From Classics to Computers
Who killed cinema?
It's a common question among Classic Film fans, those who grew up on a steady diet of the best the medium had to offer - Hollywood product from the '30s and 40's, the Actors' Studio-spawned realism of the 50's, the Baby Boomer auteurism of the disco era - only to see it appropriated by a generation in love with skateboarding, comic books and computer games.
The Suspects
The usual suspects in this quest for accountability include George Lucas and Steven Spielberg - who, by recycling the accelerated thrills afforded by the cheapie serials of their youth, created a model for record grosses - and the anonymous nerds behind such creations as Super Mario, Sonic Hedgehog and Laura Croft, for crafting a form of hero tranferable to the big screen without the additon of mature psychological dimension.
Ian Fleming
The correct answer, however, may be the name of a man born one hundred years ago today, an upper-class Englishman who, as a middle-aged lark, sat down at a typewriter: Ian Fleming.
Movie as Movie
As famed French filmmaker Francois Truffaut once pointed out, cinema changed irreparably with the appearance of Fleming's famous super spy, James Bond. The Bond films were, Truffaut argued, big budget Brechtian exercises; films which, for the first time, made audiences aware that they were indeed experiencing something outside of themselves. Hitherto, the trick had been to draw viewers in, to fuse their identifies with those of the characters undergoing the emotional arc unfurling on the screen. The Bond films, on the other hand, cultivated a self-conscious distance. They made the audience aware of movie as movie. Thus - though Truffaut didn't live long enough to measure the full effect - they set the precedent for today's massive, manipulative movies.
Cheeky Adventure
This is not to say that the Bond films, like the works of Lucas or Spielberg, shouldn't be taken on their own merit. By awarding the film rights of his novels to producers Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman, Fleming unleashed a string of stylish, cheeky adventure films whose playful sexism, smarmy gallows humor, and grizzly gallantry are just as giddily enjoyable today as they were in the sixties ( even, yes, with the outmoded gadgetry.)
Bodies
The Bond films have proven the single most successful series in movie history. Small wonder that the tide is showing no signs of being stemmed (a new Bond novel, the 20th since Fleming's demise, has just been released. Think they'll make a movie?)
Bodies, most fliply killed, will continue to pile up. What would one find at the bottom? Cinema?
