Cinematic State of the Union 2024: Here we are! Where are we? by Craig Hammill

Sean Baker’s Anora, winner of 2024’s Cannes prestigious Palm D’Or may point the direction of where cinema can go and reclaim relevancy…

Fellow movie lovers of the world. Here we are. September 2024. Movies have survived world wars, global pandemics, depressions, fear of nuclear annihilation, television, the internet, streaming.

2022 and 2023 saw near pre-Covid pandemic returns to the movie theaters. Domestic box office passed $8 billion US. And here at the start of the awards season sprint, Cannes, Venice, Telluride, Toronto, have already given us buzzed about, ambitious movies like Sean Baker’s Anora, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Alfonso Cuaron’s Disclaimer (an Apple+ miniseries but a movie event nonetheless), Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, to glance the surface just superficially.

Filmmakers like Alfonso Cuaron, David Fincher, and Martin Scorsese are making “must see” cinema for streamers like Apple TV and Netflix.

And yet, movie culture and the movie industry feel like a mess. It feels like we’re out in the wilderness or at the bottom of a hole or exhausted, disoriented, and having trouble remembering our own name. What are movies now? How do they fit into a pop culture puzzle that is increasingly driven by wild staccato bursts of creativity (or venality) on Tik Tok or the chimerical “what do we call this” content on YouTube or the breathtakingly immersive narratives coming out of the video game world like 2023’s Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom?

When time and chance play mischief with our understanding of the last 150 years, will cinema endure as a still relevant evolving art form with potential like the novel, music, theater, painting? Or will it come to be viewed as an intermediary art form like vaudeville or radio? Vaudeville has become late night comedy (in a way) and radio is still here and become podcasts, etc.

Everything is dynamic. Things evolve. Time is the river water and it feels fruitless to waste energy trying to wade against a raging current rather than harnessing that current to move towards whatever lies ahead.

And yet. . .cinema, movies have always found a funny way of reinventing themselves, reasserting themselves right at the moment of greatest peril.

Like so much that is mysterious in life, the suffering, death rattles of one moment turn out to be the birth pangs of the next. Sound begat the classic era of Hollywood. TV begat widescreen and 70mm. Digital and streaming have begat a breaking down of barriers to entry to make a short or a feature film.

But the headwinds and pitfalls are obvious and plenty as well. The fractured media landscape has somehow made movies “smaller”. Where once movies felt not only magical but the world’s way of telling itself its own myths and the actors, unfairly elevated demigods in a way, now movies feel desperate.

The greatest trick movies ever pulled was to make audiences think that the making of them happened somewhere on a mist enshrouded Mount Olympus. Now everyone seems to know that movies are harried affairs cobbled together by neurotics with mommy and daddy issues that rival our politicians. And of course, our politicians have gotten smaller too.

Sergei Bondarchuk’s USSR made epic War & Peace still stands as a high watermark of practical moviemaking with real extras.

Opening night at the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard still means something. But it’s also apparent to everyone sitting there that they’re usually watching a glorified DVD. There’s no whirr of industrial equipment in the booth, grinding gears, blaring xenon lights, silver nitrate and light and photochemistry, and infrared soundtracks stimulating our minds to dream with our eyes open.

This isn’t to fetishize film or film equipment. Movies have always been the pliant lover to the newest technological innovations. To pine after periods that have passed us is to pine after a lover that’s left us or died and to obsess over a ghost. Vertigo may be a great movie but it’s no way to live.

But that doesn’t have to mean that we have to settle for mediocrity because we think we don’t deserve any better. Or worse. . .we don’t even have the tools or memory anymore to realize that things could be better.

While huge movies like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer are still being made on Imax and/or 70MM film, while digital cinematography is finding its 65mm/70mm equivalent with the digital Alexa cameras (a la the Emmanuel Lubezski shot The Revenant), it’s very hard to say that any recent movie has scaled the heights of Stanley Kubrick’s 70mm shot 2001 , David Lean’s 70mm shot Lawrence of Arabia, or Sergei Bondarchuk’s 70mm shot War and Peace (all movies made in the 1960’s; now a clear high water mark for this kind of epic movie making). And there may be some clear answers why this is so: in the 1960’s these movies had to use real extras, real locations, real models, mind-numbing multi-pass special effects photography, film editing that literally required cutting with blades and scissors. . .In other words, the tactile requirements of the craft itself affected the medium and moviemakers ability to mold that celluloid clay.

David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia seems to be proof, a documentary of its own making, of how pushing oneself in production can lead (as long as it’s accompanied by talent and vision) to real art.

The digital tools available now produce scenes and sequences of such seamless grandeur and yet they feel less impressive. You can feel when a cathedral took three generations of vision and labour to build. You can literally feel the hundreds who died to express their faith in glass and stone. You can also feel when a hundred story skyscraper of today took just a few years.

And it’s also true that many of us in movies haven’t been tested the way the greatest moviemakers of the past were tested. Charlie Chaplin was born into inconceivable Dickensian poverty and clawed his way to fame making people laugh. He knew what it was to suffer and he turned that suffering into the gossamer of giddy fun. Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Billy Wilder, John Huston all those mid-century madmen had seen fascism and totalitarianism and a world war and their careers were wrestling with that madness for the rest of their lives. Jean Renoir and John Ford had lived through two world wars and fought in at least one each. It’s hard (and maybe not even advisable) to try to claw to the rich clay of cinematic potential if it means having to understand trauma and loss and terror first-hand in a way that emotionally stunts a person in all other avenues of life. Most people don’t have that choice but to suffer.

Yet. . .we have our share of catastrophe. Climate change, a decades long ebb tide back to populism and performative “strong men” who would be a joke if the punchline wasn’t on us. Democracy is in a defensive crouch. Borders are suddenly asserting themselves again. The free flow of trade and ideas are at risk. And factions are forming for what could unfortunately be World War III. We can all almost call it right now: Russia, Iran, China, North Korea on one side. The United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand Japan on the other.

So there’s plenty of real nerve jangling real time challenges to go around to make for some good movies.

But here we are! Where are we?

Climate change has passed two degrees celsius on cinema as well. The ecosystem is damaged. We can feel it. I can feel it. Can you feel it?

Jason Reitman’s upcoming Saturday Night about the 90 minutes before the first Saturday Night Live episode in 1975 still shows movies can find a zeitgeist topic and explore it…

There are green shoots of hope. Letterboxd as a social media platform is helping revive a kind of movie culture. The rep theater scene and so many people’s genuine love of movies are undiminished. And people still want to tell stories. Still want to experiment with form. Still want to make great cinema. I know I do. I know you must want to do the same.

But for it all to work, for that magic to permeate the air, creep into our subconsciouses, suffuse the very inhalation and exhalation of our delicate breath, we have to get to work turning over the fields again. Pulling out the stones. Sowing the crops. Preparing for the harvests. Getting up at 3am to be far enough along so by daybreak we’ve made something of the day.

As it has always been, a moment is either made or broken by the community that rises to meet it or fails to rise to meet it. Cinema will be saved by community. Cinema will be restored by community. Cinema will be reimagined by community and collaboration. Cinema will be consecrated by the collected faith of all of us putting our shoulders into it. Building our own cinematic cathedral.

United, cinema will stand. Divided, it will fall.

Do we dare to hear that distant call? Do we dare to answer it?

Craig Hammill is the founder.principal.head programmer of Secret Movie Club.

Stanley Kubrick and 2001, The once and future high watermark of what cinema can do.