“We must save the cinema by fighting superhero films,” declared Martin Scorsese in a long and fascinating profile dedicated to him in GQ magazine this week. The filmmaker of Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street responded (once again) to a journalist’s question about the ubiquity of Marvel films on screens.
Posted at 7:16 p.m.
“The danger is what this means for our culture. Because there will be generations who will now believe that films are exactly what a film is,” concluded Scorsese. “I think people already think that,” journalist Zach Baron added.
They exaggerate, even if they are not completely wrong. When my 17-year-old son invites me to the cinema, it’s usually to see a superhero film. Like many boys of his generation, he has been immersed in Marvel culture since childhood. So anything more contemplative and less spectacular than demigods destroying half of Manhattan while trying to save humanity can seem a bit boring.
Fortunately, his interest in cinema is not limited to that. This week he suggested we watch Howl’s Moving Castle by the great animation master Hayao Miyazaki. This reminded me of one of my favorite films from my early days as a film critic: Princess Mononoke on the big screen.
PHOTO LOÏC VENANCE, GENCE FRANCE PRESS ARCHIVE
Martin Scorsese at the recent Cannes Film Festival last May
I am an ardent admirer of Martin Scorsese, perhaps the greatest American filmmaker of his generation. I loved recognizing Scorsese’s handwriting and universe in its embryonic state in his student films of the 1960s. I gained my cinematographic training by discovering the films he made in the 1970s, before he turned 40: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull.
The fact is that Scorsese is heading in the wrong direction in this eternal debate about the artistic merit of superhero films. This isn’t the first time he’s commented on Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films. Every opportunity he gets is about making fun of what he doesn’t consider to be “really cinema.”
I understand what he means. If there are more computer-generated images than authentic human interactions on screen, we may wonder, like Scorsese, whether we might eventually gravitate towards films designed by artificial intelligence.
Actor Chris Evans, who plays Captain America in Marvel’s Avengers film series, recently spoke about the difficulty of interacting with imaginary monsters on camera on a green screen. Filmmaker Bertrand Bonello highlights the ridiculousness of this filmmaking method in the first scene of his new film “The Beast,” which will soon be presented at the Festival du nouveau cinéma.
Martin Scorsese is particularly opposed to the disproportionate importance given to superhero films – and their television derivatives – in popular culture. It’s hard to disagree with him. Marvel Studios, and to a lesser extent DC, have acted like a steamroller on the American film industry over the last decade, producing a series of sometimes mediocre films that take up a maximum of screens and space.
Fans of superhero films rightly criticize Scorsese for, by his own admission, blindly judging most of these works. You’re right to find him nostalgic when he claims that the old Billy Wilder films (“Some Like It Hot”) are more “real cinema” than the new Ryan Coogler films (“Black Panther”). Are the peplums and Westerns of his childhood really better than the superhero films of today?
Scorsese’s critics also rightly find it ironic that he calls on his colleagues, the Safdie brothers and Christopher Nolan, to respond with their canons to those of Marvel and DC. Christopher Nolan is the filmmaker who gave superhero films their nobility thanks to his Dark Knight trilogy (Batman)…
They are wrong, on the other hand, when they attack the quality of his cinema – a ridiculous argument – or claim that this great film lover has no regard for filmmakers who are not, like him, white men of a certain age. Martin Scorsese has done more than anyone else to preserve the world’s rare films through the restored works of his World Cinema Project.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY PARAMOUNT PICTURES
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon
The fact is that, at 80, Martin Scorsese is a privileged filmmaker who is granted budgets similar to those of superhero films (about $200 million for his new film “Killers of the Flower Moon”). And that, like everyone else, he forgets his blind spots.
Scorsese, whose cinema consists primarily of male characters, grew up admiring cinema made by men for men. I can say the same thing with my Godfather collection in three different DVD formats. I also recognized myself well in Greta Gerwig’s excellent Barbie joke about men who want to “talk back” to women in the famous trilogy by Francis Coppola – Scorsese’s old friend.
We are all products of popular culture. My film culture, like many men of my generation, finds its foundations in Italian-American gangster films by Coppola and Scorsese. My son is more focused on diverse superhero films made by African-Americans as well as Latinos or Chinese-Americans.
If, like Scorsese, I prefer Fruitvale Station’s Ryan Coogler to Wakanda Forever and The Rider’s Chloé Zhao to Eternals, I would like to suggest that he discover one of the most visually magnificent films of last year: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse by Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson and Kemp Powers. Because you can like that AND a Miyazaki. That’s the beauty of cinema.