The Future of Art

[As part of a discussion of the Cannes Film Festival at my web-group Confabulation, my friend Robert Kennedy mourned the death of filmmakers who work in 35mm as opposed to video -- a change largely dictated by economics, even if some directors pretend otherwise. This is my reply.]

Despite my cinephilia, I'm ultimately more of a literature guy, and part of the reason is, that although economics can dictate what films come into existence, it cannot dictate what books come into existence. A non-commercial book may have a harder time getting published (although nowadays, there are more options for that), but publication is only a final step; the text already exists. All it needed to be born was the author's time, energy, and imagination. With a pencil and scraps of paper, an inmate in a concentration camp can create literature. It is an incredibly open and egalitarian process.

In spite of the losses to film-making that you accurately describe, Robert, there are some potential benefits in DIY cinema, although I think that by and large we haven't begun to see those benefits yet. To the extent that making a film becomes more like writing a book ("le camero-stylo," the camera as pen), that could have liberating effects.

Since I have just enough economics to be dangerous, let me say what I think is happening. The malaise at Cannes is indeed related to the passing of an era. What is ending is the use of a highly expensive apparatus of film-making to create works that are essentially non-commercial. The financial returns are increasingly just not worth it to anyone. Soon, the notion of a major studio release that has any intent other than that of raking in the dollars will be laughable. Name actors will not make less on indie films; they'll make nothing.

You describe a cheapening of the product, Robert, and in terms of production values (including, unfortunately, the quality of the visual image), you are right. Again, big difference from literature, where the "production values" of War and Peace or Les Miserables or Little Dorrit, which would be (and have been) astronomical to put on the screen, are entirely in Tolstoy's and Hugo's and Dickens's words. It is nice that, for a few decades, considerable money could be spent on cinematic visions of greater artistic than commercial appeal; but that was for a moment only, in the larger scheme of things, and it is over.

One of the mythologies of Cannes is that it is where art and commerce meet, but as the years roll forward, art and commerce will barely be on speaking terms, and that myth will fade. It's not just affecting film: symphony orchestras and opera companies, which I dearly belove, will go out of business for exactly the same reason -- a huge expensive apparatus requirement for a style of discourse that truly appeals to less than one-tenth of one percent of the general population.

On a more optimistic note, I do believe that true art will go on. It always has. But it will re-jigger in surprising ways. The future lies almost entirely with Manny Farber's "termite art," of great imagination and modest means.