I talked the other day about the way that old movies look “different” to us – not so much because of lighting and fillm stock, but because the very posture of the actors is informed by a different sensibility.
But what about the other way? Would a movie of today make any sense to an audience of the 1930s? Or have we all collectively been evolving in our shared understanding of the language of film to the point where we are now in a fundamentally different place?
For example, would an audience used to “It Happened One Night” or “A Day at the Races” be able to understand “Momento” or even “Die Hard”. Coud they make sense of the layers of post-modern irony, the unreliable narrator, the rapid shifts in viewpoint informed by years of music videos?
And are there landmark films that we can point to which added to this shift in vocabulary, films that, in particular, educated either audiences or filmmakers (who then went on to educate audiences). Obvious candidates would be “Citizen Kane” or “Bonnie and Clyde”. But even George Roy Hill’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” arguably changed the way everybody looked at movies – the particular mix of reality and fantasy that is acceptable, and how we blend these together in our heads to accept the peculiar thing that is happening up there on the screen.
Would “Butch Cassidy” seem completely crazy to a Depression era audience? And how could we ever know?
Landmark films? I’d have to point to the flicker films done by Paul Sharits and others. They may look psychedelic but they definitely had an impact on the shift to MTV-style short cuts.
Check out the flux films (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=paul+sharits&aq=f).
Seem artsy, but they were really quite authentically(naively?) searching for a cinema defined as a direct emotional experience as opposed to a narrative structure.
I reckon if they could follow the narrative gymnastics of Joyce or Proust they could understand it given time. Overall, cinematic language hasn’t changed all that much in the last 70 years. Chaplin’s films are as modern as ever!