Seen a good film lately?

No? Neither have I.

In my view films have never quite worked. The medium doesn’t really deliver - which is why so many of us still read books and now blogs. At times a film seems to offer some kind of promise, but usually it fades into pap. Intense, loud, emotional, lavish, action-packed - but still pap. 

With few exceptions, once you’ve seen a few films then you’ve seen all there is to be seen. There are only a limited number of plots and guess what? You've seen them all.

But take a look at this:-

The room was empty, and under the flare of the gas a solitary chamber pot stood forgotten among a heap of petticoats trailing on the floor. This room afforded him his ultimate impression. Upstairs on the fourth floor he was well-nigh suffocated. All the scents, all the blasts of heat, had found their goal there. The yellow ceiling looked as if it had been baked, and a lamp burned among fumes of russet-coloured fog.

For some seconds he leaned upon the iron balustrade which felt warm and damp and well-nigh human to the touch. And he shut his eyes and drew a long breath and drank in the sexual atmosphere of the place. Hitherto he had been utterly ignorant of it, but now it beat full in his face.
Emile Zola - Nana - published 1879
(and many thanks to Macheath for suggesting it to me as a good read.)

Writing such as this may present images to the reader, but they are to a significant degree the reader's images and not exclusively Zola's. Zola's pen creates the sordid atmosphere of nineteenth century Parisian decadence - an atmosphere you could cut with a knife - but it is partly the reader's atmosphere too.

With films, this depth of personal involvement is not nearly so significant. The image requires much less input from the audience - the images are just there. Supposedly this is where the film-maker's art lies, but visual cues for a mass market are hardly likely to be subtle.

Rationalized division of labour takes all the sense out of his work. Machines relieve him, not merely of drudgery, but of the possibility of performing any creative or spontaneous act whatsoever. And this is now true of his leisure as well as his labour; he has almost ceased even to try to divert himself, but sits and suffers a standardized entertainment to trickle over his passive consciousness.
Aldous Huxley - Do What You Will - published 1929

Films are rarely thought-provoking either, because we've seen the plot before and in any case, they are almost always too short to develop a plot of any complexity.

As for characters - when you've seen a film star in one performance, then you've usually seen their whole gamut of emotions from A to B as Dorothy Parker said about Katharine Hepburn. The same trademark expressions, the wry smile, raised eyebrow, cynical scowl or whatever - doesn't matter which character they are playing. 

This is perhaps why Shakespeare is still enjoyed four centuries on while Spielberg will fade away. No shortage of verbal cues in Shakespeare and somehow I think there is a real difference here between stage and screen too.

I know I’ve pushed this rather too hard, in order to make a point, but on the whole I think there is a point to be made. Film doesn't make it as an artistic medium and because of the nature of the beast things will never change.

Too few plots, not enough time to develop the plot, too little involvement from the audience, too many well-known faces and somehow the moving image makes the limitations all too obvious.