Cinematic Heritage / True Works of Art

At the point that we're seriously arguing Avengers as a true work of art, it seems we're just steps away from debating which color crayon tastes best (I am a magenta man, myself).

I’m curious if you’ve seen any films by Marie Menken. A podcast I listen to recently did an episode on her, so I watched a few of her films last night. Her films Go! Go! Go! and Lights seem like pretty clear influences on Koyaanisqatsi, the former with its time lapse street footage, the latter with its abstracting of car headlights into smears. I plan to see a few more, as I’ve been finding them quite enjoyable. (Also an interesting change of pace to delve back into avant garde type stuff, given my usual viewing habits.)

No, I wasn't familiar with her until I saw your review on LB this morning. I'll keep an eye out for her, sounds up my alley.

PS-- Tati's Playtime is another one that occurred to me after my earlier post. Again, I don't expect widespread agreement on any suggestions but these would be in my Hall of Fame anyway.

We're not. As has been noted a few times, this is an outcropping from the original topic. Insofar as we're debating anything like this, we're debating what room needs to be made for populist action-adventure fare ("isn't Raiders of the Lost Ark part of our heritage too?", etc), and then, on top of that, whether The Avengers qualifies within that expanded definition.

My position, broadly, is that I think very few of those kinds of films have significant artistic depth, but that they don't really need to.

Is there a reason we’re trying to frame this through a generational or anti-elitist lens?

I know for a fact that I’m at least a decade younger than both Crumbsroom and Wooley, and I’ve been controlling for similar levels of budget and commercial success in my argument.

Do we really need to hand it to this one movie because of what it represents and not actually tackle the movie itself, or imply the detractors are coloured by resentment for its commercial aspects (despite citing numerous commercial movies in comparison)? Are we giving movies participation medals on this thread?

The difference between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Avengers, is that the former is a near-perfect action-adventure film where the latter is merely a competent one.

I think the greatest accomplishment of the MCU is "the MCU" and not any of the films in particular (save for Infinity War?).

Why is it more worthwhile to discuss the motivations behind why people are making their arguments, possible demographic factors influencing their arguments, the parameters of the discussion rather than discussing the actual films?

Or imply that arguments around the films themselves are tainted because of the former? That’s unfair to everybody who’s been discussing the actual movie in this thread.

A perfectly reasonable position. Anyway, my initial aim was just to establish that our shared cinematic heritage needs room for things without significant artistic depth.

Sure. A lot of otherwise bad or "OK" films have offered innovations which have changed the game.

Others are important because they represented the spirit of an age.

I'm not saying Avengers is not worthy of any merit. I'm explaining where it is lacking on the level of films which offer something, anything, one thing to give it some kind of distinguishing personality. It's an extremely low bar that I'm hoping a movie to make. Even an obvious pile of garbage like a Zack Snyder film at least is identifiable a Zack Snyder film. I'd be more comfortable with the idea of the Avengers being talked about as something worth being talked about if it could at least know how to do bad well. But it doesn't. So far all I've got is it pays proper respect to its source material. Which I think it should be clear, is hardly enough when we are talking about the cinematic value of a film


I also don't need a film to rise to the level of Bresson to be considered art. I've made that abundantly clear simply through my posting history here. I also, in this thread, have distinguished between art (which can be argued to be virtually anything of a creative nature) and Art (which becomes trickier to parse, but it usually involves the piece in question to have some kind of distinguishing characteristics or thematic idea or conceptual framework). My 'check list' is simply me giving someone, anyone an opportunity to distinguish what makes Avengers Art. Can it meet one of these standards? I'm still waiting and it really shouldn't be this hard.


Minio has also made it very clear the type of films he is looking for in this thread. Now I think its completely fine if someone wants to challenge the notion that only Minio branded films should matter. That would be one thing. I myself have already stated that as useless as I find Avengers as Art, it has value in how it represents culture (as any hugely popular film can do). But this conversation has moved past this point where we might argue how we just want this Heritage to be more representative of different types of movies, even if they aren't particularly interesting as art. What we have now are direct comparisons between the Art of Star Wars or Raiders (which, by the nature of their well established auteurship, very much qualify even while being narrative fluff) and the ****ing Avengers.


None of this is me saying no one should enjoy the Avengers. Or, if they can offer a different way for us to appreciate what Avengers is doing cinematically, not to offer it up here in order to defend this choice. As has been reiterated a thousand times in this thread , there are no genres being blacklisted from belonging here. I've already suggested the first two Donner Superman's as better alternatives. Or, even though I'm not a particularly big fan of Dark Knight, that would certainly be a considerably more understandable choice as it's clearly something.


In regards to themes, while those would qualify as something, for me they don't hold a tremendous amount of value unless they are somehow also being represented on screen. It's great for images to mean something, but unless I can also grasp these ideas instinctively through watching the film, and have what they have to say resonate emotionally with me, I generally find talk of themes to just be that. Talk. But that is just my personal preference to what matters and, obviously for some, it is completely fair that decoding a film for it's more intellectualized ideas has a value that sets the film apart from being little more than a diversion. You know, like The Avengers.

A bunch are available on UbuWeb, which is a great resource for experimental/avant-garde short films. I watched a bunch of Nick Zedd and Richard Kern shorts on there in the past.