The end of cinema? | The Press

Pauline Kael, considered by many to be America’s greatest film critic, has retired from New Yorker in 1991, distressed by the state of American cinema. She pretended to have nothing new to say. AO Scott quit his job as film critic last week at the New York Timesafter 23 years, evoking more or less the same reasons.

In an episode of The Daily, the podcast of TimesScott – greatly influenced by Pauline Kael – regretted the stranglehold of superhero films on Hollywood cinema and the harmful influence of digital platforms on the seventh art.

“The cultural space given to films that interest me seems to be shrinking,” he said. The audience required to support original works is anesthetized by algorithms or distracted by bad news on social media. »

It is difficult to contradict him. In a cinema, a director recently reminded me, we have the advantage of holding the audience captive for 1 hour 30 or 2 hours. There is no toilet break, no way to check your phone without disturbing your neighbor and there is no question of watching the film in two or three sessions, as if it were a TV series.

I understand Scott’s weariness with the famous MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and its ersatz that seem to take up all the space in the cinema schedule. While there’s some good in the mix, no one can deny that Hollywood studios tend to stretch the sauce.

The main victim of this avalanche of ironic action films is not auteur cinema (which has its own audience and its own niches), but quality popular cinema.

It’s amazing that a film as charming as The Fabelmans had such disappointing results at the box office (43 million in revenue for a budget of 40 million US).

AO Scott is right to say that cinema no longer has the same cultural influence. We no longer comment on the new films on display around the office coffee machine as before. These discussions, when they take place, come with a certain lag.

I was recently told about Triangle of Sadness and D’Everything Everywhere All At Once, offered on video on demand. “Oscar-winning” films – I’m thinking of two other Oscar finalists for best film, Tar And Women Talking – have become objects in which cinephiles are mainly interested. And this is not a uniquely American phenomenon.

Audiences are less inclined to spend the equivalent of a monthly subscription to a digital platform on a single theatrical film. It’s understandable… even if they are two very different experiences. As they say in Cannes: there is no photo.

The impact of platforms and their algorithms on the state of cinema is undeniable. Students from UQAM asked me about it this week. Of course Netflix harms cinephilia in general. Even if other platforms such as Mubi and Criterion introduce new generations to repertoire cinema.

Algorithms also hold the audience captive, making us lazy. We are more likely to look at what is immediately suggested to us than what we have to look for in the labyrinth of Netflix. If we mainly watch series, we will mainly be offered other series. It’s a vicious circle.

Also Netflix, since we are talking about it, seems to me to have shot itself in the foot by financing films with tens of millions (Rome, The Power of the Dog, Marriage Story or The Irishman) which did not have the same impact on the platform as if they had taken the poster in theaters.

This netflixization also got the better of AO Scott’s enthusiasm for his job. He will continue his career in the book section of the New York Times. What interests Scott, like Pauline Kael before him, is the discussion of art. Scott got a try out of it, Better Living Through Criticism, on the need for criticism, particularly artistic. However, film criticism is less stimulating when the dialogue becomes a monologue or, worse still, a dialogue of the deaf with fanboys (which AO Scott disagreed with his criticism of avengers).

Criticism no longer has the influence it had when Pauline Kael was rampant. About fifteen years ago I took part in a panel at the Venice Film Festival, moderated by Peter Cowie, with venerable American critics Richard Corliss, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael’s great rival.

This generation of reviews wasn’t necessarily better than those that followed, but it had the distinct advantage of not being drowned in a sea of ​​more or less opinionated comments, two-minute video reviews and ratings from aggregators on a “tomatometer”.

The profession of film critic is dying and many filmmakers will not complain about it. Quentin Tarantino is not one of them. He has already declared that he has been influenced as much by Pauline Kael as by any filmmaker, and his tenth film will be called The Movie Critic. Tarantino claims that this film set in 1977 will be his last. It will not be, however, a biopic on Pauline Kael, who died in 2001.

The end of AO Scott’s career as a film critic is perhaps anecdotal. His colleague and co-chief critic of New York Times, Manohla Dargis, assured me this week that she was staying on. This change is symptomatic of the times. Many, like Scott, wonder not only about the future of criticism, but about the state of cinema itself as a form of popular art.

The cinema is not dead as some had announced nearly 100 years ago, with the arrival of television. But will the golden age of TV series, the proliferation of digital platforms and the omnipresence of superhero films sound the death knell for cinema as we know it?

The birds of misfortune are numerous to fly over the seventh art like birds of prey, waiting for this announced death. In their place, I wouldn’t hold my breath. And not only because a public fond of thrills will always be there for proposals at the Top Gun: Maverickreputed to have “saved” theatrical cinema in the past year.

Admittedly, the relationship of the public to the cinema is no longer the same. The cultural impact of cinema is no longer the same. But from there to affirming that cinema no longer has the same value, there is only one step… which I refuse to take.

There are as many good films in 2023 as in 1991, the year of Pauline Kael’s retirement. And when you find a pearl, in all the mediocrity that you consume without thinking too much, there is so much to say.