To the Editor:
Re “The Dying Art of Filmmaking,” by Martin Scorsese (Op-Ed, Nov. 5):
I am a big fan of Martin Scorsese and his films. “The Irishman” was the highlight of the New York Film Festival. However, his fear that Marvel will degrade the film industry is unwarranted.
First, most Marvel fans would say we love the movies because of their characters and story. We love the “Iron Man” films because Tony Stark is as rich or complex as any character Mr. Scorsese has written for his films.
Second, Marvel movies are not preventing the kinds of films that Mr. Scorsese wants or preventing the next generation of filmmakers from making them. Movies like “Joker,” “Marriage Story” and “Jojo Rabbit” were all funded and in some cases extremely successful. The reason that “The Irishman” is not being shown in theater chains is that Netflix refused to grant a 90-day window before releasing it on streaming.
Marvel films are giving huge platforms to previously unknown filmmakers like Taika Waititi and Chloé Zhao, who are now using those platforms to make their smaller passion projects.
Here’s to more Scorsese and Marvel films.
Joseph Holmes
Brooklyn
To the Editor:
When did Martin Scorsese get to be so grumpy, so elitist, so judgmental? As one who loves movies almost as much as he does, I found it sad to read his defense of his anti-franchise comments.
My view is more inclusive. Art house movies, commercial movies, genre movies, foreign-language movies, on and on, they’re in the same tent. Did you like it? Did you not? A moviegoer chooses, spending money or not, and it’s a business, so revenue rises or falls based on this democratic process. It’s a fascinating, complex commercial art form.
For those starting out, like my students, Mr. Scorsese says “the situation at the moment is brutal and inhospitable to art.” It’s just the opposite. All the barriers to entry are gone. Movies made on smartphones and edited/mixed on laptops can be uploaded and distributed by filmmakers. This historic change keeps the medium truly populist.
Art or not? This is up to the viewer, and not up to critics or filmmakers, no matter how famous and talented.
It’s a big tent; let everybody in. Keep watching movies on screens of any size, anywhere, made for a variety of appetites. And explore. And argue. And enjoy.
Jason E. Squire
Los Angeles
The writer is a professor of the practice of cinematic arts at the U.S.C. School of Cinematic Arts.
To the Editor:
As an independent filmmaker for over 20 years, I can attest to the validity of Martin Scorsese’s thesis. What the business lacks is “the unifying vision of an individual artist.” There are exceptions, of course, like Quentin Tarantino. But today where are the young Steven Spielbergs, the Francis Ford Coppolas, the Brian DePalmas, the Alfred Hitchcocks, the Stanley Kubricks, the Ingmar Bergmans, the Orson Welleses?
Today’s industry is all about factory formulas, and avoidance of a unifying vision and any possible risk. A dearth of great filmmaking is now upon us, and it is our loss. Perhaps more than any other living director today, Mr. Scorsese has worked to educate young filmmakers about the art and technical aspects of filmmaking through his brilliant documentaries. For me, he has been like a personal mentor over the past two decades, and his words continue to inspire me even as the end draws near for the auteur.
Oliver Tuthill
Portland, Ore.
To the Editor:
For most of us who never lived in New York City or other major cities with art house cinemas, our first exposure, often our only exposure, to the classics, from John Ford to Orson Welles to Douglas Sirk to Ingmar Bergman to Akira Kurosawa to Preston Sturges, was watching these movies on TV, usually on a local public television station on Saturday night, then from renting Netflix DVDs or catching them on Turner Classic Movies. If we were “woke” in college, we could see them on a relatively tiny cinema screen in our college student center.
My point is that we saw these movies on a small screen, not in a movie theater. The size of the screen didn’t matter then. It doesn’t matter now.
Your life can be changed by Shakespeare in a stage play, a movie adaptation or by reading the text. It’s all good!
Jeffrey Mobley
Nashville
To the Editor:
Martin Scorsese reveals what he really believes to be cinema: movies made by the white male filmmaker. By referring to the films of Hitchcock, Bergman and Godard in his argument about what defines cinematic art, he reinforces the decades-old white patriarchal ideals that have pushed female filmmakers and filmmakers of color out of film history and out of mind.
As someone who works at an independent theater where “The Irishman” will have its first run, I find it difficult to be sympathetic to Mr. Scorsese’s concern that Marvel is dominating theater screens. Mr. Scorsese will still have his art consumed by thousands of theatergoers, but what about female filmmakers and filmmakers of color who still struggle to get their art on any screen?
At least Marvel is working to represent marginalized groups both on and offscreen with movies like “Black Panther” and “Captain Marvel,” which is more than Mr. Scorsese has ever offered.
Brenna Davis
Silver Spring, Md.
To the Editor:
While Martin Scorsese is an artist of considerable merit, and has made some of the most influential films of the last 50 years, the Hollywood he imagines, where film is art and commerce simultaneously, probably never existed. Some years ago, I watched several hundred Hollywood films produced between 1930 and 1960 as part of research for a book.
According to many scholars, filmmakers and historians, this period was a golden age for American cinema. And, indeed, there were remarkable artists who emerged from Hollywood in the early 20th century, including John Ford, Frank Capra, Ida Lupino and Samuel Fuller. But the vast majority of the films I encountered from that period were not worth the time and effort it took to watch them.
I agree with Mr. Scorsese’s assessment that superhero films are not art. But few films from the history of cinema are. Moralizing and wish fulfillment aside, history teaches that cinema and art need not be synonyms.
Graham Cassano
Pontiac, Mich.
The writer is an associate professor of sociology at Oakland University.
To the Editor:
Martin Scorsese makes a strong case for why Marvel movies aren’t cinema, but he perpetuates a longstanding myth when he asserts that art is produced by “the unifying vision of an individual artist.” For millenniums this myth of artist-as-solitary-genius has rendered invisible the labor of countless “others,” usually women and other subordinated people, without whose contributions works of art would wither and die. Cinema is an especially collaborative art form.
Perhaps Marvel’s greatest contribution to expanding what is possible in storytelling is the franchise’s invention of last-minute teasers that entice audiences to pay attention while the names of hundreds of co-creators scroll across the big screen.
Kari J. Winter
Buffalo
The writer is a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo.
To the Editor:
Though I agree with Martin Scorsese, I’d go further. Sequels and remakes feed the bottom line, but they starve the audience of genuine experience. Presenting moviegoers with familiar personalities, whose actions are predictable, not only resembles an amusement ride, but also gives a false sense of human relations, fundamentally diminishing our interpretations and understanding of one another.
Megan Ratner
New York
The writer is a contributing editor for Film Quarterly.
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