of what was possible in an art form. The revelation, mystery, or genuine emotional danger is just not there in the current movies. There is nothing at risk. These movies are designed to satisfy a certain specific demand and are made by checking the variations of certain finite themes and approved tropes.
Most Theaters are occupied with commercial movies and no it isn’t a supply and demand thing, it’s a chicken and egg thing If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course, they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.
The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audio-visual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. Each generation faces these kinds of changes with the introduction of new technology. But it seems there is a certain finality this time due to the rise of streaming services and generic content.
The desire to lose yourself in other people's lives . . . faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie -- and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. This experience was part of "going to the movies".
Good movies and even great ones will continue to disappear into thin air as long as movies are made, and great movies will continue to be made, but whether they'll be cinema or more likely just more content is the thorn in my heart.
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