Video from Jonathan Pageau - Clips
Signs in Storytelling That a Culture Is Running Out of Steam
"Watch the full version: The Datsusara Podcast - #24 - Jonathan Pageau - The Symbolic Worldview: https://youtu.be/P8msxsJQdcA" from video introduction.
“When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.” – John Steinbeck
The regurgitated garbage that passes for film these days (or even entertaining blockbusters) is appalling; Robocop remakes? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remakes? Saw XXI? Is anyone’s intelligence insulted? The lack of original thought in our arts and culture would make anyone think the western world is truly in decline. The movie industry no longer invests in such frivolous things as plot, script, and original ideas..." from the article: THE QUALITY OF MODERN MOVIES SIGNALS OUR CULTURAL DECLINE
"This deep into the coronavirus pandemic, how many cinephiles haven’t yet got word of the bankruptcy or shuttering of a favorite movie theater? Though the coronavirus hasn’t quite killed filmgoing dead — at least not everywhere in the world — the culture of cinema itself had been showing signs of ill health long before any of us had heard the words “social distancing.” The previous plague, in the view of Martin Scorsese, was the Hollywood superhero-franchise blockbuster. “That’s not cinema,” the auteur-cinephile told Empire magazine in 2019. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks.”
This past March, Scorsese published an essay in Harper‘s called “Il Maestro.” Ostensibly a reflection on the work of Federico Fellini, it also pays tribute to Fellini’s heyday, when on any given night in New York a young movie fan could find himself torn between screenings of the likes of La Dolce Vita, François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, John Cassavetes’ Shadows, and the work of other masters besides. This was early in the time when, as New Yorker critic Anthony Lane puts it, “adventurous moviegoing was part of the agreed cultural duty, when the duty itself was more of a trip than a drag, and when a reviewer could, in the interests of cross-reference, mention the names ‘Dreyer’ or ‘Vigo’ without being accused of simply dropping them for show.”.. from the article: The Decay of Cinema
The Decay of Cinema
Video from Eyebrow Cinema
"In his recent essay Il Maestro, Martin Scorsese critiqued our modern media culture, where movies are little more than content and algorithms drive film exhibition. Salient though his words are, Scorsese is not the first to lament cinematic loss. This video essay puts Scorsese in conversation with Susan Sontag's 1996 essay The Decay of Cinema and probes deeper into what exactly is lost in the movie from cinema to content, and why cinephilia is worth fighting for." from video introduction.