Is modern cinematography really declining?
From silent, black and white short films to full color, CGI-saturated blockbuster franchises, cinema has experienced a tremendous evolution over the last century. Since the late 1900s, however, the commercialization of film, disintegration of attention spans, and accelerated access to advanced filmmaking techniques has undermined the art of cinematography.
Take Federico Fellini, a pillar of popular 1950-60s cinema, renowned for fantastical Italian films such as La Dolce Vita and La Strada. Among greats like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, Fellini’s films are feats of art and storytelling, the kind of content that film schools base entire lecture serieses around.
In a time of black and white films and limited production technology, Fellini instead captivated audiences using surreal, non-linear images and gut-wrenching symbolism for the nuances and tragedies of the human condition.
Hitchcock relied on similarly artistic techniques in movies such as Psycho and Vertigo, eerily meandering camera shots through his scenes to grant viewers access to rumination or suspicious details that characters aren’t aware of. Producers of their decades competed for the more intricate, intellectual filmmaking experience.
Unfortunately, such progress has seemed to invert itself. Adventurous propulsion of the vanguard of these cinematographic techniques has now become a parched vacuum that sucks the few remaining drops of innovation into monotonous blank space. It’s like humanity is so exhausted by their immense advancement of the art form that they’ve lost a reason to keep innovating, resigning to sit around and wait for someone else to do it.
Ultimately, the modern producer who is virtually unlimited by resources will rely on less creativity and flexible thinking than the one who is constrained by yet-to-develop technology, who has a necessity to shapeshift. Be it a sad reflection on the damages of technological progress; I dearly hope not. But just as profound, creative solutions are born of technological limitations, bland solutions are born from virtually unlimited technological tools.
Nowadays, movie consumption is less focused around the movie theater and more accessible to the lazy comforts of the home. In his essay, “Il Maestro,” popular filmmaker Martin Scorsese argues that an excursion to the cinema was a canon experience – a ritualistic outing – that made entering another story’s built world a special adventure, not an insignificant family-room display while viewers socialize and catch up on work.
Commercialized streaming platforms have thus diminished the intimacy of being bound to the movie theater visit – the intimacy of being thrust in front of a big movie screen among eager strangers in the dark. In her groundbreaking essay, “The Death of Cinema,” American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag explains that the “larger-than-you image” of a theater physically overwhelms viewers, “kidnapping” them and allowing them “to lose [themselves] in other people’s lives,” which is the whole point of watching a movie.
Again, the vacuum of profit-driven streaming services demands any remaining ounces of creativity that should be alternatively directed towards the mindful theater-goer through a big screen. And while there are plenty of modern blockbusters that still debut in theaters, they are not created primarily as an advancement of filmmakers’ creative output; rather, they are extensions of Hollywood’s agenda to build vast, safe streams of revenue.
Take for instance – franchises. Formatted as a string of sequels with extensively advertised and marketed brands, screenwriters and producers are infamous for trying to make every high budget and high energy movie into a blockbuster franchise. Such establishments are considerably more lucrative than a typical standalone film. Once Hollywood realized how good franchises like Star Wars were for business, our modern generation of movies has always been geared around establishing a franchise.
Sontag attributes this shift to skyrocketing production costs in the 1980s. Hollywood started to prefer films that guaranteed fast reimbursement of considerable investments. Blockbusters became an easy way to tap into an established audience that Hollywood could easily milk for their sequels. Sontag notes that such a prominent industrializing of cinema made “the standards of making and distributing films [to be] far more coercive,” dulling the precise artistic motivation of European and independent American films peaking in the 1960s.
Flashy, commercialized franchise films are even more omnipresent today, with superhero films making up the majority of Hollywood’s output – output that is now profit-driven, with a need to quickly astound audiences with intense visual effects, explosive scenes, and aggressive franchise marketing campaigns (such as legos, Halloween costumes, toys, and other forms of media). Output that diminishes the objective of filmmakers of the past, to craft creative, artistic cinematographic experiences out of limited resources.
Sontag describes this as a “reduction of cinema to [faster cutting], assaultive images … to make them more attention-grabbing,” producing “a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention.”
Ultimately, the question has now become about how producers can work in the best interest of their shareholders.
Personally, this feels somewhat dooming. Hollywood is a complex, multifaceted bloc of corporate officials and talented artists. It is regrettable that most decision-making power lies in the hands of those motivated mostly by money.
As our younger generations sustain shorter and shorter attention spans due to short-form media, it is no wonder that flashy, action-packed, visually stimulating movies are becoming the norm and the necessity. It’s like succumbing to junk food – successive Marvel movies being rebranded versions of the same plotlines, humor, and character arcs. Nothing feels particularly exciting or subversive; there appears to be no intention for originality.
Christopher Nolan, legendary Dark Knight and Oppenheimer director, speaks to the necessity of blockbusters, maintaining that “there’s always a balance in Hollywood between established titles that can assure a return in audience and give people more of what they want,” and that this “pays for a lot of other types of films to be made and distributed.”
Since Christopher Nolan is a pillar of modern blockbusters, such a defense is expected, but also understandable. Movie production’s financial climate is drastically different from what it was in the mid to late 1900s. Perhaps this is a reflection of consumer demand, but such demand only arose because of the creation of technologies that could deliver mindless cinematography. Since intricate CGI, special effects, and expedited time frames have sent production budgets ballooning, profit-concerned studios have needed a sense of viewership security.
The way I see it, if Hollywood invests more for a movie, they want to make sure their money is going toward something that is guaranteed not to flop, or their investment is shot. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: thinking that their audience is too impatient for a more artistic, less marketed, explosive film contributes to the diminishing of meaningful, enriching content that modern media is unleashing on younger generations. Thus, their audiences actually become impatient, being trained to possess shorter attention spans.
In a situation eerily similar to the meaningless, 24/7 media that captivates characters in Fahrenheit 451, I wonder if Ray Bradbury was right – that the advancement of technology is systemically destructive. In that sense, the advancement of civilization is responsible for the destruction of cinematography.
Written by Corban Vogler
