As you may have heard, legendary director Martin Scorsese shared some thoughts about the current crop of blockbuster films based on comic book superheroes. “That’s not cinema,” he stated. “As well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances,” they are more analogous to “theme parks” than any other art form. Well, much of the internet did not like that, and a predictable dust up ensued.
We’re not much interested in that (though, full disclosure, we’re with him). But the shouting got loud enough that Marty (Mr. Scorsese to us) decided to take to the pages of the New York Times with a short essay thoughtfully and very respectfully elaborating his position—and in so doing penned one of the great modern statements of cinephilia. That got our attention.
In 1966, the film critic Stanley Kauffmann coined the term “The Film Generation,” what he described as the “hunger for film that young people were full of in the sixties . . . the enthusiasm, the appetite, the avidity for film.” Roger Ebert, invoking Kauffmann, described himself as “a member of that generation,” among those “younger filmgoers who were obsessed with film.” Ebert’s best work over the course of a long career – his “great movies” essays – most clearly reflected this passion.
It can be hard to describe what Kauffmann called “the avidity for film,” but a number of seminal statements – which we can’t recommend highly enough – express and are inbued with the culture that is cinephilia; our favorites include Susan Sontag’s “The Decay of Cinema,” Paul Schrader’s long essay wrestling with the concept of a film canon, and, especially, Philip Lopate’s “Anticipation of La Notte: The Heroic Age of Moviegoing.” (“If the movie had been genuinely great, I would leave the screening place inspired and pleasantly conscious of my isolation, and wander the streets for a while before taking the subway home. I came to love the way the gray city streets looked after a movie, the cinematic blush they seemed to wear.”) It is not a coincidence that Ebert, Lopate, and Schrader were born between 1942 and 1946 (Sontag was a bit older).
For anybody who loves the movies, these are must-read essays. With “I said Marvel Movies aren’t Cinema: Let me Explain,” Scorsese (born in 1942) adds to this list. You should read the whole thing, but we’d like to call attention to a few passages in particular. After three fine opening paragraphs that touch the required qualifications, there is this: “For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”
But wait, there’s more: “And that was the key for us: it was an art form. There was some debate about that at the time, so we stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance. And we came to understand that the art could be found in many different places and in just as many forms — in “The Steel Helmet” by Sam Fuller and “Persona” by Ingmar Bergman, in “It’s Always Fair Weather” by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and “Scorpio Rising” by Kenneth Anger, in “Vivre Sa Vie” by Jean-Luc Godard and “The Killers” by Don Siegel.”
Note that he’s not just pouring our heart out here—equally important is to observe how radically different those three pairs of films are from one another. Similarly, note the wildly heterogeneous selection of name drops that follow: Hitchcock, Paul Thomas Anderson, Claire Denis, Spike Lee, Ari Aster, Kathryn Bigelow, Wes Anderson. Scorsese could have effortlessly added several dozen distinct voices more. This is not about taste, or about telling you what movies you are “supposed” to like—this is about an ethos, about valuing movies, of whatever type (including light comedies), that have something to say: “When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.” Whereas, in fundamental contrast, comic-book blockbusters lack “revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands . . . market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.”
As these sterile, suit-driven business-ventures increasingly represent the dominant film culture (we find it beyond baffling and utterly bizarre when fans of particular movies celebrate box office numbers like they’re getting points or something), what is at stake, Sontag suggested, “is not cinema . . . but only cinephilia — the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired.”
Any Questions?