Directors and Cinematic History: A Nostalgia For the Ways of Old
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans won the People’s Choice Award at the 2022 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, to no one’s surprise. It is the American director’s first film at the festival ever (now that is a surprise), it had a handful of public screenings, and it is seen as an overall crowd pleaser based on the icon’s childhood (and what drove him towards his love of film). That automatically begins the current Academy Awards season, as the majority of the winners of this public award have been nominated for — or have won — the Best Picture Oscar since 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire. Furthermore, the Academy recognizes the love of film, particularly through those that express this adoration themselves, and that’s more or less where I’m going with today’s article. TIFF 2022 was a return to form: the first complete package of the festival since the pandemic hit in 2020. TIFF is seen as a celebration of cinema, much like any other film festival, but notice what won the PCA this year. Does Spielberg being the director of this film help? Absolutely. My point is that people have missed the cinematic experience, and directors have this exact same notion.
It’s a little more specific than the general longing for the theatrical experience once COVID-19 hit, however. This reflection that established directors have had has been going on for at least a number of years. Of course, there have always been films about filmmaking, cinephilia, or the film industry since the very start of the medium, but there’s something a little different with these works now. There’s a certain mindset you have to inspect: the realization of the streaming age. Spielberg himself was pretty vocal about his feelings on streaming services, particularly when it comes to the consideration of streaming-exclusive releases in the awards season, although Amblin Entertainment would strike a deal with Netflix (so Spielberg isn’t against streaming entirely, or he changed his tune).
Regardless, Spielberg is certainly cognizant of the impact of streaming services within the film industry, and he is far from the only one. There’s a certain irony when David Fincher released his father’s passion project, Mank, as a Netflix release, especially considering its topic (Herman J. Mankiewicz’s screenwriting process for Citizen Kane), and its aesthetic makeup (built to feel like an old ‘40s film, down to the cigarette burns to mark the ends of reels, which are clearly for cosmetic reasons only). Still, this project that Fincher was wanting to get done for decades (after Jack Fincher passed away) came at the perfect time. It is far from the only film about the industry to be made. Quentin Tarantino’s most touching film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, marked the end of Old Hollywood with the vicious, relentless turn of New Hollywood (in the director’s own revisionist ways); this is meant to be the penultimate film in his career, and he’s clearly starting to take note of the bigger picture of what he’s been a part of for the last thirty years. Damien Chazelle’s upcoming Babylon is a similar tale: the shift from the silent era to talking pictures during the roaring, self-destructive 1920’s. Spielberg has more of an autobiographical approach, but even he isn’t the first to do this lately, as Kenneth Branagh delivered his best film in many years, Belfast, with the same coming-of-age concept: how one’s love of film got them through tough times.
We could keep going down the list of films that are heavily based on these topics, or the ones that at least feature them to varying degrees (Roma, as one such example, where Alfonso Cuarón also places his love of film from his youth in a Netflix release), but there isn’t any point. The main thing is that there is a clear nostalgia for how things used to be with film. You would escape the world in a theatre, where everything around you is pitch black, all parties nearby are here for the same event, and you all gaze upon that latest release that you have been dying to see. It just isn’t the same anymore. Cinemas were close and on the verge of extinction during the height of the pandemic, but even then things were quite different already. With streaming, there is no second life for films to earn money back, and they have to sell as well as possible during the theatrical run, hence why franchises and blockbusters continue to thrive more than ever before (particularly when compared to other releases). Now that cinemas are back, there is still a lot that has remained the same during the worst of the COVID-19 outbreak, including the films that get released straight to streaming (Disney+ is incredibly guilty of this), or the suffering budgets and projects because studios are playing it safe to weather the remainder of this storm.
Is it bad that we are in a new age of cinema? No, but change is pretty difficult to digest, especially if you have been a part of the ways of old for so long. All of the examples I provided before come from filmmakers that are established in varying ways. These could be their farewells to the cinema that once was, especially if they are many years into their careers and can look back in such a way, or simply tributes to the way things once were. The point is we’re seeing many films like this lately, and there’s clearly a collective response to the streaming age. Martin Scorsese’s love-letter to film, Hugo, is eleven years old now, and I doubt that there was any way that the director could foretell where motion pictures were heading that long ago (Scorsese himself has made streaming exclusives, like Netflix’s The Irishman, and the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, which is an Apple TV+ release). What this particular film tells me is that directors are always reminding themselves why they love this industry (Hugo just has serendipitous timing, and is a major work that leads this pack of contemporary homages). Now, directors are recollecting these sentiments quite frequently. I would expect more films of this nature to come (particularly the autobiographical works that connect these auteurs with the medium that has whisked them away for their entire lives).
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.