How one “horrible idea” ruined modern cinema, according to Martin Scorsese
Recently, Martin Scorsese made headlines for partnering with an AI company, something that surely the cinema purist would have once been against, but if that’s not a signal of the way cinema is heading, then what is?
We’re doomed as long as the biggest filmmakers in the business endorse such damaging and artistically redundant technology. Yet, Scorsese has often been outspoken about his distaste for the various ways that he believes cinema is being ruined, like when he compared Marvel superhero movies to theme park attractions.
When the Taxi Driver director declared his distaste for such films, many cinephiles were relieved that such a big name was talking sense, but now his apparent endorsement of AI seems at odds with his strong opinions, which are usually pretty agreeable.
For example, a few years ago, he shared one of his biggest dislikes when it comes to modern filmmaking, something he called “the devaluation of cinema itself”. Speaking at the Turner Classic Movies film festival, Scorsese explained, “It can all be summed up in the word that’s being used now: content. All movie images are lumped together. You’ve got a picture, you’ve got a TV episode, a new trailer, you’ve got a how-to video on a coffee-maker, you’ve got a Super Bowl commercial, you’ve got Lawrence of Arabia, it’s all the same.”
He sees cinema’s importance as an art form as having lessened as other mediums of visual entertainment and commercialism have overloaded our brains with stimulation and the hungry desire to constantly keep feeding it.
“They can also turn a picture off and go straight to the next piece of content. If there’s no sense of value tied to a given movie, of course, it can be sampled in bits and pieces and just forgotten,” Scorsese said, noting the easy access of movies as something ultimately disposable.
In particular, though, he took issue with websites like Rotten Tomatoes that award scores to movies without giving people a chance to simply make their minds up for themselves, claiming, “The horrible idea they reinforce [is] that every picture, every image is there to be instantly judged and dismissed without giving audiences time to see it. Time to see it, maybe ruminate and maybe make a decision for themselves. So the great 20th-century art form, the American art form, is reduced to content.”
We’re living in an age of pretty unavoidable content, so it seems like this is something that Scorsese is going to have to get used to, whether he likes it or not. Not only do we have sites like Rotten Tomatoes that rate movies with numbers rather than allowing people’s written opinions, and really, our own, to inform our experience of a film, but we also have sites like Letterboxd.
Here, one-sentence-long quips and an average star rating can be enough to give someone an indication of whether they should watch a movie or not, but Scorsese thinks people should just turn off their devices and press play, allowing a movie to do all of the talking, uninterrupted, without the distraction of other content.
