jww342 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 22, 2019 7:26 pm
I don't know exactly what the cause is, but I'm inclined to think that film institutions have become too homogenized; from film education to funding to festivals to distribution to criticism and to academia. I've been studying the DGCINE, the government institution that has been supporting Dominican cinema, and it seems to me to be pushing directors into becoming 'festival auteurs' with all of the baggage that comes with rather than letting filmmakers develop a bit more organically. Film criticism has also become in many ways a tool for promoting the same few names that have been pre-packaged by the festival circuit.
Yes, exactly my impressions throughout the last 2 decades. As festivals have become "distribution networks" themselves, and some films primarily make (or used to make) money touring the festival circuit, people tend to get put into categories and niches and labeled very fast these days. As I recall it this has been a complaint throughout the 90s already, but I think it has turned itself into a small industry, a kind of "arthouse-by-the-numbers genre", that produces good and bad films, but feels terribly homogenized to me as well.
but it's hard for me not to think that more support should be going to the preservation and restoration of hidden gems from the past than to the production of new work.
Yes, I also think that would be a great idea, because, as I said before, I honestly think that film history is about to be forgotten if we talk about the general film-enthusiastic public, as even many self-described film lovers aren't really (passionately!) interested in exploring "old" pre-1960s stuff. I also think newer filmmakers (even from the 90s) have somehow left behind "film history" or the interest to find out what came before as a concept, and probably mostly wouldn't even know who William Castle, Alfred Cheung, Roberto Gavaldon or Usmar Ismail were, and wouldn't care and couldn't be botheres to find out about them.
I have a feeling that it's rather a selection (which gets narrower and narrower every year) of some 50 or 100 "marquee" names (like Bergman, Murnau, Antonioni, etc.) and just a handful of films from them, which makes the bulk of "what one has to see nowadays" or "what's still relevant nowadays", cause - as capitalism is always quick to tell us - there has been so much "positive" overall change in the arts and so much "advancement" in technology, that the way we make films now is so much more "innovative" and "fresh" and "relevant" and "exciting" (enter another popular buzzword) than what used to be called cinema in the past (which is altogether becoming more and more "problematic", cause "the past", and people (and of course also the artists pandering to them) were generally unenlighted and uneducated and basically idiots back then - of course only when compared to our times nowadays) - it's a bit like people used to feel about early cinema or later "the silents" in general during the 40s and 50s. The past then gets relegated to an "archive" of sorts, and the films are mostly merely "products of their times", and interesting as e.g. "artifacts" from a "sociological" point of view, etc. etc.
PS: Maybe people have lost a bit the idea of artists and art expressing "universal" truths about people and humankind as such, no matter how the world was organised, and how the people lived and talked and thought, how they expressed themselves and what kind of clothes they wore. It's a bit like the past has a general deficit, and we are here to right it. But for me that's basically politics, not a legitimate point of view or anything resembling a discussion of art. This has happened in the past (like the renaissance dismissing the middle ages), and it's funny how history repeats itself again and again (the young french nouvelle vague auteurs in the 50s dismissing the older generation of french filmmakers from the 40s and 50s).
"I too am a child burned by future experiences, fallen back on myself and already suspecting the certainty that in the end only those will prove benevolent who believe in nothing." – Marran Gosov
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