What is the difference between art and entertainment?
Whatever answer you give here, it’s almost certainly going to be subjected to accusations of subjectivity.
The criteria that I use in distinguishing art from entertainment is the idea of art as meaningful, effectual, and participatory.
Now, that is to say we think of entertainment as inherently less-than.
I enjoy a good Three Stooges short.
Yet, where does that land us with defining attributes of entertainment?
Let’s suggest then that entertainment is escapist, neutral, and external.
So where art is meaningful (as in, it conveys more), entertainment is escapist (allowing the viewer to be outside themselves).
Where art is effectual (it catalyzes a change, however temporary, on the viewer), entertainment is neutral (it is intended to convey less).
Where art is participatory (there’s a dialectic or dialogue between the viewer and the art), then entertainment is external (it is not designed to penetrate our psyche).
What criteria still works when trying to be creative?
After all, the art film guys can break all the rules they want and they can still make art - it’s right there in the term “art film.”
The coining of that term strikes me as unfortunate.
Perhaps not all film needs to be art.
And maybe “cinema” is simple enough as a term for what we’d call “artistic film.”
But perhaps these are questions that have to be parsed out to the individual.
As you’ve likely heard by now, Martin Scorsese has made comments about the Marvel Cinematic Universe not being cinema.
He considers it more the film equivalent of a theme park ride.
It’s worth noting though he doesn’t view that as a bad thing, as he points out in a Director’s Roundtable from Variety.
At another point, director Kevin Smith essentially attributes Scorsese’s comments to his generation.
“He's a very serious filmmaker, and he's a man who's of a certain age and stuck in his ways,” Smith said.
Questions of taste are more than a generational matter.
Dismissing a viewpoint because the holder of that viewpoint is “stuck in their ways” is awfully poor criteria.
Scorsese has a rationale though.
He wrote this for the New York Times:
For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.
What if we had these enormous budgets thrown at that sort of cinema?
I can’t help but think these gorgeous mystical landscapes and fascinating concepts that dance across the screen in a movie like Doctor Strange 2 might have the chance to be experienced and participated in.
There were a number of great elements at play: characters had interesting motivation. But they didn’t have resolution. The overstuffed movie doesn’t allow for us to truly feel with the characters.
We’re just feeling a story strung across multiple films.
As soon as we think we have the cliffhanger — Doctor Strange’s third eye — it’s undone by a new cliffhanger when Charlize Theron shows up and whisks him away as he now seems to have gotten a grip on his third eye.
Alas, this is not a film criticism publication.
No, I just talk about these things because we see here a question of narrative.
Why are these movies so contrived?
Why does it feel like the characters are puppets, made to dance on cue?
I’d recommend Filmento’s critique for a more in-depth look.
In the meantime, I think there’s good reason not to dismiss the people who are stuck in their ways.
Allowing other people to tell you their ways - the lives they live, the way they see the world - is the key to our growth as people.
This empathetic regard for the tastes of others cultivates our judgment.
An authority deserves the role of making these distinctions.
But as he closes his article, he notes his remorse:
For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.
The fact that the current set up — the current situation — is inhospitable to art tells me one important thing: I’m going to create my own situation.
Someone needs to blaze a trail.
And if no one beats me to it, I will.