Innovation in Cinema. Hitchcock Zeitgeist needed again. Film loses eyeballs. Docu-drama innovation zeitgeist.
Whilst painting and art are my primary cultural interests along with food & wine, I still enjoy cinema, when it transcends the mundane. Mundane is most modern Hollywood pap, only occasional is the great moment in cinematic art, a few a year. And arthouse with it’s staple diet of drugs, atheism, sex, drama and false hyperbole can be boring too.
The key zeitgeist innovation in arthouse cinema is the docu-drama -more on that later.
Hitchcock is that grand moment, the artistic gesture that lifts movies above those college comedies, Adam Sandler movies and horrifically depressing arthouse movies about depression, cigarettes and sex. Do we need to debate sex any more, surely any taboos are well and truly lifted? I know more than I need to know about options!
Hitchcock however is a director of unequalled genius, and especially my favourites, one of which is North by Northwest, with Cary Grant as wronged everyman on Madison Avenue, NYC, Roger Thornhill.
His artistic construction of long shots alternating with close-ups, juxtapositions, over-the-shoulder shots, changing moods, twists and turns and dialog that was unmatched in cinema. Vertigo, The Man Who knew Too Much, Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief, and Torn Curtain (more Hitchcock).
Few realise in these days of post-modernist deconstructionist movies, that Hitchcock artistically played with the traditional movies, but he was reacting to the traditional.
Modern cinema is no longer innovative, more special effects do not constitute innovation.
Big stars do not consistitute innovation.
More salacious sex is no longer shocking, and does not constitute innovation. Sex has become so wall-to-wall in Western countries, it is now boring on screen at the zeitgeist. Sex is no longer the zeitgeist and innovation is always the zeitgeist.
The only zeitgeist innovation of modern years has been the rise of the docu-drama, such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or Michael Moore’s movies, or the unusual Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me — which has enough power to influence McDonalds to change their behaviou, despite their protests to the contrary.
Like all innovations, if you had market research telling an executive in the exisitng paradigm that documentaries would be the new zeitgeist, no one would believe you. Innovations N– N — N E V E R ….! show up in market research or anything operating inside the paradigm. Innovations always arise in pockets.
Hitchcock was such an innovator, adapting the mainstream, an influential genius worth immeasurably more value to society than the products of any Adam Sandler movie. But one only makes great movies or great art by a return to classical themes of humanity, not pointless cotton candy of drugs, cigarettes, greed and sex, without a broader point.
Hithcock was the zeitgeist of cinematic innovation.
Adam Sandler, many English-speaking arthouse movies, and all the sequels currently doing the traps show the current lack of innovative cinema.
If I have to see one more depressing navel-gazing sex and drug-laden controversial arthouse cinema, that is so consistently boring and monotonous as to be mainstream, shows that arthouse has lost it’s way, except for the excellent foreign language films and docu-dramas.
When I finish learning French, I will look forward to my wife and I watching the whole French back catalog of artistic cinema in DVD. Recently we saw Daniel Auteuil in the good My Best Friend, and we have seen quite a few French and Italian movies (such as are available in Australia), but there is a whole back catalog to be enjoyed without subtitles in French I hope.
At current all the best-selling films at the Australian and US Box Office are sequels, and you can hardly call that innovation.
A good cinematic experience leaves your mind full of ideas, and inspires you to create, as does all art. Hitchcock the great, inspires new art and creation of innovation based on his tension of classical themes, limited and playful deconstructionism. Innovation from cinema is part of the artistic layers of everyday cultural life, along with innovative food, coffee. music, creative books, museums and art of the higher expression.
We could do with a new Hitchcock, capturing the innovation zeitgeist again. until then I will (like a lot of people) stick to DVDs and great cinema experiences like the Astor, St Kilda, a Melbourne institution which shows retro /cult film on the big screen.
And docu-dramas/documentaries or French / Italian movies in arthouse cinemas. Oh and videos of cute cats you-tube, but that is another story for another day.
Mr. Christopher Hire
Innovator-In-Chief
2thinknowTM : Global Innovation Agency
Bio | Speaker
Speaker. Author. Editor-In-Chief. Executive Director of Innovation, 2thinknow.
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Jan 5th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
[…] Innovation in Cinema. Hitchcock Zeitgeist needed again. Film loses eyeballs […]