If you have been disappointed by what has been coming to cinemas and streaming platforms in the last few years, you certainly haven’t been the only one. From cinephiles to casual viewers and everyone in between, people have been complaining about the quality, or lack thereof, of recent releases, pointing out the endless stream of remakes, sequels, and adaptations. If it’s generally agreed upon that the last ten years have not been the best ones for cinema, one might wonder what has been causing this.
Films and censorship – a long and ongoing history
Although it is associated with creativity and emotions, cinema is very much an industry, the kind that Adorno and Max Horkheimer defined as “cultural industries” in the 1930s, which means that in late-stage capitalism, what studios, especially the big ones, pursue above all is profit. Not only that, but a thriving film industry has been, for about a century, a strong way of building soft power. Much of the United States’s soft power comes from Hollywood’s ability to churn out films that the whole world watches, and there is a strong, decades-long connection between the US film industry and the military sector, a relationship that, despite the transparency, raises questions about censorship and artistic freedom.
What states want and don’t want portrayed on the big screen matters a lot, and not just in the United States. In Italy, there has been a lot of talk this spring about who is and isn’t receiving financial support for their film from the current far-right government.
This May at the David di Donatello, the yearly film awards given out by the Academy of Italian Cinema, the co-winner of the Best Documentary, film director Ilaria de Laurentiis, has pointed out during the acceptance speech how the production was banking on financial aid and not getting that aid had left them “drowning in debt”. This is not the only documentary that didn’t receive financial aid despite its merits. ‘Giulio Regeni. Tutto il male del mondo‘, a documentary about Giulio Regeni, the Italian PhD student at the University of Cambridge who was kidnapped in Egypt in 2016, where he was researching Egyptian Unions and whose body was found showing clear signs of torture near an Egyptian secret service prison was also denied founds, same as the film ‘Eco Chamber’ co-written by the late Academy Award Winner Bernardo Bertolucci.
A rich kids’ playground – Elitism in the film industry
The matter of funds is especially relevant given that according to research by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre among the people working in Film, TV, video, radio and photography in the United Kingdom just 8.4% of people identify as being from a working-class background, and only five percent of those from working-class origins based outside of London and the South East work in a creative field, compared to fifteen percent of those from privileged backgrounds living in these regions. This imbalance means that a ton of engaging, truthful, and trailblazing work will never see the light of day, simply because the people behind them cannot make a living working in an elitist industry.
Big players, little quality
When money becomes the main entry barrier to the film industry, it’s not just working-class actors, directors, producers, and screenwriters who struggle to find a place in this field, but also indie producers. The American “Big Five” major studios control the majority of global box office revenue and international distribution.
One of the ways they gained such large control over the market has been by buying out competitors, as Disney did by purchasing 21st Century Fox, Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar over the last twenty years, and as Paramount did this February by buying Warner Brothers for $111 billion. It’s no wonder that people have been talking about the death of the mid-budget movie for years now.
Needless to say, studios with a long history and a thirst for a monopoly, who wish to make bank with every project, will not seek the bold, innovative stories we all want to see. Streaming service giant Netflix has notoriously favored media that is “second screen friendly”, with scripts optimized for viewers who watch while scrolling on their phones.
Even amid this bleak picture, there are still creatives from all sorts of backgrounds who, despite the odds, still pursue their dreams and make films that make us feel seen, and as long as they are, the film industry won’t be “dying”. While we all should support their work as we can, it’s undeniable that a different, fair system would also give us all more, better, freer art.
