Cinema of Loneliness by Kolker Robert;

Author:Kolker, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

4 Steven Spielberg, War, Superheroes, and the Digital Mise-en-Scène

Steven Spielberg seems somewhat less at the center of things than he was in the 1990s, but that may be because there are few directors at the center of things in Hollywood. Look at the credits of almost any recent film and you will see an enormous list of producers, co-producers, and executive producers. The director’s name may be as unfamiliar as any one of those producers, perhaps less so. In studio production, directorial talent seems to be a second thought (the situation is somewhat different for independent filmmaking, which I will discuss in the next chapter). This is not meant to imply that there is no good work being turned out but rather that there are few directors of sufficient presence who show recognizable patterns in their work. Still, Spielberg remains an important figure in contemporary film; while he may no longer be a central figure, he remains a touchstone of contemporary filmmaking. We can better understand Spielberg and his place by examining the flow of cinematic work around him. This chapter will play a bit of counterpoint as it looks for patterns in late-twentiethand early-twenty-first-century film. I want to find a place for Spielberg in the context of some movements in contemporary film, comparing him with the work of other directors, and then examine the form and content of his work.

Mainstream cinema of the first decade of the twenty-first century was a time of minimal experimentation, characterized by large-scale repetition of older ideas and tried-and-true genres: romantic comedies (with the addition of male buddy romantic comedies), horror films, action films and thrillers of various kinds, and some science fiction. However, the corporate, economic, and technological events surrounding film production during the period are very clear, and many critics are focusing on these aspects of the cinematic equation. The merger of the studios into units of very large corporations continues unabated, leading in turn to the further globalization of American film. This development forces profits to depend increasingly on foreign sales, thereby pushing the films themselves to be acceptable and accessible across cultures. The excitement over the resurrection of 3D—available since before the invention of film and popularized in the 1950s—celebrated in James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, indicates the poverty of innovation during the 2010s. More and more, youthful studio heads and producers assign films to increasingly younger directors, who have minimal experience—in filmmaking or in life—beyond the films they’ve seen at USC or UCLA film schools or the music videos and television commercials that may have been their first venture into production. This is not necessarily a negative. Martin Scorsese is a product of film school, and David Fincher continues to make music videos from time to time. At the same time, the studios and the independents (many of which are often financed and almost always distributed by the independent film units of the studios: Sony-Columbia’s Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight, Warner Bros./New Line) are less and less open to experimentation of any radical kind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.