Democratization and Dissipation
The Revolution in Filmmaking that Wasn't
Art advances partially based on who gets to be an artist. European Painting would have been stuck longer in the Academic style of the 17th and 18th centuries if not for the artists who were able to strike out on their own and paint without approval of the masters. The 19th century brought new kinds of paint better enabling outdoor work, which in turn allowed for the Realists, Impressionists, and their many descendants to open the medium up to all the visual languages of the modern era. Many people wanted to make art in new styles, and with access to the simple materials of the medium they did.
Of all the mature art forms, Film may have the highest bar to entry and its century of history reveals best the shaping power of resources. To access camera equipment, actors, lighting, crew, etc has always required enormous expense and has severely limited the number of people able to make films. Making a full length feature for the first decades of the medium almost always required corporate or government backing, and the films made before World War II are unsurprisingly rather conservative. Once the first pioneers figured out a formula for what would justify the invention, experimentation was discouraged, the artistic language of the medium frozen. There were many brilliant works of art made in this language, but the medium itself could not advance.
Fortunately, this grip was not total. As more got access to cameras, new subject matter and new styles were explored. The young aspiring director Roberto Rossellini was able to self-fund the production of anti-fascist film in the bombed out ruins of Rome and began the Neorealist movement. The graphic designer Satyajit Ray who founded the Calcutta Film Society wanted deeply to make a film based on a novel set in his native Bengal, but could not find producers who would fund the production. So he funded it himself, gathering a cast and crew of inexperienced first-timers, and after shooting for over two years made the beautiful Pather Panchali. Film had gotten bigger. When the young critics and artists of Paris in the 1960s got access to cameras, they too grew film. Jump cuts, never allowed in studio films before, were now part of film. Real-time plots, essay films, absurd tracking shots, improvised dialogue, all became part of film. The resulting appetite for truly artistic work allowed this niche to become economically self-sustaining. All the artists who revolutionized the medium were able to keep making films, and keep inventing new things. Americans followed in the 1970s, and much of the rest of the world joined.
Even just introducing filmmaking unconstrained by a studio system or government censorship to a new country could still produce incredible advancement. In the 1990s, Iran had just exited a difficult decade characterized by the consolidation of a repressive government and an all-consuming war with Iraq, but a few more artists were able to get cameras. Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and others made a new style of film which combined fiction and documentary in a new brilliant way not seen before. Recent decades have seen the same pattern. Auteurs such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Costas, Lisandro Alonso, Lav Diaz, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Wang Bing have been enabled by inexpensive film production techniques, dedicated artistic funders, and gaps in government censorship to significantly move the medium of film forward.
But film has gone through another transformation in the last decade which has not had the same effect. Video cameras orders of magnitudes better than what the Neorealists or New Wave directors had to stake their life-savings on are now in the pockets of a sizable percent of the world population. Not only is the technology available, but the medium has exploded. Between Youtube, Instagram, and Tik Tok around 1 million hours of video are uploaded every day by filmmakers ranging from well funded corporate projects to aspirants with a phone and a dream. These videos feature narrative dramas and documentary, as well as many new genres enabled by this technology: vlogs, reactions, lets plays, and more. But these videos are all still using the same language of the films that preceded them - they stay to the safe, standard conventions of Hollywood and its refinements. And nearly nothing that would qualify as an advance of film art, or even particularly good works of art at all, have come from this.
This is a deep disappointment. One would expect that democratization would be good for a medium, and especially would be good for film which has benefitted at every stage of the gradual democratization of moving image production technology. Getting cameras to aspiring filmmakers in Iran, India, Senegal, and Mali has produced incredible works of art in the past, and surely not everyone who could make a great film has been able to. Something is very different in this moment which should be the ultimate freeing of the medium. Everyone should be filmmakers, and everyone should be moving art forward at speeds never before seen.
The answer may be not in access, but desire. All the great filmmakers then and now went through extraordinary efforts to obtain cameras and crews because they loved film and wanted to make films. The bulk of those enabled by the camera phone has no such desire. It is possible that there is some finite percent of the world population who want to make artistic films and we have already exhausted them. If anything the desire for artistically deep and experimental work in general is dissipating. It is increasingly rare among the general population to watch films with artistic aspirations; internet video has usurped its place in the media diet. Meanwhile the most-watched films that still fit into longform narrative content have found a new economics of funding and profit which centers aesthetic conservatism more than even old Hollywood did.
There is still a great amount happening in filmmaking thanks to these technologies, but those who use them belong to the same lineage as their predecessors. It is not kids on youtube who have discovered the new aesthetic possibilities of digital as a medium, but old directors like Michael Mann and David Lynch. The upstart crew that made Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, learned how to do special effects on Youtube, but their storytelling and editing still come from the movies.
Art will continue to change and advance and democratization will still pave the path forward. But democratization alone does not make art flourish, there needs to be an underlying culture which desires art. If entertainment is easy, and entertainment can fill up a life such that the difficulties or art are not required, then artless entertainment will be what triumphs.