Love this post! Your "Part 2" hit pretty hard. I am constantly astonished by how many people seem to disregard even recent history.
Re the 1970s in particular, I'm a decade younger but remember the crazy clothes, hairstyles, etc. Occasionally I will see/read something about that era that is genuinely shocking to me - something that, as a child, I missed. One example is the fantastic nonfiction book by Brendan Koerner, The Skies Belong to Us, about the spate of airline hijackings.
Interesting enough to inspire the name of Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. (Harry Truman, also, was a charming curmudgeon who refused to leave his cabin at mount St. Helens.)
Why would you think that? What is wrong with you Americans? You think wearing shorts to your knees and rapping about killing and raping people is better than leather pants and adrogynous outfits?
Really?
The 70's and 80's were peak humanity; Perry. Mercury. The beatles. Prince. C'mon, Man. 1985. London. Live aid. Mercury's yellow jacket. That was the Greatest performance ever. 1981, in houston, yellow shirt, blue jeans, Perry soared. Total legends.
Degeneracy. Not really. It was about liberty and hope. People were still reserved in many ways, still conservative, but they were also fighting for the individual.
The really creepy clothes are the new 40 year olds and 50 year olds who still walk around dressing like teenagers. Those born in the 80s still wearing their baggy pants and shorts down to their ankles. People who never grew up. Never learned how to communicate without profanity, never learned to tuck their shirt in. never learned to wear a suit properly. That's the real degeneracy - not perry and mercury and the 70s more broadly. Those folks, behind the scenes, actually had class. They were surprisingly educated, and good natured.
I wouldn't go that far, but in defense of the 70s I remember walking around on any summer night in my southeastern college town and on every block you could find one or two porches with 2 to 10 people, some playing their acoustic guitars, some singing songs of the era, or more likely, from previous eras.
What do you see if you do that these days? If anybody is on the porch at all, they'll be staring into their phones very likely totally unaware that you're walking by and hardly aware of their companions on the porch who are likewise unaware.
I feel like the 1970s were peak privacy. Urbanization, lax culture, and not much electronic surveillance. Also in some ways peak freedom. Then came AIDS.
To me the cold war has always seemed distant and unreal. The existence of the USSR and East Germany seems so far away that it may as well be the Napoleonic Wars. And yet was actually pretty recent. So recent in fact that I was alive for the end of it - the Berlin Wall fell when I was a toddler.
Good example. Because time speeds up as you age, I feel like I lived the vast majority of my life before the Wall fell. (Which is not true--it's roughly 50-50.) The post-Cold War period seems fairly brief from my perspective.
I'm a few years younger than you, have seen many of the films you list, and agree with the vast majority. I would quibble on a few, such as 'Liberty Valance' which seemed rather weak to me - John Wayne gets away with saying 'Pilgrim' a lot - compare it to his acting in 'Red River'. But I now have several more titles I really need to see.
I do also appreciate your point about history and our perception of years before our birth or awareness. For that reason I found the 'Twin Peaks' discussion a little off - cause those guys weren't around for the initial seasons and can only partly understand what it was like at the time. Linking the leather jacket to only the 'Fonz' felt like a crime to me.
As you age, not only do the times you've lived through seem relatively recent, but also I feel like the times before my birth seem more 'real' and tangible than they did when I was young.
Someone else also pointed out that Ford's peak came a bit earlier, and I think that's right. But I think John Wayne was really good in Liberty Valance--almost as tragic a role as in The Searchers.
I thought Richard Hanania underrated the original Twin Peaks, but overall I thought it was a really interesting 90 minutes. Now when I watch "quality TV", I am continually amazed by how much of it is just ripping off the original Twin Peaks. Younger viewers may also underestimate directors like Hitchcock, as they don't realize that he invented so many of the techniques that are now commonplace.
John Ford reportedly expressed surprise that Wayne could act after he saw Red River, and their subsequent collaborations were better for it. When I watched Ford's earlier My Darling Clementine, it seemed hoaky in comparison.
Watch 'Paris Blues' the 1961 film by Martin Ritt with Paul Newman and Sidney Potier. Score is by Ellington and Strayhorn (wonderful) but they lost out on the Oscar to 'West Side Story' even though the musical did not have much original music and was already a Broadway hit.
What are your thoughts on Bollywood and Indian movies in general? (not talking about Satyajit Ray-type films). In your opinion, are Indian movies as terrible as I think they are?
I'm told there are some outstanding recent Bollywood films, but that's a gap in my knowledge---I've seen very few modern Indian films. In my last quarterly review, I discussed a long documentary history of film, which praised one in particular---does anyone who saw the documentary recall which one it was?
If you look at the greatest films of all time, chosen by people online from around the world, films between 1980 and 2015 dominate the list. Actors refined their techniques, technology advancements allowed for better special effects, character depth and story arcs improved. We hit a bit of a snag between 2015-2024 because of the cancel culture: directors, writers, producers were all walking on egg-shells. Self expression took a major hit. But overall, hollywood has consistently produced better content. Compare true grit 2010 to true grit in 1969, and you can see the improvement. Steinfeld, Damon, Bridges, Brolin, all gave brilliant multidimensional performances, show-casing modern acting ability, and the strength of modern acting schools. Each one of them was vastly better than their counterpart. Todays actors would run over Wayne. He couldnt compete. The same is true of almost every actor of that old era. Some older folks have a nostalgia for the old hollywood because it reminds them of their youth and innocence, but if we look at the global stats 80s to 10s clearly dominate.
I ain’t a serious film buff, but aside from the obvious age and recency bias problems of your claimed online “poll”, it is plausible enough to me that acting, the production values and some cinematography - especially the more technical aspects - could be better in the latter period, even as the writing and especially the directing is not.
And for serious film buffs the directing and the writing are the most importantly attributes.
Great post. I love the late 30’s, particularly French, but you make the case for the world wide phenomenon. You could become famous by making art in those days. It isn’t pure financial competition, there is just pure competition to absorb influences and excel. No one could ever be lionized for writing like Shakespeare except in that era. The conditions for great art are so much more important than the “great artist” myth allows for.
I have stopped watching the products of “Hollywood”, whether film or TV. The last two films I saw in the cinema were both Chinese (The Condor Heroes: the Gallants, which was fun but not remarkable, though I was surprised how sympathetically the Mongols were portrayed, and Nezha 2, which was great).
For “TV”, I watch costume C-dramas. They have a sense of beauty, character-driven story, excellent acting and production values, and don’t preach at you.
You don’t have to have official state censors to have the degradations of ideology disfiguring films and series while a serious culture that literally has millennia of experience dealing with actual censors can do remarkably well at producing highly watchable, amusing and moving entertainment. That very much goes to the importance of conditions.
(I don’t know what it says about contemporary Chinese culture, but they are really good at portraying “mean girls”.)
There is perhaps a study to be made about the market for censorship that “Hollywood” has developed, with its DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers and so forth and apparently self-defeating (falling box office/viewership) degradations of popular franchises. Or the vicious conformities in much of the arts (see Scottish writer Jenny Lindsay’s book Hounded).
Once mainstream media journalists became advocates for censorship, that was a mark of increasing institutional failure while also pointing to the importance of wider conditions.
Love Between Fairy and Devil, Until the End of the Moon, The Story of Kunning Palace and The Blood of Youth are probably my top four. The first two are xianxia (high fantasy), the second two wuxia (martial arts/historical).
But I have also very much enjoyed: Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, My Journey to You, Fangs of Fortune, Ashes of Love, Back from the Brink, Word of Honor (BL), The Untamed (BL), Moonlight Mystique, Coroner’s Diary, Sword Snow Stride, Feud, Return of the Female General, Love’s Rebellion, The Blooms at Ruyi Pavilion, Tiger and Crane.
I found League of Nobleman (BL) a bit melodramatic. Wanru’s Journey was a bit clunky in its plot.
BL = Boys Love, so the key emotional connection is between the two male leads. This is mainland China, it is all suggested, so no kissing or sex scenes or anything, though Word of Honor notoriously sailed very close to the censorship edge, which may have had something to do with the cancellation of one of its two stars, Zhang Zhehan though he has made a remarkable singing and documentary film comeback. China is a complicated place.
"Lulu in Hollywood" is indeed a great book. Kenneth Tynan had a great article on Ms. Brooks in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1979/06/11/louise-brooks-tells-all The two Pabst movies are amazing. I mostly agree with your picks but not about John Ford. I find his calvary trilogy of the 1940s far better than his later works. His final film 'Cheyenne Autumn' is an utter train wreck of a film. Peckenpaugh's 'Ride the High Country' was the best Western of that time period. I always found Huston's 'The Roots of Heaven' an interesting film and far better than 'The Misfits.'
Re: assessment of Nuri Bilge Ceylan that you quoted at the end of your post.
Yes, Ceylan is a worthy filmmaker who receives praise at fancy film festivals while gaining only marginal exposure to the general public. In this he reminds me of filmmakers like Theo Angelopoulos and Manoel de Oliveira, who in their day received rote acknowledgement as the masters from their respective peripheral countries. Certainly one can blame historical timing or location for their obscurity, but I think that's letting them off the hook too easily. Michael Haneke also emerged from relative obscurity, and he's as classically inclined as anyone, yet he found a way to make challenging, timely, memorable, and often shocking films that earned his place in the global pantheon. In their own way, the same is true of Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami. I just don't think Ceylan has taken the same risks, either personally or aesthetically.
I don't want to be too hard on NBC, though. Speaking of taking aesthetic risks, I thought the breaking of the fourth wall in About Dry Grasses was pretty spectacular, and I think I understand why he did it.
I have slightly different taste (I prefer Ceylan to Haneke), but thanks for this very thoughtful comment. You are correct that in the long run it tends to be the innovators that hold up best---so perhaps I've overrated Ceylan.
Iirc, with Fantastic Four in the news I remembered the 2015 version that delayed Miles Teller becoming the next leading man although it didn’t stop Michael B Jordan...that could be another post with The Hangover delivering Bradley Cooper to Hollywood during a drought of leading men. But what I remember of the fallout was what a director is supposed to deliver per their contract is “90 minutes of usable footage”…that’s what a director has been reduced to these days—90 minutes of usable footage.
There is only one reason to post about movies you've watched.
1) you're bored. and you're seeking attention.
2) you want to virtue signal your refined sensitivity so as to hopefully be noticed by the artsy, wealthy class.
This is the insufferable type of person who goes to open art houses, uninvited, and tries to ingratiate themselves with us. The fraud and the phony, desperate to climb the social ladder.
We hear them, of course. Their mouths always open widely and obnoxiously, but they only deliver mundane platitudes.
I've noticed that some people wrongly assume that everyone in the world is the same as they are. If you can imagine no other motive than virtue signaling and seeking attention, then perhaps those characteristics describe you. But (thank God) not everyone in the world has that personality. The world is complicated---people have many different motives for their actions. Read my very first post if you wish to learn more about my own motives.
Very much agreed on part 2. I have had that feeling very often. I was born a decade after you, and I regard the 70s as my forever normal. Only to find out that today, even the (to me, banal) 90s are seen as some kind of freak period of history.
The 70s exemplify a particular "peak": ongoing cultural liberalization from the late 50s onwards peaked in the 70s and decayed afterwards. Similarly, economic neoliberalism peaked in the late 90s and decayed afterwards. And globalisation peaked in the early 2000s, and decayed afterwards (not sure if the decay really started post 9/11 with the 2008 GFC being its death nail, or if decay only started 2008).
Perhaps the larger point is that change in the world eventually loses steam, and once it does, it gets replaced by something else even if it was working great. Losing steam is no surprise. I just don't understand why past progress can't just be at least kept coasting - why do positive developments decay just as easily as crises? Why do all things pass, even the good ones? Why do we toss away perfectly good designs for that matter. Because the same thing happens to products too - if you have ever seen the meme about ca. 1980s heating and cooling levers in cars which worked perfectly fine in extreme simplicity, and today we all got near unusable screen-based climate control monstrosities in our cars. Why?
OK I do have a scientific data point on why stuff gets more complicated as a rule. At least one study I read, using Lego block designs that participants were supposed to improve, showed that when people are asked to "innovate", they will typically choose to add things to a design. Very rarely will they discover ways to improve things by subtracting elements. There is a human bias to complication. And yes ... no one just leaves well enough alone.
I just realized that Santayana applies perfectly here. "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Great point. It's interesting that Trump seems determined to remove every single official who has actual experience, sort of like the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
I usually have a low opinion of 1950s cinema (which doesn't mean it is all bad or something), but you made a great case. I would stretch though to 1957 to include Bridge on the River Kwai, though. :)
and The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries, and Paths of Glory, and The Cranes are Flying, and Nights of Cabiria, and Throne of Blood, and 12 Angry Men, and Witness for the Prosecution, and An Affair to Remember, and Funny Face . . .
Oh, good point. I think Bridge was on my mind because I just rewatched King Rat.
I hate it when people say, "oh you forgot this one!" but since I am reading books on the Titanic, there is A Night to Remember, the high point of both British cinema and Titanic films (admittedly a very low bar overall). Indeed, comparing A Night to Remember to 1953's Titanic makes your point and, in a way, mine. The 1953 film was so bad it inspired Walter Lord to write the book that became the film.
This is excellent and exactly the type of essay Substack could use a lot more of.
Love this post! Your "Part 2" hit pretty hard. I am constantly astonished by how many people seem to disregard even recent history.
Re the 1970s in particular, I'm a decade younger but remember the crazy clothes, hairstyles, etc. Occasionally I will see/read something about that era that is genuinely shocking to me - something that, as a child, I missed. One example is the fantastic nonfiction book by Brendan Koerner, The Skies Belong to Us, about the spate of airline hijackings.
"the spate of airline hijackings"
The most interesting case was that guy in the Pacific northwest that parachuted off the plane with a bag of cash, and was never caught.
Interesting enough to inspire the name of Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. (Harry Truman, also, was a charming curmudgeon who refused to leave his cabin at mount St. Helens.)
Thanks, I didn't know that was the inspiration.
The clothes weren't "crazy".
The hairstyles weren't "crazy".
Why would you think that? What is wrong with you Americans? You think wearing shorts to your knees and rapping about killing and raping people is better than leather pants and adrogynous outfits?
Really?
The 70's and 80's were peak humanity; Perry. Mercury. The beatles. Prince. C'mon, Man. 1985. London. Live aid. Mercury's yellow jacket. That was the Greatest performance ever. 1981, in houston, yellow shirt, blue jeans, Perry soared. Total legends.
Degeneracy. Not really. It was about liberty and hope. People were still reserved in many ways, still conservative, but they were also fighting for the individual.
The really creepy clothes are the new 40 year olds and 50 year olds who still walk around dressing like teenagers. Those born in the 80s still wearing their baggy pants and shorts down to their ankles. People who never grew up. Never learned how to communicate without profanity, never learned to tuck their shirt in. never learned to wear a suit properly. That's the real degeneracy - not perry and mercury and the 70s more broadly. Those folks, behind the scenes, actually had class. They were surprisingly educated, and good natured.
"The 70's and 80's were peak humanity"
I wouldn't go that far, but in defense of the 70s I remember walking around on any summer night in my southeastern college town and on every block you could find one or two porches with 2 to 10 people, some playing their acoustic guitars, some singing songs of the era, or more likely, from previous eras.
What do you see if you do that these days? If anybody is on the porch at all, they'll be staring into their phones very likely totally unaware that you're walking by and hardly aware of their companions on the porch who are likewise unaware.
I feel like the 1970s were peak privacy. Urbanization, lax culture, and not much electronic surveillance. Also in some ways peak freedom. Then came AIDS.
say it with me now! 3..... 2... 1......
ok boomer
To me the cold war has always seemed distant and unreal. The existence of the USSR and East Germany seems so far away that it may as well be the Napoleonic Wars. And yet was actually pretty recent. So recent in fact that I was alive for the end of it - the Berlin Wall fell when I was a toddler.
Good example. Because time speeds up as you age, I feel like I lived the vast majority of my life before the Wall fell. (Which is not true--it's roughly 50-50.) The post-Cold War period seems fairly brief from my perspective.
I'm a few years younger than you, have seen many of the films you list, and agree with the vast majority. I would quibble on a few, such as 'Liberty Valance' which seemed rather weak to me - John Wayne gets away with saying 'Pilgrim' a lot - compare it to his acting in 'Red River'. But I now have several more titles I really need to see.
I do also appreciate your point about history and our perception of years before our birth or awareness. For that reason I found the 'Twin Peaks' discussion a little off - cause those guys weren't around for the initial seasons and can only partly understand what it was like at the time. Linking the leather jacket to only the 'Fonz' felt like a crime to me.
As you age, not only do the times you've lived through seem relatively recent, but also I feel like the times before my birth seem more 'real' and tangible than they did when I was young.
Someone else also pointed out that Ford's peak came a bit earlier, and I think that's right. But I think John Wayne was really good in Liberty Valance--almost as tragic a role as in The Searchers.
I thought Richard Hanania underrated the original Twin Peaks, but overall I thought it was a really interesting 90 minutes. Now when I watch "quality TV", I am continually amazed by how much of it is just ripping off the original Twin Peaks. Younger viewers may also underestimate directors like Hitchcock, as they don't realize that he invented so many of the techniques that are now commonplace.
John Ford reportedly expressed surprise that Wayne could act after he saw Red River, and their subsequent collaborations were better for it. When I watched Ford's earlier My Darling Clementine, it seemed hoaky in comparison.
When I was younger, I didn't think Wayne was a good actor. I was wrong.
Nicely done, thank you. IMHO, American jazz peaked in the same period of time.
Good point. Miles Davis has a wonderful improvisational score for Elevator to the Gallows, and jazz plays a major role in my 1950s films.
Watch 'Paris Blues' the 1961 film by Martin Ritt with Paul Newman and Sidney Potier. Score is by Ellington and Strayhorn (wonderful) but they lost out on the Oscar to 'West Side Story' even though the musical did not have much original music and was already a Broadway hit.
What are your thoughts on Bollywood and Indian movies in general? (not talking about Satyajit Ray-type films). In your opinion, are Indian movies as terrible as I think they are?
I'm told there are some outstanding recent Bollywood films, but that's a gap in my knowledge---I've seen very few modern Indian films. In my last quarterly review, I discussed a long documentary history of film, which praised one in particular---does anyone who saw the documentary recall which one it was?
Is it Devdas? (Not sure)
It was a more action oriented energetic film.
Does this ring any bells - Gangs of Wasseypur. Otherwise, I don't know.
It might have been PK, but I'm not sure.
If you look at the greatest films of all time, chosen by people online from around the world, films between 1980 and 2015 dominate the list. Actors refined their techniques, technology advancements allowed for better special effects, character depth and story arcs improved. We hit a bit of a snag between 2015-2024 because of the cancel culture: directors, writers, producers were all walking on egg-shells. Self expression took a major hit. But overall, hollywood has consistently produced better content. Compare true grit 2010 to true grit in 1969, and you can see the improvement. Steinfeld, Damon, Bridges, Brolin, all gave brilliant multidimensional performances, show-casing modern acting ability, and the strength of modern acting schools. Each one of them was vastly better than their counterpart. Todays actors would run over Wayne. He couldnt compete. The same is true of almost every actor of that old era. Some older folks have a nostalgia for the old hollywood because it reminds them of their youth and innocence, but if we look at the global stats 80s to 10s clearly dominate.
The public prefers 1980-2015, as you say. The movie experts say the 1920s-1970s were the best.
I ain’t a serious film buff, but aside from the obvious age and recency bias problems of your claimed online “poll”, it is plausible enough to me that acting, the production values and some cinematography - especially the more technical aspects - could be better in the latter period, even as the writing and especially the directing is not.
And for serious film buffs the directing and the writing are the most importantly attributes.
I'm skeptical of your claim about 1980-2015. Do you have anything online you can point to?
Great post. I love the late 30’s, particularly French, but you make the case for the world wide phenomenon. You could become famous by making art in those days. It isn’t pure financial competition, there is just pure competition to absorb influences and excel. No one could ever be lionized for writing like Shakespeare except in that era. The conditions for great art are so much more important than the “great artist” myth allows for.
"The conditions for great art are so much more important than the “great artist” myth allows for."
Exactly my view. And I see 1938-41 as another cinema peak.
I have stopped watching the products of “Hollywood”, whether film or TV. The last two films I saw in the cinema were both Chinese (The Condor Heroes: the Gallants, which was fun but not remarkable, though I was surprised how sympathetically the Mongols were portrayed, and Nezha 2, which was great).
For “TV”, I watch costume C-dramas. They have a sense of beauty, character-driven story, excellent acting and production values, and don’t preach at you.
You don’t have to have official state censors to have the degradations of ideology disfiguring films and series while a serious culture that literally has millennia of experience dealing with actual censors can do remarkably well at producing highly watchable, amusing and moving entertainment. That very much goes to the importance of conditions.
(I don’t know what it says about contemporary Chinese culture, but they are really good at portraying “mean girls”.)
There is perhaps a study to be made about the market for censorship that “Hollywood” has developed, with its DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers and so forth and apparently self-defeating (falling box office/viewership) degradations of popular franchises. Or the vicious conformities in much of the arts (see Scottish writer Jenny Lindsay’s book Hounded).
The monopoly pressures of network goods can extend to ideological monopolies if a particular set of moralised status games becomes dominant. See this study of the narrow conformities of contemporary academe. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L6aUnf3HZPqOTJrP8ee-m2Szh-uyFKZA/view?pli=1
Once mainstream media journalists became advocates for censorship, that was a mark of increasing institutional failure while also pointing to the importance of wider conditions.
Love Between Fairy and Devil, Until the End of the Moon, The Story of Kunning Palace and The Blood of Youth are probably my top four. The first two are xianxia (high fantasy), the second two wuxia (martial arts/historical).
But I have also very much enjoyed: Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, My Journey to You, Fangs of Fortune, Ashes of Love, Back from the Brink, Word of Honor (BL), The Untamed (BL), Moonlight Mystique, Coroner’s Diary, Sword Snow Stride, Feud, Return of the Female General, Love’s Rebellion, The Blooms at Ruyi Pavilion, Tiger and Crane.
I found League of Nobleman (BL) a bit melodramatic. Wanru’s Journey was a bit clunky in its plot.
BL = Boys Love, so the key emotional connection is between the two male leads. This is mainland China, it is all suggested, so no kissing or sex scenes or anything, though Word of Honor notoriously sailed very close to the censorship edge, which may have had something to do with the cancellation of one of its two stars, Zhang Zhehan though he has made a remarkable singing and documentary film comeback. China is a complicated place.
The ratings on https://mydramalist.com/ are a pretty good indicator.
I am also amused by a famous (now deleted) tweet which identified three stages of watching The Untamed.
(1) This is nonsense, this very bad.
(2) This is quite watchable nonsense.
(3) OMG I HAVE NEVER CARED ABOUT ANYTHING SO MUCH IN MY LIFE.
Somehow, I forgot Mysterious Lotus Casebook, which was very good.
I would now add Love in the Clouds to my favourites. I also enjoyed When Destiny Brings the Demon and Shadow Love.
"Lulu in Hollywood" is indeed a great book. Kenneth Tynan had a great article on Ms. Brooks in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1979/06/11/louise-brooks-tells-all The two Pabst movies are amazing. I mostly agree with your picks but not about John Ford. I find his calvary trilogy of the 1940s far better than his later works. His final film 'Cheyenne Autumn' is an utter train wreck of a film. Peckenpaugh's 'Ride the High Country' was the best Western of that time period. I always found Huston's 'The Roots of Heaven' an interesting film and far better than 'The Misfits.'
I love those two Pabst films. You are probably right that Ford's peak came earlier. I'll have to check out The Roots of Heaven.
One can argue that peak cinema had some overlap with peak science.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/2023/01/16/study-disruptive-science-decline
Bureaucratisation—which is also a corporate thing—may not be good for creativity in any field.
Re: assessment of Nuri Bilge Ceylan that you quoted at the end of your post.
Yes, Ceylan is a worthy filmmaker who receives praise at fancy film festivals while gaining only marginal exposure to the general public. In this he reminds me of filmmakers like Theo Angelopoulos and Manoel de Oliveira, who in their day received rote acknowledgement as the masters from their respective peripheral countries. Certainly one can blame historical timing or location for their obscurity, but I think that's letting them off the hook too easily. Michael Haneke also emerged from relative obscurity, and he's as classically inclined as anyone, yet he found a way to make challenging, timely, memorable, and often shocking films that earned his place in the global pantheon. In their own way, the same is true of Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami. I just don't think Ceylan has taken the same risks, either personally or aesthetically.
I don't want to be too hard on NBC, though. Speaking of taking aesthetic risks, I thought the breaking of the fourth wall in About Dry Grasses was pretty spectacular, and I think I understand why he did it.
I have slightly different taste (I prefer Ceylan to Haneke), but thanks for this very thoughtful comment. You are correct that in the long run it tends to be the innovators that hold up best---so perhaps I've overrated Ceylan.
I believe the period you mention, late 50s early 60s was also peak jazz.
Yes, check out Callahan's comment above.
Iirc, with Fantastic Four in the news I remembered the 2015 version that delayed Miles Teller becoming the next leading man although it didn’t stop Michael B Jordan...that could be another post with The Hangover delivering Bradley Cooper to Hollywood during a drought of leading men. But what I remember of the fallout was what a director is supposed to deliver per their contract is “90 minutes of usable footage”…that’s what a director has been reduced to these days—90 minutes of usable footage.
There is only one reason to post about movies you've watched.
1) you're bored. and you're seeking attention.
2) you want to virtue signal your refined sensitivity so as to hopefully be noticed by the artsy, wealthy class.
This is the insufferable type of person who goes to open art houses, uninvited, and tries to ingratiate themselves with us. The fraud and the phony, desperate to climb the social ladder.
We hear them, of course. Their mouths always open widely and obnoxiously, but they only deliver mundane platitudes.
I've noticed that some people wrongly assume that everyone in the world is the same as they are. If you can imagine no other motive than virtue signaling and seeking attention, then perhaps those characteristics describe you. But (thank God) not everyone in the world has that personality. The world is complicated---people have many different motives for their actions. Read my very first post if you wish to learn more about my own motives.
Very much agreed on part 2. I have had that feeling very often. I was born a decade after you, and I regard the 70s as my forever normal. Only to find out that today, even the (to me, banal) 90s are seen as some kind of freak period of history.
The 70s exemplify a particular "peak": ongoing cultural liberalization from the late 50s onwards peaked in the 70s and decayed afterwards. Similarly, economic neoliberalism peaked in the late 90s and decayed afterwards. And globalisation peaked in the early 2000s, and decayed afterwards (not sure if the decay really started post 9/11 with the 2008 GFC being its death nail, or if decay only started 2008).
Perhaps the larger point is that change in the world eventually loses steam, and once it does, it gets replaced by something else even if it was working great. Losing steam is no surprise. I just don't understand why past progress can't just be at least kept coasting - why do positive developments decay just as easily as crises? Why do all things pass, even the good ones? Why do we toss away perfectly good designs for that matter. Because the same thing happens to products too - if you have ever seen the meme about ca. 1980s heating and cooling levers in cars which worked perfectly fine in extreme simplicity, and today we all got near unusable screen-based climate control monstrosities in our cars. Why?
I guess that people are restless, never willing to well well enough alone. I never hear people say "Don't do something, just stand there!"
OK I do have a scientific data point on why stuff gets more complicated as a rule. At least one study I read, using Lego block designs that participants were supposed to improve, showed that when people are asked to "innovate", they will typically choose to add things to a design. Very rarely will they discover ways to improve things by subtracting elements. There is a human bias to complication. And yes ... no one just leaves well enough alone.
I just realized that Santayana applies perfectly here. "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Great point. It's interesting that Trump seems determined to remove every single official who has actual experience, sort of like the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
I usually have a low opinion of 1950s cinema (which doesn't mean it is all bad or something), but you made a great case. I would stretch though to 1957 to include Bridge on the River Kwai, though. :)
and The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries, and Paths of Glory, and The Cranes are Flying, and Nights of Cabiria, and Throne of Blood, and 12 Angry Men, and Witness for the Prosecution, and An Affair to Remember, and Funny Face . . .
If you stretch to 1956 you can add The Searchers.
Oh, good point. I think Bridge was on my mind because I just rewatched King Rat.
I hate it when people say, "oh you forgot this one!" but since I am reading books on the Titanic, there is A Night to Remember, the high point of both British cinema and Titanic films (admittedly a very low bar overall). Indeed, comparing A Night to Remember to 1953's Titanic makes your point and, in a way, mine. The 1953 film was so bad it inspired Walter Lord to write the book that became the film.