Regular Power Line Forum readers know that my favorite Forum is Patsy's, where culture and the arts are discussed and sometimes debated. So that's the logical place to locate discussion of this post on Libertas, a site devoted to critiques of motion pictures from a conservative perspective.

The post critiques the Sundance Film Festival that has just ended, replete as usual with depressing, anti-American films, and is titled, "Gloomy Sundance Reflects Lazy Filmmaking." An excerpt:

Not always, but for the most part, a dark, cynical take on things is the easy way out for an artist. Politics aside, the glut of these kinds of films reflects a dearth of talent in contemporary filmmaking. Successful art makes its audience feel something. So, a piece of art in the form of a film that makes the viewer feel ugly, dirty, depressed, or ill is in itself successful, but it’s much more difficult to uplift an audience. ***

To lift an audience, to inspire, to put a dance in their step… That requires a real gift — a gift we see from fewer and fewer filmmakers today. Instead they rely on irony and cynicism to gloss over a lack of any real emotion. Inspiring an audience is a tricky thing. You have to walk the fine line between corny and uplifting, between melodrama and drama, between saccharine and sweet. This is especially difficult in drama.

During Hollywood’s Golden Age, especially during the Depression, the Dream Factory pumped out film after film to lift people from the dark reality of their lives: Musicals, comedies, romances, adventures. Astaire and Rogers, King Kong and Tarzan, Carole Lombard and Frank Capra… These were films. These were filmmakers. These were stars. And they’re timeless. Today’s bleak, dark, angry, bitter, lazy films are not long for this world.

I think that last proposition is consistent with the last forty or so years of film history, in which one pessimistic but supposedly "important" movie after another has sunk into obscurity because hardly anyone wants to watch it. What do you think? To contribute your thoughts to the conversation, go here. Patsy's is open all night.

PAUL adds: John probably doesn't remember this, but when we were at Dartmouth we went to see a critically acclaimed Jane Fonda vehicle called "They Shoot Horses, Don't They." The film is about a Depression era dance marathon in which desperate couples essentially subject themselves to torture while providing entertainment to the cheering masses. After the show, I said something to John about looking forward to the time when we wouldn't feel obliged, as members of the radical youth culture, to inflict movies like this on ourselves. I think John's parents were in town and saw the movie with us, because I remember feeling bad for them.

I don't know how this "bleak, dark, angry, bitter," film is by rated critics today. I suspect it is still admired by bleak, dark, angry, and bitter leftists, and forgotten by or unknown to everyone else. I caught a few minutes of it on Turner Movie Classics the other night. You couldn't pay me to sit through the whole thing.

JOHN responds: Actually, as I was writing this post, I did think about the time we saw They Shoot Horses, Don't They? at the Nugget Theater in Hanover. Paul and I liked the movie, or said we did, anyway; my parents were mystified and somewhat appalled by it. They, of course, had actually lived through the Depression. Afterward, when Paul and I talked about the evening, he pointed out that we college students spent a lot of time theorizing, in an abstract way, about how terrible life is, when in fact our own lives were pretty good. He guessed that people whose lives are tougher are less interested in going to the movies to be instructed in the philosophy of hopelessness.

That was a long time ago, but it still bears pretty directly on the contrast between many of the Sundance filmmakers and their critics at Libertas.

Posted by John at 09:12 PM  |    |