Midway through the new quasi-autobiographical Sam Mendes melodrama Empire of Light, there is a speech. It is delivered by the kindly cinema projectionist Norman (Toby Jones), who is attempting to explain the physics of movie-watching to a wide-eyed usher, Stephen (Micheal Ward), in the booth of a Margate cinema in 1981. “It’s just static frames with darkness in between,” Norman says wistfully. “But there’s a little flaw in your optic nerve so that if I run the film at 24 frames per second you don’t see the darkness.” Stephen, impressed, says, “Wow!” Then Norman, emboldened, invests the speech with a poetic hint of spirituality. “It creates an illusion of motion,” he says, before pausing dramatically and adding, “An illusion of life.”
This is interesting. Because in an early, pivotal, sequence in the new, quasi-autobiographical Steven Spielberg movie The Fabelmans, there is also a speech. It is delivered by the kindly computer engineer and father Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), who is attempting to explain the physics of movie-watching to his wide-eyed son Sammy (Mateo Zoryon). Burt describes how the projectionist shows still photographs at 24 frames a second and something called “persistence of vision” tricks the brain into seeing continuous imagery. Sammy’s soft, loving mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), interrupts and, adding a poetic hint of spirituality, says, “Movies are dreams that you never forget.”
This is interesting too. Because at several points in Babylon, the new, riotous Tinseltown history from the La La Land director Damien Chazelle, key characters frequently attempt to articulate the central allure of cinema before drifting into florid bursts of poesy with hints of, yep, spirituality. The most memorable is from the Hollywood gossip columnist Elinor St John (Jean Smart), who turns to the fading silent film star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and announces, “In a hundred years when you and I are long gone, anytime someone threads a frame of yours through a sprocket you’ll be alive again . . . You’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.”
One could go on. For this is not a cute anomaly. Hollywood movies often emerge in cheekily cloned couplets and shadow versions (Armageddon and Deep Impact, Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down etc), but this is something different. This is introspective, self-reflexive film-making from established auteurs that is swiftly becoming a genre. Think of Kenneth Branagh’s quasi-autobiographical movie-obsessed Belfast, or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, or James Gray’s Armageddon Time.
Or what about Alejandro G Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths? Or Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God? All these films, including The Fabelmans and Empire of Light, are doing the exact same thing. They are the cris de coeur of established (exclusively male) film-makers who are reflecting upon their lives and finding justification and meaning in their journey towards self-expression and creative fulfilment. And the source of this new navel-gazing genre? The pandemic, apparently.
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In recent interviews Mendes especially has claimed that the subjects of Empire of Light (racism, mental health and cinema) were inspired by his teenage years, but only fully transmogrified into drama by the reality of lockdown. He was motivated to make it, he said, by the fear that “we would lose the experience of the cinema. That we would never have that experience of being in a dark room with strangers and that all live performance would die.” And so he made a film dedicated to himself and the ineffable majesty of cinema.
Spielberg too has said that the practicalities of the pandemic inspired his own introspection and facilitated Zoom meetings with the screenwriter Tony Kushner, where they thrashed out the bones of The Fabelmans. And Branagh had similar inspiration for writing Belfast. “It was the silence of the beginning of the lockdown that really allowed it to come out,” he said.
Yet as a famous bearded wizard once said, I think there’s more to this Hobbit than meets the eye. Yes, the privacy of the pandemic clearly facilitated the reflection that forms the basis for these inherently personal projects. But the existential threat posed to cinema by lockdown is a lazy catch-all idea for a rot that had already set in long before the first case of Covid emerged.
Remember Martin Scorsese in 2019? Reacting to the unparalleled commercial dominance of joyless jaded sequels (Frozen II) and comic book franchises (Avengers: Endgame), he derided the ubiquitous Marvel movie machine in a New York Times opinion piece, claiming that these films offer no “revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.” He was expressing the widely held disillusionment about the creative poverty of an industry that was still reeling from the Weinstein scandal, seemed to be constantly in crisis (see Kevin Hart’s last-minute departure from Oscar-hosting duties) and was confident only of its over-reliance on blockbusters as a workable financial model.
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By early 2021 it was even worse. Scorsese then warned that cinema itself was under threat from the rise of cash-rich streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon. He worried that the movie business was becoming invalidated by the algorithms of these same giants, and that film was being “systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content’”.
Scorsese is not alone. When James Gray was this year promoting his own quasi-autobiographical navel-gazer, Armageddon Time, he also speculated on the imminent end of the movies. As the Cineworld chain stumbled into bankruptcy and box office figures remained depressingly low (2022 was down 30 per cent on pre-pandemic levels), Gray pondered the reductio ad absurdum of Hollywood’s blinkered obsession with globally profitable tentpole films.
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“When you make movies that only make a ton of money and they’re only one kind of movie, you begin to get a large segment of the population out of the habit of going to the movies,” he said. “And then you begin to eliminate the importance of movies culturally.” When asked if he had any theories about the sudden rise of these small, intensely personal autobiographical movies from serious film-makers, he joked, “Well, Paul [Thomas Anderson] says it’s just because we’re getting old.” He then added, “I think the state of cinema is quite parlous. So, in my own way, and with others that I know who make films, we want to get it out before it ends.”
Hollywood has, of course, faced existential threats before. In the 1950s, television was the villain, and it lured audiences away from cinemas in alarming numbers — a Paramount survey from 1950 found that families that had invested in a television set decreased their filmgoing by 20 to 30 per cent. And how did film-makers and the industry react? Did they make tiny personal movies about how tough it is to be simultaneously talented and a teenage boy? No, they made riveting, era-defining epics such as The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Sound of Music. They wanted to remind audiences of the limitations of television.
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Similarly, the collapse of the traditional studio system in the 1960s inspired a generation of film-makers to liberate themselves from the tyranny of the producer and unleash unhinged experimental classics such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider and The Graduate. That generation also unleashed Spielberg, who gave the world Jaws, blockbuster culture and a modern moviegoing system against which his new smaller and more intimate movie appears to be reacting. The Fabelmans is a modest family film about the maturation of the young Spielberg and how he finds his creative voice and embarks upon his career as a film-making giant. It’s not, alas, Spielberg’s best movie. And it flopped at the US box office.
And there, ultimately, is the rub. The Fabelmans, Babylon and Empire of Light have all fared poorly, so far, with actual real-life ticket-buyers in America. And their perceived failure raises the question: when does a personal passion project become too personal?
Babylon, despite the low ticket sales, is a knockout piece of sensory overload. It is, thankfully, the least introspective of the present crop and made by a film-maker who’s so immersed in Hollywood history that he doesn’t seem especially bothered by the news that the entire edifice is crumbling to dust around him. When asked recently, for instance, about the end of cinema, and whether Babylon was a reaction to it, Chazelle simply said, “There have been a lot of those hand-wringing type questions in the past few years, or five years, or ten years, about the future of movies. Do movies have a future? I find it comforting looking back in time to see that that question has actually never not been asked. The movies have been dying, according to the experts of the moment, since 1901. Even [the cinema pioneer Louis] Lumière said that the movies had no future. Every decade you’ll find a sort of ‘movies are dead’ proclamation.”
Fighting talk, perhaps understandably. Yet it’s no spoiler to reveal that Babylon ends with a hallucinogenic montage that rapidly clips together everything from Charlie Chaplin to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Jurassic Park to Avatar. The montage ends with a sensual blur into colour alone, as if the inky pigment of the film itself is finally taking over. It’s as if all images are finished and only light remains. As if film, in fact, is dead.
Empire of Light is in cinemas on January 9; Babylon is in cinemas on January 20; The Fabelmans is in cinemas on January 27
