Are you talking to me?

What is cinema? is suddenly a question on people's lips. But how many of the people asking it really want to know the answer? Last weekend Martin Scorsese opined that the superhero movies released by Marvel Studios don't meet with his definition of cinema, prompting a backlash that was surprisingly overblown, revealing just how sensitive filmmakers and fans of the Marvel films are to accusations that, while they're phenomenally popular, they're far from what cinephiles would call art.

Now another old cineaste, Francis Ford Coppola, has joined the fray with comments that are more blunt: "When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he’s right because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration. . . . I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again. Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.” 

What Scorsese actually said was part of his David Lean lecture hosted by the British Film Institute: "Theatres have become amusement parks. That is all fine and good, but don’t invade everything else in that sense. That is fine and good for those who enjoy that type of film and, by the way, knowing what goes into them now, I admire what they do. It’s not my kind of thing, it simply is not. It’s creating another kind of audience that thinks cinema is that.”

In 2017 Woody Allen made similar remarks in a Deadline interview: "I think movies have gone terribly wrong ... And the big blockbusters for the most part are big time wasters. I don't see them. I can see what they are: eardrum-busting time wasters. I think Hollywood has gone in a disastrous path. It's terrible."

I noticed the trend as far back as 1977, when George Lucas's Star Wars was released. Lucas and Steven Spielberg, whose Jaws was an enormous hit in 1975, were two filmmakers who, ironically, were working diligently to establish their independence from Hollywood studio interference. They founded production companies of their own, Lucasfilm in 1971 and Amblin Entertainment in 1981. Even then, however, Hollywood recognized there was a difference between what sells and what was good: while Star Wars (budgeted at $11 million, box office of $775.4 million) was nominated for the 1978 Best Picture Oscar, it was beaten by Woody Allen's Annie Hall (budgeted at $4 million, box office of $38.3 million). The success of Lucas and Spielberg created the blockbuster syndrome, that became the dominant practice. Instead of spending $100 million producing ten movies whose revenues would offset losses and show an aggregate profit, the blockbuster syndrome taught producers the lesson that a single movie budgeted at $100 million could potentially bring in several times the initial outlay. But those nine other modestly budgeted movies never got made.

The volume and shrillness of the reaction to Martin Scorsese's statement proved at least one of the points that he was trying to make (Coppola contributed nothing to the conversation and probably did his side a great disservice). He was expressing his concern that the Marvel films were cultivating an audience that has had no contact with the films that have come to define what he calls "cinema" and that their ignorance is of a hardness and unwieldiness that cannot admit dissent. The filmmakers who have rushed to Marvel's defense must know that they are on the winning side, that Scorsese picked a fight that is grossly unfair and that they are punching down at him.

I went back to the summer of 1981 when Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark was in release. I was 23 and I hated it. Stanley Kauffmann, who was in his 60s, saw it and wrote his review of it. What he wrote needs repeating:

I won’t pretend that I got no thrills or tingly laughs out of Raiders, but the more it happened, the more it irritated me. (Bernard Shaw said it happened to him when he found himself laughing at certain comedies.) Raiders, as bruited, is the Saturday-afternoon serial in excelsis. It was directed by Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and one of the executive producers and authors was George Lucas (Star Wars)—two of the brightest young successes in Hollywood. But the more spectacular the sweep, the more stunning the special effects, the more ingenious the editing, the more my irritation grew until it toppled over into depression.

What’s depressing me most in all this is the future. I mourn no lost paradise of film. I know that, in a good year, 95 percent of the world’s films were trash, four percent plus were good entertainment, and there was a small fraction of seriously good films. In a good year. But that small fraction seems to be shrinking. Economic and cultural conditions all conduce to shrink it. What’s grim in the film world, as Raiders attests, certainly in the US and gradually becoming so elsewhere, is that the stringency of filmmaking conditions is making the talents with the best possibilities want to revel in the movie-ness of the past. Yeats worried that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” But Spielberg and Lucas, as far as ability goes, are among our best, and they are full of passionate intensity.

Another irony. Thirty years after Kauffmann wrote this, George Lucas sold the rights to future Star Wars sequelae - and prequelae - to Disney and retired from making blockbuster films. Shortly after that, however, he began to object to what Disney was doing to his creation, prompting many to effectively disenfranchise him from the franchise. 

Via Instagram, James Gunn responded to the objections raised by Scorsese and Coppola by referring to clueless grandfathers and great-grandfathers. I don't know how tall Gunn's grandfather is, but Gunn would have to stand on his shoulders to be big enough to kiss Scorsese's arse.