I wrote this blog back in 2011, but this is its first posting on this site:

I spent last night watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and I was struck, as I am almost on a daily basis, with this generation’s obsession with realism. In contrast, Fassbinder’s 1972 movie is one of the greatest achievements of German New Wave cinema and is far from realistic. However, the stylized, brooding and, in many cases, silent and cold behavior of the characters sheds just as much light on humanity as the more realistic films of today.

The trend toward hyper-realism isn’t surprising, as all art evolves. The highly stylized and artificial films of the 1930s and 1940s slowly gave way to Method Acting under Marlon Brando and James Dean, among others, which gave way to a new wave of realism in European film, which morphed into almost a type of expressionist or impressionist film in the 1960s and 1970s, at least in the way the films were written and shot, not so much in the acting, which has been on a slow progression toward true realism for decades. Now it seems that almost all aspects of film are continuing to trend more toward realism, with perhaps the notable exception of scenes being shot out of chronological sequence, made popular most recently by Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan.

I suppose what I’m trying to say in a round-about way is that, sadly, the huge artistic strides we made in the 1960s and 1970s, which are probably the two greatest decades of film, are often overlooked by the average moviegoer today, who simply judges a film by how realistic it is. The same can be said for the theatre, at least mainstream Broadway, which seems obsessed with adapting popular movies and other light fare for the stage instead of focusing on new material. It doesn’t help that almost half of our television today is non-scripted, supposedly reality based, which is ironic because non-realistic art can often illuminate the human condition more than simple, real-time observation of the human condition itself.

I should end on a fairly positive note by pointing out that, artistically, this is perhaps the greatest time to be a filmmaker. There is no Hayes Production Code, and directors are free to experiment with virtually anything they want to, with the added advantage of being able to draw on a 100-year film library for inspiration. And the concerns I’ve described above have always been the concerns of film critics over the years, who have bemoaned the average moviegoer’s desire to shun more artistic works for movies that are more accessible and easy to understand. So before we go longing for the good old days of classic cinema, go back and watch the average film from the 1940s. You’ll then realize how far the art form has come, the GWTWs, Third Mans and Casablancas notwithstanding. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to revisit the aesthetic strides that the Kubricks, Truffauts and Bergmans made 40 years ago, just to remind yourself of where cinema came from, where it is now and where it’s going.