It seems irrelevant or evasive to say it now that the quicksand of Brexit-horror has come up to our collective chin, but cinema has had a great year.
New films by Paweł Pawlikowski, Steve McQueen, Lynne Ramsay, Debra Granik, Lucrecia Martel, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Andrei Zvyaginstev, Jean-Luc Godard and Mike Leigh have amazed and provoked. Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, his autobiographical film about growing up in 70s Mexico City, left audiences saturated in their own astonished tears. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cannes prizewinner Shoplifters – about an extended family with an awful secret – has done unexpectedly great box-office business. Bradley Cooper’s sugar-rush version of A Star Is Born, starring Lady Gaga has survived the inevitable op ed put-downs from naysayers. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther was delirious, surreal and very enjoyable. The animation Coco was a joy. And we still have Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, featuring the incomparable Olivia Colman, to come on new year’s day.
But there is no doubt who has the bragging rights in the world of movies in 2018. And that is Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of the all-conquering streaming platform Netflix. Netflix, Netflix, Netflix: the word dominated movie conversations this year like a sneezing fit. Earlier, Netflix found itself cast as the bad guy, the anti-cinema philistine whose product was rejected by the Cannes film festival, under pressure from French cinema chains, and opinion-formers found themselves broadly in agreement, arguing that the big screen was all-important, and that people who consented to watch films on laptops and tablets were despicable, soulless content-zombie freaks. The objectors had forgotten, perhaps, that the first time they watched films was on their humble telly at home, and that was where they learned to love cinema.
But Netflix took its films to the Venice film festival, which snapped them up. There, Netflix gave us the Coen brothers’ bangingly good The Ballad of Buster Scruggs; it gave us Roma, which many people (including your correspondent) believe to be the best film of the year. And, to put the exquisite seal on its victory over Cannes, Netflix presented its loving editorial reconstruction of Orson Welles’s “lost” film, The Other Side of the Wind. That’s right: a new film by Orson Welles! Courtesy of Netflix! It doesn’t get more impeccably cinephile than that. Surely Netflix is now the good guy? Not quite. Once these films emerged in the UK in the autumn, cinema exhibitors were furious that Netflix had set up a deal with just one chain to show its flagship Roma. Again, Netflix was cast as the wrecker, suppressing the big-screen identity of its own film. Even Cuarón was tweeting that people should see it in cinemas.
To which we can only say … well, yes, but Cuarón consented to the Netflix deal. Streaming on digital platforms is what Netflix does. This is the commercial decision that Cuarón made. Netflix got his movie wide distribution, provided some cinema showings and festival eligibility. As a critic and filmgoer, I can only say that Roma got a more widespread cinema showing than many superb independent films. It is a fact that nothing will replace the big-screen experience; it is also a fact that many outstanding films are really only accessible on DVD or streaming services, hence the anguish that greeted news that Warner Bros was to discontinue its FilmStruck streaming service for rare, classic and arthouse titles. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Barry Jenkins, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Rian Johnson and Christopher Nolan campaigned for it to be brought back. All in vain, although the Criterion Collection is to launch its own streaming channel next year.
Someone else made a very important contribution to the debate around the small screen and the cinema experience this year – and that was Tom Cruise. He posted a video alongside Christopher McQuarrie, director of his new action hit, Mission: Impossible – Fallout in which he talked about an anti-cinematic tendency that is arguably far more important than screen size, but much less discussed: motion smoothing. It is a facility that is automatically activated on most televisions and has to be actively “switched off” in the settings. It has the effect of making film look like video. It was the same discovery that was made when Peter Jackson presented his Hobbit films in high frame rate (HFR): 48 fps. The motion was smoother and the images clearer, but more banal, like daytime TV. Audiences preferred the alternative version, in the traditional 24 fps. Something in the “lag” between those images creates the richness and shimmering density – the heightened unreality – that we think of as filmic, not televisual. Abolishing motion-smoothing on TV is a more cinephile act than bashing Netflix.
