is film at a particularly good state now?

wrong board yeah lmao my b

i do think people don't take the fact that "anyone can make a film" seriously; it's something people acknowledge and then spend a big para moaning about how Silence flopping is the death of cinema.

YouTube or a similar alternative is the future for film auterism.

There's a lot more to explore which means the quality range has widened a lot (better distribution, accessibility and the rise of social media, internet etc. is a double edged sword), but I would also say the cultural shift towards instant gratification and oversaturation has been a definitive (negative) game changer, especially for the more mainstream/comercially minded part of cinema. 

No

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking.

I think there are very much two sides to this. Many people took Scorsese's argument as just an old man who has lost touch moaning about cinema being different than what he was used to but people complaining about Scorsese haven't really taken the time to understand him. His point wasn' necesarily that the movies themselves are bad but that the media landscape around them is bad, that out culture is totally oversaturated by images. Today we live images, more than text and more than sound or music. We know everything from images and even tons of things which we have never seen with our own eyes. There's obviously a lot of abusal to this and culturally it's very dangerous but it also does something to the individual. Nothing is holy anymore... and this was the intention of Tarkovsky's idea about sculpting in time for instance, to canonize the pictures, to give them some eternal, absolute power. This is something I very much lament aswell but there is no final judgement passed. If we change society, it could be fine in 10 years or so, the problem is that we don't seem aware enough.

On the other hand of course cinema as an art-form is much more accesible today. Would I have been able to watch or even hear about all the obscure films I've seen 20 or even 10 years ago? Likewise would I have been able to shoot like 10 different short films (with the help of other of course) in non abysmal quality and then to edit it all properly? I could even make my own animated films when I was like 11 years old. And if I'd want in theory I could share it all with the entire world.

Again both of these are double-edged swords though. How many people work in the film buisness (speaking in the broadest sense, so includinglets players and beauty Vlogers aswell) today whome I'd wish would rather not? And how many clicks do the most sophisticated low budget films get, even if they're put on the internet for free, when tey're up against clikcbait and list videos?

I do think we're in dire need of cultural renewal and I don't say that because I necesarily think we're worse of today, I don't think you can really compare today to the 60's. It's because today every decision has even more weight but still we seem to be making less of them because we don't know what to do, while the world accelerates faster and faster. Climate change and our financical system are both anticipating disaster but we feel completely impotent in the face of such large powers and yet we seek to make our society even more individualistic. At times when I watch a movie or read a book I feel like: This should be mandatory for anyone. After watching Not Reconsiled for instance I thought: Every german schoolkid should watch that. Of course this is completely impractical, dictatorship doesn't work in art but we need to learn to appreciate it better, that's one of the most important lessons we have to learn today, to make a full stop and just to watch and to listen and to think. Essentially this is all film but it's barely present in any of the top 20 highest grossing films and that's horrendous.

I know this is really long but I'd like to make one final point: What I fear is that we completely lose our forum to debate. In the past some people had the autorithy to tell people what to watch or to read and artists were a major part of the discourse. Today we more and more have the mindset that it doesn't matter if I don't understand this or that and it doesn't matter if I go for the easily digestable spectacle over the confronting drama. Essentially, yes, art is subjective and everyone enjoys what he enjoys and can enjoy whatever he likes. But sometimes upholding the veil of objectivity and authority is not bad, because we need people to confront the challenging things (and film is really good at transporting that to people if only it and they want to) because our democracy is basicly built on those people and they and we have an enormous responsibility (this is brougt up way too rarely). There's the famous quote: "Have we become so opneminded that our brains have fallen out?" and I think there is something to that at least, otherwise I wouldn't remember it, no? Maybe a new trend should be to shame everyone into watching the #1 Sight and Sound pick of the year (and I got to admit, damn I'm pissed about missing Toni Erdman at the theatre, I hope it wins the Oscar and gets one more run at my local theatre).

Sorry about the length but I've thought a lot about this as I also want to become a filmmaker myself. I think the desicive factor in the end was the potential impact but I got to admit, often I felt like cinema had almost no impact. I mean even if Mad Max frames all the biggest problems of our society in an incredibly reductionist way (so that there's almost nothing else left to discuss), people still prefer to talk about the movie having a badass female character or to throw around buzzwords like feminism.

Maybe my outlook is extra bleak though, because cinema in Germany is so extremely stale (I feel like it might be getting better just now though). I'm definitely anticipating the impact of all the modern possibilites which have been mentioned in this thread and the enormous diversity and I believe it has enormous potential.

Considering the best movie in like 5 years is crushing it at the box office right now, I'd have to go with yes.

It depends. The film industry is still bringing in big money, but most of the best films are independent releases. Hopefully though, these releases will reach a larger audience with all of these film platforms.

Good read. Isn't Love Exposure kind of thought of as our Breathless though? At least it kind of feels like that to me despite not having seen it.

Also Mysteries of Lisbon was extremely innovative in the higher budget filmmaking field (still costs nothing compared to Hollywood movies and even less than Toni Erdman for instance), I'd say that's probably the Barry Lyndon of today.

Nah, it's not really on the same scale. Love Exposure is just a really inventive, crazy, fun ride. Narratively, it's pretty ambitious and out there, but it's nothing compared to Breathless, which was revolutionary in both form and content through its radical approach to filmmaking itself.

I'd say it's in a much better state now than it was 5 years ago. Franchises with gargantuan budgets ($200m+) have been more consistently underperforming if not outright flopping, smaller and foreign films are getting better broad distribution, more diversity in theaters as far as genre and non-IP works, investment in the theatrical model is getting boosted as studios recognize the near-impossibility of making streaming profitable.