I once toured the Art Institute of Chicago with a friend who makes collages and builds houses. The paintings there are placed chronologically. When we left the rooms with works by the Dutch Masters, he told me, "It's all downhill from here." There would be good, excellent, sometimes great paintings to come in the intervening centuries, but no Rembrandts or Vermeers tumbling effortlessly from state of the art visionaries on a consistent basis.
It's all downhill for cinema after "Raging Bull". There have been a few fistfuls of great movies since then but they run like sand between our fingers down, the tide of mediocrities come sooner than the almanacs promise to sweep our hopes of cinematic rejuvenation back beyond horizon. When was the last time you felt a new movie changed your life? After the nouveau waves from South Korea and the Philippines wash outland, which other atlas-plastered zone will tempt us like a foodie's favored trendy new cuisine? Will it matter much beyond the specificities of trade winds? Is Hollywood itself now the Old West it lionized, a weedy pocket of ghostly recollections whose artisans from Eastwood on down paint their crabbed, anointed visions in murky filters of graveyard desaturation?
O'er the last fortnight I witnessed two movies which reaffirmed my choice of cinema as the greatest of all possible art forms, at least until holograms who touch us physically inhabit terra firma. One of them is 75 years old, happy anniversary, the other a sprightly 53. As much as I love "Brokeback Mountain" and "Storytelling" and "Buffalo 66" and "Lost in Translation" and "There Will Be Blood" and a kiddie portion of other movies o'er the past decade, there is no conceivable way that the relative geniuses who molded these relative masterpieces could ever compete with the supernaturally astounding work of Max Ophuls and Frank Borzage and their venerable creative teams. "Lola Montes" and "Man's Castle" deserve entire volumes of appreciative critical analysis. They are better movies than "Citizen Kane" or "The Rules of the Game" or a gazillion other genuine or putative classics. They show and tell us legends of human experience and sensory marvels. Comparison with recent would-be classics, as wonderful and sweetly fresh as they have been, defies the cheesy craft of the simile.
I carry the "Man's Castle" ticket stub in my billfold like a beloved snapshot. If the Music Box printed out their titles, I'd carry "Lola Montes" around with me as well and she could have a very lively D/s threesome with Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young. "Buffalo 66" is one of the greatest movies of my experience, a re-invention of the art of video editing and the art of black comedy and a landmark in the study of postindustrial men's issues, but I can't carry Billy Brown around with me. He needs a bath and I'm not invited to join him.
Virility and vitality fade. Mother Nature dooms art as well as being. Cinema will never bloom again.
It may be argued that the aforementioned recent relative masterpieces were all birthed in the land Uncle Sam owns, and the blush of creative youth abounds overseas or downstream. While I admire the work of cultural anthropologists, I witness movies as a parishioner in aesthetic dim cathedrals. Show me a visionary product of any national cinema that changes us and alters our perception the way "Stagecoach" or "Sunrise" or "Beauty and the Beast" or "Sansho the Bailiff" or "Black Narcissus" did, and I'll once again feel passion from the movies in their decrepitude.
Cantankerous excellence persists in cinema, and will for centuries if not longer. Greatness does rarely, if ever. Excellent painters continue to please us, great works of art no longer grace the walls of our contemporary galleries. The antiseptic lodging scent of multiplexes will suffuse their offerings with sweet promises of deliverance, but we can't move into a hotel. Cinema is dying, and we must plan to move beyond the denial stage to other forms of greatness in creative bloom.
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