What does “peaked” mean? If you mean amount of film produced, that left its peak ages ago. At its peak, enough celluloid was shot in the United States alone each year that laid out, it would cover the entire state of Texas. Filmmaking today is a lot more “green”—less plastic and chemicals as digital cinema only takes up data.
—PolarisDiB
Film or cinema?
And, the answer is no. It’s alive and well and moving forward.
This question reminds me of Monty Python and The Holy Grail-
“’African or European?”
Ha ha ha ha
If by “peaked” you mean exhausted all possibilities of meaningful artistic expressions, I’d say no. Can we say that about any artistic medium?
On the other hand, “peaked” could mean that all the new ground have been “discovered,”—i.e., there won’t be any major breakthrough and innovations within that medium. Can we say that’s the case for any medium? (I guess it would depend on what we mean by “innovations” or even “medium.” I was thinking of novels, for example, which isn’t a medium so much as an artform. In some ways, have there been any major innovations in the novels? It doesn’t seem like there has been. Has film experienced something similar?
And then there are other meanings for the word “peak.”
In which case, I would hope that “peaking” would be an experience that would happen multiple times. Throughout the centuries.
(Ruby and Ben are to blame for this train of thought on STL).
HAHAHAHA! ^
Assuming that cinema will continue in some form for the rest of human civilization, I think it’s ridiculous to believe that it could have peaked within its first one hundred years. Film was certainly better around the 50s and 60s than it is now but it’s preposterous to say that there can’t be another peak. All forms of art wax and wane throughout the ages in terms of overall quality.
The entire history of cinema is likely not going to end up a neat bell curve.
Maybe Greenaway does not have anything left to say. Which is all right, he said plenty during his time. But to claim Cinema is dead. Please.
Maybe it is Greenaway who is dead. Brain dead.
The guy is too corrosive for his own well being.
Someone once said that cinema won’t come into its own as an art form until the ability to make films is in the hands of the masses, which is just now happening.
So to call it dead seems ridiculous.
People always make pronouncements like that just to get attention.
Hasn’t painting been declared dead several times?
well i agree with Greenaway that there aren’t a lot of innovative directors anymore. Even most of the ones people rave on about here(including myself btw) are probably just reworking ideas from the old masters. We live in an age of remix, and artists are getting lazier as far as i’m concerned. Justifying what you do on the grounds that all art is just remix is not only pretentious, it’s also ignorant.
having said that, there is always something out there worth watching.
^ I think Greenaway is not omniscient and omnipresent and on top of it old, and doesn’t know where to find the good stuff.
Too bad for him.
^^He is probably out of touch, to some extent, but i think the further the ‘good stuff’ moves underground, the less impact it has on the culture at large.
One thing i didn’t appreciate though is that when he was talking about the ‘few’ directors in an interview that have strong ‘auteurist’ tendencies in Europe, he mentioned Von Trier and Almodóvar and then stopped. Either he was having an off day, and or he was just being stupid or biased. What about Denis, Haneke, Angelopoulos, Tarr etc etc? There are more than just two. Even a grumpy bastard like me knows that :-)
either way, i didn’t like that.
“Justifying what you do on the grounds that all art is just remix is not only pretentious, it’s also ignorant.”
It’s neither pretentious, not is it ignorant to point out the fact that the vast majority of cinema is based on either other art works, a historical record or a mythology (usually a combination). It’s just something undeniable; most films (from any era) come from other sources.
It’s always been about how a filmmaker uses those sources (Albert Serra’s reworkings of mythology being an example of extremely innovative filmmaking today), not where they came from initially.
“It’s neither pretentious, not is it ignorant to point out the fact that the vast majority of cinema is based on either other art works, a historical record or a mythology (usually a combination). It’s just something undeniable; most films (from any era) come from other sources.”
Sure, but i think too often that is used as an excuse to not do anything remotely interesting.
It’s only the hacks that use that excuse as a justification. The great ones know they are operating within certain traditions and try to add something meaningful to them.
I’ve been reading a bit of Bruce Sterling recently, and he says that we live in a network culture today, whereas yesterday we lived in a literary culture. To paraphrase that means we had single authors and genuine and realistic notions of concepts such as progress. Today progress ceases to exist. He says there’s neither progress nor conservatism, because there’s nothing left to conserve and no direction in which to progress. So what you get is transition. Transition to Nowhere. You can see this in music. We haven’t had ‘new’ music for a long time. Instead we reference styles that have passed and mash them together. By conservatism, I think he’s talking about preservation of ideas by passing them forward. Today, everything has been catalogued and exists online. Knowledge is not so much dead as it is redundant.
I think Drive and Wuthering Heights are interesting examples of cinema in a network culture, but speaking personally – I find film more capable at completely re-defining itself through the use of technique than any other medium. The cafe scene in Oslo, August 31st was wonderful because the technique exists within that film world, rather than cinema at large. Likewise the jabbing, disjointed aspect of time in We Need to Talk about Kevin felt different to cinema I had seen before. Freshness of cinematic technique is all about the smaller context than a larger one in my eyes.
Great films teach you how to watch them.
“We haven’t had ‘new’ music for a long time. Instead we reference styles that have passed and mash them together. "’
That may be true about "’Pop"’music,but in contemporary music there is plenty of new and interesting work being produced.
Sterling seems to be speaking about himself. He has been making a living as a pundit since the early nineties when he ran aground as a novelist after The Difference Engine.
“’Today, everything has been catalogued and exists online.”’
EVERYTHING? All sunsets,friendships,passions,dreams,cat’s purrs….
“’Everything has been catalogued…”’
That sounds like a Borges nightmare. And you know the fate of all those Borges characters.
“Knowledge is not so much dead as it is redundant.”’
Wow. Please send me all your redundant knowledge to me. I promise to use it.
I paraphrased him and did admittedly add my own things like the music and the cataloguing, but I do think there’s something in the reduced power of knowledge. Specifically I’m talking about the facts and figures kind of knowledge that you find on the internet, which is in itself a form of passing down through the ages, but it’s become distanced from direct interaction with the individual. So this is the thing, it isn’t my knowledge, but I can happily send you a link to google where you can type anything and be confronted with all manner of redundant knowledge.
As for whether it’s everything that’s been catalogued. Well… I would say you can find everything except for direct first hand experience. I could probably find you a million cats purrs and sunsets on youtube alone. The argument, of course, is in the difference between the abstract and the physical. For me, that’s a great appeal of cinema. It straddles the divide because on the one hand it’s entirely abstract, yet the length of features creates an absorption that allows us to comprehend the physical reality of the situations and in a way experience them. Not really, not fully, but in a way far more advanced than the internet at the moment.
Today, everything has been catalogued and exists online.
No.
And we couldn’t do that even if we tried. Have you ever been involved in digital archiving? Do you know how little is spent on it and how MUCH work there is and how complicated it actually can get?
So no. We’ll never have everything catalogued and by the time you blink your eyes the technology will have changed and we’ll all be scrambling to catch up on the last mess and it will never end. This cycle will go on forever until we blow things up in a war and we start making cave paintings again.
Progress is “progress.”
^^and regress is regress ;-)
and ingress is ingress, and egress is egress ;)
….
When you come to think of it though, all art forms change and transform into something else like a hybrid. Punk becoming grunge. Drama and poetry becoming slam poetry. Can any art form really “peak?” How do you define “peak?” I wouldn’t know myself and I guess you could sort of draw conclusions by reading something like books on the end of the Impressionist period of painting or the end of the jazz age in the 20’s, but do things really or totally end? Is it possible they could help lead to other things in that particular art or other arts? Take 3D technology. After films like Avatar, Up and Alice In Wonderland came out, a whole slew of other 3D films raced into the theaters. A lot of them were unsuccessful. I guess with any sort of technology or movement or genre of art form or whatever, you are always going to hit a few bumps in the road. Like people are saying. Cinema is young. It’s just going through another transformation.
Film: probably. The moving image: hellllllll no
Bruce Mayne
Has film already peaked? If so, when? If not, what is yet to come?