For some of the films that streaming services are flooding their programming with, there is only one explanation: excessive tolerance. On the part of the audience. In the past few weeks, for example, the thousands of Christmas films that already existed have been added to what feels like two hundred, and most of them seem to have been using resource-saving script recycling. Actually there are only two stories: Either a lonely heroine gets under the hood in time for Christmas, or a completely dysfunctional family pulls together for the festival – although in reality, during the holidays, the madness breaks into fully functional families. It’s often about atmosphere, maybe also about the fact that the perfect Christmas decoration only appears in the film, which is why it is noticeably often set in castles. On Netflix alone, this subgenre has several newcomers, “Father Christmas is back” (for the John Cleese fans), “A Castle for Christmas” (for the presumably existing niche of Brooke Shields fans “,” Princess swap “). Every room is a dream, only these rooms tell nothing about the characters, but rather about old British furniture.
The master director David Fincher has wrested a kind of penance from Netflix with his small essay series “Voir: The Art of Cinematic Modernism”. Fincher (“The Social Network”, “Mank”) is the producer of the series – the six small films each have a narrator, critic and aficionados. The love for the cinema is simply not erratic, it feeds on the consequences of obsession with detail, of new ideas, it shies away from mass production. But there is no shop-talk here, the episodes are sometimes informative, but often mostly emotional.
Blogger Sasha Stone remembers the summer when Jaws made her a movie freak. Another of the six episodes is about animation and how it has changed – for example, how it has become established that there is very little choice of face shapes and snub noses for the female cartoon characters, while the male faces are much more different may. And because that has become a viewing habit, Hollywood’s gods of trickery can no longer get away from it, even though they are aware that these norms are not only sexist, but also boring. With films it is just like with food: if you have only ever eaten canned ravioli, you will never notice that something is wrong with canned ravioli.
Fincher’s little school of seeing explains quite nicely what it means that television did not evolve from the cinema but from the radio, which is why the dialogue over the images still triumphs there today, which has a lot to do with the tolerance mentioned at the beginning has: TV was filmed cheaper and faster, and you couldn’t see much on the small screen anyway, and because everyone watches too much TV and the eyes and the brain and the streaming services keep mixing these two different approaches, nobody knows the silent twitching anymore to pay tribute to the corner of the mouth in a medium long shot, or the dedicated work of an outfitter who spent months tinkering with the furniture of a film character so that every object in every room actually tells of her.
Much of it relates to the stories that scripts – like “Jaws” influenced the viewing habits of a generation, or why our sense of justice leads us to love visions of revenge on screen. Sometimes “Voir” lives up to the title’s promise. There is a very vivid example of the proportionality of revenge, a scene from Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” in the cinema version and an edited one that was made for television: only six seconds are missing, but this cut turns the whole scene upside down . Suddenly a berserk turns into a righteous man – which was probably not at all in the spirit of Martin Scorsese. There is no better way to explain what cut is. Unfortunately, “Voir” is rarely that specific – but the series is definitely a first step away from the cinematic canned ravioli. (“Voir – For the love of the cinema”, six episodes on Netflix.)