Superheroes vs ‘Real’ cinema

BCR News (Swati Bhat/Mumbai): Martin Scorsese’s dismissal of Marvel films as “not cinema” has split Hollywood and moviegoers, sparking reactions from full-blooded support to accusations of hypocrisy and elitism.

           The Oscar-winning director penned a New York Times op-ed this week in which he argued superhero blockbusters lack the sense of risk, mystery and complex characters vital to the “art” of filmmaking.

          Marvel films are “market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they´re ready for consumption,” wrote the Goodfellas director.

          “They lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist,” Scorsese added, fueling a controversy he initiated in a magazine interview last month.

        Fellow luminaries such as Francis Ford Coppola, Ken Loach and Fernando Meirelles have backed Scorsese, with Coppola even calling the record-breaking Marvel franchise “Despicable.” Top Hollywood film critics have also endorsed the auteur’s position.

              “Scorsese is basically a film climatologist, pointing out a sinister change we can all see with our own eyes,” tweeted David Ehrlich, senior film critic of Indiewire.

Glad he said this, sad he had to,” he added. But the rejection of film´s highest-grossing franchise has provoked debate in Hollywood about what constitutes “art,” and who gets to define it — not least because of Scorsese’s admission that he has only “tried to watch a few of them.”

             “That’s just not good — you can’t dismiss an entire genre as uncinematic without watching them,” said Tom Nunan, an Oscar-winning producer and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Theater, Film and Television.

           “People have always been vocal when they see change going on and it makes them uncomfortable,” Nunan (Crash, 2006) told AFP, pointing to the arrival of 1970s smash hits like Jaws and Star Wars.