THE GREAT DISASTER OF MODERN BRITISH / AMERICAN FILM
PART ONE – APPEALS TO HEDONISM & EGO
© by Rob Ager 2007
A real film maker, when formulating a new project, will start out with a series of conceptual messages and ideas that he/she wishes to communicate to an audience. These will be fleshed out into a fictional storyline scenario and, layer by layer, a workable script and aesthetic / technical style will be developed in accordance with those concepts. That is the artist’s approach to film.
Modern film making in Britain and America, even at the level of short film making, almost universally starts with the desire to make money … NOT ART! Film producers look at what films are already making money then seek ways to emulate those films as closely as possible, but in a way that avoids being sued for copyright infringement. They will copy / mimic almost everything from other box-office hit movies – right down to the music, editing styles and actors (if they can’t get the actors they want they will go for up and coming actors with similar looks or personas).
Of course, if audiences know that a new film is purely a clone product of movies they have already seen then they will be unlikely to take an interest, so almost every film project has to incorporate a couple of gimmicks to convince the audience that they are watching something original. These vary incredibly. The gimmick can be an unusual plot twist within an otherwise unoriginal script structure. It can be an unusual visual style layered onto an otherwise uninventive story. It can even be as simple as an A-list actor playing against type, but within an otherwise uninventive film. Whatever the gimmick is, it will be made the centre-piece of the films marketing campaign, while the other 95% of the project is mere assembly-line content.
There are a number of unwritten rules about the kinds of gimmicks that get used. It must not be something that will deeply offend certain social groups to the point where the film gets banned all together. The financial cost of the gimmick must be justified by the forecasted box-office pay-off. It must not be a gimmick that is so far off the wall as to alienate audiences intellectually. And above all, it must not be a concept that upsets the business / political interests of the film’s investors.
Taking all of these gimmick guidelines into account, the most frequent choice of film makers is to appeal to the audience’s hedonistic desires – their desire for a sensory thrill. The obvious examples are special visual effects, sex and violence. This is followed closely by appeals to ego – film’s that give their audience a fantasy of superiority / domination over other human beings. To achieve an ego appeal, the characters of the film must be separated into two categories: A) central characters that the audience will identify with, and B) wooden support characters whose sole purpose is to behave in a way that makes the key characters seem physically, morally or intellectually superior.
The ego appeal also surfaces in a slightly more sophisticated way. Some feature films are deliberately designed to be cryptic so as to appear intellectual and artistic, and this in turn allows art house audiences to feel intellectually or morally superior to other audience members who lack the skills or motivation to decipher the cryptic storyline. You could simply call these kinds of intellectual gimmick films “pretentious”.
The vast majority of modern feature films fall into the categories I have described above, but the problem today is that these gimmicks are becoming more and more obvious. The assembly line structure is over-used.
Rather than give a voice to talented up and coming film makers, for fear of investor disapproval, production companies have gone all out to make their more recent films as hedonistically engrossing as possible. Special effects films now overload the viewer visually to the point where we are looking at little more than a swirling mass of computer generated content, which amounts merely to a super hi-tech cartoon.
Films that don’t use computer generated special effects have succumbed to a series of hedonistic cinematography clichés. Constantly shaky handheld camera work is an annoying trend now that does nothing to support story or character interaction. Occasionally this works within an appropriate context such as the beach invasion scene of Saving Private Ryan, but all too often it is a pathetic attempt to add tension to a straight forward dialogue scene. A similar visual technique is for cinematographers to create focal depth in every single shot. They try to create out of focus backgrounds or to have intrusive out of focus objects appear in the foreground. Another gimmick is to create harsh contrasts between light and dark in every shot and yet another is to edit the film at breakneck speed so that the shots change several times a second, even if the scene is simply a dialogue between two characters.
The apparent logic of these modern visual styles is that the audience will feel more engrossed in the film, but many people describe these gimmicks as distracting and would much prefer a return to the non-intrusive filming techniques of the 1980’s, a time when cinematographers simply showed what needed to be shown to keep the story coherent. Despite people being turned off films by these styles, producers carry on using them. Perhaps the real reason for these gimmicks is to save time and money trying to shoot scenes effectively – proper lighting, careful framing, smooth camera movement.
My favourite example of a film that goes over the top with almost all of the visual gimmicks I’ve described is Tony Scott’s Man On Fire. Almost every scene in this film uses unnecessary camera movement, focal depth, exaggerated contrast etc to disguise what is actually a very dull script.
Unfortunately marketing appeals to hedonism are the central theme of most modern British and American feature films and will probably remain so for some time. One of the sad things I’ve seen time and time again is amateur film makers and semi-professionals mimicking these clichés. Up and coming film talent should be developing their conceptual voices with an emphasis on narrative – this is the factor from which aesthetic and technical choices should be made. It would also help if underground film makers gave themselves a cinematic purpose other than making money.
Unless appeals to hedonism and ego are dropped in favour of emotionally and intellectually stimulating story structures, foreign cinema will continue to grow stronger and gain popularity among western audiences – and rightly so.