Should we save cinema? | The Press

We must save cinema by fighting superhero films, Martin Scorsese declared this week in a long and fascinating portrait devoted to him by the magazine GQ. The filmmaker of Goodfellas and of The Wolf of Wall Street answered (once again) a question from a journalist on the omnipresence of Marvel films on screens.

“The danger is what this does to our culture. Because there will be generations who will now believe that films are just that, that’s what a film is,” Scorsese summarized. “I think people already think that,” added journalist Zach Baron.

They exaggerate, even if they are not completely wrong. When my 17-year-old son invites me to the cinema, it’s usually to see a superhero film. Like many boys of his generation, he has been immersed in Marvel culture since childhood. So anything more contemplative and less spectacular than demigods destroying half of Manhattan while trying to save humanity can seem, well, a bit boring.

Fortunately, his interest in cinema is not limited to that. This week, he suggested that we go see in theaters The Howl’s Moving Castle (Howl’s Moving Castle) by the great master of animation Hayao Miyazaki. Which reminded me of one of my favorites from my early days as a film critic: Princess Mononoke on the big screen.

I am a fervent admirer of Martin Scorsese, perhaps the greatest American filmmaker of his generation. I loved recognizing, in their embryonic state, Scorsese’s signature and universe in his student films from the 1960s. I got my cinematic education by discovering the films he made in the 1970s, before I was even 40: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull.

The fact remains that in this eternal debate around the artistic value of superhero films, Scorsese speaks out of turn. This is not the first time he has spoken out about Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films. At every opportunity, it is to make fun of what he does not consider to be “really cinema”.

I understand what he means. When there are more computer-generated images than authentic human interactions on screen, we can wonder, like Scorsese, if we will not eventually slide towards films designed by artificial intelligence .

Actor Chris Evans, who plays Captain America in the Avengers (from Marvel), recently spoke about the difficulty of acting on camera interacting with imaginary monsters on a green screen. Filmmaker Bertrand Bonello highlights the ridiculousness of this filming method in the first scene of his new film, The beastwhich will soon be presented at the Festival du nouveau cinéma.

Martin Scorsese is especially against the disproportionate importance given to superhero films – and their television derivatives – in popular culture. It’s hard to disagree with him. Marvel studios, and to a lesser extent those of DC Comics, have acted like a steamroller on the American film industry in the last decade, producing a series of sometimes mediocre films which occupy a maximum of screens and media space.

Fans of superhero films are right to criticize Scorsese for judging blindly, by his own admission, most of these works. They are right to find him nostalgic when he claims that old Billy Wilder films (Some Like It Hot) are more “real cinema” than Ryan Coogler’s new films (Black Panther). Are the peplums and westerns of his childhood really better than the superhero films of today?

Scorsese’s detractors are also right to find it ironic that he calls on his colleagues, the Safdie brothers and Christopher Nolan, to respond with their canons to those of Marvel and DC Comics. Christopher Nolan is the filmmaker who gave superhero films their nobility thanks to his trilogy of Dark Knight (Batman)…

They are wrong, on the other hand, to attack the quality of his cinema – a laughable argument – ​​or to claim that this great cinephile has no consideration for filmmakers who are not, like him, white men of a certain age. Martin Scorsese has done more than anyone to preserve the world’s rare films through the restored works of his World Cinema Project.

The fact remains that Martin Scorsese is, at 80 years old, a privileged filmmaker who is granted budgets similar to those of superhero films (some 200 million US for his new film, Killers of the Flower Moon). And that he forgets, like everyone else, his blind spots.

Scorsese, whose cinema is mainly made up of male characters, grew up admiring cinema made by men, for men. I can say the same, with my collection of Godfather in three different DVD formats. I also recognized myself well in the excellent joke of barbie by Greta Gerwig about men who want to “duplicate” the famous trilogy by Francis Coppola – Scorsese’s old friend – to women.

We are all products of popular culture. My cinematic culture finds its foundations, like many men of my generation, in Italian-American gangster films by Coppola and Scorsese. My son’s is more focused on superhero films of diverse origins, made as much by African-Americans as Latin-Americans or Chinese-Americans.

If, like Scorsese, I prefer the Ryan Coogler of Fruitvale Station to that of Wakanda Forever and Chloé Zhao of The Rider to that ofEternalsI would like to suggest that he discover one of the most visually splendid films of the last year: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse by Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson and Kemp Powers. Because you can like that AND a Miyazaki. That’s the beauty of cinema.