what you are describing there is the death of the western cultural hegemony! asia from Thailand to iran to china is where the future of cinema ( and its present) now resides.
It’s not just in cinema. I have the strange feeling that the world is dying in front of my eyes. Politics, society, religion and art are decaying. Either we’re witnessing the death before the rebirth or everything is really fading away. Our culture became progressively infused with a sense of apocalypticism in the last couple of decades and I may have been a bit too influenced by that. The problem is that when we see or read the news this sense of foreboding is enhanced.
I just remembered that I should have taken my medicine for depression!
By rough estimates, cinema is about 115 years old.
That means it has only recently begun to be older than human life, and as a result many important historical figures of cinema are going to die.
It is not the end of the world.
What is very bizarre and strange for me, is that I actually am saying that phrase literally. The things that happen on MUBI, I swear to fuck…
—PolarisDiB
Polaris, I cannot wait to see what cinema looks like 40 years from now.
OP: I agree with some of those feelings. As cliche as it sounds, I think it just comes down to getting older. There is a feeling, an air of our youth that really cannot be replaced. It was a fleeting time whether we were aware of it or not. To me, growing older is about not only learning, growing, and getting wiser but also finding ways to recapture that youth. That’s why I work hard at what I do, so that soon I’ll have the same freedom that I had 10 years ago.
A bunch of cool babies were born this week. Some of ’em will make some good films, of course, by then…
Personally, I choose to ignore all the flaws of my past, idealizing it and iconizing as an unattainable vision of perfection that never really existed. That way, all the problems of the present which are really modern variations of the problems that have been around from the beginning of civilization can seem like a downward cultural spiral into oblivion.
-It’s not just in cinema. I have the strange feeling that the world is dying in front of my eyes.-
Sorry, Carlos, but it is you and I who are dying before our own eyes, not the world. “Ripeness is all.”
the world of my childhood vanished long ago- certainly since Champion the wonder horse went to the great meadows in the sky
the last traces of my childhood died with the creator of bagpuss!
not forgetting the Clangers
hahahha oh merlin! that actor was awesome.
what reactionary conservative bilge.
the death of the western cultural hegemony
don’t think so…..
this thread reminds me of A E Housman and Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
-
and bad news for young uns here, time keeps speeding up, each decade goes quicker than the last, you’ll be 20 years older before you know it and wondering where your life has gone. Pink Floyd had it right.
Soon the doctors will fix indefinite life spans, then our favourite directors will be around for hundreds of years:)
^ They better come up with an inexhaustable food supply first, or you’re going to find yourself fighting a superannuated David Gordon Green over a wafer of Soylent Green.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/weekinreview/03dave.html
my uncle shared this ny times article about penn and curtis etc.
“what reactionary conservative bilge”
hahah, and this is coming from a guy that has a picture of a GYBE!!! album cover on his profile ;-)
As for Jirin’s remark, let’s wait and see. Many people argue we are on the verge of great ecological collapse. whether that’s true or not is open for debate but we are depleting our natural resources at an alarming rate and so far there have been no real alternatives. If we do not find subtitutes for oil, for example, believe me, our lives will get worse, esp in countries where the popularity density is low. plus some of the problems we face now are quite historically specific, such as the breakdown of the family unit, and the increasing fragmentation of social life. Maybe you don’t consider these problems, but they are not problems that have existed universally throughout history, particularly modern history. They must be dealt with in the here and now.
i could go on but i wont’. it’s just that too often people use that ‘oh it’s always been this way’ as an excuse to justify not thinking about the present in terms of specifics and it can just as easily be a form of denial as seeing history through rose tinted glasses.
Lermentov
Not the most uplifitng topic, granted. And yet, am I the only one that feels there’s something in the air, something is passing. I guess when one gets to a certain age an ineluctable change occurs – the people who occupied the adult space (cultural, famillial, etc) we looked upon through a child’s eyes begins to change. All the protagonists of our own personal life-drama, get older…older…then die.
And one day we look up and the world, that world we knew so well has also passed.
A few recent deaths of doyennes within the film-world has felt like the arrival of that moment for me. It wasn’t just Curtis. In fact since Newman died, not a week appears to have gone by without another obituary panging on my heartstrings: Penn – yesterday, Hopper, Pollack, Chabrol, Rohmer, on and on. Who’s left? Godard, Eastwood, one or two others. Soon they’ll be gone and that same space will be replete with a new cast: Oh, how the heart sings when one utters their mere name: Guy Ritchie, Michael Bay, Ewan McGregor, Matt Damon, ad nauseam! Has this spate of deaths foregrounded the inexorable passage of time and its plangent bell for anyone else? Or is it just me?