by Neil Archer 
Martin Scorsese either has a very thick skin, or simply doesn’t pay attention to Twitter (I suspect both). Whatever the case, the celebrated director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Departed recently brought on the ire of the blogosphere by taking a shot at one of its most cherished subjects: the films making up Marvel’s ‘Cinematic Universe’.
‘I don’t see them’, Scorsese commented during an interview in this month’s Empire magazine. ‘I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are… is theme parks’.
That Scorsese of all people should publicly take this line is at once apt and ironic. Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which references Scorsese’s 1980 masterpiece in its title, evokes him as one of the great filmmakers of the ‘New Hollywood’: the decade or so between 1968 and the end of the 1970s, when it seemed that film-literate, serious work by creatively adventurous (and almost exclusively male) directors and writers would re-imagine the Hollywood industry. The end of this period, in Biskind’s view, owes mostly to the immaturity of films like Jaws and Star Wars: films that helped usher in the new, dominant infantilism in American cinema – the idea of films, to use a critical term of the time, as ‘rollercoasters’ (see Tom Shone’s book Blockbuster for a brilliantly nuanced, and less needlessly salacious, critical response to Biskind).
If Scorsese is frequently seen as operating outside this so-called ‘Spielberg-Lucas syndrome’, the impact of which is still with us (the ninth instalment in the Star Wars saga, out in December, being eagerly awaited), it’s worth noting that these filmmakers are both his peers and, in many respects, artistic bedfellows. As I suggested to some of our new first-year students last week, if you want to look at the economical, expressive storytelling possibilities of film, just watch Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982). It’s all there! Scorsese has said as much himself, this time in another Empire interview (April 2018): ‘[Spielberg is] a pioneer of visual storytelling… reinventing our art form with each new picture… To me, Steven and the art of cinema are almost one and the same’. Given that he so strongly supports a filmmaker once blamed for the demise of modern cinema, it is perhaps surprising that Scorsese should come out so vocally against the most current examples of popular film.
What’s the problem, then, with Marvel? As I’ve explored in a recent book, the MCU’s most significant contribution to modern cinema has been to re-think the idea of the ‘standalone’ feature and the classical, feature-length story; favouring instead dispersed narrative across its extended network of heroes and antagonists, appealing mostly to a devoted fan-base. Has this been done at the expense, in Scorsese’s terms, of the ‘emotional, psychological experience’ and emphasis on ‘human beings’ that is the preserve of cinema? Hulk is not Hamlet – nor, indeed, is Iron Man, despite the laboriously regal send-off that character gets granted at the end of Avengers: Endgame (2019). But for all its whiff of self-congratulation, right from the start, Endgame offers much of the experience Scorsese asks for, and which he might recognise (if he’s seen it): meditations on loss, on family; debates on responsibility and moral choice; reflections on time and the impact of certain life decisions.
I guess, ultimately, asking what is and is not ‘cinema’ is a fruitless task, since it relies on mostly subjective judgements and tastes. Taika Waititi, who as director of 2016’s Thor: Ragnarok has skin in this particular game, offered a simple but logical response to Scorsese’s comments: ‘Of course it’s cinema! It’s at the movies. It’s in cinemas.’ Cinema is, from one point of view, whatever you want it to be, and whatever people will choose to see. In 2006 I saw Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait; a real-time film of the great French footballer playing in a match for Real Madrid. Gordon and Parreno’s film had originally been intended as an installation work, but enthusiastic festival responses, and the impact of Zidane’s exploits at the 2006 World Cup, helped get the film into theatres. Was this cinema? Admittedly, the person I saw the film with fell asleep, and still won’t watch it. Myself, I found it one of the most mesmerizing, exciting experiences I’ve had at the movies. Cinema is what you want it to be.
But there are limits, surely? When I started teaching film, I used to do an exercise where I asked a class to define ‘cinema’. It’s trickier than it sounds. Too many definitions overlap with theatre, literature and comic books. Even when you fall back on the technological staple – ‘big screen’ projection, an audience, amplified sound – you can find a host of examples we’d be pushed to call ‘cinematic’. Even if it has all the conditions to be such, is the live public screening of Olympic events or football matches ‘cinema’? What about the screening of plays, concerts or opera that is now a regular feature of many cinemas’ repertoire?
Does cinema, as Scorsese also suggests it does, need ‘people’ at all? As I’m exploring in one of my courses this semester, many of our potentially most profound relationships with cinematic narratives are not with ‘people’ at all, but with their proxies, in the form of animated toys (in films like Toy Story or The LEGO Movie). On a somewhat different scale, a film like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) offers, depending on your point of view, a 150-minute snore-fest, or a deeply profound meditation on space, human history, and the future – all of this despite, or because of, the fact that its most human character is a computer, and its most lively moments feature space ships.
Equally, does anything have to happen for a film to be ‘cinema’? As I show students in my first-year lectures, a real-time, unedited view of the Empire State Building, from dusk till dawn, is most definitely a film: but is it cinema only when, within this view, something happens? Where does the merely decorative (to follow this example from Andy Warhol, a kind of cinematic ‘wallpaper’) become a ‘movie’, if in both cases we’re dealing with ‘moving pictures’? Why, to pursue this example, are we most likely to be interested only when something changes in the shot? When we see, for example, someone at work in the building? When we sense that they are going to do something – or conversely, that something is going to happen to them?
There’s evidently no easy answer to this question. As I said, at some level it’s just down to taste, and what we’ve grown up with. But there’s one thing at least that seems to bind these experiences, which is the idea of story. I’ve recently been asking our third-year screenwriting students to reflect on what we understand by narrative in film, and why it matters. It’s a question given wonderfully thoughtful consideration by John Yorke, in his book Into the Woods, where he reflects on the psychological, cognitive and emotional reasons informing storytelling and narrative form. None of these films I’ve mentioned dispenses with that basic hook: where are we, who are these characters, what do they want, and why do we care? Even Zidane, brilliantly, through editing, music and text, turns the random patterns of a football match into a story, with the player at its centre battling frustrations, adversity, and ultimately giving way to a barely suppressed, yet still mysterious fury. Yes: cinema is what you say it is, and what is in the cinema. Maybe it’s the reasons we stay watching till the end, though, that ultimately make something cinematic or otherwise.
What do you think? If you’d like to reply to this, leave a comment; or if you’re a Keele student who’d like to post your own response, contact me at n.archer@keele.ac.uk
film keele 