THE SWEET NEW STYLE (THE CINEMA, THE FOSSIL FUEL ECONOMY AND ENTROPY) |
By Amos Poe

By Admin

What the heck is going on in the world? Where’s Andy Rooney when we need him? Where’s Marvin Gaye for that matter? Where’s the independent spirit — are thems creative passions gone? Will Video-On-Demand be the next big thing? Is it becoming a DIY world? Is Lena Dunham the new Spike Lee? What’s going to happen to the Gulf Coast when the next hurricane hits and all that muck and stew gushing out of the ocean floor starts covering humans like they were freaking pelicans, and poisoning the farmlands, shopping malls and Beale Street like it’s doing to the Gulf waters? Does Eisenhower seem like the only American president of the last 50 years who had the balls to tell the truth? I’m just asking, because I don’t know the answers. I have no clue.

Not to worry. At least the film business is booming. Right? James Cameron’s dystopic hero saga Avatar earns three billion dollars for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, Blackwater, Goldman Sachs, and The Carlyle Group are making dough hand-over-fist (see Carol Reed’s The Third Man). The Gulf of Mexico looks like an endless Morris Louis painting. Does the European Union look like a Monopoly game where the bank prints new money every turn, every roll of the dice, before the board tips over? General Motors, not too long ago, America’s biggest Hummer building company is in receivership. There are wars on terror, border wars, drug wars, oil wars, religious wars, ethnic cleansing wars everywhere you look. The President of the United States goes on TV and says lets pray this madness stops. Pray is right. The Prime Minister of Italy, and its biggest media owner, says he can’t do his job if there’s a constitution, so the Italian Parliament basically agrees to get rid of it. The wealthiest man in the world is a former KGB agent turned Stalinist-capitalist. I mean, where the heck are we? We’re certainly not in Harvey Weinstein’s Kansas anymore.

And by “we,” I mean us, ‘independent’ filmmakers.

At the turn of the last century a bunch of great ideas converged upon humanity, among which were the motion (see Edward Muybridge’s The Horse In Motion) picture and the use of oil for our energy needs (see There Will Be Blood). In the beginning, there were a lot of film companies and a lot of oil companies – though there was only one oil refiner. His name was Rockefeller and between 1883 and 1903 he amassed the greatest fortune in the world, the first billionaire, with his monopoly. Teddy Roosevelt and Congress made him break it up, which of course, made him even richer.

Over the next 100 years, oil companies either went out of business or were bought up by bigger dinosaurs, now there are like seven oil companies that run the world. Same deal with the Hollywood studios, there’s about that many that control production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures world-wide. The idea is that more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer people makes for a duller and duller existence. With every ‘new’ picture, every newly arrived narrative at the multi-plex it seems we’re in a kind of Groundhog’s Day of sameness. Entropy is a mannerist era. I’m awed by James Cameron’s craft, I have no idea on how he does it, it really is movie magic, he’s king of the world, he’s the state of the art and I feel like the art of the state.

Don’t you think that America in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t look like the empire strikes back but the empire strikes out?

Are movies merely exercises in nostalgia? Proustian obits at best?

In 1970 the United States reached peak oil production, from that point on it had to import more and more oil from abroad to keep its economy on a very limited track. The OPEC countries that produce most of the oil soon figured it out, to test the economic waters they decided to double the cost of a barrel of oil. In 1972, a gallon of gasoline went from 29 cents to 73 cents and there were lines around the block to fill up at Esso and Mobil and Shell and Amoco. I know because my father owned a gas station. There were shock waves in both the economy and political life of America. Nixon, the American president, quickly realized that this event meant that the American treasury would soon be depleted and that the U.S. couldn’t afford its war in Vietnam. He sent Henry “Dr. Strangelove” Kissinger to Paris to make peace with Ho Chi Minh. So you might say that the OPEC oil embargo ended that war, not the long-haired hippie protesters, who merely managed to get rid of an inept President Johnson for a more evil President Nixon (helped of course by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy).

Do you think that the 2000 (s)election of W. by Wee Willie Rehnquist and James Baker III was a corporate coup d’etat? Is the Constitution just another piece of paper? What is the U.S. without a Constitution? Was the U.S. empire built on a history of genocidal ambition, manifest destiny, fueled by all those great forests, African slaves, mountains of coal and spewing, gushing oil? Have the chickens come home to roost?

Ironically, the 1970’s was the last great decade of American cinema. In the 1950’s the Justice Department put an end to Hollywood’s monopoly of production, distribution and exhibition, thereby bringing an end to the golden age of Hollywood. Luckily for some, there was this new technology coming in, called television. Similarly, in the late ’20s the advent of sound technology re-invigorated cinema. Then in the ’40s color film technology became the rage, Kodak was on a monopolistic B-roll. In the 1990’s the advent of personal computers and digital technology helped the industry with DVD’s, and saw its economy boom. So where the heck are we? Please tell me its not 3D porno.

Back in the ’70s as American culture was tanking, “we” came up with something vaguely authentic; some called it “punk”, some called it “no wave.” Eventually the “culture” absorbed the avant-garde and by the ’90s, independent cinema was all the rage. Kids could take their little films to a festival in Utah and win the Hollywood lottery. Producers could cobble foreign deals together and make a modest movie. But it seems those times are gone, as there are fewer and fewer players in that game every year… but let me get back to oil and cinema for a second, because where would movies be without the car chase? The drive-in? Those big teamster trucks with hundreds of lights, dollies, gels, stingers and steadicams inside, idling at the curb, oil. Of course in the beginning of “oil” and motion pictures, were three other equally important revolutionary ideas, the theory of relativity — in which time, space and light were brought to the forefront; cubism – in which the notion of painterly perspective was put to bed and illusory 3-D on a flat plane borne; and the airplane — how else would we get from NYC to Hollywood and back again? Is the idea of flying as old as the moon? Could it have happened without oil?

In the Renaissance the Medicis realized that real power doesn’t come merely from wealth, but from the use of that wealth to patronize the arts. So I ask you, is kickstarter.com a way in which patronizing the arts becomes truly democratic?

Does it seem to you dear reader, that lately we are artists under the gun? That “indies” are like small nations in a world economy gone amok? Is Hollywood a metaphor for the World Bank? How are we to survive, create, thrive? Are we to be saved by that lucky break? That HBO series? That re-make of another re-make, becoming the hacks we so long loathed, feared of becoming? Does Final Cut Pro and other new technologies free us from the film language of yesteryear like Dante freed us from the language of the Vatican? Has the language of film died from its own lethargy, its metastisic boredom? Is this new technology going to finally lead us out of the wasteland, out of the entropic mind-set of fossil fuels into a new era, a hydrogen economy (read Jeremy Rifkin’s The Hydrogen Economy) version of cubism? Why is it that on a time-line we often have several, sometimes dozens of sound tracks but only one or two visual tracks? Can visual tracks be mixed with the same ‘design’ ideas, filters and textures that we currently use for sound? Will this be the new “lingua vulgare” that Dante discovered in 1310 with his ground-breaking, revolutionary “Comedy”?

What is the sweet new style?

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Amos Poe is a NYC filmmaker, currently living in Florence Italy, where he’s in post-production on La Commedia, a new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy that will have its world premiere at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. The film is largely financed by backers on kickstarter.com – if you would like to help produce, please visit the site.