What is Cinema? Part I

A few years back a friend asked me what my favorite movie was. Without hesitation I answered The Godfather. She rolled her eyes and said she didn’t want to know my opinion on which movie I thought was the best ever made. She wanted to know what my favorite movie was, the movie I watch at least once a year, maybe more each year. The movie I go back to time and time again.

I wanted to argue that the reason I don’t go back to The Godfather year after year is because I don’t have to. That this film (and its sequel) are so indelibly etched in my memory there is no reason to see them regularly. This reasoning began breaking down before I could even articulate it. I wanted to argue that the perfection of those films were so much so, that periodic enjoyment of them was best. I wanted to argue snobbery and I knew it.

Why would I want to deny that I watch Point Break time after time, or the more recent Man on Fire, or 300? Am I such a film snob I can’t admit that one of those three is probably my favorite movie? Why don’t I watch The Godfather at least once a year? It’s never boring when I do watch it, it never gets old, but it’s never quite the joyous ride that those other less cinematic films can be. Is Point Break really less cinematic than The Godfather, or Citizen Kane?

This depends upon how cinema is being defined. Recently, when asked about Marvel’s MCU, Martin Scorsese responded “I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema.” He went on to clarify that the Marvel films were more like theme parks, but not the “cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” It’s unclear how hard Scorsese tried to watch Marvel movies and of those he did, which ones, but there’s an argument to be made that plenty of Marvel movies do convey emotional, psychological experiences from one human to another.

James “Rhoadey” Rhoades finding Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man is Marvel’s first example of conveying a human emotional and psychological experience from one to another. It’s a cathartic moment that also conveys Tony Stark’s psychological evolution as a human being. The last two Avengers films are arguably packed with emotional and psychological interactions. Rather than list the number of Marvel films that actually do precisely what Scorsese says they don’t, the larger question is whether that’s a valid description of what makes cinema.

After all, Steel Magnolias seems to be brimming with emotional and pscychological experiences between people, as do all soap operatic films. Plenty of horror films do this, Stallone’s Rambo and the Colenel in First Blood did it, not to mention Rambo and the Sheriff. Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood, or Jones and Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Arc did it, and plenty of really bad movies (Tommy Wiseau’s The Room comes to mind) also do this. How many of these films is Scorsese willing to call “cinema” simply because they meet this criteria?

Just what is cinema anyways? Documentarian Chuck Workman (many of the montages seen at the Academy Awards were put together by he) made a documentary in 2013 asking this very question. By parsing archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Bresson, and Akira Kurosawa among others, and new interviews with directors such as Robert Altman, Costa-Garvras and Mike Leigh and viewing over a 100 clips of films he considers to be cinema, an answer begins to develop. In his own statement of the film he offers this answer.

“Most movies that we see are prominently involved with story-telling, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but significant breakthrough cinema contains moments of truth and reality and cinematic style that can’t be expressed any other way – that is, except through cinema.”

This statement alone tends to vindicate Scorsese’s attitude towards Marvel films since they obviously can be and were expressed in the comic book form before ever leaping to the screen. Still, Mario Puzo published The Godfather as a novel before it was made into a film and few would argue that it isn’t cinema just because it was a novel first. The point is The Godfather can be expressed, story wise, in another way, but the novel didn’t have Francis Ford Coppola casting Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Diane Keaton while relying upon Gordon Willis to paint the canvas of the novel in your mind as you read it. That could have only been accomplished through cinema.

The Godfather, like all cinema is not just the work of an author – unless we accept the auteur theory as crucial to cinema – but is a collaboration brought together by a director who imposes his own vision upon this canvas. It is this artistic expression that creates a bond with those who watch it, making “the experience even richer,” as Workman concludes in his statement. David Lynch fans can appreciate this, as can fans of Stanley Kubrick, or Wes Anderson. Films that aren’t generally seen as mass entertainment. Quentin Tarantino, Coppola and Scorsese come closer to mass entertainment but still seem to fall within the scope of an audience bonding with the artist through their expression.

Still, all too often films that are clearly mass entertainment are immediately dismissed as not cinema simply because they appeal to a mass audience. Talk about film snobbery. The significant breakthrough with CGI was quite evident in Avatar, and Cameron’s T2 before that. Both also have plenty of emotional connections between the characters of their story’s and the audience. Long before Hollywood and the left began demanding bigger and better roles for women in action films, James Cameron had already created a filmic bad-ass in Sarah Conner. He took the mantle of the Alien Sequel, where Ridley Scott and Dan O’bannon created another female bad-ass in Ripley.

Before they, George Lucas created the bad-ass Princess Leia. Following Leia, Ripley and Sarah Conner were bad-asses such as The Bride in Kill Bill Volumes One and Two, Trinity from the Matrix trilogy, and multiple Angelina Jolie vehicles. If we are to take seriously at all the current claims that women have been denied the opportunity of bad-ass roles generally reserved for men, then certainly the films featuring Leia, Ripley and Sarah Conner are groundbreaking. Probably the more realistic view and in the context of determining what makes cinema cinema, is that the current claims are nothing more than hyperbolic propaganda from activists and not to be taken too seriously.

Indeed, long before Leia, Ripley and Connor there was Dorothy from Kansas who rode a tornadoes to Oz. Dorothy is not only a bad-ass in her own right, she represents the every-man in this parable on populism. The men, be they scarecrows, tin men or lions are merely followers of Dorothy and even the Great and Powerful Oz must bow his head to the fierceness and straightforward nature of Dorothy. Beyond that, The Wizard of Oz was groundbreaking in other ways too. In fact, given the existence of a gal called Scarlett O’Hara, it’s a leap to call Dorothy the bad-ass groundbreaking.

I am not arguing that any of these movies deserve to be called cinema, I point to them only to support my argument that this question of what makes cinema cinema lurks below the murky waters of poorly defined parameters and that it just may be folly to dismiss mass entertainment out of hand. Almost all of the films I’ve referenced to make this point are fantastical and here might be the defining line between cinema and movies. It is worth considering what film scholar Andre Bazin (What is Cinema) has to say about this conflict between realism and pseudo-realism.

“The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding, from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological; between true realism, the need that is to give significant expression to the world both concretely and its essence, and the pseudo-realism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind); a pseudo-realism content in other words with illusory appearances. That is why medieval art never passed through this crisis; simultaneously vividly realistic and highly spiritual, it knew nothing of the drama that came to light as a consequence of technical developments. Perspective was the original sin of Western painting.”

A “quarel” that apparently continues to this day. An academic feud between Hatfield and McCoy film geeks, and even the art world at large. An ongoing struggle that only gets murkier and murkier as the feud lingers on. It was the advent of movies where these technical developments became stark. As Bauzin puts it: “Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all, our obsession with realism.” Isn’t this Scorsese’s biggest quarrel with the tent-pole movies of the MCU, that they have little to do with realism?

It is a fascinating quarrel and Scorsese and Bauzin are not the only ones who weigh in on the matter. So, I will leave these other arguments opinion for Part II of this What is Cinema series. Perhaps there can be some sort of resolution found for the quarrelers that might allow for the surrealistic expression to stand beside the effort for realism in the halls of cinema. Then again, maybe not and the quarrel will continue and probably remain just as fun to pick apart.