Philosophy of Cinema

Essays and Blog

Prometheus Moulding Man from Clay by Constantin Hansen, 1845

A Letter to the World

Dear reader,

After a decade of musing on cinema as the most complex and quintessential form of art and after an extensive period of writing on cinema and on art in general I decided to share my thoughts with the broad audience. I do so in hope to inspire people to see cinema beyond the straitjackets of the modern film industry, which turned the highest form of art into a product of the mass consumption, which just as modern cars or TV-sets gets ‘produced’ on an assembly line according to the same blue print. Once a film producer told me, that the success of any film lies in marketing and knowing the target group. Well, the most films that are produced today are targeted at the teenagers and young women, since these are two largest demographic groups, responsible for the lion’s share of the cinema attendance and hence box-office takings. The main principle of marketing – “produce what you can sell” dictates the film industry (Hollywood) to produce mainly superhero sequels for teenagers and romantic comedies for the young women. Needless to say that marketing kills art and culture and any individuality.

And of course we have the opposite of the mainstream commercial cinema – the so-called European art house films, which are mostly funded not by privately-owned film studios like in the US, but by the European State funded programs (tax-payer money). The producers and directors of these films have other priorities – they aim primarily at A-list festivals like Cannes, Locarno, Berlin, etc, which will allow them to get an international exposure, recognition, and ultimately a distribution deal. However in most cases that distribution deal won’t let the producers recover the State-money, which is spent on the film production. Well, the government allocates that tax-payer money on this ‘artistic’ projects, knowing in advance that those funds are hardly redeemable. In the most cases due to ‘the bad taste of the masses spoiled by the Hollywood”. These artistic filmmakers himself or herself and his/her abilities are not questioned, which results in constantly funding the same filmmakers, who keep making ‘highly artistic’ films, who nobody wants to see. Of course such a ‘social’ European system of film-producing did nothing good to the European cinema, since the ‘free’ government money instantly creates unhealthy situation, in which nepotism and subjectivism of certain individuals who are responsible for allocating these ‘free’ government money, exclude any honest competition. By the way this is typical to socialism. Since I was born and grew up in the USSR, I know that the re-distribution of the ‘free’ government money always creates waste, misuse, and corruption on a large scale, as opposed to the privately owned funds, which are spent or invested with careful consideration and intention to make a profit. This corruption and misuse of funds was the reason why the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed.

Anyway, as to the European art-house films themselves, this is unfortunately for the most part a product of bourgeois decadence making pseudo-art with a typical Western European arrogance and pretention, filling the gaping void of the subject matter with explicit sex scenes or other forms of exploitation and cheap sensationalism, in the most cases being extremely boring.

Anyway the vast number of films released today, are made according to the same template. All the producers and filmmakers I know talk about the Story by Robert McKee. Film students around the world are obliged to read this screenwriting Bible, including myself (when I was a film student at Film Academy in Amsterdam 10 years ago). Ironically McKee states himself in his book, that today cinema as an art form, and especially the art of storytelling/screenwriting  is in an unprecedented crisis. He strongly urges his readers to be original. However if everyone around the world reads the same ‘Book’ on screenwriting, they will end up writing the same story, or at least sharing the same approach to the story-telling and the structure.  As William Goldman, a famous American screenwriter, wrote: ‘Story is the structure’. To paraphrase him – structure is the story, since it dictates and determines the direction in which the story unfolds itself. The structure in modern storytelling became more important that the story. The form became more important than the subject matter. The meaning of life is substituted with the quality of life.

However I totally agree with McKee. I think too, that cinema is in crisis, since it mirrors the humanity in its deep crisis. It reflects the demise of the Western civilization. Our stories became very shallow, polluted with false ideas and wrong answers to the eternal questions, filled with the existential void and despair. People seem to forget the sacred sources, from which they used to draw their inspiration. People seem to forget the sacred origins of the ancient Greek theater, where the word ‘hero’ literally meant ‘saint’, someone who is stronger than the rest, at least strong enough to go beyond own survival and sacrifice himself or herself for a higher cause, for the nation, for own people, and to become immortal, immortalized by his/her good deeds and people’s memory of him/her. Myth, of which a hero was the protagonist, was not only a ‘story’ conveying factual information about the adventures of the hero, or the history. In fact the ancient Greeks used myth as a vehicle of getting beyond the limitations of ego, myth helped to get freed from the straitjackets of the reality of ego, its fears and desires. On the contrary, the modern pseudomyth uses and abuses the narrative structure of the ancient myths, by exploiting our fears and desires, elevating our base human instincts and weaknesses in order to manipulate us. Hero became antihero. Our values are substituted as well. Altruism, sense of duty and strong interpersonal relations are substituted with extreme individualism, self-interest and as a result, loneliness, anti-social behaviour, madness and (self-)destruction. Achilles, Hercules and Aphrodite became a serial killer, a drug lord and a prostitute, or the combination of the three. Instead of ethos of a hero we have characters suffering from what the psychologists call – the dark triad – the narcissistic type of personality, dominating the silver screen and all type of state-of the-art screens of all types of modern devices. Ancient stories are used to convey the sacred fire of inspiration stolen by the hero titan Prometheus and given to the humanity as a gift. Well, it seems that the humanity has lost that gift of the ancient Greeks. We don’t need sacred fire anymore, we don’t need philosophy, we just need to be entertained as stupid children in order to forget own existential pain. Modern films and stories socially condition us as Pavlov dog’s not to think and even not to feel, and to salivate on command. The magic of cinema is misused as propaganda and as a money-making machine. The word ‘story’ became an empty word, void of any meaning, or a synonym of a lie, as opposed to history. Well, let me remind you something, the ancient Greeks made no distinction between the two. In fact the Greek word historia meant both ‘story and history’. English is the only European language, which divides ‘story’ from ‘history’. German, Dutch, all Scandinavian languages, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and other Slavic languages loaned historia from the Greeks, while preserving its original unity of connotations. The Greeks understood that historia was not about conveying the factual truth of a certain person going from point A to point B, and doing this and that; they were not as much obsessed with the truth as we are. The Greeks were excellent warriors, poets, creators of dramaturgy and philosophy. They were much smarter, stronger and more creative than we are, despite our smart phones. They knew that historia was about conveying the mythical truth from generation to generation, ensuring the survival of the culture and national identity and spirit of humanity in general. Without mythos and ethos people degrade to the state of a brute, an animal. And their stories and films reflect that degradation.

All the stories lie within us, we don’t need to search for them in the newspaper articles, or TV-shows. All you find there is negativity, despair, decadence, recycling of garbage. Cinema is a mirror of our soul. Let us re-discover that sacred source of inspiration from within. Let cinema be our modern myth. Be the sacred temple of art, where there is no place for petty traders. Get inspired, be inspired, and inspire the others.

Sincerely yours,

Timur Ismailov

24th of December,

Leiden