This evening I had a delightful dinner with an old friend who is even more of a film aficionado than I. We spent several happy hours analyzing not only the latest releases, but also classic old films starring Edith Evans, or featuring Richard Widmark, or directed by Ida Lupino.
At some point in the conversation it occurred to me that we were speaking a kind of shorthand language, a language that is known only by people who have seen and loved a vast number of films of all genres. Once you are able to draw upon much of the canon, and you also know that your friend will get the reference, you are free to compare, say, a performance or camera shot in a modern Hollywood RomCom with a moment in an old black and white noir or a British war drama.
Yet this time there was something new in our conversation, because the changing medium of distribution is having an effect on the dramatic form itself. Due to the rise of the internet as a primary medium of distribution, for the first time in the U.S. there is an economic incentive for artists and producers to create truly coherent long-form stories.
One current example is “House of Cards” on NetFlix. When you have twenty hours to relate your dramatic arc, to take your characters from start to finish, you can begin to think big. Such a long-form work is not the same as traditional episodic television, where economic constraints force some sort of artificial conclusion each episode. A guaranteed twenty hour running time, commercial free, is a completely different beast.
Of course the BBC has been at this game for some time now. But it’s interesting to see it come to this side of the pond, with our vast audience reach and consequently greater budget ceilings.
In early eleventh century Japan, Murasaki Shikibu introduced a new medium — the full length novel — which quickly spread through the world. We may just be witnessing something similar taking hold in cinema.