Finally had time to check out Tribeca's new Future of Film blog, which launched with articles, such as "How the internet is changing the film festival experience," "Exhibition and distribution in the digital age," and "It's not the 0s and 1s but the oohs and ahhs of your story." The titles look like reading assignments for a film history course (not a bad thing), and the editorials are written by people of the Peter Guber, Geoffrey Gilmore, and Todd Wagner ilk. If the initial five blog posts are any indication, the blog will focus less on time-sensitive and "newsy" information and more on personal viewpoints about the impact that technology is having on filmmaking, as a whole.
I am curious about the business and creative drivers behind the creation of this blog. As with Jay-Z's new lifestyle blog, which launched this week, I wonder how often it will update and who is guiding its editorial voice. Who is the intended target audience? Will there be sponsored posts? Hopefully, someone who isn't a white male will join the ranks of their guest authors within the next week. Otherwise, it sets an unfortunate tone for a new blog representing one of the world's leading film institutions, based in a city that is chockablock with film professonals of all stripes and genders, and having an international reach that only a few film organizations in the world can match. Regardless of whether the editorials continue to be well written, a diversity of perspectives is not only welcomed but expected from a brand like Tribeca.
In his blog post, "Is innovation evolution," producer Eric Steel (THE BRIDGE, JULIE & JULIA, ANGELA'S ASHES) urges us not "to conflate technological innovation with disruptive storytelling [because] they are not the same [thing]. If they are joined at the hip, it is an uncomfortable relationship, like Siamese twins... maturing at totally different speeds." He goes on to say that "it is hard to see how people who feed on the tweets of Ashton Kutcher will hold on to a taste for Dickens or Emily Dickinson--much less Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Or that people who, hour after hour, thumb through games of PlayStation 3's CALL OF DUTY will ever stare into Picasso's GUERNICA for even a minute."
Where to begin.
First, thank you, Mr. Steel, for not busting out Shakespeare, the kneejerk "serious" author that people trot out when they want to chastize digital (or other) audiences for their short attention spans and lack of intellectual curiousity. Second, have you ever actually read or followed Kutcher's Twitter feed? #itsnotthatstupid. Perhaps some other paparazzi bait would have been more appropriate? Third, it's absurd to assert that the kind of people who follow Ashton Kutcher's Twitter feed will somehow lose their taste for classical or serious art forms. (You are assuming that they had a taste for that kind of content in the first place.)
Also, why do people insist on making the appreciation of one kind of entertainment or art rely on the outright rejection or ignorance of other types of entertainment and art? I don't know a single person who is that simple. Not one. Most people I know have an appreciation for a spectrum of art forms, running from low- to middle- to highbrow. The only thing that varies from individual to individual is how much they consume of each type.
Right now, I'm probably running 60% middlebrow, 20% low, and 20% highbrow. Which leads to a whole other discussion about whether something like JUSTIFIED, on FX, would be considered middlebrow, because it's a crime drama starring a handsome main character with a sixpack, or highbrow because it's based on characters created by Elmore Leonard and it won a Peabody Award. Leonard is someone who Dickens, with his penchant for populating his books with all manner of lowlifes and double-crossers, would have adored, envied, or both, had they lived in the same time period and competed for the same audience.
The thing is, I don't think that the majority of people who follow the Twitter feed of a Britney Spears, Charlie Sheen, or a ShitMyDadSays would ever be interested in reading Dickinson or Tolstoy. Or, to put it another way, I don't think that the bulk of art and entertainment they consume would be from that category of content. I suspect that they comprise an entirely different audience, and if this is true, it makes no sense to say that a person would start off with an appreciation for serious art and then somehow lose interest in such things, because they're following the one- and two-line musings of a celebrity. Plus, it's kind of a mean thing to say.
Every generation seems to have a penchant for beating up younger generations for their lack of focus and discernment. There are more than six billion people on the planet now, and my gut tells me that the percentage of people who appreciate highbrow writing, visual art, and music has only grown as the distribution of those art forms has become more democratized and inexpensive over the last five hundred years. What was once reserved for the eyes and ears of the elite for millennia is now readily accessible to millions of people. Including ones who have Britney Spears on their iPods.
And then there is the matter of intent and cultural context. We always seem to forget that writers like Charles Dickens and Alexander Dumas were the John Grishams and Irvings of their time. It is we, from later generations, who have elevated their work to a place that is set apart from the mainstream, with much loftier artistic goals than those authors intended. If either of them were alive today, I wager that they'd be creating fiercely well written TV shows, such as THE SOPRANOS or THE WIRE. Tough, action-packed stuff about macho characters getting caught up in complicated situations. I don't think that Twitter was ever intended to tell such stories (but it might be in the future), and only recently are we are starting to see game developers attempt such narrative complexity in their games. RED DEAD REDEMPTION, the first BIOSHOCK, and ALAN WAKE come to mind. We need to give game storytelling and gaming technology time to mature, as Mr. Steel put it in his blog post, and we need to take a much longer view in our assessments of of gaming as a storytelling medium.
When audiences watched silent movies in the 1920s, they judged them by standards of the day. But have you watched THE GOLD RUSH or BEN-HUR recently? Although they have been deemed classics, entertainment standards have changed, along with story delivery mechanisms. It's hard for me to put myself in the place of someone from the 20s and assume their storytelling values. But, oddly, I could watch THE THIN MAN or IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT over and over again. What a difference a decade (and a synchronized audio track) makes.
The emergence, in the last 40 years, of new types of digital storytelling and digital entertainment immensely complicates these sorts of conversations about taste and culture. When new form factors emerge, does it still make sense to compare Dickens to CALL OF DUTY? Or to compare THE THREE MUSKETEERS, the 1844 newspaper serial, to THE THREE MUSKETEERS, the 2011 film, to THE THREE MUSKETEERS, the 2009 video game? The dilemma is that even when you focus on the same story or core IP, the fact that the story delivery devices are so different from each other forces us to acknowledge that the customary "if you like or love X, then you cannot possibly appreciate the value of Y" type of art criticism doesn't work when comparing digital forms of entertainment with their analog predecessors. It's probably one of the reasons that the Amazon recommendation engine doesn't make music recommendations to a customer buying a book (at least not without prior knowledge of that person's musical tastes). It would be one hell of an algorithm to write.
Moving from the form factor of a book to a film to a game requires fundamental changes in the way that the audience (or story consumer) engages with the story. Huge, radical shifts. At with each new wave of form factors came assertions that tastes were eroding and that the very future of the culture was at stake. Hogwash. We're going to survive this current shift and, 100 years from now, we'll see that CALL OF DUTY and similar games are the equivalent to the introduction of sound to film, with PONG and its peers making up the silent era. Superb stories will be created for digital story delivery devices over the next 60 years, just as they were for films before that and books before that. Television, comics, and graphic novels also seem to be in the midst of a renaissance themselves, in terms of the kinds of stories being told, how they are being delivered, and who's telling the stories. It will be wonderful to see how those three story delivery formats evolve. There are many who would say that THE WIRE, MAD MEN, BATTLESTAR GALLACTICA, and THE SOPRANOS are the artistic equivalent to A TALE OF TWO CITIES or WAR AND PEACE, in their ability to tell a timeless story, filled with indelible characters who reflect a particular moment in history and evoke a precise sense of place. In other words, classics. Who could have predicted those kinds of stories at the dawn of the television age?
