Scorsese on the end of Cinema

[Wellesnet]

Martin Scorsese, whose new film, "Silence", opened recently, spoke about the end of cinema as we know it in the article, "‘Cinema is gone’: According to Martin Scorsese, ‘younger people’ just don’t understand'":
http://feed.hypervocal.com/items/293602

Few today are making movies with the scope and ambition of Silence — a fact, he grants, that makes him feel like one of the last of a dying breed in today’s film industry.

“Cinema is gone,” Scorsese says. “The cinema I grew up with and that I’m making, it’s gone.”

“The theatre will always be there for that communal experience, there’s no doubt. But what kind of experience is it going to be?” he continues. “Is it always going to be a theme-park movie? I sound like an old man, which I am. The big screen for us in the ’50s, you go from Westerns to Lawrence of Arabia to the special experience of 2001 in 1968. The experience of seeing Vertigo and The Searchers in VistaVision.”

Scorsese points to the proliferation of images and the over-reliance on superficial techniques as trends that have diminished the power of cinema to younger audiences. “It should matter to your life,” he says. “Unfortunately the latest generations don’t know that it mattered so much.”

Scorsese’s comments echo a tender letter he wrote his daughter two years ago. The future of movies, he believes, is in the freedom that technology has yielded for anyone to make a movie.

“If the younger people have something to say and they find a way to say it through visual means as well as literary, there’s the new cinema,” says Scorsese. But the current climate reminds him more of the ’50s of his youth. “I’m worried about double-think or triple-think, which is make-you-believe you have the freedom, but they can make it very difficult to get the picture shown, to get it made, ruin reputations. It’s happened before.”

Silence, which Scorsese screened for Jesuits at the Vatican before meeting with the Pope, remains a powerful exception in a changing Hollywood.

“He wanted to make this film extremely differently from anything out there,” says Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s editor since Raging Bull. “He’s just tired of slam-bam-crash. Telling the audience what to think is what he really hates. Trying to do a meditative movie at this point, in this insane world we’re in now, was incredibly brave. He wanted to stamp the film with that throughout: the pace, the very subtle use of music.

[atcolomb]

Scorsese is right about cinema today and the horseshit that is shown on theaters theses day. In the last few years I have gone to the theater only a few times a year and with the crazy prices of pop & popcorn and the tedious sequels and the gloom & doom films I am better off watching one of Orson's or David Lean's films or The Marx Brothers on my large tv at home.

[Le Chiffre]

I think the doom and gloom of today's cinema, usually in the form of all these superhero flicks (supported by the younger generation that awaits all of them with bated breath), definitely shows the huge influence of not only theme park rides, but video games as well. Will it last? No one can say, but you can't discount the rapid evolution of technology to keep people coming back for more. You're right, atcolomb, that many films actually play better on video, and for a lot less money. On the other hand, if I'm gonna go see a superhero flick, which is seldom these days, it's got to be on the big screen in 3D. That's what keeps me awake.

What seems to be dying, or at least being diminished, is the idea of cinema as an art form in and of itself, even as the greatest films become more available in pristine editions then ever before (thanks to Criterion, Kino, etc.). We love them, but most young people couldn't care less. Film itself as a medium for new work is already all but dead, unless some nostalgiac guy like Tarentino tries to resurrect it for a bit. Then it goes away again. Purely digital cinema will probably start morphing into something else, maybe a fusion with video games or theme park rides. Video games are already getting to be like movies, with dialogue, plots, etc., and movies have the new 4D coming up, where you can actually FEEL the movie, like a ride.

Great movies will still be made, just like great books will still be written, but the high place of cinema in society-at-large will probably be diminished by new forms of entertainment, including those that use cinema for their own ends, which come to think of it, Welles sought to do a long time ago by using film in his theatre productions.