Current state of Film

I have a 17-year-old son and, maybe it's just me, but I don't see any difference between him and his friends than between me and my friends when I was his age. Technology isn't making us dumber or giving us ADD or whatever crazy fear people want to invent. Texting isn't lessening human interaction. It's just a new tool for interaction to occur. People probably said the telephone was going to be our undoing 100 years ago.

Again, to the OP, your interest in film and how it acts as a reflection of life just puts you in the company of other film nerds. I'm sure the young people you see in the theater watching with less discriminating eyes have their own passions or will develop them later in life. I'm sure some of them will one day watch films the same way you do.

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I would not say young people are dumber with technology! I would say that they now want to experience quicker gratification and that is not in any way compatible with any form of art... The society is now used to be able to do everything with just one touch, they don't want to spen 30 minutes or more looking at a painting trying to understand what the painter wanted to transmit... With films, it's the same thing! The more I watch foreign or american independent movies, the more I can't stand Hollywood, just because they focus too much in not loosing the viewers short capacity of attention instead of giving the filme some depth... Watching a film is an experience that lasts much more time than the duration of the film...

So, ya, I would say the technology is responsible for that, but not for making the people dumber... They are just lazier...

Something else I don't agree with in this thread? What?!

Since the internet went totally broadband and more readily available we've seen the death of the video store, the decline of print media, and less and less sales of digital films and TV shows. We've watched the world slowly change (for the better IMO).

What we haven't seen is the closing of museums. In fact, the St. Louis Art Museum 10 minutes from my house, just completed a massive addition to their facility. So, no, I don't believe people no longer "want to spen 30 minutes or more looking at a painting trying to understand what the painter wanted to transmit." Just because those people are hard to find doesn't mean they don't exist. They've always been a niche group of people.

Again, the same can be said of film fans. The ones who just want to be entertained with explosions and bright lights have always and will always outnumber the people who want an artful experience at the cinema. Don't worry, you'll always have a home right here with us geeks.

The only thing technology in our pockets will lead to, IMO, is a more specific group of interests. It's not giving people less attention spans, but it does prove to limit the type of media we consume. If I'm into punk rock, for example, I can use spotify and pandora or even my own itunes to limit my music consumption to punk rock. I can find groups of people who also love punk rock and put myself into that community. In the future we will all be people who know a whole lot about a few things we love.

You're talking about the now... The Internet is a very recent thing, the massive expansion of touch technology is even younger... You can't measure the results of it with museums attendance right now, you have to analyse to 3 year old kids that can't be 5 minutes without an ipad and that in 20 years will not go to an art exhibit unless the paintings are digital!

Of course the people that like art were never the majority, but the numbers will decrease to a point when making art stops being worthy, to the people who finance it!

So you're crying that the sky is falling based on...nothing? Seems legit.

I think a lot of this discussion is really about vanity, egoism, fear of irrelevancy. If society seems to be moving away from me, what does that say about my place and value in it?

He's basing it on what he thinks he observes in younger people. And you initially disagreed with him based on what you think you observe in them, so if that's based on nothing, the response would be, too.

And while he may be right or wrong about what these younger people will grow up into, the museum attendance argument seems like a non-sequitur. The overwhelming majority of these institutions are kept alive by endowments, and based on my own trips to such places, it sure doesn't seem like they're being kept afloat by the younger generation.

Anyway, let's keep this civil; I don't see any reason to use a pejorative like "crying." And let's try to keep it relegated to cinema, specifically, if at all possible.

I'm pretty sure art museums weren't kept alive by the younger generation when I was a kid either, but that doesn't change what he said. Saying younger people don't stop and appreciate the finer things is an argument people have been saying for generations.

I'm curious though, neiba, do you have children? How old are you? What makes you think younger people have lesser attention spans? If this opinion is based on the fact that they seem to run around with their faces stuck in their phones that seems like the opposite of short attention spans.

None of this changes what I said about film fans being a niche group of people. It's the reason a film like Transformers can make a billion dollars while The Great Beauty only makes $21 million. It's been like that for years. We aren't a dying breed, we are a minority.

I'm too young to be a member of a dying breed

Also, I may note that the two films I went to this weekend by Hou Hsiao-Hsien (a very complex, obscure, difficult, and many would say "slow" director) were packed to the brim and sold out by both young and old audiences.

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Mubi

"Art For numerous reasons, a difficult word to define without starting endless argument." Artlex art dictionary.

Seeing how cinema/film is art, no one person can define the meaning of it for another.

If a person loves one type of film, we don't have to automatically hate other types. And even if we don't personally care for certain types of films, we don't have to belittle those who do like them. It's a big universe people and there's room for diversity.

The danger is that the younger people won't appreciate the finer things 10 or 20 years from now because they are not getting used to think like the past generations did!

I'm 23 yo, and I hv no children though there are kids in my family to whom I'm very close and that's why I say what I'm saying!

Being stuck in their phones does not mean high attention span, means that they are always playing games that don't cultivate their creativity at all! And that's the danger I'm talking about! being creative is the most important thing to be an educated citizen and an art lover when they grow older, IMO!

Check it out! In the 1920s people were poo-pooing technological advancements. My favorite quote:

"Just as an example from the very first page of the book: In 1926 the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee discuss the topic “Do modern inventions help or mar character and health?” Among the specific questions the committee proposed were “Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?” [and] “Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”"

Besides, kids don't give a crap about art or deeper questions about humanity or any of that crap. Give them time. We're way too early in this tech to even begin to worry.

State of film? Why not discuss the actual decline of photochemical film, both as a negative format and as a distributional method? And the subsequent rise of digital cameras and projection.

It's such a contentious issue, but a really interesting one. It was only 15 years ago where the prospects of a new negative format replacing film, especially customary 35mm, were low, especially when you looked at the monopoly companies such as Arri and Panavision had in film equipment. Sure, directors such as Cameron, Lucas, and Coppola predicted it theoretically, but for it to come into actual effect - and so rapidly - continues to astonish me.

Today, a majority of films, particularly low-to-mid scale projects, are shot entirely with digital cameras. It's cheaper, it's more accessible, it's more user-friendly, and it ultimately aids the actual labour process of making a film drastically. And it's not just digital cameras - every film now enters a digital intermediate process. Editing is digital, colour grading is digital, finalisation is digital, and distribution is digital. Most cinemas now, as we all probably understand, feature digital projection only, whether it be 2K or 4K projection (only high-end theatres tend to feature the latter). And just think how huge this fundamentally is.

15+ years ago we'd go to a cinema and see an illusion. A collection of still images would go through a light bulb at 24 fps and we'd discern movement when, in actuality, there really wasn't any. It was hypnotic, almost, and part of what made the cinematic experience so truly unique. Now we attend a cinema and see a media file projected onto a large screen. It's like having a bigger TV and a better Blu-ray player. It's remarkable how much has changed in such a short period of time.

But it's the fact that, now, the negative format that used to be so closely associated with the art of making motion picture is... dying Despite efforts from film advocates such as Nolan, Tarantino, Spielberg, Scorsese, and various others, it will continue to decline.

I'm not giving my actual opinion yet on this. But I just wanted to put it out there.

How narcissistic is it to think that we're in complete knowledge of what the finer things are and that everyone should appreciate them? If the younger generation deems our art boring and not worth their time (which is probably not going to happen), then let us reconsider our art and ourselves, rather than point to them as failures. I think the main connection you can point to in my life as to when I became an art lover as opposed to a standard consumer was the same time that I really became an independent thinker, and it's foolish to say that independent thought is on the way out.

I also feel that I would never have become so enamored with cinema if it weren't for the internet. Back in my home town, my library had next to no DVDs and video stores were on the way out, so I turned to the internet in order to find good movies. As someone whose favorite movies are all mainstream/canonized American movies, I don't know if you can relate to this, but for me, I wouldn't have been able to find (or afford) many of the movies that are now most important to me without the internet.

For me, the preservation of film culture is all about how available the movies are, and currently we're in a better position than ever.

Also, how can you say that kids play games that don't cultivate creativity when one of the most popular games right now (and from my experience, the most popular among young kids), Minecraft, is one of the most open and creativity filled games of all time?

I honestly don't think that this is a very interesting issue because it's a primarily economic issue that has very little to do with film itself, and everything to do with lowering production costs.

Excellent post Matteo.

I'm always interested in learning about the technical aspect of movie making, albeit film or digital. I don't know much about it other than I notice a distinct difference in the look of digital vs film movies.

What he actually said is that they don't want to spend a lot of time looking at an actual painting. I'm not sure how "museums are not closing" is a response to that.

It's also always true. It's just that it's usually true because they're young. The question is whether or not it figures to persist more with this one as they grow up.

The fact that they're staring at one thing is not an indication of a long attention span if that one thing (the screen) is malleable and capable of displaying lots of different things.

I'm with bluedeed here, my interest in film came from my independent thinking and access to the internet. No one else in my family, or anyone I know enjoys films as much as me really, and my expansion of tastes has come from the internet which has gave me access to all kinds of films and materials related to them.

And about Minecraft too, my ten year old sister plays that or the time, or watches YouTube videos relating to it, so I'll support his point there. In her school now they have lots of iPads and Computers available, my primary school had a few old computers that we rarely used. She's often set homework that involves internet research and she can use a computer pretty confidently, probably better than my mum. I remember having encyclopedias when I was younger, there's no need now, really.

The younger generation has, by definition, experienced less. Taste is inevitably cultivated through experience and thought. So if we're going to talk about these groups in aggregate, that's the last group I would use to decide what to reconsider.

And if we're measuring narcissism, it doesn't get more extreme than the fact that almost every teenager thinks they're the first person to question things.

I agree; I think plenty of what neiba's saying makes sense, but I don't think creativity is something this generation lacks.

I think the problem with discussions like this is that the complaints people have about the next generation are usually right, but their overall conclusions are not. For example, I think it's quite obviously true that this generation is far more self-absorbed than previous ones. But it's also more creative, so it's hard to make a case that this is a net gain or net loss. They are better at some things and worse at others. This is how older people can be simultaneously correct in their complaints, but wrong in their overall opinion that the next generation is inherently inferior.

What I've seen from Yoda throughout MoFo is that all of his arguments about the younger generation are founded on a "truism" that he's found that the younger generation is far more narcissistic than any generation before it. If you don't agree with that, arguing isn't really worth it because he's found this to be true and can't be convinced otherwise (since narcissism is such an unquantifiable quality).