So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

I'm rummaging through tonight's offerings and look at MF reviews of recent movies and can't help but reinforce something that's been rattling around in my head...namely, what movies are supposed to be. When I read published reviews I know that, based who is reviewing, they will have a preference for a certain type of flick.

At one extreme, we have the cinephiles who often veer toward movies that don't do much with action and FX, who want intelligent drama, centered around people taking about important stuff.

On the other extreme, we have movies that are little but action, clearly stereotypic dialog that's kept brief, lots of combat, car crashes, exploding planets or whatever.

In particular, a movie popped into my queue, "After Sun", which according to Wikipedia, is meaningful, full of angst and psychological issues, adolescence and parenthood. It's being touted as a "great" movie. It also seems like it could be a book or a stage play, since it's about "meaningful" dialog, etc. In short, really slow and talky on a night where I need some action.

I guess, my contention on this issue is that, if a movie doesn't do more than what can be done in a book or stage play, if it doesn't take you somewhere, alter the time-space continuum, evade some of reality, show you something that you won't see in regular life, why bother? If it's just a visual version of a book I wouldn't read, why bother? Critics will say that it's meaningful, insightful, well acted, etc, but again...to me....too much sitting and talking, an angsty version of My Dinner With Andre.

I guess the question is...what is the right balance of action, literature and FX? Is a movie just filmed dialog? I don't know the answer, but I do find myself asking the question a lot.

Laying out catnip for pedants? Meow?



I'm not sure what the question is, so I'll wait and see if this takes an interesting direction.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

They're not supposed to be anything. Film is a medium. Artists use it to their liking. Then if people happen to respond, great. If not, great too. At least someone took the effort to create something.



If there is any one particular thing that matters, at least to me, is that the form doesn't get codified into something it is supposed to be. Our ideas of what a movie is should always be changing. As well as what we get out of them.


What gets interesting is to see over time how many different ways different people use the exact same media for entirely different purposes. Some just want to satisfy an audience with spectacle. Fine. Some want us to think. Fine. Some want to provoke. Fine. Some have something to say about a particular subject matter. Fine. Some don't have anything in particular to say at all but just can't help themselves from expressing themselves. Fine.



They create them. We watch them. Then we enjoy them or not. Discuss them or not. And then maybe they'll make something else for us to understand or misunderstand or completely ignore.



Now if one chooses to only like watching one branch of the many possibilites film offers its viewers, well that's ultimately fine too. But the more limited one is in what they are willing to watch or think about, the less interesting the discussion about film is ultimately going to be. It would be like a person who when talking about their friends can only describe them by their haircut, ignoring the possibility that maybe there is more about these people to discuss. Now, if they have a great level of knowledge about haircuts, that might be one interesting conversation if one loves haircuts. But it doesn't give much of a chance for us to get a complete understanding of who that person actually is.


So movies are basically everything you want them to be. But they can also be even more than that.

I'm not a cinephile and I don't aim to be one. However I do like movies that are mostly void of action, twist endings and special effects...and I do seek out intelligent drama BUT I often prefer if they don't talk about 'important stuff' but instead talk about everyday life stuff. I guess that's why I'm not a cinephile.

Once again I want to see slices of 'regular life', to me that's more cinemagraphically honest. And I don't read books or go to stage plays so movies are the vehicle in which I can explore such things.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

Also, just because there might be lots of talking in a film does not mean it isn't inherently cinematic. How it is filmed matters. How the editing punctuates what is being said or lets it linger. The performances. The sound design. How what they are saying is reflected in their surroundings. Music, either diagetic or non-diagetic can add a tremendous amount. All of these things are a completely different experience from reading about people talking. They actually have very little in common beyond potentially the words being spoken and maybe the actions being taken. They act on the brain in completely different ways. Both art forms have their limitations and benefits that shape how we relate to them. Completely different.


Also, very few movies are just people sitting around talking. This is usually said by people who stopped paying attention after a couple of minutes of uninterrupted conversation. My Dinner With Andre is an exception (and also cinematic in a way that reading what they say on paper would be an entirely different experience, even if it was translated verbatim). Also, in regards to Andre, simply the idea of placing a dinner table conversation in front of a camera is the point. To think of conversation as a movie is a kind of provocation worth thinking about, in how this makes us relate to two men talking.

Well film is unique as an artistic medium, in that it's is able to convey actuality more vividly than any other medium. This can be used either in the direction of realism, conveying more realistically life than a stage play could (and even more so than paintings or novels) -- or this could be used to play with the medium and beguile the viewer into thinking he's watching real life when you're actually toying with it and bending perceptions through surrealism. I like both styles.


Because of the former realistic style, when a moviemaker is depicting something conventional and not trying to be surreal, it annoys me when they take shortcuts like a stage play would. So for example, Quentin Tarantino has a good grasp of this. When he directed a couple of episodes of CSI the TV series, he had one of the protagonists walking across a parking lot when it was getting dark in Vegas. A lot of people in movies or TV shows if they're showing someone in outside locations, they'll just have a set. But Tarantino clearly had chosen an actual vast parking lot situated in downtown Vegas where you could see actual cars and streets in the distance and it had a nice visual effect as a backdrop while the protagonist was walking slowly to his car, combining long shots to take in the surroundings and closeups (where he would be abducted).



There are so many examples of this, for instance when billion dollar budget movies use fake snow. They actually spend millions of dollars with snow machines, why can't they just use that budget to wait for a snowy day or go to a snowy geographical location? That's one reason why I love the Polanski movie Fearless Vampire Killers, because he has this long scene in the middle of the night where one person is chasing another across many sloping connecting rooftops of a medieval villa or castle, and all the rooftops have actual snow on them, and the two characters are slipping and sliding and creating messy tracks in the snow, which obviously could not be done in many takes, because the snow was real and he would have to wait till the snowfall covered over the tracks again. It was an amazing feat of cinema to choreograph, and I deeply appreciated the real snow in that scene, and elsewhere in the movie.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

I think they're supposed to be profitable and entertaining, no?

Profitable clearly has nothing to do with it. Like, nothing.



Entertaining, sure. But I think the real word we want is engagement. Entertainment is a word that has been corrupted by the notion that something entertaining must be something disposable that caters to audience expectations (which isn't necessarily true, and also isn't necessarily always a bad thing) or that something that is serious or slow or challenging can't be entertaining by default of being serious or slow or challenging.


I think Rambo 2 is entertaining. I also think My Dinner With Andre is entertaining. As well as all sorts of ponderous art films or completely unapproachable experimental films. But the word has a double edged sword of either discounting popular art forms (which is on its face dumb) or not being applicable to more serious ones (even though it is, I don't like anything I'm not technically 'entertained' by)

You won't make it as a producer. It's an industry. An expensive and risky one at that. Whatever else we condescend a film to be, it had better darned well be profitable. Otherwise interests associated with it will be slotted for extinction. Darwin rules all.




I define entertain broadly. Whatever it does, some audience must have a preference for it. It has to do something for the people for which it is made.

"Supposed to" is an ought. What you're describing is an is.

No, I am describing how the ought derives from practical conditions. I am assuming that my interlocutor values "survival" and "being able to more of what they set out to do." If, as a producer, you don't care whether or not you are able to continue producing after your film flops, then there ain't much I can say to, as you do not have the assumed shared value in your commitment store. If, however, we may safely presume that producers wish to go one producing (which stands to reason if one identities as such), then this is an ought from an ought. With respect to David Hume, it's a little clunky to unpack the enthymeme in syllogistic form to make the suppressed ought premise perspicuous.



In addition, the Darwinistic frame gives us a practical ought, if not a metaphysical one. It may not be the case the universe really cares about anything, but its processes tend to favor and demand certain things, one of them being profitability in financial enterprises. We can protest and blather on about the integrity of art, and so on, but if we really want to play the game, then we have to play by market rules. And the market demands making a buck.

Precisely. We can protest and blather about the integrity of art. We can have academic discussions that have no immediate real world application. Those seem like okay things to talk about, yeah? They might not interest you, and that's okay, too. Unless you want to start a companion thread called "So...WHAT are threads supposed to be?" and argue otherwise. But barring some kind of consensus about that, I don't really see the point of throwing the cold water of reality on a question that can be asked and considered as a pure hypothetical (or even just the expression of a desire). Counterfactuals are both interesting and useful.

There's also, of course, the fact that if people actively lobby for something as an ought, it may eventually become an is. People discussing what movies should or shouldn't be is one of the many ways you get what movies end up being.

Obviously nobody disagrees, so obviously when people seem to disagree it reveals that they're talking about different things.

https://new-cdn.mamamia.com.au/mamam...9086803473.jpg

I haven't argued that we can't bang on about such notions. I have spent years discussing such issues at great length. However, whatever else a movie is, it should entertain and make money. If we get our heads so far up our backsides that we hold the audience and the market in contempt, we may blame both for our failure, but a failure it will be.
The point is quite simple. If we are to discuss this question, it is helpful to place it within certain parameters. Whatever else a film does, it should entertain and make money. These are serious considerations. Just ask Carolco films. We have book ends for discussion with such parameters, even if there is a lot of range within the bookends.
I am not so sure that everyone disagrees. There are some hardcore "art for art's sake people" who hold the audience and profits in contempt.

And if they don't, then it should not be controversial to set this out as a grounding parameter of discussion. Whatever else they may be, they must make people happy in some way (i.e., people must have some preference to watch them) and the watching of them must be profitable. This reminds us that our "art" is quite practical at bottom. It reminds us that we must serve, we must please, we must play a part in a greater dance (and not blast the world with unintelligible prophecies and visions of our muse).

We should not forget the three maxims inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. "Know thyself", is immediately followed by "nothing to excess" and "certainty brings ruin." Film serves the community. It is not and cannot simply be a pure exercise in self-knowledge and self-expression (nothing in excess). And as much as we may climb the beanstalks of artistic abstractions to steal aesthetic treasures from some giant's castle, we must remember that such pillars are uncertain (certainty brings ruin).

Even with the bottom line concern in the movie industry, there are producers who recognize that they don't have the magic ingredients that only inspired artists have, and that they have to navigate a murky in between area where hopefully they can recognize an inspired artist, or if they can't, they sometimes have to gamble on one. But the point is, in a business that also involves art, savvy producers know that they have to deal with an X factor that they can't fully control, and which may involve some risk. This process has a lot of leeway and depends on the personality of the producer in question, some being more open minded some being less. Robert Evans for example, seemed to have a good sense of knowing when a gamble would pay off, apparently to a large extent by intuition, as when he trusted Roman Polanski and his project Chinatown.



That said, the movie industry surely can accommodate both styles -- you can have say 90% of your budget going to formulaic schlock that you know will pay off, and then delegate 10% of the budget to risky ventures giving artists a chance to experiment. Again, the savvy producer knows that oftentimes the experimental artist that didn't seem to have a profitable project sometimes turns out to deliver an unexpected hit, which can't be predicted by those who don't have artistic talents.

The delicious and dangerous position of the producer is to have a work which shows promise, which inspires, which seems to have intrinsic merit, but also to have to consider how to make the thing work and whether it can be made to work. Film without inspiration is soulless. Film without rhetorical and fiduciary care is impotent.

A great producer is a mediatrix between the audience and the artwork, right? I would think, although I don't know, that a hallmark of a good producer is one who is a lover of film and of profits. I suppose that they should be good at log-rolling (i.e., engaging with the equilibrium dynamics of meeting the many conflicting needs of these massive projects).

There is lots of great art that has added tremendous value to people's lives that has never made a profit.


Does money make things easier, yeah, duh, and I wished every artist I loved was making a billion dollars. But, in the unideal world we are living in, those who have things to say that the majority of the population don't care about, or don't know they might care about, have to push forward regardless that they likely won't make a dime. Or certainly not enough to live on.


You always treat the notion of 'art with integrity' as some kind of glib empty statement that only weirdo art extremists like me espouse . But honestly, how much value is there in stating the obvious that money is important (and it should be noted, you have in the past been pretty open about your hostility towards artists profiting off of their work...a weird combination of opinions I've got to say). Again, of course it's important. But it doesn't dictate what matters. What is art. What is a movie.


I also hope you see that you placing a dollar value on profitability in art as primo importance is basically the shit that has turned the world of galleries and modern painting into a pretty overt scam. Its basically made a joke of an entire medium on the world stage, an opinion I would think our two contrary takes on this might agree on. And this was purely the result of too much money, and too many know nothing's becoming the gatekeepers because they have the money

Thus, satisfying one of the two criteria I specified. It entertained them. And had it turned a profit, I might have entertained even more people.

Money is not a mere inconvenience, it is a necessity. It doesn't just make easier; it makes it possible. And if we value the possibility we needs must also value (at least instrumentally) the purpose (that dirty cash).

Why make a film for an audience if you hold them in contempt? Whatever the intended audience is for a film (it need not be a majority of the general population), that film must serve that audience. It must care about them and what they're interested in. An artist with no regard for reception might as well not ever release the artwork. That's an entirely different proposition. If we give an audience what they don't know they desire, in the knowledge that it will entertain nevertheless, that is within the parameters of our prime criteria. Nonsense. Art which is only for the artist is not a cultural product, but private idiosyncratic product which need not be released, because it served no purpose outside the artist. No one really believes this romantic nonsense. Artists want to reach their audiences. They offer up all the pretentious, contemptuous declarations of "not caring," precisely because they know that their is a good chance that they will fail, that they will not reach the audience. Let's stop pretending that art is just for the artist. It isn't. It never was. That which is is just a hobby or habituation, or madness.

I disagree. I am all for art with integrity. However, the art must be adjusted to and for audience. It's integrity lies in playing a part in a cultural dance, not in claiming mastery, control, and ownership of itself as a hermetically sealed process that holds the dance in contempt.

Given how much you protest, deflect, and even deny the necessity, I would say quite a bit.

I am fine with artists making a fair amount of money for a fair amount of time with the work then entering the public domain as a cultural product. However, corporations are now people and they never die. What matters most about art is that it belongs to us all. Its about the dance, circulation, and not the constipating restrictions of anyone's assertion of final ownership.

It does so instrumentally. It points us in the direction of what matters--pleasing audiences. If the audience is not happy, the project does not make money. It is the stick.
This cannot be the case by your own analysis. You grudgingly admit of its necessity (if only in the attempt to dismiss its significance as a consideration "Of course we all know this!"), but this admission means that it is a universal consideration. Your admission establishes that there is no world in which this interest does not intrude, thus it cannot be the uniquely corrupting feature of art.

Well, I'm happy to have ZERO action or FX or they can have zero dialogue or zero drama or whatever.
Movies don't have to take me to a place I cannot go in other ways... but they do. A play is not a movie. I've been to lots of plays and I know, they are very different mediums. There is never the sense that what you are seeing is real and that's actually part of the fun of them. Movies are different in that way.
When I watch My Dinner With Andre, which I love, which is about 2 men sitting around a table in a restaurant talking, I am transported to the actual scene, the restaurant where they are and eavesdropping on a conversation I would never be able to hear even if I were sitting right next to them, and it's fascinating and wonderful and I love it. Neither reading it nor seeing a play of it would be quite the same. Even a pure drama with no action whatsoever can give us points of view we would never get and evoke emotions that some other medium could not.
On the other hand, something like Underwater, which has precious little dialogue or drama and is nearly all action and FX, transports me to its world and is also perfectly enjoyable in its way.
Both are movies, by the way.

I guess I can't disagree with this. Yes, if it turned a profit, more people would have seen it. Still not understanding why this is what a movie needs to be. A movie with no more than ten fans is still just as much a movie as one with an entire industrial complex behind it. But okay, yeah, sure.





Yeah, everything needs money to at least some degree. But you are act like things don't happen in art without profit. And they do, all the time. This may surprise you, but people are creating art on their own, everywhere. Even movies. Camera's cost money, sure, but it doesn't cost anything to go out and film whatever the **** you want. Just because you haven't seen any of these movies doesn't mean they don't exist.


Where is contempt coming into the picture. Why are you letting your insecurity show so completely? This isn't about you and your taste. It's about other people making different movies for people who are not you. Get over yourself.



It doesn't have to serve a ****ing single soul. But people might still like it regardless. What is your obsession with artistic obedience? Things can still matter if they aren't subservient to your particular needs.




Are you completely unaware of all of the artists who have felt they have created something too self indulgent for release, and only do under protest, only to find that it has an enormous audience?



Artists very frequently do not create with the notion of a reception in mind. It might blow your mind, but obsessing over those sorts of things is something that seems to frequently create the worst art. Yes, there are some out there who are masters at giving the audiences exactly what they want, while also remaining artistically potent (Billy Wilder for a quick example), but he is the exception to the rule.



And here is where you completely tip your hat to being staggeringly ignorant. I will never bumble like Inspector Clouseau into your theology discussion because I understand I'm not equipped. Be humble and listen for a second.


Jim Jarmusch has a great quote about this. I don't know if it his or him paraphrasing someone, but when he feels doubt about the very idiosyncratic (but also profitable enough for him to make a living off of them) movies he makes he reminds himself: "If this is something I want to see, I have to assume someone else wants to as well".



He creates out of belief. He creates out of hope that someone else, hopefully lots of someone elses, are looking for the kind of thing he's creating. He's not catering to an audience, because he is only theoretically hoping it even exits. He doesn't know until he puts it out there.




And lucky for him they do exist. And lucky for them that he is trusting his gut. Otherwise these movies that matter to these audience members wouldn't even exist. You don't get a Jarmusch film by reading the wind or conducting surveys. You take a chance. Hope someone gives a ****.


This is the vaccuum that most art is created out of. They create their own cultural product because it didn't exist before them.


It just makes me wonder exactly how many artists you've ever personally known. Or even, for the lack of anything else, how many books on art or biographies of artists you've read. Because that above comment it staggering in its ignorance. And it's one your repeat over and over again, no matter how many different posters try and correct you on. Stop embarrassing yourself with this. If you want to continue these conversations, at least try and grasp the process where creative people create.



Do you really want to get into belief? Do you have no concept at all about the value of belief or faith? Give me a ****ing break.



Hey, a breakthrough. Yes. Being seen as an artist has a lot of value (not all the value, but it is certainly a good portion)




Some probably do this. Artists are notoriously insecure, for very good reason. Because they take enormous chances with what they put out there, having no idea if anyone could possibly give a shit. At having people like you look down on them like they are some parasite that dared to express themselves in a way that they hoped would matter.



But also, stop talking for what artists think. You are a terrible ambassador.







It's for both. And if they don't happen to find an audience, they missed and they didn't connect. Stop claiming that artists should stop doing what artists have always done. What the **** are you so upset by when someone you don't even know dares to express themselves they choose to. Honestly, what is wrong with you? Just don't watch what you don't like and move along.





Yeah, it can be all three of these things. And those three things have probably supplied a good deal of everything even your milquetoast taste has enjoyed.


The audience isn't you. The audience isn't consensus. The audience is any person who may enjoy or find meaning in their work. Some people don't happen to find art other people respond strongly to to have any meaning. Are they just supposed to adhere to whatever dogshit principals you designate as being proper art so they at least have something? Honestly, **** off with this shit.




For someone who doesn't like masturbatory art, you sure love to felate yourself with this crap you write.




Okay, whatever. Or maybe you just don't understand what I'm saying and so we have to go through this 'dance' over and over again (is this going to be the part where you claim we are at a stalemate and there is no reason to continue the conversation?)


This is an extremely complicated matter that I certainly don't have an entire handle on...so I definitely know I shouldn't be trusting anything you have to say about it. Yes it belongs to the people. In some ways. But it also definitely belongs to the artist, certainly for as long as they live. But...it's complicated.



Clearly I'm too dumb for this academia speak you continuously flop around in like pig shit, so I'll just say, sure, whatever you say. Now read a ****ing book about art and get back to me.

You're setting up I'm unnecessary either/or here. Of course some artists do embody the "either" or the "or" of this formula, but not necessarily all artists. In other words, an artist could remain an unknown, and yet it's not untrue for that reason that his art is worthless and not even great. And at the same time an artist can become famous and his art could still have merit regardless of his fame. I.e., I don't think there's really a necessary relation between fame and artistic merit.



It's not always the case that an artist remains unknown because of his own fault. Sometimes an artist might remain unknown because of circumstances beyond his control. One of them being, that it's virtually impossible to become a famous artist no matter what you do, unless you have nearly supernatural luck and get invited to the right parties and sleep with the right person, etc. So are we going to fault the artist who just happens not to be able to have such extremely unusual luck?



And finally to underscore my point, take the famous wealthy artist who has a long career of public rewards for his art: If he can't in the middle of the night when he's all alone measure the worth of his art not by his public fame or his money but solely on the merits of the art itself, then unless he's a deluded narcissist or coked & drunk out of his gourd, he will feel a gnawing existential angst of an abyss in the realization that he's a phony. Come to think of it, if he felt pain about that, that would be a good sign, since if he were a perfectly vacuous narcissist, he wouldn't care that he's a complete phony.

A film does not "need" to be profitable to exist "as a film." The question, however, is "What are movies supposed to be?" We are NOT speaking of what is required for a film to merely "exist."

A film is made to viewed. Profitability is generally instrumental in connecting eyeballs to artifacts.

Moreover, films are financial endeavors. Financial endeavors are supposed to make money. People invest in production, postproduction, distribution, etc., in large part, because they're trying to make money.

Some of the many hands who make it for the light work are a bit mercenary, like Han Solo. A film depends on the collective intentions of the people who make it. Some of those people are just in it for the money, so the purpose is not just instrumental, but for some it is is intrinsic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkogUhQIVeE
And there is a lot of art on refrigerators made by children which I have not seen and which involves no financial interest. But so what? The looser we are with categories, the more exceptions we will find, but in approaching "everything" we risk losing the capacity to say anything of real interest.

Yes, there are some people out there making recordings which they have no intention of ever releasing. If you wish, you may call private films made for sole amusement of their makers "movies." These have an audience of one and they have no profit motive. It is here, however, that the sidewalk ends. We can have no useful discussion of what these products are supposed to do, because they were not created as cultural artifacts.There is no judging the idiosyncratic purpose of purely subjective interests. If we go this far what a movie is supposed to be is "everything and nothing." This is a checkmate for rational discussion. There is nothing left to be said once we divide by zero. The game is over.

So, do you want to "win" at the cost of making the question unanswerable or do want to discuss what is typical of "movies" as we talk about them on a film forum dedicated to discussing movies? If we go with the former, you have a Pyrrhic victory (no rational discussion possible, because there is always someone recording something for no particular purpose at all). If we go with the latter, then we are speaking of what is typical of the movies we watch here.
You know, you could almost pull off this sort of moralizing sniping if you didn't immediately reveal your contempt for audiences in your very next statement.

First (above) you say that this is about "people making different movies for people who are not you." So far, so good! Films are made for people, it's just that some films are not made for me. Here I am implicated in greedily thinking that all films are made for me or rather that they should be. I mean, this is completely out of left field, and nothing I've said here evidences the insane accusation that I think films are all about me. But if you could make it stick, this would be OK. You would be pointing out that audiences are various and that a good film can serve an audience which is not everyone or even "most of everyone."

Unfortunately, you kind of flip out and shove your foot into your mouth into your next statement.
See, this is what I mean by "contempt." This is the obnoxiously romantic idea of "art for art's sake" under which the artist gives the world the finger and just makes his/her stuff. "I made it just for me!" Again, this is a cope, because artists know that most artworks fail and it hurts when the reception of your new baby is silence. Art, however, is most typically made in the hopes of being inaugurated, noticed, understood and appraised (e.g., this is why we have all those art galleries--it's so all those people who allegedly don't matter can have a chance to view artworks).
But then again, they might not. It is not made for them, after all.
And once again, we're back to the checkmate of subjectivism. If a film only need be made for the idiosyncratic purpose of the maker (the audience of one), then there is no meaningful answer to the question of the thread. A film is supposed to be potentially everything and nothing. In your world where there is no external criterion of correctness, the discussion of purpose and value is entirely vacuous.
It's not about me at all. It's about playing your part in the dance. What is your obsession with art as perfectly autonomous from the very culture it is supposed to challenge and delight?
This is not a class of counter-examples, crumb. This proves my point. The artist thought it didn't do what it was supposed to do (please an audience), because it was thought to be deficient (self-indulgent). However, when it escapes it turns out that it did meet my prime criterion (i.e., it was pleasing to an audience).
What a "movie is supposed to be" may or may not align with the private intention of a writer, or director, or producer, or lead actor, etc. The evaluative question of what a movie is supposed is not the same question as to what it's maker wanted it to be (e.g., the maker may have wanted to make a bad movie or a movie no one would ever see or a movie that confused three friends).

We cannot reduce standard of evaluation of what a movie is supposed to be down to the private intention of a maker without committing a very gross version of the Intentional Fallacy under which the VALUE of a work of art is determined by artist. No one in the intentionality debate in aesthetics and literary criticism has championed the idea that the artist gets to determine the value of their expression. Again, you're flirting with vacuous subjectivism.

Also, "movies" as we discussing them here (in a movie forum) are large commercial enterprises which reflect the collective we-intentions of the people participating in making them (the composer, the writer, the director, the actors, director of photography, the editor, the producer, and so on and so on). There is no single romantic private intention to turn to here. There are many. These are large projects collectively intended for popular audiences. They aren't fridge art, or private poems.
What people are trying to do when they make something is an entirely different from the question of what a properties a good example of that something should have. Another swing. Another miss.
At some point you may learn that adjectives are not arguments. ;)
I'm all ears.
This is not a counterexample. Rather, this is a description of how the avowed creative process of an artist aligns in meeting/statisfying a criterion I advocated (a film should be entertaining). How the film turns out to meet this standard is not my concern.
And you hope that someone does, because is what a movie is supposed to do. It is supposed to pleasing such that people to give four asterisks!
Even we agreed that art magically comes from a vacuum -- it doesn't, but let's suppose just for a moment that it did -- this is independent of the question of what art is supposed to be (an honorific/valorific question which speaks to "good art").

The rest of your post is rather hysterical and abusive, so I'll leave off here.

Okay. Bye.

I am speaking of an attitude here and Crumb is dripping in it (e.g., his statement that "It doesn't have to serve a ****ing single soul."). I am not trying to set a trap here so much as talk him off the ledge. The old prideful narcissism of "my art is made by me and for me only" just doesn't realistically reflect what artists are generally up to and certainly offers us no brief for what "good art" is supposed to be.

A tree that falls over in the forest with no one around makes no sound that is perceived. An artwork that is forever buried is an artwork that plays no part in the cultural language game we call art. It must be inaugurated as an artwork. It must be received as an artwork. It must circulate as an artwork to be part of the cultural game of art. To evaluate the artwork we must know it. To know it, it must be made public. It's quality cannot be assessed in isolation and without circulation. And the quality of the artwork is assessed in terms of whether it pleases the community.

Sure, but what does this have to do with me?

What makes an artist successful and a movie is supposed to be are two separate questions.

I am not faulting the artist at all. I am talking about the "movie" and what it is "supposed to be." And a movie, whatever else it may need, is supposed entertain and make money. It is supposed to be profitable mechanism of delight in addition to whatever else it should be.

Might it be the case that what we now view as a good movie may have initially flopped? Sure. Might we find that what failed to be a profitable mechanism of delight is good? Yes, but only because we find that it is delightful. Blade Runner, for example, was not an initial success, but after all those cuts and improvements it has proved that it was, in the long run, a profitable mechanism of delight.

Movies (the sort of movies that have producers and distributors and which are viewed at film festivals) are collective enterprises, partially financial in purpose (i.e., they are supposed to make money), partly made for the purpose of pleasing some audience (this purpose is instrumentally dependent on the financial success of the film). There is no single artist of artistic intention which defines what they are or how good they are.
The merits of the word of art are not decided by the artist, but by the public. Once released into the world, the artwork is separated from the artist, and must stand on it's own two feet. An artist might might never believe in the merits of the artwork, but the artwork might be recognized as culturally important nevertheless. Likewise, a failed artist producing drivel might always believe in the merits of her artwork, but the artist is not the judge.

And again, there is no single intention that defines the purpose of movies (which are the products of many hands).

Whatever else the filmic work of art is supposed to do, it is supposed to please some audience and thereby produce a return on the investment of the investors. This isn't to be reductive and jaded and say that this is all there is to it, but one ignores these realities at one's own peril. Moreover, unpacking the question of the qualities which make for a good movie will be an excavation of the features that result in the entertainment of the audience.

As Crumbs said earlier, film makers make art that they presume people like them want to see, not necessarily films for themselves first and foremost.
Art isn’t created soley for the individual, but for like minded individuals. Sometimes it’s a niche audience.

Yeah, for sure. For backers, they are an investment. Money in should yield more money out.

How to make that happen is the big question. People like the idea of "Art" (note the capital A), but they also want action, conflict and entertainment and you do need, at some point, to get butts in seats. It gets to be like the blind men and the elephant.

Right, so a key question to ask is "Who are these like-minded individuals?" This is not a purely objective question, but a normative one.

How large, for example, does the audience need to be to really offer a respectable mark of intersubjective accomplishment? It is impossible to please everyone, so we can't raise the bar too high. On the other hand, you can always find one person who is a fan (or claims to be), so we shouldn't set the bar too low. Where would you draw the line?

Another question is whether the audience for whom the artwork "works" needs to be the audience the artist had in mind. Or does the artwork merely need to find "an" audience regardless of whether it is the one the artist has in mind? If we go with the latter, we should note that the author's relevance is fading from view.

If we're talking about a single artist (which is not the case when we're speaking about movies), the artist gets to

1. decide whether to make the work
2. decide whether to release the work (unless it is leaked without their approval)
3. decide to announce it is an artwork
4. to a limited extent the artist might determine the proper categorization (i.e., genre) of the artwork

What happens after the work is released into the wild, however, is not up to the maker. The artwork lives a life of its own once it is out there. Thus, the value of the movie (what it is supposed to do) is connected to the context of it's reception and not its creation. And if we are making an artwork, we would be well-advised to keep an eye on the context of how it will be received.

Finally, a film is not a single-artist enterprise. An artwork is a raft of collaborative efforts of artists, technicians, makers, financiers, etc. A movie is the result of a collective "we-intention" which involves competitive and mutually exclusive ideas. The finished product is most often the result of fights and compromises and deadlines. Once again, the idea of dipping into "the artist's intention" to answer questions is not a promising well into which to dip.

Movies, probably more than any other art form, are the most deeply and massively mired in the world of commercial concerns. If that isn't bad enough for the artist, it's also the most committee-oriented art form of all, in that an individual rarely has control of the artistic product but has to defer to many other people, most of whom are not artists. That said, it still was born as an art form and over the decades has been pursued as one, notwithstanding those two giant hurdles in the way of practicing it in a traditionally artistic way.

And then of course we have variations, where some filmmakers are lucky enough to have much more control than others. Woody Allen is a typical example who has extraordinary individual control over his movies. His producers and financial backers essentially just say do whatever you want. But he's the exception that proves the rule. Nevertheless, even with much less control it's not like the individual artist -- whether he'd be the director or the screenwriter -- has zero control as an artist, he just has to do a lot of deferral and cooperation with others. And then of course there are movies that are almost completely commercial ventures with pretty much zero artistic content.



So the issue is complex and one can't just generalize about movies as an art form. Secondly, I disagree that the public defines whether a movie is good art. The public may decide that it's successful and entertaining, but the determination of whether it's art is in the hands of the art critic. Now among the public there may be people literate enough to be critics or to have a critical eye, but the question in general is not decided by the Roman Forum filled with John Q Publics & Joe Blows with their thumbs up or down.



Closely related to that, I would say that art is very similar to theology in that it is at its core elusive and mystical -- it's not a material commodity. Certainly it can become mired in material commercial concerns, just as someone who has true love in their heart can get seduced by prostitutes and live a life of one night stands and suppress their yearning for true love because it's too painful or it's too difficult or whatever. But that doesn't mean love doesn't exist just because they don't experience it in a fulfilling way. Similarly art, like faith and love are inviolable realities that are not dependent on fame and money to make them real; only to make them materially successful.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

I really didn't get AFTERSUN. Read my review if you don't believe me.

Exactly. Like it or hate it, filmmaking is bound to commercial concerns. A film is supposed to make money.

Exactly, we cannot hope to evaluate the "supposed to" of film in terms of the private mental state of a single individual. Even if we could reduce everything to the design or plan of the author, this is no standard for saying what a film should be as this would be a gross version of the Intentional Fallacy (i.e., the artist decides for himself whether the artwork is good or great or poor).

Meh, it has always been a collective art form. Pining for romantic visions of individual creator single-handedly creating the work misses the point.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. However, the film is made, it should make pay off as an investment and please an audience. There are many ways to make a film that embodies what a film should be.

The complexity of creation is irrelevant. What matters in discussing what a film should be is the product. What properties should the finished film have? Note: If we cannot generalize about this, then your move is a checkmate for rational discussion. Your stance would, in effect, be that there is no answer to the question because we can draw no conclusions at all that can be applied across cases.

If they don't, then who does?

The author/maker? Since when do we let a disputant serve as the judge of his own case? It would be foolish to allow the artist to be the standard of evaluation. Every confident artist would be a success. Every troubled artist would be a failure.

Shall we appeal to objective standards? God's standards? Plato's ideal forms? This seems unlikely, given your scruples about generalization.

As the saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting and it is the audience which does the tasting. They are one's whom we serve.

Your preferred answer appears to be expert authority. But who determines which authorities are qualified and regulative? The celebrated critics are the ones beloved by John Q. Public. Today, we live in an age of public criticism. We are all of us film critics. Criticism isn't what it used to be. The Tomato-meter is now split between commercial critics carrying water for the films that we're supposed to like which is often the opposite of what users report they actually like. I trust the users more than the meter.
The creation and circulation of art preceded the existence of professional critics.

Moreover, we should ask -- why should we listen to the critics? What do they know? You trust their opinion because it is qualified by something, but what is that something? It must be some objective standard which they apprehend, but what does this say about your caution that we cannot generalize? And what is the nature of this magical something which they know? Do they know the mind of God? Are they seeing true value propositions and relations in the universe?
Show me an objective standard of art. Detail what underwrites the authority of those critics. Where is fancy bread? In the heart or in the head?
And what underwrites theology? God? The universe?
It does not exist outside of those commercial concerns. You recoil from this fact, comparing it to whoring vs. true love, but there is no "pure" version of movie making that does not involve financial relationship. At best, you might find a hooker with a heart of gold. But these are financial enterprises producing products for consumption.

Again, it depends what we are measuring: for measuring material success and effective entertainment, sure. But art is another matter.


For determining if I want to be entertained, I agree; ordinary users seem to be more reliable.




It also preceded the hoi polloi public as a voice determining whether something was art. And even now, I'd wager the vast majority of the public who opine about movies aren't concerned with whether they are "art" or not.



This is a difficult question to answer. It's not cut and dried as if there's an instruction manual for specific points. Like I said, it's akin to the mystical. Read T.S. Eliot's little book about art criticism or read John Simon's book Paradigms Lost.

Yoda Big Brain Time: I'll ban politics so there will be no drama on the forum!
Movie-related drama: Am I a joke to you?

These threads where a couple of people or more become locked in endless battles of wills are getting old. Let's just be friends here people we don't need to dominate the other person. It's more rewarding to coexist.

You've been using the word "art" in the valorific sense. To be art, it must possess a higher quality. This allows separating what the masses like from what the critics like. It implies that we can elevate true works of art from the muck and mire of the ooze financing a winning project and the collaborative chaos involved in quilting a movie with all that union labor.

The downside with the valorific sense is that we might be forced orphan certain works. What do we do with poems that do not possess the level of quality you require? Do we no longer recognize them as art? How can we speak of of "bad art" if we have invoked the word "art" so as to "only include the good stuff."

Seeing as how the war on beauty is complete and old standards have been toppled and that now "art can be anything" such an approach really appears to be impossible without repudiating the entire "cosmology" of aesthetics for the last hundred years. Can we even stick the landing with the valorific definition in a world that says everything may be art?

Most important, the valorific approach tends to beg the question. We must solve the problem of quality (what is an artwork supposed to be) in the same moment that we identify what an artwork is. But if we're attempting to address the problem of quality (e.g., the prompt of our thread), then we cannot assume that we know what an artwork is (as the question of quality is open and under discussion).

Finally, even if we make the valorific approach work, we can still admit that movies as also financial projects designed to entertain in addition to whatever high-falutin art stuff it should do.
Well, my definition of "entertain" is very wide. I submit that those who pay money to watch a film DO want to be entertained.

It seems that you want to "Rosa Parks" the average viewer for not meeting critical standards, but movies are made for popular audiences.
I'm not sure about that one. The first bards who told the first stories around campfires were attempting to please the gathered audience. Art is culture and culture requires circulation within some public.
Vaudeville is theater. So is opera. Must we really quibble about which is art?
With respect, if we cannot unpack the answer to the question here, then it appears that we don't have an answer to the question. At the point where we would really get down to answering the question, we retreat into the pious silence of mysticism.

Supposing for the moment that this is the correct disposition toward art, then this is all the more reason that the objective criteria I have offered are useful as bookends for discussion. Whatever else a film should be, it should be entertaining and thus profitable. We can talk about what these terms mean. Earthy as they may be as considerations, they ground us before we attempt to reach for the heavens. Thus we have parameters, limits.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

I've never judged a movie on anything other than its merit. I wouldn't know if it was successful or not, financially, although I can guess, and sometimes overhear it in an interview/article.



I think there's too much condescending behavior to the audience. The typical, "Oh ME and YOU could appreciate greatness, but the others" .. and then use prejudice as a reason they have to dumb-down movies. I think you make the best movie you can make, and hopefully there's a triumph for good taste, as opposed to the idea that if movie x is successful, the artist must have diluted its message.



Because of marketing, you have less art, and more self-consciousness and making movies that fit market, or a genre.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

It depends on what you call 'a movie'.

Your position or posture seems puzzling, in that you seem to insist on including art in your discussion of movies. It becomes puzzling because you seem to subscribe to the prevailing Zeitgeist that believes that art is anything and everything, which effectively destroys any possibility of defining art. So art would simply be a redundant phenomenon which can be dispensed with, and then you can move on to discussing movies solely in terms of public acclaim, monetary success, and ability to entertain and leave that quaint relic "art" out of it (one could paraphrase Tina Turner: What's Art Got To Do With It?)

(I say "entertained" in the broadest sense meaning causes the viewer to enjoy it and have pleasure in watching it as opposed to being repelled by it and turning it off, with degrees of star ratings etc.).

For those of us who do believe that art is unique and special, and that many movies involve it among its participants -- directors, screenwriters, actors, even editors and cinematographers -- then it makes sense for us to include art in the discussion of movies. Whether or not we can define art to everyone's satisfaction is another matter. I don't think art can be defined to everybody's satisfaction, but just because we can't do that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means there will be no universal consensus. So I guess we have to agree to disagree.

I object to valorific definitions of art as these exclude "bad art" from actually being art. I want a definition that is wide enough to include the "high" and the "low," the "good" and the "bad." I think we have to be careful about packing evaluation into the same bin as description. I don't think anything and everything is art, however.

You're making a slight mistake here. The definition of art can be inclusive (allowing for "bad" art to be counted as art), but the definition of art is not the same thing as the evaluation of art. Evaluative criteria can be discriminating (they have to be, as we must sort the good stuff from the bad stuff, the better from the worse). My contention is that whatever these evaluative criteria include, they should also include the more earthy criteria I have described as grounding parameters. Art is not necessarily unique and special. There is a lot of bad and middling art out there. Art can be sublime, and so I would invite you to unpack your evaluative categories to allow us to determine when a film is "unique" and "special." Those categories, however, will involve generalization, so your ability to articulate your standards would appear to be challenged from the outset.

Matters are not this dire. We should just be careful not to pack evaluative criteria in the definition of art (if art must meet the standards of "greatness," then we will find that there is not much "Art" out there).

First of all I've never heard the term valorific before. I don't fit your definition entirely, and I don't think John Simon does either, even though we both believe in art as something unique and special in human endeavor. Where we don't fit the definition is we don't say that something cannot be bad art. If you have a standard for something being excellent, that doesn't necessarily mean that attempts at it can't partially fail. It could derail into semantics where anything that's not excellent could be redefined as simply not art at all. The distinction between not art and bad art would seem to be a semantic quibble. Bad art is simply attempts at art that don't quite measure up. I don't see what the problem here is. For example John Simon considers Harold Pinter to be an artist as a playwright, but other than one play he says most of his stuff is just "okay", but it's not great. There is among those of us who believe this way, a sense of knowing greatness when you see it, much like the famous Supreme Court Justice Stewart who said he could not define "obscenity" but "I know it when I see it".. John Simon of course is more articulate than I am and has written at length on why he thinks certain works are great part. But at the end of the day, no matter how articulate and detailed he might get, Simon can't prove it like someone could prove something in a chemistry lab.

But there's still something that seems incoherent about your posture, in that you admit degrees of art and even descriptions of them as good and bad. If art can be good relative to bad then it could be also very good relative to sort of good, and then finally we get to the word great which would simply be so good it can't get better. So you've got all these words denoting art that seem to be value judgments, which I thought you rejected. And, how would you define art that's good? Would you define it in a way that distinguishes its goodness as a measure distinct the measures of public acclaim and monetary success? If so, then I don't see how your position is much different than mine (other than the details). If not, then art becomes redundant and you don't need to mention it, all you need to do is talk about the other measures of the film's success.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

"Art is what you make it, don't try and fake it." CR

If the standard is the definition, then that which does not meet the standard is excluded from the definition. By this logic, we would have to say that a bad poem is an "almost poem," or an "attempt at a poem," or a "failed poem."
The derailment is the result of a conceptual commitment, so it is inevitable.
The problem has just been noted. We either have to violate the letter of your definition (by keeping around the bad stuff so we can call it "bad art") or we have to exclude non-excellent attempts as being non-art.

We don't have to go this route. We don't have to mix evaluative standards (only best of the best) with basic definitional standards (Welcome to the art club! Keep at it, we all start somewhere.).
Which seems to be all the more reason not to pack evaluative standards into the definition of art.
I'm not sure what you mean here, so I am not sure if I do.

The move you were making was a sort of "purification" play. You were arguing that the excellences of movies are what are essential to them in a play to exclude profit and collaboration as being a part of what a movie is supposed to be. If only the purest thoughts and outcomes are allowed, we can sever our discussion from those rude considerations which intrude on the "purity" of fimic art, thereby slipping the surly bonds of Earth and matriculating to the timeless standards in the heavens. But films are collaborative. They are made (among other purposes) to make money. And it is dubious thing to mix descriptive standards with evaluative standards.

If I were to admit that art should be defined evaluatively (definition and evaluation occurring with the same stroke), I could still argue that films are more than just art, so the move isn't guaranteed to pay dividends. And I have objected here, because I really do think it is mistake (I could make my argument without pointing out what I think is an error).
Again, I am afraid that I don't quite see what you're saying, so I am unsure of whether I am obligated to "cop" to the accusation.

Can mediocre artwork X stand as "better than" very poor artwork Z? Yes. Sure. But I would be counting both as art before making the comparative statement. The mediocre work would not be bootstrapped into the category of art by the comparison (as I would have already counted both as art).
By evaluative standards of "good art."

First, we establish that X is an artwork by descriptive standards of a definition. Second, we move on to consider whether it is an excellent artwork (a subset of the domain we call "art"), by bringing in additional criteria. A violin is a bowed stringed musical instrument of a certain size and shape. A great violin, however, will have specific tonal properties. This source argues that this greatness includes having a certain volume, sustain, projection, power and sweetness.
Two options here, both of which are consistent with my case.

We may view the purpose of profit and pleasure as being proper to the category of the genre of artwork. In this case, part of the "art" of filmmaking is making money and causing delight.

Alternatively, we may view profit and pleasure as being alien to the "artistic" ambitions of movies, but then we would still need to remember a movie is more than just an artwork (e.g., it is also a financial interest), a movie is supposed to be an accomplishment in making profit, producing pleasure, creating collaboration, meeting aesthetic excellences, etc. As I said earlier, "Whatever else we condescend a film to be, it had better darned well be profitable," thus this is consistent with what I have already argued.

Either way, my standards are still relevant to determining (in part) what a movie is supposed to do. They still serve as parameters for whatever else we stir in.

My position isn't that movies should be evaluated as art primarily. I am happy to concede that most of what movies do is not even on the level of art let alone great art, and most of my movie enjoyment doesn't even depend upon whether the movie is delivering art to me at all. I'm only saying that movies can contain art -- in the director or in the script writer or in the actors or in any combination of those -- and that the art that is contained is not entirely mired with or dependent upon the other ways we measure the film's success. It's one thing to say that the art is partially mired with and/or dependent upon these non-artistic factors; it's another thing to say that it is necessarily so. So at the end of the day, my position is not as ambitious as you seem to think it is. I'm just trying to humbly carve out a little niche for art for art's sake within the sprawling, fabulously industrious world of Cinema.

And secondly, there was the tangential point that I believe an artist can be an artist defined as producing art, and the art he produces being good or great, without any fame, or with only a little bit of fame. I don't define art as dependent on fame. The art critic Robert Hughes in his series "Shock of the New" discussed one artist who was nearly homeless and lived at the Y for a while and produced a complex artwork made of intricately carved pieces all alone in his room and never received any notoriety, other than after his death when Hughes discovered it. Hughes considered it great art in and of itself, without any external measure like fame, or gallery showings, or money, or whatever. If one is going to accept a category called "art" then it stands to reason it would have its own criteria for definition without being dependent on externals. Your position seems to lead to the absurdity that the song a nobody writes by himself for which he never gets recognized and the tape is only accidentally discovered 50 years later, cannot possibly be a great artistic song because of those extraneous circumstances. Sure it could. It might be tragic and sad and pathetic, but that is irrelevant to whether it's possible for such a person to create a great song.

Similarly with music, most of the music I enjoy and cultivate is not great art. I can recognize that Beethoven or Mozart reflect great art, but I much prefer to listen to Santana or Sly and the Family Stone because I enjoy them more. But I'm not going to use that in some kind of argument against my conviction that Beethoven and Mozart produced great art.

You have a pretty high bar for art, but OK.
We're not in disagreement here. I think films are, generally speaking, "art."
And I think that it is necessarily so in the case of movie-making. Great art in the past has depended on patrons, commissions, tastes, etc., so it is no great tragedy to note that the film industry is an industry. We can still get art from that industry.
I am happy to be corrected as to what your position actually is.
And I am just trying to ground our ambitious discussion in objective standards. "Art for art's sake" to my ears sounds like, "I'll do as I damned well please!" That is, it sounds like a repudiation of anything but a free-wheeling subjectivism which makes the question of quality moot.

I know that you're gesturing at something more, of real depths in the mystical mists of aesthetics, something which is real, but which resists generalization and reduction. Even so, I am uncomfortable with the subjectivism implied at the surface and also with the hidden depths (i.e., your take) which resist generalizations. Neither one immediately suggests accountability or quality control. And this is why I tend to want bookends for our discussion. And this is why I think pleasure and profit are not terrible grounding considerations.

The closest we get to what you want is the art film or the student film. There are certainly movies that get made that are not intended to make a lot of money. Then again, even an art film is going to need financing and the student film is made partly in the hopes of someday making it to the big leagues (to make "real money"). Even so, there are some films that are made in terms that I think you would feel are more "pure" than others. And I am fine with that.

Profitability is more of a "typicality" consideration. What we think of as a "movie," in the main, is something that is supposed to make money. At the very least, they're not supposed to lose money. And if they lose money, then this is only strategically allowable in pursuit of profit (e.g., Oscar-bait which gives the studio visibility to sell more tickets next year).

What has less wiggle-room is the idea of a movie being made for an audience. A movie is supposed to be pleasing to its audience. I am not, contrary to Crumbs rather wild accusations, supposing that this means everyone, or most everyone, or that the audience must include me. However, it must be some audience and it must be an audience worthy of the name "audience" A film that fails to please is not doing what a movie is supposed to do. We can argue about the parameters of the audience, but films serve audiences.

So, I stand by my two standards. We can have art. We can have great art. We can have art films. However, we should also be grounded.
Sure, there are plenty of starving artists out there. Indeed, there are a lot of bad artists too. I count them all.
OK
To play a role in the culture-game we call art, we must have an artistic intention, an artifact/work, a framing/inauguration of it as an artwork, and a reception of it as such. In this case, our unknown artist was elevated by an art critic who pointed at the this person and this work, claimed it as art publicly (on BBC), and made a dent on you and others with it's reception as art. In effect, "Shock of the New" was its gallery showing.
And this leads us back to the question of whether "movies" (the sort of movies we talk about on a movie forum) are purely "art" or if they are partially art (or in some cases not art at all, as you seem to allow). What a movie is "supposed to do: and what an artwork is supposed to do are two different questions on this reading.
Again, your example involves an artistic intention, an artifact, a public framing/inauguration (the discovery), and reception as such after the framing. Artworks are public, not private.
If we asked, "What is a song supposed to be," we would not answer that it is "supposed" to be something on a lost cassette tape which no human other than it's maker ever hears. Rather, we would say that a song should be pleasing to those who hear it. And to the extent that that song is a commercial product, it should make a buck or two.

There is a difference between what a song "can be" and what it is supposed to be (aspirationally). Here we are not just talking about what a song or a film "is," but what it is supposed to be.

You really need to watch 'Aftersun' to see exactly why it is masterpiece of modern cinema and offers EXACTLY the things that a stage play / book can not.

No they are not. Infact I'd say the opposite. If the purpose of a film is to be a financial endeavour, then it has lost all artistic integrity.

Not really the prevailing Zeitgeist is it? Unless you mean the last 100+ years. In which case, it is.
Duchamps and Fountain settled this over a century ago. That does't mean that you can't think differently, but it does mean it's not a new or modern thing or that it's a fad that will pass once the silly people realise their mistake.

The argument isn't what is art? It's what is good art?

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

Titties and lasers.


Next question.

Well I think it's both. One can't answer the latter question without answering the former. That said, I don't think it's a simple proposition, it's an ongoing perennial discussion that has yet to be resolved definitively. The question of art is also a historical philosophical question, and anthropological. If we take Western art, there are incredibly vast and complex areas to plumb in adjudicating this question. For example, Greek tragedy and then Roman poetry, and then the long arc of Christian art that synthesized Graeco-Roman culture.

After those sweeping complex rich traditions lasting millennia, we get to this strange episode in human history which we're still thrashing around in, called "postmodern" where simultaneously with stupendous advances in technology and science, and mixed in with that unprecedented geopolitical imperial powers, we have a strange unraveling of civilizational traditions, where the moral and legal substance and structures of the West in large part are running on the fumes of a dead civilization while enjoying the unprecedented razzle-dazzle and power that technological progress bestows.

In this context, you have art reflecting a complex array and disarray of disorientation on all levels -- cultural, psychological, philosophical, religious. Thus as the 19th century merges into the 20th, there was an explosion of experimentation of this newfound freedom from tradition, often richly supported by wealthy institutional powers and wealthy individuals, and an increasingly receptive mainstream (with token resistance here and there).

Amid all this complexity, one still has a kernel of what art is supposed to be, and that is a kind of existential enactment or reenactment of the fundamental paradox and mystery of life between opposing poles that create tension -- life and death, good and evil, suffering and success, rich and poor, love and betrayal, emptiness and meaning, anxiety and hope, honesty and hypocrisy... and dozens of other polarities one could think of -- where art doesn't deliver one from the tension, but grants glimpses of what it would mean to "solve" it.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

A movie is an experience, and as such, it doesn't have to abide by conventional rules of filmmaking, whatever those are.

When watching a movie, don't focus on overanalyzing it. Some thoughts will naturally come to your mind, and that's OK. But don't try to analyze a film while watching it. Let it wash over you, just like a classical piece or looking at a sunset. Appreciate the scenes, pacing, performances, atmosphere, and writing. If you want to analyze the movie - fine, but do that after the movie. Not while watching it. Engagement is important, don't waste your first watch on misinterpreting minute details.

Viewing a film is an opportunity to explore perspectives and reflect on yourself. By the end of a good movie, you should feel enlightened. and be able to look at the world (and cinema) in a new way. (Or at least be entertained.)

Cinema is perhaps the only branch of art that is inevitably connected to money. To write a book, you just need a pen and paper. Or a computer. Or a typewriter. But to make a film... with the exception of radically minimalist no-budget filmmaking, you actually need money. So, there's always that tension in cinema; it has two feet. One foot is inevitably steeped in commerce. The other is steeped in art.

And so, money becomes the fundamental issue in cinema. At the very least you have to pay for the equipment. And you have to pay the actors. There's no way around it.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

A movie is a situation: where you go to a dark room and someone else controls what you see and hear, typically for about two to three hours.

I think the biggest problem with movie buffs is that they take the opinions of other movie buffs too seriously. Since experience with movies is subjective, they have to accept their individuality and therefore understand what they like without caring about what other people think about it.

I think that the best movies are a balance between the artist's desires and the public's. That is, movies can be made with some consideration for the public's preferences and not absolutely as an exercise of the director's self-indulgence. However, if the movie is made absolutely as a product, with the team producing it without trying to do anything creative but instead just delivering a by-the-numbers product, then it tends to be unwatchable garbage as well.

Miyazaki said that when he made his movies, he consciously tried to make them entertaining, but at the same time, it showed what he liked in his movies (such as his obsession with flying or environmentalist).

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

"No they are not. Infact I'd say the opposite. If the purpose of a film is to be a financial endeavour, then it has lost all artistic integrity."

Yeah....but.....We're in blind man and the elephant territory here. Given that most movies cost millions, involve hiring a lot of people, negotiating contracts, dealing with unions safety issues and locating sets, etc, etc, they will never be like doing an oil painting, which is fairly cheap.

Somewhere in the calculations, a bean counter has to figure out how much money is likely to come in. Even this has gotten seriously complicated in an environment where the income includes streaming and media sales in addition to the old measure of tickets that lead to butts in seats and popcorn purchases. There's no way to engage a studio without dealing with the economics.

Somewhere in this mix of mercenary interests, you hope that the "Art" doesn't get lost, but, at its core, if you are the person putting up a few million, you probably want to think that you will at least make that back, hopefully with some profit.

Artistic integrity is one thing, but for the investors, it's just a means to an end.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

There have been many movies and shows exploring this very theme, of the tension between artistic integrity and the financial side. One of my favorites that explored this with great wit and poignancy was the Showtime series "Episodes" (2011-2017) -- and incidentally probably the greatest role Matt LeBlanc has ever had.

I don't agree. Maybe most of the movies that you watch cost millions. But of all the hundreds of thousands of films made every year, a minimal percentage will be costing 'millions'.

Again, you're just focusing on large production companies / distributors within the industry. This is not 'all movies'.

This is the thing with these threads, they always seem to get generalized into....'movies'. As in the movies that are on at the multiplex. That's not the whole of cinema.

You wouldn't generalize music into.....'the songs that you hear on the radio', because you know there are bound to be a few local bands that are actually quite good. Yet they don't have a multi album deal with Sony.

Why do it with cinema? Just check the career of Sean Baker to see how the cinema ball gets rolling.

That's why I asked it depends on what you mean by movies.

Are you new to the internet? :D

No need to engage, I'm just passing through.

How much does it cost to make a movie?
https://stephenfollows.com/how-much-...-cost-to-make/

Excerpt from the above linked article:

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

The lowest budget movie still costs a lot of money, and it's the only art form that requires lots of money to produce, with rare exceptions of some individual who films something on his phone or something. Blair Witch Project budget was $60,000 which to most normal people is a lot of money (particularly in 1999) to throw away on a possibility of success. The only other art form that comes close is music, if you want good quality sound system/engineering of recording, but still pales in comparison with what it costs to make a movie.

I don't disagree with you entirely, but the other side of this is that a movie has to get shown somewhere before someone like me sees it. Festivals and universities are nice for an "in group" of cinephiles who congratulate each other for being there, but most of the world never hears about those films, much less sees them. If you're lucky, you live somewhere big enough to have a theater or two that shows movies like this but, even in better times for the business, it's hard to keep them afloat. I've at least heard of Baker and his movies, again, shown at a festival.

It makes for an interesting question about what movies are. Mainstream movies take a lot of money to make, need to make a lot of money to be profitable and the people that back them expect profit. Personally, one of my gripes is when cinephiles advocate for movies that have low budgets, unknown actors and zero FX. To me, as a guy who also enjoys live theater, movies like that are like imitations of live theater, except not live. That's a middling proposition at best.

Who cares? That has no bearing on those films existing, how good they are, what they cost etc etc.

There are hundreds of thousands of films I haven't even heard of. Some cost $200 dollars to make, some probably $200m.

I made a short film last year. On a shoestring budget, with a professional crew. It got shown at two festivals. It made no money whatsoever. I expected it to make no money whatsoever. I paid for it myself. I expected nobody I know to ever hear of it at any time in their lives, let alone see it. I made a movie. Nobody can ever take that away from me.

So this does come from a place of personal perspective. But I'm mindful of the whole art form being considered. And as with any art form, there are millions of people making art for many different reasons, and for many, money really doesn't come into it.

Who is the audience for a hypothetical $200 movie?

In my local world, a guy who grew up in my neighborhood with an ambition to make movies, was John Waters, the Pope of Trash. Even his earliest movies cost more than $200, even back then, just to get enough 8 mm film to put in the borrowed camera, and required neighbors working for free to be cast members and crew. It seems possible that someone like Waters, who had energy and novelty, could do this for a while, but once the novelty was past, it was also certain that budgets and production would have to get bigger since Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs (see Divine get raped by a giant lobster) had been done by then and some of his actors (other neighbors) had moved on or wanted to be paid.

That was when Waters' movies got a wider audience and he became the somewhat-celebrity that he became, but the march of money seems to have been inevitable, even for a film maker whose biggest budgets are really pretty small and who specialized in being outside the boundaries of "Hollywood".

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

The Budget for Tarnation was just over 200 dollars.


And it's not like that wasn't even seen. It made over a million dollars


Also, John Waters made films long before digital. Film cost lots of money. With digital technology movie making can be insanely cheap to the comparisons of John Waters' budgets.

Better question would be - is there an audience for such a movie? And if anybody gets to see it of their own free will, then that's a success.

And without those 200 dollar films he wouldn't have done any of the other things. It's a perfect example of what I'm trying to get across.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

Off the top of my head, the cheapest budget for a film I can think of that actually used film, was Last House on Dead End Street. $3000.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

Flaming Creatures: $300

It definitely got him started, kinda like Spielberg and his camera, but it was also just a first step on the way to something bigger. I can't imagine anybody today, in a theater, actually watching Multiple Maniacs unless it was a targeted festival event for groupies and historians.

Multiple Maniacs has got a Criterion Release. If that doesn't legitimize a low budget film, I don't know what does.


Also, what's with the qualifiying of audience members. Groupies and historians are also people who want to see movies as well. The asses they put in seats also count. Also, it's John Waters. He's a huge draw. His films are a part of the American film vernacular. He's a cultural institution. And this includes his early films

It feels like basically every one of your replies has either tried to redirect the conversation away from that, or outright suggested it would be a useless/bad parameter for discussion. I don't know if that means you've literally argued we "can't bang on about such notions," but I'd say that's functionally the case. "I didn't say you couldn't talk about that really bad and pointless thing you want to talk about, I just like to tell people it's bad and pointless whenever they try to" feels a little disingenuous.

Whoa, hold up, you just made like three leaps of logic in one half-sentence here:

1. There's lots of daylight between "doesn't make enough to become a franchise" (or whatever) and "holds the audience in contempt."
2. Financial success does not map perfectly (or even mostly?) on to respect for the audience. Tons of people think they're making crowd-pleasers that fail to please crowds, and people sometimes make weird, idiosyncratic movies that happen to catch on.
3. You're using "the audience" as a synonym for "a sufficiently-sized audience to justify large investments in other similar movies."

Basically, these arguments seem to require that every film either be a crowd-pleasing blockbuster or up-its-own-butt-arthouse-nonsense. As if there weren't a massive number of mid-budget films that may or may not please people (but plausibly might!), or may please a moderate number of people. Or please a smaller number of people, but on a deeper level.

That's another part of the problem here: by talking only about money, you flatten enjoyment levels. You assume, without having argued correspondingly, that "will pay $10 to see" is not only the most important boundary, but the only one we should care about. It's Tomatometer logic: a 5.1 is the same as a perfect 10, because they're both past that minimum threshold. This movie that changed my life and helped me reconnect with my grandfather is the same as this movie some 15-year-old said was "kinda cool I guess" and then never thought about again.

Whether or not something is a failure depends on what it's trying to achieve. If someone makes something weird and idiosyncratic that has a major impact on some modest number of similarly weird and idiosyncratic people, then it isn't a failure. Surely you've experienced this? Surely you've found some film, that was not especially well-known, that you vibed with in some way that most people wouldn't. Such films can, in fact, have millions of fans. But somehow, in your artistic calculus, this doesn't exist or doesn't count for anything. "Oh, 300,000 people had a profound emotional experience from your film? Worthless. Talk to me when you make something 50,000,000 find moderately amusing."

It's pretty meaningless to throw around words like "failure" when they all need the parenthetical of "(according to the standard I have chosen for them for the purposes of this argument, which may or may not mirror their goals or desires at all)."

This is a sufficiently broad parameter for me. Only problem is all the stuff I know you're smuggling into "people." For example, apparently the plural noun "people" requires it encompass, like, 10 million people? And anything less than that is just for the director?

I'd like to propose an exercise. When you disagree with this post, I'd like you to imagine a film that cost, like, $40 million, and has a significant-but-not-mainstream fan base. Imagine hundreds of thousands or millions of people who really like it, but it doesn't lend itself to any sequels or cinematic universes or anything. Maybe initial box office is kind of bad, but it gains a following over the years. It's just a good little film that a bunch of people really loved.

To be a substantive disagreement, I think your response needs to apply to that hypothetical, and not just the hypothetical of some gallery installation that's nothing but a loop of eggs hatching and clouds moving for precisely 23.46 hours each day.

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

Well said. The Northman and The Green Knight are recent examples of these types of film.

Didn't both Blade Runners initially make big losses in their first month? People seem to appreciate those.

The title of this thread would've been more defined if it said:
So...WHAT are movies supposed to be to you?
as opposed to a one size fits all:
So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
That title is more of a hot button inviting arguing. See I don't get why people argue about personal taste & personal views. Isn't it better just to discuss and learn why people feel they way they do. I know I find that more rewarding.

Conversing with you is sometimes like playing ping pong by mail correspondence. You will have to forgive me if replies here are not consistent with the line-by-line, post-by-post that led here. It's been a minute.
You can hardly convict a man for over your feeling.
And I would say that I have functionally argued for what I have literally said.

You sound a bit like a cop who thinks he's found his crook, but can't quite figure out the crime. We're into feelings and functions and so on.

Allow me to make myself clear.

Consideration 1. A "movie" a complicated accomplishment that is the result of mixed-motives and serves multiple functions. It is not just one thing. I have argued how this is the case in terms of the financial (profit) and the artistic (collaborative) interests/aspects of filmmaking. Consequently, the evaluation of what "movies are supposed to be" involves multiple standards.

Consideration 2. The idea of operating from purely aesthetic standards has been hollowed out by a thoroughgoing aesthetic relativism (a creed which has been mentioned and endorsed by other posters in this thread) which has been with us for about as long as the flickering image has. We have scant resources for evaluations under this creed. Our resources are thin, at best, and justifications we have seen offered in this thread have been, predictably, thin. Consider your own comment that,


This statement accords with our modern creed that art need not answer to any standard outside of itself (art for art's sake!), but if there is no external standard of what a film is "supposed to do," then there is no answer to the question. A movie should do what a person (or persons) is trying to do, however, a person (or persons) might try to achieve anything they please(!!!). Your off-hand comment does not just cash-out for relativistic standards of some wider community, but rather plunges us headlong into subjectivism. If a film was tying to achieve massive financial losses, critical hatred, and apathy from the paying public, then we must hold that the film that held this standard for itself is a success! If we are to discuss what a movie is supposed to be then we need an external criterion of correctness. Other posters in this thread have recognized this and have vaguely gestured at background standards that cannot be directly summoned for inspection. We have been told that filmic standards resist simple "generalization." However, this means that they're not really at the ready for application. We cannot objectively say what movies are supposed to be, because we cannot directly refer to the standards which they are supposed to meet. They're a sort of ghost in the machine, something which which is allegedly there in the background, but which we cannot pin down to inhabiting any space. So, we have subjectivism and divine mysteries--our resources here are thin.

The two considerations I raise suggest that a top-down approach to the question will not work well. We no longer believe in the starry heavens in which we would need to be perched in order to look down and make such judgments. The constellations which offer basis of judgment are now thought to be fictions. They are features, or so it is said, which we have imposed on the night sky, not elements within it. Plato has been directed to clear out his desk of ideal forms and take them in a cardboard box out of the building.

I have proposed working from the ground up. Start in the sublunary realm where mere mortals are trying to make a buck by making people smile and see where that leads. What constraints do we find? What patterns emerge? At the very least, starting with our feet planted firmly on the ground provides us with parameters, bookends to keep us from sliding too far into idiosyncratic discussions of standards which (according to the paradigm of our age) are not even really "there." Adding in other considerations makes our discussion more rational, because we may appeal to more objective criteria. We can build our way up.

Start simply. Start cautiously.

Can we bootstrap our way back into the heavens? Maybe? Maybe not. Even if we cannot, however, we can find objective criteria to answer part of the question (e.g., profitability and pleasure). The base level of prudential considerations is, at least, a level.

But we may climb higher.

In terms of local (i.e., not global, immutable, timeless) standards, we can work from mutual commitments within communities and have rational discussions relative to intersubjective standards. We will have to hash out what counts as a community and what the standards are (e.g., must the standards be explicit and exceptionless?), but this can be done.

And we might climb higher still.

Human universals, grounded in our "form of life" remove Plato's forms from the heavens and locate them inside of us. Movies are made for humans, so what do humans want? Are there any patterns we can find which suggest patterns/standards? Prick us do we not bleed? Tickle us do we not laugh. And thus, we might climb upward to sit on a mountain peak which, although not quite in the starry heavens, stands over the contingencies of the valleys and plains.

I am trying to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. You are objecting that this doesn't feel right, but therapy can sometimes "feel" wrong.

We must either come up with a defense of objective aesthetic standards and repudiate the modern creed of thoroughgoing relativism OR we must take the approach I have suggested here. Seeing as how I have been "refuted" on the basis of the assumptions of the modern creed, it appears we're not ready for that. I propose that the latter is our best bet, at least until we find our way back into the starry heavens.

As for the rest, I will leave off here for now as you're taking issue with your impression of what I said, rather than what I said.

You seem to have seen the word "feelings" and latched onto it, at the expense of everything else. I can appreciate that perhaps you've run into people who try to persecute you for the vibe they get off you, but I'm not doing that (and won't). There were/are a lot of other direct and salient points/questions after that, though.

I say "feeling" in hopes that you won't make me jump through any hoops to prove something that I think is fairly obvious, because it's my experience that people can deflect and delay for a really long time by doing that. They can "win" disagreements through sheer attrition by demanding even benign claims be extensively cited. At the same time, I won't deny that asking for proof of a claim is a reasonable thing, at least in a vacuum. So here's the deal: you can demand I provide evidence of this, but I want a preemptive commitment to acknowledgement and withdrawal of any relevant arguments if and when I do it. I can't be given homework just to end up back at the neutral starting point, having parried an effortless demand for rigor. Sound fair?

For context, so you know what you're getting into, my claim is simply that you've argued with nearly everyone who's proposed some standard other than profitability, and that shooting down every alternative argument is akin to saying we can't/shouldn't talk about, which makes the whole "go ahead and talk about it if you want!" thing disingenuous. Saying this isn't really stopping people is like saying "oh, you're ALLOWED to eat all the candy you want before dinner, I'm just going to punish you every time you do."

That there is no objective answer to some questions is simply a fact, and one somebody has to be comfortable with if they're going to discuss art. And since you've joined a forum dedicated to one such art, I take it for granted you do want to do that. It would be a silly thing, indeed, to join a forum for art discussion and then spend a lot of time there talking about how pointless it is to do so. Or to insist on idiosyncratic material standards in order to do so.

You've also made a considerable leap in logic by suggesting that, if we do not subscribe to your claim that "it must be profitable," we are necessarily saying that "art need not answer to any standard outside of itself." Lots of people create frameworks to help us discuss art, and I think that's fine. The problem is with confusing that standard for some kind of metaphysical truth, or inevitability, as opposed to the scaffolding we use to build discussions with. The problem is refusing to accept the inherently fuzzy nature of art and instead trying to shove it into a science-shaped box.

Also...where is the evidence that your standard creates discussion? So far all the discussion is about whether it's a good or bad standard. I strongly suspect, in fact, that if everyone in this thread said "yup, you're right, profitability is the right framing," the thread would pretty much immediately peter out. On the other hand, we have tons of thriving discussions all over this forum that somehow manage to be interesting and thoughtful and illuminating without this standard.

At what point do we leave the realm of theory and actually start looking at real-world results? Because they seem pretty definitive to me, a dude who's been running a movie forum for literally 60% of his life.

If this is really the core of your position, I'd think you'd show a little more interest in what those words actually mean. If it's all about "what humans want?" then our definition of those last two words are pretty important, eh? And yet you've (without really acknowledging it) decided "humans" means "humans on the scale of millions" and "want" means "is willing to pay a few dollars to see." It completely eradicates any human interaction that takes place on small-or-moderate-sized-scales (even though that's the overwhelming majority of human interaction, and interaction with art) and it treats human pleasure as if it were a coin that can fall only on the sides of "want" and "do not want." Every 49 is really a 0 and every 51 is really a 100. These are not serious definitions, and they do not come close to encompassing human desire. They don't even try.

I made these exact points (some of them more than once!) in the previous post, by the way.

No I'm not. I'm objecting because of the reasons above, and a few others. I was perfectly clear on this.

I'll borrow your trial framing above and note that we're in the middle of the trial. We're into cross-examination. But for some reason opposing counsel just launched into their opening statement again. Permission to treat as hostile?

What can I say against this? If I contest the charge, I am obstinately denying the obvious and unfairly demanding that prove your accusations. Or I can just accept what you take to be obvious. Heads you win. Tails I lose.

And all of this after quite a few hoops that you've laid out for me to jump through.

"When you disagree with this post..."

"To be a substantive disagreement..."
There are all sorts of dialectical abuses. There are abusive demands for proof. There are also abusive dodges (e.g., shifting presumption to the other side). Since you are purporting to tell me what I am really saying, I think you do have a burden of proof here. I made my meaning clear in my last post, so I think it would be more productive to discuss the position I have clarified rather than the position that you have inferred as a sort of speech-act or overall function of the argument.
Not really, no. You are both referee and player here. As a moderator, you cannot really afford to lose an argument refereeing meaning and function of a post as this spills into your boundary work as a referee (e.g., authority, legitimacy, consistency).

You are increasingly making legalistic demands about what I will agree to do once you "do the work" to refute me, as if the refutation is a foregone conclusion and the only thing that isn't is whether I submit, and as if manning your side of the argument is "homework."

What would be fair, I think, is to allow me to make my meaning clear. Read my last post. My position, function, and purpose are there. If you take issue with that, then we might have an interesting discussion. I have thrown three paths for the fly to escape the fly-bottle in my last post. That's my piece.

As for arguing a traffic ticket in a court where you're the judge, no. Just tell me what the fine is and I'll pay it. I'm not going to go line-by-line with you, only for you to get frustrated when you find a rejoinder to be proof of bad will, strategic maneuvering, denying the obvious, etc. Your mind is already made up.

Skinamarink was made for around $15,000 and in a limited release in less then 1 month has grossed over 2 million. Now, that may not seem like much, but 2 million gross is actually impressive for its shoestring budget and shows that yes….there is an audience for these kind of films.

Im genuinely interested in how much Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey makes this coming week, which is supposedly it’s only week of release in this country (The US). My brother and I are going to see it this Saturday.

Geez Corax don't tell me that you finally got enough attention and now don't want it:rolleyes: Maybe try rethinking your initial posting methods, something that's less confrontational might be more rewarding to you.

I merely asserted that whatever else a film should do, it should make money and should entertain. It is this very proposition that some people found offensive, because this is (to some minds) a "base" consideration of art. It is good, however, for discussion do be provocative and confrontational in this sense (e.g., it challenges us to think).



If you find some particular flaw in my "initial method of posting" feel free to share it. However, confronting questions with candidate ideas is the purpose of conversation. :)

Re: So...WHAT are movies supposed to be?
 

A visual experience that touches a part of us, telling a story or theme in its own way.

I haven't kept up with latest movie news since the 1990s, maybe a little in the early Aughts. I just wait a few years then browse titles to see what I might like to rent/stream. I just hope this latest Winnie has plenty of masked mixed-race transgenders who stand with Ukraine and take a knee for BLM and are octuple-vaxxed to keep us all safe.

not boring

I'm always interested in casual and friendly convo, but not so much in continuous debating. I've had many good post with you so take anything I say as friendly tips.We'll have to disagree, as I've gotten older I find provocative post and confrontation not to my liking. I find it tiring. These days I try to avoid that. I wish this thread's discussion could've been less about 'one upmanship' and more about people just posting their thoughts sans any ego attachments. To be fair I'm talking in generalities, I'm not referring just to you or even just this thread.

Some topics for me are bit like catnip. Talking about the value and purpose of art is kind of like climbing Mt. Everest as far as aesthetic discussion goes. We're in the double-bind of loving art and not wanting to restrain it with brittle and arbitrary standards, but then find ourselves unable to justify our love having just deprived ourselves of critical standards. This is arguably the core problem facing serious critical discussions of art. How do we create a large space for art to roam, but not also slide into subjectivism?



You're right about the ego-attachment thing. It's very hard to have a critical discussion without it devolving into face-saving posturing. At the same time, I find that my mind does change through conversation and my own positions and elaborated and clarified through the process. Intense critical discussion can result in intense critical thought. All of the sudden you realize that you're taking responsibility for a point of view revealing that you're an "X" person, a self-discovery. And I must admit that I also love the cut-and-thrust of argument and that I find that it is helpful in keeping one intellectually nimble. There's still a place for it, at least for me, however, I agree that this isn't the end-all, be-all of conversation.



I think Yoda does a pretty good job of keeping us in line and I find that I am not looking for endless line-by-line disputation (for the sake of disputation) anymore. I dunno, I think that the trick is probably to know with whom you can have a serious critical discussion without things getting out of hand and to perhaps(?) to have a better process of engaging in a persuasion dialogue to prevent it from tilting into eristic. Dan Dennett champions Anatol Rapoport's rules, however, it was a bitter irony to see those rules fail him in his dispute with Sam Harris over his book on free will. Rules will not save us, it seems, so we need more charitable attitudes and goodwill. And perhaps sometimes we need to be advised by our fellow travelers to tap the breaks. Consequently, I suppose I owe you a debt of thanks for advice.

Oof, sorry, I let this one get away from me. Busy busy. I'll try to scale down a bit and mostly just address the really salient stuff.

(I have responses already written for the suggestions that I'm not addressing what you actually said, but those seem unnecessary once everything else has been addressed. If you disagree, let me know, and I'll post those, too.)

A "hoop" is some task required above and beyond the normal expectations of a discussion. The two lines above are me asking you to 1) consider a hypothetical that exists outside of your generalizations and 2) be substantive. Are you saying you find either of those requests to be above and beyond normal expectations?

(Also, I should note that the these two supposed examples are actually one example because they're about the exact same thing, not "quite a few.")

(Also, you left out me saying "I'd like to propose an exercise" and "I'd like you to imagine." Presumably because they undermine the idea that I'm being unfairly demanding?)

I did, though! I did in the previous post, and the one before that, and neither was even acknowledged. I'll reproduce them:

Originally Posted by Me

by talking only about money, you flatten enjoyment levels. You assume, without having argued correspondingly, that "will pay $10 to see" is not only the most important boundary, but the only one we should care about. It's Tomatometer logic: a 5.1 is the same as a perfect 10, because they're both past that minimum threshold. This movie that changed my life and helped me reconnect with my grandfather is the same as this movie some 15-year-old said was "kinda cool I guess" and then never thought about again.

Originally Posted by Me

Only problem is all the stuff I know you're smuggling into "people." For example, apparently the plural noun "people" requires it encompass, like, 10 million people? And anything less than that is just for the director?

Originally Posted by Me

...somehow, in your artistic calculus, this doesn't exist or doesn't count for anything. "Oh, 300,000 people had a profound emotional experience from your film? Worthless. Talk to me when you make something 50,000,000 find moderately amusing."

Originally Posted by Me

If this is really the core of your position, I'd think you'd show a little more interest in what those words actually mean. If it's all about "what humans want?" then our definition of those last two words are pretty important, eh? And yet you've (without really acknowledging it) decided "humans" means "humans on the scale of millions" and "want" means "is willing to pay a few dollars to see." It completely eradicates any human interaction that takes place on small-or-moderate-sized-scales (even though that's the overwhelming majority of human interaction, and interaction with art) and it treats human pleasure as if it were a coin that can fall only on the sides of "want" and "do not want." Every 49 is really a 0 and every 51 is really a 100. These are not serious definitions, and they do not come close to encompassing human desire. They don't even try.

Those are all simple objections to your own stated standard/your clarified position. This is exactly what you just asked for above. I have clearly heard and understood your position and articulated what I think is being missed and why I think it's important.

As for the stuff about not wanting to argue with a mod: I can appreciate that on some level, but surely by now you've seen lots of people really lay into me and face no reprisal for it. When someone goes after me, personally, I actually have to give them more leeway than I normally would, rather than less. Caesar's Wife and all that. But, uh, try not to spread that around.

I'll make a claim here - actually true - I attended the world premiere of Multiple Maniacs in a local college auditorium. Several people I knew were cast or crew, it was filmed in some locations that were quite familiar and "everybody" (about all 150 of us) knew about his movies, especially Mondo Trasho. Several cast members and Waters were there, although Divine was not. Glenn Milstead was still somewhat reticent about his identity.

We were, indeed groupies in the sense that we knew Waters and the cast and wanted to be at the event. Some locals were horrified, some thought that we should all be arrested. Some protested that it was being shown in a college auditorium, which, in their view, was for education, not "porn". Now it IS history.