When words are no good

Film is dead says Will Self

Trying to shut myself off from the repulsive commercial pop classical music concert my mum was watching on tv, I came across these words in the Times Review:

Film is dead...

I don't usually like reading any newspapers least of all the overly self-conscious Times, and I usually find Will Self (yes, that's his name) a little annoying and somewhat verbose, but these words immediately jumped at me because I've been feeling this slow creeping death for the last couple of years. But it is more than just the endless run of 'bad' films, as Self points out, it's a wider cultural loss of a centre, culture seems to have become decentred, fragmented.

Will Self: "Then I looked back on a childhood, an adolescence and an early adulthood when movies were a way of thinking about the world, a multi-dimensional style guide, a source of cool and kicks - and most importantly shared references. Without the common horde of film references - quite as much as popular music - it's difficult to see how my generation would cohere atall.... ...the sadness is at the loss of a specifically collective experience, just as when there were only three terrestrial television channels, people would all watch, then discuss the same programmes, so up until the 1980s you could be certain that people would all have seen the same films more or less the same time. To understand this loss you have only to reflect that the expression 'shared culture' is really a tautology."

Tautology? Looked it up but none the wiser. Still, you get the gist of what he's saying. He sounds nostalgic doesn't he. This shared culture of my generations childhood is now being regurgitated. Nostalgia is big business now. I'll go back to this in another post. Eavesdropping on his teenaged kids and their friends:

"...I have no sense of films centrality for them; instead they are at the vortex of so much full-motion imagery - on tv, computer screens, games consoles, CCTV, 3G phones - that the silver screen hovers only in their mid-distance, a ghostly presence unless animated by the next big novelty spectacle."

So films need to compete with all of this other media. Here comes 3D bringing what's on screen literally in-yer-face, blind us by turning up the contrast, deafen us with even louder and more precisely engineered sound effects and editing, crank up the THX so much that we shake off of our seats...jesus, it's as if they literally want you to 'feel', 'experience' something, anything! This sensory bombardment just leaves us numb and dissatisfied. And they play the same tricks every time, we become desensitised, it loses its effect. So, we move onto the next thing, searching for meaning, something to share.

"Rather than bring our imaginations with us into the auditorium, we abandon them at the door."

The experience of alot of recent film is becoming passive. Lay back and think of England...like being fucked by a machine, it asks nothing of you except your body. There is no heart or soul.