Movie theater. Photo by Fin Fahey. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Technological advances have always driven major changes in the art of film making, from the coming of sound to the development of computer animation. But could the digital age render film itself irrelevant? Tribeca Film is tackling this question through a series online of video clips exploring the new documentary Side by Side.

The documentary, directed by Keanu Reeves and produced by Christopher Kenneally, deals with the effects of the digital revolution, and specifically new methods of shooting movies without film, upon traditional film making. After asking whether film can survive in its current form, Reeves explores the history of cinema and attempts to shed some light on its possible futures.

Reeves interviews a pantheon Hollywood mavens, including James Cameron, David Fincher, David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Steven Soderbergh, in his attempt to depict the monumental shift digital film-making has created at the movies .

Tribeca Film’s Future of Film blog is hosting a continuing conversation by showing daily clips featuring interviews edited out of Side by Side in the final cut. Each day features a new interview with film industry veterans and stars, including Greta Gerwig, Jost Vacano, Wally Pfister,  and Ellen Kuras, among others.

Tribeca Films will release Side by Side through on-demand platforms on August 22.  The film will also play theatrically in select cities, including Los Angeles (August 17), New York (August 13), Boston (August 23), Seattle (August 31), Chicago (September 15), Tacoma (September 15), San Francisco (October 18), and other cities to be announced.

By Clare Coffey

by Armond White

Margaret’s DVD and Dust Bunnies attempt to rescue the elite

By Armond White

As a children’s film, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is overwrought and under-thought. Its story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphaned boy who lives in a Paris train station where he surreptitiously maintains the clock mechanisms, suggests a fantasy autobiography. He wants to think of himself as a child of cinema, always working behind the scenes at the actual preservation of old films and—egotistically—maintaining the very idea of cinema. Unfortunately, it’s the idea of cinema that Hugo shortchanges, just as Scorsese betrays what at one time seemed his gift.

These are Scorsese’s hack years. He hasn’t made a decent movie since hitching his cineaste ambitions to Leonardo DiCaprio’s box-office power. Each recent catastrophe (Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island), routinely hailed by critics as masterpieces, lacks the personal, real-world touch that had been the promise of Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

The childhood fantasy in Hugo doesn’t express Scorsese’s urban Italian Catholic sensibility; it’s a false, Pixarish externalization of the ethnic, hormonal and psychic tensions that distinguished even a second-tier Scorsese movie like The Color of Money—it’s either about a boy’s search for an artistic father figure or a brash young acolyte’s competition and infatuation with a mentor. Take your pick.

In Hugo, Scorsese trivializes boyhood passions into merchandise—that is, 3-D technology that sells out and misrepresents his perception of the world. The you-are-there quality of the bars, streets and tenements of Scorsese’s best films are abandoned for an undistinguished artificiality. Hugo is cluttered with bric-a-brac intended to salute fin de siècle industrialization related to the birth of the movies. But unlike Peter Bogdanovich’s charming, silent-era fable Nickelodeon, Hugo sacrifices a historically accurate sense of place. Instead, Scorsese seems to be imitating the pixilated world of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a vision of Paris’s cultural heart that was authentically marvelous in Amélie, The City of Lost Children and last year’s wondrous, underappreciated Micmacs.

Unsuited to 3-D, Scorsese’s Hugo world looks like the obsessions of a cultural hoarder. The screen is literally cluttered with so much ornamentation and junk that there’s no feeling for materiality of the industrial era (a specialty of the little-known animated film Robots). The technology stifles Scorsese’s sensibility and distorts it.

Hugo’s opening foretells the coming two-hour disaster. It’s a super digitally enhanced traveling dolly shot, like the famous Copacabana entrance scene of Goodfellas, which drew viewers into the gangster world and its corrupt, seductive pleasures. Here, the shot goes on too long, doing rollercoaster-style loop-the-loops. This is not the exhilaration of movement; it’s digital overkill. Throughout Hugo, Scorsese loses spatial and veristic reality. (A train wreck occurs without showing the train jump the track.) The slapstick action scenes are incoherent, and 3-D “closeness” violates the cuts to long shots, losing geographic orientation, making the action chaotic. Any critic who praises this mess is simply bowing to the Scorsese brand as to the Pixar brand.

Scorsese the artist gets lost among Hugo’s sweetly roguish characters—a spunky little girl (Chlöe Moretz), a crotchety old man (Ben Kingsley), a cute, dog-loving couple (Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour), an emotionally crippled war vet flic (Sasha Baron Cohen, mugging), a flower seller (Emily Mortimer) and a boy hero too much like Harry Potter.

Who is the director of Goodfellas and Casino trying to kid with this craven cast of puppets? Hugo’s falseness recalls the arch, excessively technological style of Baz Luhrmann. Hugo and friends’ constant blather about dreams is Hollywood huckster babble. Scorsese, an expressionist realist, should know better than to make a Moulin Rouge—but now he’s worse than Luhrmann: He’s a hack.

This is how a once special filmmaker destroys his virtues and becomes ordinary. Scorsese’s fakery gets worse when it pretends to shift into sincerity and little Hugo’s obsession with a mechanical automaton leads him to encounter silent filmmaker and magician Georges Méliès. Here’s where Scorsese panders to film geeks with his love for all cinema. As with the preposterous celebration of Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels in The Aviator, Scorsese pretends to honor cinema history by exaggerating the importance and wonder of movies that are frankly unwatchable, only notable as historic footnotes. This celebration of Méliès is as disingenuous as pretending to rediscover the essence of cinema in 3-D.

Asa Butterfield and Chloë Moretz in Hugo.

A horrible couple made in Hollywood Hell.

In the early 1950s, Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient at an island-based hospital for the criminally insane. With his partner (Mark Ruffalo), Daniels encounters creepy prison guards, inmates and seemingly mad-scientist psychiatrists (Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow). Scorsese piles on insanity: Daniels’ periodic flashbacks to the Dachau death camp, then ghostly visions of his wife (Michelle Williams) who died mysteriously—but gruesomely—during peace time.

Victim of at least two holocausts, Daniels undergoes haunted-house trauma in a slow, relentless, bug-eyed manner while Scorsese treats the audience like rats in a CGI maze. Wherever the narrative is going, it barely comes to a point. As incredulity shifts into absurdity then repulsion then hopelessness, Shutter Island respectively salutes specific cinematic figureheads: Val Lewton for the heebie-jeebies, Sam Fuller for the topical tension, Roman Polanski for the demonic and, of course, Kubrick for a nihilistic finish.

What happened to the filmmaker once so attuned to his characters’ cultural experiences that Pauline Kael was moved in her review of Taxi Driver to exclaim: “Scorsese is just naturally an expressionist”? Shutter Island fails a deliberate attempt at horror-movie expressionism, yet this isn’t Scorsese’s first go at the genre. After Hours (1985) was similarly dour and hopeless. Bringing Out the Dead (1999, Scorsese’s last decent film) successfully blended personal hysteria with big-city realism. Both urban nightmares connected to Scorsese’s knack for the New York City fantastic. His singular gift for ethnic authenticity and pop stylishness gave genuine power to Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, even Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Shutter Island is a perfect example of Hollywood excess: It demonstrates a once-significant filmmaker decaying into a big-budget, poorly-motivated hack. Its story could have been told better if it were cheaper and shorter. But Scorsese has found himself flummoxed: cosseting DiCaprio, a genuine box-office attraction, as if expressing his own private concerns. But where Lewton, Fuller, Polanski and Kubrick were visualizing their personal issues, beatnik and hippie-era Scorsese stays emotionally distant from the WWII and the House Un-American Activities Committee crises that haunt Teddy Daniels.

It’s exasperating—and tasteless—for Shutter Island to pile concentration camp atrocities on top of medical and penal institution outrages, then bring in marital psychosis, mass murder and infanticide. Screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis interjects a couple of speeches about violence (“You are men of violence”; “God gave us violence”) which ring hollow in the work of a director who exulted in violence to expose macho anarchy. It’s a weak way to address the 20th-century’s horror, and Shutter Island itself makes a paltry metaphor for what’s gone wrong with modernity.

When Daniels argues about “moral order” to a fiendish guard, it’s just another of Scorsese’s altar boy hiccups. The scene of Daniels and his squad slaughtering a troop of Nazi P.O.W.s—staged entirely without feeling, as if boomer Scorsese had no consciousness of even the My Lai Massacre—makes it clear that he’s simply laying out clichés. Personal feeling has gone out of his filmmaking.

The time has come to ask Scorsese to move on: Perhaps become a producer and lend other, hungrier filmmakers the benefit of his vast cinematic knowledge and technical enthusiasm. As an artifact of the boomer generation’s imagination ruled by the Bomb, Communism, Social Welfare and Sexual Revolution—in the form of enigmatic, elusive, predatory females—Shutter Island is remote and formulaic. Not even tough enough to embarrass Tarantino’s glib take on history, Shutter Island suggests Scorsese has no reason to make movies other than relieving boredom.

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Shutter Island
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Runtime: 138 min.