Creative Progress

There is decidedly more that can be learned from watching films than I'd care to admit. I'm not talking about the complexities of life, being more than happy to leave that in the hands of those who experience cinema without ever so much as glancing beneath it's onion-skinned layers. I'm referring to the art itself.
One man's wine being another man's vinegar set aside, I enjoy disliking a film just as much as loving one, and that simple fact that makes me realize how lucky I am.
That being said, it's quite staggering to see how many films are being made (despite the recession) by people commanding astronomical budgets, their epic-scale offerings mostly having so little actual substance that they can be likened to nothing more than extremely long pop videos. This is of course hardly surprising, given that today's filmmaking generation was raised on the aforementioned medium. Paradoxically, Many viewed the video as the death of the music industry, at least as a source of true talent, while others saw it as a bright, challenging new platform from which one could rewrite the laws of The Moving Image.
This brings me somewhat tenuously to my point. There seems to be a general school of thought within the film industry that asks: Where to now? What haven't we tried? It seems that so many of today's up-and-coming directors, and not too few of the well established ones, are so caught up in this problem that they forget to ask themselves if they should be trying to find this particular holy grail. Don't get me wrong; if I see something that hasn't been tried before and it works, I'm all over it. But when I see something that leans entirely on that one technological crutch, I see a wasted opportunity. I want the twist. I want the impact. I want the sequel to have a point. Which brings us back to the wine and vinegar, which are becoming increasingly harder to differentiate between.
Flavour is a good comparison to most creative arts. Music, for example changes it's flavour constantly, as does cinema. The current trend of over-applying computer graphics to films, which often leaves us with a very flat plot or screenplay, can be compared to producing fast food. One thing that occurs to me is the change brought about by the advent of the synthesizer within the music industry. Bands like Depeche Mode, having achieved immortality early on, relying on the novelty of the synthesizer to capture the appropriate imagination, later reverted to using electric guitars, bass and drums, using instead the synthesizer as an ingredient rather than a recipe. This is much the same pattern I'd like to see emerge within the film industry regarding cgi.
I just watched (for the second time) John Turturro's brilliant Romance And Cigarettes, which I believe is his directorial debut, and is a poignant and ballsy musical, starring James Gandolfini and a wonderfully slutty Kate Winslet as his mistress. Superb stuff, and refreshingly human.

Quentin Beck
20th July 2010