During her wedding reception Justine takes a break from the party and walks into a very pretentious appearing study with bookshelves holding open a few art books to pages of elementary looking shapes of cylinders and rectangles. Justine approaches these open art books and begins to remove them from the wall and replace them with other art books and specifically all to pages of paintings with a rather sad image. It was clear Justine was not felling as one would expect a bride to feel on her wedding day and she replaced the images void of emotion with ones that were full of emotion, specifically sadness and despair. This however is how I view the current phase cinema is going through. Movie spectators are currently enjoying the focus group made films being put out by money hungry production companies. They know exactly what actor or actress to put in their film not because they will give the best performances but instead for the reason that this person is “hot” right now and probably evoke a great opening week turn out by movie goers. I doubt it stops there though; they most likely have everything from the wardrobe to the script pre-tested in some control group testing facility. This practice is turning film away from an art form and into a formula, this actor, wearing these clothes, and saying these jokes will equal high revenue. Films such as Melancholia however are working to keep film as an art alive; Von Trier almost forced us to understand his film as art with the many recurring images of artwork we see throughout his film. I would be curious to learn how interested in revenue George Melies was when he released A Trip to the Moon; my guess would be it was the furthest thing from his mind. I still do believe there are filmmakers out there with an agenda to make art and not money and I believe it will one day again show with the film that will be released in the future. And like wise there are spectators who are getting sick of the commercialized films we see on the billboards every week and like Justine are ready to replace them with films that like Melancholia are works of art. Thursday, March 22, 2012
Melancholia and the Current Phase of Cinema
During her wedding reception Justine takes a break from the party and walks into a very pretentious appearing study with bookshelves holding open a few art books to pages of elementary looking shapes of cylinders and rectangles. Justine approaches these open art books and begins to remove them from the wall and replace them with other art books and specifically all to pages of paintings with a rather sad image. It was clear Justine was not felling as one would expect a bride to feel on her wedding day and she replaced the images void of emotion with ones that were full of emotion, specifically sadness and despair. This however is how I view the current phase cinema is going through. Movie spectators are currently enjoying the focus group made films being put out by money hungry production companies. They know exactly what actor or actress to put in their film not because they will give the best performances but instead for the reason that this person is “hot” right now and probably evoke a great opening week turn out by movie goers. I doubt it stops there though; they most likely have everything from the wardrobe to the script pre-tested in some control group testing facility. This practice is turning film away from an art form and into a formula, this actor, wearing these clothes, and saying these jokes will equal high revenue. Films such as Melancholia however are working to keep film as an art alive; Von Trier almost forced us to understand his film as art with the many recurring images of artwork we see throughout his film. I would be curious to learn how interested in revenue George Melies was when he released A Trip to the Moon; my guess would be it was the furthest thing from his mind. I still do believe there are filmmakers out there with an agenda to make art and not money and I believe it will one day again show with the film that will be released in the future. And like wise there are spectators who are getting sick of the commercialized films we see on the billboards every week and like Justine are ready to replace them with films that like Melancholia are works of art. 
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Jon Michael,
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with what you're saying here. Cinema overall is definitely changing and many production companies are primarily concerned with making money and subsequently end up being "sellouts" rather than auteurs and artists. Movies like "Valentines Day" and "New Years Eve" that feature who-knows-how-many big celebrities are great examples of this change. In such films, there are no true cinematic moments or qualities and no margin for true cinephiles to find appreciation. Those films are examples of the ones that make us worry that cinema and film in its oldest forms are dying out. However, I don’t think that we need to completely panic because, as you pointed out, there are exceptions to this change--Melancholia being one. I realized this right from the start of the film. The epic opening scene consisting of the powerful slow-motion images (planets crashing, horses falling, and people holding to each other dearly) combined with the music created something genuinely cinematic. Of course all the elements of that scene tied into the plot. However, that opening was also able to stand on it's own as a beautiful art form. Had the movie stopped right after that scene, I would have still been content. There was nothing “plastic” or “Hollywood” about the opening, which was a refreshing change. In addition, this slow motion allowed us to really absorb what we were seeing and let our imaginations run wild to interpret the images. Given the artistic nature of the film--in the opening and throughout the whole film—I have to believe that this movie was intended to be something more meaningful than many of the movies released in recent years. Also, I really liked your question about Melies—whether or not he was concerned with the revenue his film would make. Similarly, it makes me wonder about Trier as a director and whether he is concerned with making a lot of money off of his films (also, is he concerned with making award winning films or films that will be box-office hits?) I don’t know much about Trier’s general film style since this is the only film of his that I have scene thus far, but I have a feeling that most are similar in the sense that they stray from the typical Hollywood blockbuster format. No matter what, it’s nice to know that creativity and art in cinema isn’t completely dead.
-Aliza Bresnick