Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh gave an epic speech on the state of Cinema at the San Francisco Film Festival. Nearly everything he covers has a corollary in the music video world — a "mayhem porn" reel of action film sequences sounds like the typical MV reel — so definitely worth a read if you care about the underlying craft and commerce.
Here's the "money quote" -
Now we finally arrive at the subject of this rant, which is the state of cinema. First of all, is there a difference between cinema and movies? Yeah. If I were on Team America, I’d say Fuck yeah! The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made. It has nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with where the screen is, if it’s in your bedroom, your iPad, it doesn’t even really have to be a movie. It could be a commercial, it could be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.
But go read the whole thing. Or better yet. Watch it.
