Current Events > Martin Scorsese writes new op-ed explaining why Marvel movies aren't cinema

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https://www.msn.com/en-ie/entertainment/indepth/martin-scorsese-i-said-marvel-movies-arent-cinema-let-me-explain/ar-AAJSMU9?li=BBr5KbJ

When I was in England in early October, I gave an interview to Empire magazine. I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that Ive tried to watch a few of them and that theyre not for me, that they seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as Ive known and loved them throughout my life, and that in the end, I dont think theyre cinema.

Some people seem to have seized on the last part of my answer as insulting, or as evidence of hatred for Marvel on my part. If anyone is intent on characterizing my words in that light, theres nothing I can do to stand in the way.

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves dont interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if Id come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies of what they were and what they could be that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

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.

It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.

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 Its Always Fair Weather by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly and Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, in Vivre Sa Vie by Jean-Luc Godard and The Killers by Don Siegel.

. . .

Some say that Hitchcocks pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps thats true Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of todays franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. Whats not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.

They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it cant really be any other way. Thats the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until theyre ready for consumption.

Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know Im 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.

[To be continued because of the dumbass small character count on this website.]

So, you might ask, whats my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. Its a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I dont know a single filmmaker who doesnt want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.

That includes me, and Im speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make The Irishman the way we needed to, and for that Ill always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.

And if youre going to tell me that its simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, Im going to disagree. Its a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course theyre going to want more of that one kind of thing.

But, you might argue, cant they just go home and watch anything else they want on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu? Sure anywhere but on the big screen, where the filmmaker intended her or his picture to be seen.

In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.

Im certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were heroic and visionary.

Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: Theres worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and theres cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but thats becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.

For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.

Martin Scorsese is an Academy Award-winning director, writer and producer. His new film is The Irishman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM9jhGiIAFM
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Seems pretty reasonable

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/400-current-events/78135652
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Hard to tell if his contention is that filmmakers design films "for the big screen" or the translation is "they aren't making $."

And I disagree with him implying that because a sole franchise is dominating choices, that is what people gravitate towards. If 3 Terminator films were released in the span of one year, they wouldn't automatically be successful because they've saturated screens. People have chosen the MCU because they are very well made movies.

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Ok boomer

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Very interesting. I think it's very similar to the argument that some people make about certain genres of videogames "not even being games".

Just because I respect Scorsese's opinion, doesn't mean I agree with it.
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I dunno who this Martin Scorsese guy is but if he doesn't even know that cinema refers to movies, I'm not interested in his opinion lol.
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