BY JAMES FANE-TREFUSIS
Cinema this year has been putting people into a tail spin. 2019 has got us all questioning, especially concerning blockbuster filmmaking, what cinema is. Auteurs of old, like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ken Loach are, with certain choice words, going head to head with the behemoths of commodified big-screen entertainment. One such film adapted from a blockbusting superhero story has created real life political and security concerns. “Joker” is a film that calls back to the character dramas Scorsese made his own in the 70’s, the decade when films where knowingly artistic while still drawing big crowds. Like in those days, “Joker” is a big budget franchise movie, with gritty, realistic concerns without a CGI army in sight.
N.B. This piece was written before Scorsese clarified his position in his New York Times Article. As such, it was a speculation on his position considering my knowledge of his concerns as a director, a cinephile, and a champion of the history of cinema.
The “Pure Cinema”
Tarantino has courted controversy with acclaim this summer in his treatment of woman characters, real life characters, and real-life tragedies in his film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Like his fellow white, male, cinephile directors, he calls back to a lost time when cinema was pure in the sense that it moulded reality, and idealised it into artistically challenging forms. The criticism with the most consensus for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is that it is slow and indulgent. In that film, we spend leisurely, cinematic time with a stationary camera placed in the back of a moving car, in the style of serious filmmakers of old, like Jean Luc Godard. Is cinema better when we follow around real actors of flesh and blood? When it explores their physicality, their emotional state, and not how hard a digitally created character can hit another in the face?
The focus on the human body, on the physicality of Joaquin Phoenix’s performances is one of the highlights of “Joker”. This is an extremely exhilarating cinematic concern we rarely see in other comic book films where each CGI slugfest has a digital plasticity. Of course, these special effects artists are the creation of are just that artists tirelessly and creatively ingeniously using their form to create wonderful imagery and rich complex worlds.Yet it is understandable to mourn the loss of how way cinema once told stories using the tools that didn’t consist rely on a computers.
That being said, cinema has always employed cutting edge technology for the sake of the thrill;, the chariot race in “Ben-Hur” exemplifies the big-budget effects pictures of its time. Even “Citizen Kane” has effects-enhanced shots: one quite unconvincing one where a Cockatoo is imposed into the foreground of a shot. “Singin’ in the Rain’s” use of superimposed imagery in a montage sequence, or when Gene Kelly magically lifting above the stage in the “Broadway Melody” sequence. Alfred Hitchcock, the auteur before he was ever called one, was the master of using the illusions of cinema to create his tension-filled art. Hitchcock used effects and production design as ways of imposing control over the worlds he created. Most strikingly using animation in “Vertigo” to represent the tortured sub-conscience of Scotty. Most pointedly Scorsese himself is using digital de-ageing technologies to let screen greats play their thirty-year-old versions of themselves. This technique was employed by the big-bad Marvel itself in “Captain Marvel”.
A New Epic Tradition?
Could the problem be a what we mourn is the loss of one artistic vision? The bonehead studio executives are in charge after all; however, the Russo brothers were architects of their own universe. Their vision has led to films that uphold the baton of the epic Hollywood tradition, spanning from “Lawrence of Arabia” to “The Godfather” to “Star Wars.”
So why, in this case, aren’t the films of Marvel considered cinema? These films have been decried by people who have worked in a similar tradition before, namely Coppola, who in his time was the master of the Hollywood epic.
Scorsese himself is no stranger to epic cinema but maybe the safety of these homogeneous entertainments makes them less cinematic. When a challenging film is made with studio big bucks in the name of the immortal character himself, “everybody loses their mind.” The backlash against “Joker” seems to be proof of this. It’s like the masses can’t be trusted with provocative cinema. Cinema may be commercialised as it always has been, but it is still dangerous: an unstable element, like the one powering Tony Stark’s heart. Taking the danger and edge out of any art form will always weaken it.
Yet “Joker” is not wholly original, and we must remember “Taxi Driver” was extremely controversial in its days too. “Joker” uses cultural touchstones of films like “Taxi Driver,” the way Marvel recycles the modern mythology of the comic book. Cinema is always devouring itself for inspiration as any artistic or narrative form does. So, when is this uncinematic and when is it cinephilic and oh so wonderfully postmodern? Scorsese is of course a great champion, protector of the world’s cinematic heritage his knowledge and love of cinema is profound. He is in an elevated position to comment on what film should be.
Cinephile Superheroes
Superhero movies devour themselves instead, with “Deadpool” standing as the ultimate meta-commentary. Yet one Superhero movie makes a film reference that Scorsese should be proud of, namely “Logan” and its wonderful references to the Alan Ladd classic, “Shane.” I suspect this was not one of the films Martin Scorsese was directly targeting, it lies outside of the main Marvel-Disney movie formula. The reference grounds “Logan” within a cinematic legacy of one specific film genre, the Western, while also complimenting its comic book roots.
The point may be that Superhero films should be films firstly, and as such should reference the form that they inhabit. What might be the issue is that Marvel films are cinema but cinema in a pop-corn, fast food, over commercialised sense. In other words, they are not Artistic Pictures. You can always find challenging artistic and interesting stories on the fringes of the cultural output. The artistic often lurks outside the mainstream: it always has it always will. Every now and again, a daring, big-budget film slips through the cracks, but often these are ignored or rejected by audiences, and the same was true in the supposedly “lost golden days when cinema was cinema.” “2001: A Space Odyssey” had a lukewarm critical reception, as did “Citizen Kane,” and audiences didn’t flock to see “The Shawshank Redemption” on its first theatrical release.
I have sympathy for the directors that decry Marvel. The use of practical and in-camera effects or the imaginative cinematic solutions to the constraints of reality have been lost to the grand designs of computer graphics. No longer could we have David Lean camping out in the desert trying to film the impossible in inhospitable conditions. No longer would a studio let a big-name director spend copious amounts of money on helicopter assaults in the Philippines.
Cinematic Art
Scorsese, the first dissenting voice of “theme park cinema,” is no stranger to the epic traditions of filmmaking. Pieces on the historically portentous side lie in between his character studies of violent, male sinners and gangster epics. “The Last Temptation of Christ” employs special camera effects to portray the miraculous, using the trickery of cinema to achieve the sublime. Most notably, the end when the cosmic howl of Christs pain is demonstrated by a rotation of the camera on its axis plunging the landscape and crucified Jesus into a surreal, upside-down dance. This is a manipulation of reality through wholly analogue technological means.
So far, Scorsese films as cinematic, artistic auteuristic: but he is no stranger to digital technology. He has used it to bring the past back to life in “Gangs of New York” and “The Aviator” and to de-age his ageing stars for the upcoming film “The Irishman.” So why can he get away with using CGI and claim he makes cinema while Marvel is dismissed? Is it the hypocrisy of the lofty, self-appointed artist against the popular, democratised alternative?
The enjoyment, emotional engagement, and wonder I got from watching “Avengers Endgame” in the cinemas this year felt like experiencing the exciting moviemaking on an epic scale. Yet I must admit a lot of the Marvel output does feel like serialised, big budget TV content filler built to keep the bucks rolling in. Lacklustre episodes between the really exciting instalments that deserved to be watched on the silver screen.
A Cinema without Stakes
It is not the technology itself that Scorsese is criticising, it is not the use of special effects that are the problem. They are just another other tools in the filmmaker’s cinematic box.
What is more likely is that he is criticising a genre, a type of filmmaking that has developed into what we now might call, “the cinematic universe.” Epics of old were self-contained and the stakes meant something — the drama had weight and heft. There was no risk of Peter O’Toole being brought back for “The Lawrence of Arabia” sequel: by the film’s end, his journey is complete and we have been teased in the opening moments scene where his life is eventually going to end’s rest. The saddest thing about “Avengers Endgame” is that after the moving character work and the wonderful completion of Tony and Cap’s arcs, they could be brought back to life to boost toy sales: quite a degenerate reason to warrant resurrection. This young genre’s hyper- commercialisation undermines the cinematic deftness that the Russo Brother bring to their offerings.
A great moment of heroism and self-sacrifice.
We live in confusing times in general, and cinema cannot escape this. What film is what cinema is: always changing in this new technological landscape. That has always been the case throughout the history of cinema spanning over the last 120 years, and definitions are only going to keep evolving.
This article was written by James Fane-Trefusis. James is following a masters in script writing at the London Film School.
