Robert De Niro takes Cybill Shepherd to see THE AVENGERS

Last week, thousands of comic fans from around the world learned the name Martin Scorsese for the first time, as the Italian American master of movies unassumingly seemed to tread on their turf. In an interview with Empire magazine, Scorsese was asked to give a few thoughts on the superhero phenomenon, and was quoted as saying:

"I don't see them. I tried, you know? But that's not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."

The internet, in customary fashion, erupted with a series of memes and angry reactions from fans, most of them vapid, some of them heartfelt, and even fewer personal affronts from the people actually involved in making these studio behemoths.

I, myself, thought about the above statement a great deal more than I probably should have (and managed to hatch this meme in the process), but not because there is a particular horse in this race that I want to win. Martin Scorsese is perfectly free to his opinions, and wouldn't be the first senior citizen to disregard contemporary popular entertainment as junk. But, here's the thing: Marty is wrong. Not just wrong in his espoused opinion, which is entirely subjective (as taste tends to be), but wrong in a deeply philosophical, aberrant way, that leads me to think that Marty must know that he's wrong. It's wrong in the sense that it contradicts nearly everything Martin Scorsese has either said, done, or stood up for in regards to cinema, and cinema preservation. It's wrong in the sense that Martin Scorsese should know better.

Martin Scorsese is one of the patron saints of cinema. A champion of movies from every genre, era, culture, and small corner of the world, he introduced many of us to some of our favorite directors, films, and greatest experiences in life, which is to say nothing about the cinema that he, himself, has created over the course of a career spanning half a century. The case can easily be made for Martin Scorsese as the world's greatest living filmmaker. And, all throughout the years, the shadow of his enthusiasms and cinephiliac spirit mirrored our own explorations of the medium, telling us that anything could be cinema.

Pieces of dead moths glued to unexposed celluloid, and projected at 24 frames per second is cinema. Watching a man sleep for eight hours is cinema. A series of still images telling a complex time travel narrative is cinema. A dying man whispering stories about his life over the color blue is cinema. And, yeah, a movie which costs $200 million and aspires to be the equivalent of an amusement park can also be cinema.

Martin Scorsese knows this. He knows, because he has celebrated movies of a previous era which exude the same qualities that he's trying to diminish here. Movies that were the Disneyland rides of their day, whether represented in the pageantry of Cecil B Demille, Griffith, Ford, Lang, or the size and scale of sword and sandal epics. Of David Lean, and, when they went corny, of Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, and Anthony Mann. If emotional and psychological resonance is the standard blotter test for what constitutes cinematic art, I defy Scorsese to isolate those aspects in the Ben-Hur chariot race, or, one better, his own shot of Hugo Cabret riding down a twirling slide in 3D.

My point is not malicious, or to trash Scorsese, who I will always love and admire as a hero, but to get people thinking about cinema again, and (in an era of long format narratives and streaming platforms) thinking about what exactly constitutes cinema. What is cinema? When Andre Bazin published his wonderful and influential series of articles into the volumes titled What is Cinema, we have to remember, television didn't even exist yet. And, as we all know, each new medium swallows up the qualities of the previous, and changes whatever follows. Let's also remember that Scorsese himself is on the verge of releasing a three and a half hour movie costing in the realm of $200 million, and made almost explicitly for home viewing. If you were to ask me what the Marvel Comic Universe movies most resembled, I wouldn't say amusement parks or Swedish porn, but a very expensive television show. The odd two dozen interconnecting movies that make up the MCU are the most popular entertainments in the world, yes, but why?

The television format itself is self perpetuating, like a virus, with seemingly no end to a narrative arc, only requiring the viewer to want to tune-in to the next episode. And television, for the first half of a century, has attempted to replicate the look and feel of movies. Now, we see movies trying to do the same thing, but in yearly episodic structure. Aren't they both cinema? What we need are fewer memes, and more radical redefinitions of the word itself.

Видео Robert De Niro takes Cybill Shepherd to see THE AVENGERS канала Jesse Goldsmith