That’s an interesting call-out because I’ve had The Rain People on my list forever and was recently thinking about it after Megalopolis, but hadn’t heard of Filmmaker. I’ll see if I can track them down.
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Interesting questions and I'm not sure I have all the answers. I suppose Justice Potter Stewart's definition of porn will have to do for my admittedly subjective definition of art, "I know it when I see it."
Art is always personally subjective. One man's art is another's trash. Personally, I don't feel like I'm a terribly gifted artist. I was a decent high school, college, and summer stock actor. Perhaps, my definition of good art, at least for myself, is "could I do this easily myself"? If I could, it's not art. If I couldn't, perhaps it is.
But, the viewer's emotional engagement is clearly a part of art. I remember seeing a blue canvas in the Paris Modern Art Museum. I could easily have painted that, I thought. An artist snapped back, "But you didn't, did you?" No, I didn't but the canvas left me with nothing but the regret that I had lost precious time viewing it. A film friend of mine once described the feeling of watching an unsatisfying film as "brushing your teeth for three hours". For a film to be great, every scene should engage the viewer and "fit" into the puzzle. Wasted scenes annoy the hell out of me. Doesn't matter whether the film is 1 1/2 hours or 4 hours, there has to be a compelling reason for every scene. In essence, the scene is a little short movie unto itself.
Expectations are another issue/problem. I have to fight them sometimes. "Star Wars" seems to be a fave here. I hated the movie the first time I saw it. It had been out for months and I had endured people constantly chirping about it. I went in expecting "2001: A Space Odyssey" or at worst, a good episode of "Star Trek". Instead, I got a stupid, space western with admittedly interesting special effects. To me, "The Empire Strikes Back" was a FAR better movie. Was it because I had lower expectations for the second movie? Was it because the first movie was merely exposition for the second? Was it because my personality tends to gravitate towards the dark side of the force? I don't know. Perhaps, I just thought the second movie's parts fit better together and "moved" me more than the first. By the way, I absolutely hated the Ewoks movie. It was the worst of the three and pretty much ended my fascination with Star Wars.
I could go on and on. Mercifully, I won't. The bottom line is - art is subjective. If it doesn't connect with and engage in some meaningful (emotional?) way, I'm out.
P.S. - I think "Rocky 3" was the best Rocky movie. I liked "Crash" and hated "Brokeback Mountain". 1979's "The In-Laws" and "This is Spinal Tap" are two of my all-time favorite movies. I marveled at "Schmigadoon!" and consider it to be one of the best TV shows I've seen in years. I love "The Shawshank Redemption" but I'm "meh" about "Citizen Kane". Go figure!
Add "Conclave" to the list. As of last night, three down and seven to go.
I liked it a lot and gave it an "A". The acting was stellar. From what I've seen so far, Ralph Fiennes should win the Oscar. The sets and costumes were spectacular and the "mystery" story moved at a nice pace. At no time in the two hours was I aware of my butt in the seat.
Did I derive some joy from knowing that MAGA Catholics' heads would explode at the end of this movie? Perhaps. But the twist ending, while somewhat contrived, worked all right for me.
No Best Director nomination may handicap this movie from winning the big prize. And what of Isabella Rossellini's Supporting Actress nod? Was that actually a "Lifetime Achievement" nomination? I certainly didn't see anything Oscar-worthy in her performance.
You can usually find both films on YouTube. I wouldn't exactly call either film fun or entertaining.
The Rain People is a sort of allegory for what American Zoetrope can do as a lean, anti-bureaucratic organization operating according to a different type of ethos.
Filmmaker is an addendum to that argument, but also Lucas's own contribution to the question of why directors, and not studio producers, should have control of the making of a film.
I don't agree with everything in this video essay, but I think it offers some counterpoints to your idea about how film narrative should work:
It wasn’t until Megalopolis that I even realized American Zoetrope was still active. But I guess Sofia’s films have been most of that activity.
I think it's been shuttered a few times only to rise again.
It’s like our Flatiron in NYC but cooler and greener.
There is a degree of tomate-toe/toma-toe to this. BOTH can be cinema. Both approaches can move a narrative along. One with more regard given to tone and ambiance. The other with less. Don't get me wrong. Both can work and both can fail, depending on the effect on the story.
Unless the intent of the artists is for the work to be performed only for themselves, consideration must given to a potential audience. I would argue that without an audience, is there art, or in this case, CINEMA?
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I recommend watching Jodorowsky's Dune, a documentary about legendary cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky's attempt to get Dune made in the mid 70's. According to their plans, it was going to be everything that Star Wars was not (check out the cast, they had Salvador Dali inked to play the emporer) but alas, the production fell apart (supposedly the run time on the finished product was going to be over 10 hours and Jodorowsky wouldn't budge on that, although wasn't the only reason the production fizzled). It's intriguing to think what the future of sci-fi would've looked like if Jodorowsky's version of Dune had been produced and screened before Star Wars. At any rate, some (many?) of Jodorowsky's ideas certainly influenced Lucas and many sci-fi directors after him..
Maybe Jodorowsky influenced other SF directors, but I'd need more evidence to be convinced that his aborted Dune (and the Moebius's art direction) influenced Lucas in any appreciable fashion. As far as I can tell, Lucas does not have a surrealist bone in his body. His avant-gardism is less psychological than physical/visual, which is why he hired abstract animators like Jordan Belson to work on SFX.
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I think this reply misunderstands what art cinema generally purports to do. The point of a lingering shot in De Sica's Terminal Station is precisely to not move the narrative along, but to de-center the goal-oriented protagonist at the center of Hollywood storytelling. You can call that "tone," but I think that identification underestimates the realist impetus behind the decision: Hollywood stories are not akin to real life. Contra classical Hollywood narrative, we do not proceed in our lives in lockstep fashion towards the achievement of some goal. Duh, one might respond. But more clearly recognizing how Hollywood narratives work helps us to recognize the limits on how they might "move us."
Granted, De Sica is not the best example of this--if I had to pick an Italian filmmaker, I'd go with Antonioni, whose films like L'Avventura more clearly abandon the pretenses of goal orientation and the strictures, one might say, that such narration place on storytelling.
As for potential audiences, I agree--we're seldom going to ignore audiences altogether. But these films often presume different audience segments with different educations and capabilities, and different sense of what a film should accomplish: should it entertain? is it art?
So, the blue canvas IS art?
I agree - different strokes for different folks. But sometimes pretentious masturbation is simply ... well ... pretentious masturbation. I suppose it may be fun to watch and even more fun to do. But is it art? I suppose it's in the eye of the beholder.
I'm reminded of those YouTube videos where they film themselves in the mirror each day for five years. Think how much better the completed project would be if they filmed each sequence for two hours instead of five seconds. Sorry, breepf, I'd rather feel or learn something from the art I consume. Call me provincial if you wish but there's only so much tooth-brushing that I care to do in a day.
I'm not arguing that art cinema is better or worse than classical Hollywood narrative. When it comes to art, I'm a pluralist, which is why I do think it is provincial to insist that classical Hollywood narrative has some unique purchase on human emotion and feeling. Moreover, art cinema is generally closer to Hollywood classical narrative than it is to a blue canvas. If you want a blue canvas in film, there's always Jarman's Blue:
Part of what potentially makes your position provincial is that it insists--to use painterly language--that art should be a picture, not a painting. Put another way, you've suggested that the great virtue of Hollywood cinema is the window it provides unto human existence, from which we can glean therapeutic benefits. But what would it mean to be forced to confront a painting as a painting (or film as a film)? For one, it would require that we concede the presence and existence of the other thing, which is an important gesture in a world that prizes social media, selfies, influencer culture--in a world, in short, that views other people as instruments for our own prestige and hustle, as so many windows unto ourselves.
superrific
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I'm sort of in the middle between you two. Whether the blue canvas is art strikes me as not a particularly interesting question. I find minimalism in painting to be quite boring and none of the justifications or defenses of it strike me as convincing. At the same time, I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say that every scene in a film must "fit" and not be "wasted." What counts? Does it have to fit the plot?
This is one of my favorite scenes in movies (though the duel scene following it is even better, this is more easily digestible). It's unnecessary. We don't need to follow Bullingdon on his sojourn through an aristocratic gentlemen's club. What is necessary is for Bullingdon to challenge Barry to a duel. But I'm very very glad that Kubrick decided to do it like this:
superrific
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I can't get on board with a) calling other positions provincial while b) espousing meaningless tautology and reveling in vagueness. The last sentence in no way follows from the one before, and none of it even tries to be persuasive. It's just critical diktat.
I would argue the opposite: that the measure you've espoused is actually provincial. Whether that blue painting is art is a question of concern, perhaps, to a tiny community of artists who revel in self-referentiality (whether they admit it or not). It has nothing to say to anyone else. What's more, these types of productions have little to say even on their own terms. I am so tired of reading about art that "invites the viewer to question whether art must be . . . " The problem here is:
a. It's never a question. Marcel Duchamp wasn't inviting viewers to question whether a toilet on a museum wall is art. He was asserting that it is. That's why he did it. Sometimes the art community is more or less upfront about this: sometimes we see artists described as pushing the boundaries of what is art (thus obviating the formality of the audience's agreement). That's more honest but revealing. The easiest way to achieve creativity without actually being creative is to slap some ugly thing on a canvas and say you're exploring the nature of art.
b. Duchamp made the point over a century ago. One hundred years of dada and post-dada art and what insight have we achieved? That blue painting is a toilet on the wall. It's the same idea. The blue canvas is a toilet on the wall. It's all so fucking BORING -- and not just because the artworks themselves are uninteresting. The entire discourse is uninteresting. Even the stock response to "I could have done that" (which I don't consider to be a useful consideration) or "well, you didn't" is boring.
No, that cinematic blue canvas is MUCH more interesting than the one I saw. The one I witnessed more resembled the segments they used to have on the Oscars where they'd show, "What does this scene look like without sound editing?"
I generally stay off of social media. I've never taken a selfie. I don't even possess a cell phone. Guilty - as provincial as you can get. I see little value in calling a blank canvas a painting for the sake of "art". Now, if status as a tastemaker or a hot chick or some other social bean can be collected for such a concession, perhaps I could be persuaded to call a blank canvas a painting. But isn't that what you criticize in those who have not been elevated to an unknown (and perhaps, unknowable) level of awareness of anti-classical Hollywood cinema? Sometimes the beautiful clothes that the Emperor appears to be wearing are simply a birthday suit. Admittedly, some birthday suits are appealing, even must-see according to some haughty aficionados, but basically, they are still just birthday suits.
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By the way, I'm guessing the artist who painted the blue canvas was Yves Klein. He had a whole series of blue canvases. There's one at MOMA in NYC IIRC.
Yves Klein - Wikipedia
When it comes to my case for the value of this hypothetical blue canvas, the point of self-referentiality isn't to revel in it or to police the boundaries of art and non-art.
Take a real painting or two: Jasper Johns's Flag or Three Flags. To use the distinction conveyed above, those paintings are paintings, not pictures. Three Flags fucks with perspective through its arrangement of smaller flags on top of bigger ones. Johns made the paint gloopy and textural--we don't forget it's paint and that Three Flags is a painting itself, not just a window for thinking about some verisimilar flag. So, yeah, it is an artwork that presumes to discipline--successfully or not--the type of attention that we give to paintings.
So my point is about attention. I guess that could be shifted into an argument about art/non-art, but it feels sufficiently distinct to me.
And, to return to the conversation about film, Hollywood films--for all the variety of one genre versus another--discipline attention in very particular and, ultimately, narrow ways.