The Power of Film

I mentioned TCM's new six-part spotlight on The Power of Film the other day in conjunction with the first part. Since the DVR is going to record all six parts of it, I figured I'd better sit down and watch the first part before the second part comes on in order to be able to do a post on it.

The first part introduces us to the presenter of the series, UCLA Professor Emeritus Howard Suber, and deals with the question of what makes a movie both popular and memorable. After all, there are a lot of movies out there that were popular back in the day but are relatively little remembered today, or else panned by the critic types. (I'm reminded of The Greatest Show on Earth as something that is looked at with disdain nowadays.)

Unsurprisingly, the focus in the opening episode is disproportionately on more recent movies, since it's always been the case that new things become popular and push out the older things that were once popular as the people who whom those things were new age out. Those of us who are into older movies are a decided minority, and trying to get people interested in older movies outside of a very small group of them isn't easy.

One thing, however, that I haven't seen mentioned so far in what makes movies popular and memorable is the outsized influence of critics and people like Suber himself in the film school vein. The influence it much more noticeable when it comes to foreign films when there's the language barrier. I've argued in the past that it's in no small part to the critics that we get a bunch of arthouse crap as the foreign films that are the memorable ones, while stuff that was domestically popular never makes it to America.

Suber himself falls into this trap, where he denigrates old Hollywood because demographic check-boxes. Not that he puts it that way, of course. But there's another scene where he mentions American materialism and says that you many not have those values, but you have to admit that they're there. The unstated assumption is that those values are bad, and he's one of the goodthinkful people not to have them, either.

Finally, Suber doesn't come across as much more of an expert than any of us blogging about old movies. And I don't mean this to imply that I'm somehow some sort of great expert. I'm more of a glib fan trying to get people interested in old movies. Not that there's anything wrong with being just a fan with a bigger interest in a field. People have to be introduced to areas like classic old movies some way, and there's a reason why there are tentpole movies and fans like us writing very low-traffic blogs. The idea that experts should be blindly followed is a dangerous one, as we've seen multiple times over the past four years.

In short, I'll probably give the second episode a chance, but so far I'm not terribly excited by what I've seen.