Cinema

Scorsese vs Marvel: Is Cinema Really Dead?

Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott say superhero films have killed cinema. Marvel's Kevin Feige calls the charge an insult. So who is right, and where does cinema live now?

Husam Sam Asi 20 May 2017

Husam Sam Asi with Martin Scorsese. Photo: ASI Photos.

Three years ago I asked Martin Scorsese, the director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street, what he made of the special-effects films Hollywood turns out these days. He told me he did not watch them and could not comment on them; foreign and independent films were all he watched. More recently the veteran director has declared cinema dead. “Cinema is gone,” he told the Associated Press last December. “The cinema I grew up with and that I’m making, it’s gone.” Another veteran, Ridley Scott, the director of Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator, echoed him earlier this year, saying that cinema had become very bad.

Both directors accuse the Hollywood studios of abandoning original, creative films and of stifling artistic freedom in order to guarantee profits at the box office. The studios, they say, have concentrated on superhero films, packed with action and special effects and, in their view, empty of artistic value or serious content. Scott has revealed that he turned down offers to direct films of this kind because their stories are illogical and far removed from reality.

The trouble with superheroes

The criticism of effects-driven films starts from the fact that they abandon the elements of classical cinema that create drama and suspense in the telling of a story. They rely on digital tools that build an illogical reality and trade emotional engagement for fleeting thrills. The viewer forgets what happened as soon as the film ends, and it leaves no mark on mind or feeling. Superman, for example, stretches out his arm and flies into the sky, sometimes into space, to pursue his enemy; the story never asks him to find a realistic way of getting there. Ant-Man shrinks to microscopic size to escape his enemies or defeat them. The ease with which the hero escapes his predicament through unreal powers weakens the viewer’s emotional identification with him, and by then the viewer’s senses are numbed and exhausted by the assault of visual and sound effects. The hero of other kinds of film is usually drawn from the viewer’s own reality and behaves as the viewer would when he faces challenges and solves the problems of his life. That makes it easy to sympathise with him and sink into his world, and so the experience of watching becomes moving, transformative and sometimes permanent.

Cinema does carry us to imaginary worlds, sometimes peopled by imaginary characters, as in Star Wars, which is crowded with strange and wonderful figures and creatures who fight with weapons unlike anything on Earth. Those characters fit the reality of the story, which unfolds long ago and far away. Superheroes live in our world, yet they possess qualities and abilities that contradict the laws of nature and physics, and that a sound mind cannot accept. This is why Scorsese accuses effects films of numbing people’s feelings, above all those of the younger generations, who have lost the ability to engage with storytelling and become addicted to the passing thrill.

James Gunn, Husam Sam Asi and Kevin Feige during promotion for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Photo: ASI Photos.

Statements like these anger Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, the leading producer of superhero films such as Iron Man, Captain America, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers. In an interview last year he told me he feels insulted when his company is accused of lowering the standards of Hollywood films and making their content shallow.

Whenever Marvel sets out to make a film, Feige said, the aim is to make it entertaining, exciting, thought-provoking and enjoyable. Marvel’s people, he said, love their films as passionately as the makers of art-house and independent films love theirs. He called the description of Marvel as a Hollywood machine that damages cinema insulting and irresponsible, and said it usually comes from people who know nothing about the company and do not watch its films.

Those who do watch Marvel’s films are devoted to them. Audiences at home and abroad pour into cinemas like a flood whenever one opens, and the critics greet them with praise as well. Since Marvel Studios began, none of its films has failed commercially or critically, and they regularly top the box-office charts. The art films whose passing Scorsese mourns cannot say the same. His latest film, Silence, which cost $50 million to make, failed badly, taking about $7 million at the US box office.

Steven Soderbergh, the director of Traffic, the Ocean’s series and Magic Mike, accepts that the assault on cinema comes from the audience as well as from Hollywood. Cinema as he defines it, he said in his State of Cinema address at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2013, “is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience”. Hollywood’s executives say much the same: they make these films, they claim, to satisfy the demand of audiences at home and around the world.

Some of the best films ever made were seen by nobody, the actor Chris Evans, who plays Captain America in Marvel’s films, remarked when I met him this spring to talk about his leading role in a small independent film, Gifted. Superhero films, he said, have without doubt become the backbone of Hollywood and make enormous profits even when they are bad. He found it hard to say which came first, the chicken or the egg: did audiences demand these films, or did Hollywood impose them? Evans, who directed an independent film of his own, Before We Go, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014, said he was proud of his part in Marvel’s films and insisted that they have real artistic value and serious content. In his opinion, Marvel’s films match independent films in cinematic value and artistic quality.

Marvel’s films do often explore important contemporary political and social questions through the predicaments of their characters. Captain America: Civil War took on the freedom of the individual against the power of the state when national security is under threat, an issue that divides liberals and conservatives in every country. Avengers: Age of Ultron centred on the danger of intelligent machines taking control of humanity and destroying it, a subject that occupies scientists, thinkers and politicians today. By Soderbergh’s definition, however, these are broad, general themes of the kind commercial movies deal in, and they fall short of cinema.

Husam Sam Asi with Chris Evans during promotion for Gifted. Photo: ASI Photos.

Movies and cinema

Soderbergh draws a line between movies and cinema. “Cinema is a specificity of vision,” he said in the same address. It is the unique vision of an author, artist or director, carrying his aesthetic and intellectual world and expressing his self and his ideology; the wishes of the audience play no part in it. The auteur director develops the screenplay and chooses the technicians and actors he trusts to realise his vision, with no interference from anyone else. Cinema, in Soderbergh’s words, is “the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary”. “It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience.” Without the director, it would not exist at all.

It is true that a project in a Hollywood studio today gets its green light in the worldwide marketing and promotion departments. In the past that decision was taken in the script development departments. The aim is a film whose subject resonates with the largest possible audience, clearly and without complication, so as to draw the greatest profit from every market in the world. Yet Feige insists that he does not interfere in his directors’ decisions and gives them complete artistic and intellectual freedom to make their films.

Feige does usually hire directors from independent film or television. One was the British director and actor Kenneth Branagh, who gave the first Thor, in 2011, a Shakespearean colouring. The directors of other Marvel films, among them the brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, assured me that Marvel gave them complete freedom on the Captain America films. James Gunn, the director of Guardians of the Galaxy, told me the same. These directors cannot, of course, start work on a film without a green light from the studio’s executives, especially when each one costs hundreds of millions of dollars. They must also consult the studio while the film is being made and win its approval before release. The director of a Marvel film is an auteur working under the studio’s supervision.

Art or entertainment?

The first films, which appeared at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, were short, primitive scenes showing a moving train, rough waves at sea or travellers at a railway station. As the language of cinema developed, film-makers learned to tell dramatic stories through actors, shots of different sizes and editing, and later through sound and music. All these elements were enlisted to create complex characters living through love, war, crime and the other experiences that bind the viewer emotionally to a film. In Hollywood, though, this cinema was a business of entertainment, no more and no less. When veteran Hollywood directors such as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder heard French critics such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut describe them as auteurs, they answered with irony, remarking that they had always thought of themselves as makers of entertainment and had never called themselves artists.

The definition of cinema as art therefore appeared first in Europe. The American film industry adopted it in the 1960s, after the curtain fell on the classical Hollywood era and independent cinema emerged. Free of the studios’ commercial system, it produced a new generation of directors who regarded themselves as artists, where their predecessors had called themselves entertainers working for the studios.

The films of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s did offer the distinctive vision of their makers. That vision, however, came from a purely white American perspective, and it was often stereotyped and racist. Westerns, for example, presented Native Americans as savages and criminals. Other groups, such as Arabs, Black people and Asians, were also shown in a negative light. At the time, the Hollywood studios paid no attention to this stereotyping, because the market for their films was confined to the United States and Europe and most of their audience was white. Today they will not allow their directors to do it, because 70 per cent of their films’ revenue comes from outside the United States. They cannot risk hurting the feelings of non-white audiences around the world, so they make broad films designed to please everyone, and the decline of cinema becomes inevitable.

Where cinema lives now

Auteur directors have found a home at the giant streaming companies such as Netflix and Amazon, which give them complete creative freedom and stay out of their artistic and production decisions. One of them is Scorsese himself, who recently secured $100 million to make The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

Emma Thomas, Husam Sam Asi and Christopher Nolan during promotion for Interstellar. Photo: ASI Photos.

The irony is that Hollywood’s critics are unhappy with Netflix too. They call it a graveyard for films, because it keeps them out of cinemas and releases them on its own platform, where they are lost in a vast ocean of titles. Christopher Nolan, the director of the Dark Knight trilogy and Inception, told cinema owners at CinemaCon in March: “The only platform I’m interested in talking about is theatrical exhibition.”

Soderbergh, though, holds that cinema is cinema however it is shot and wherever the screen is. In his view it can be watched in a bedroom, on an iPad or a phone, or on YouTube, so long as it expresses a particular vision.

So there is no need to fear for the cinema that Scorsese misses, because the internet companies are making it, funding it and showing it on their platforms. Cinema is in fact living through a revival thanks to these companies, which attend the independent film festivals and pay huge sums for films that would once have sunk into oblivion after screening there. The problem is that audiences, the younger generations above all, take no interest in these films.

Some blame the Hollywood studios, accusing them of brainwashing whole generations from childhood and keeping them ignorant by accustoming them to special-effects films. In reality other forces are at work, among them the internet, which has taught us to expect everything in the blink of an eye, with no waiting, and to watch short, exciting video clips on social media. We now need constant stimulation, and a director who cannot supply it cannot hold our attention. George Miller acted on this in Mad Max: Fury Road two years ago. Audiences now read films faster, he told me when the film came out, and it is made of about 2,700 cuts, against 1,200 in the second film of the series in the early 1980s.

It seems, then, that humanity as a whole is in retreat and has become the property of the computer, which produces everything at speed, whether it is supplying us with information through a search of the internet in seconds or providing the constant thrills of Hollywood films. As for cinema, it is alive, and it is passing through a transformation.

Sources: Associated Press (via The Salt Lake Tribune); TheWrap; The Playlist; Gulf News.

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