(Travis here.) This is a response to Pope Leo’s recent rhapsodizing comments on cinema, made to an invited assembly of film stars at the Vatican. It was quoted in a post on the Substack by the filmmakers of the documentary The Last Class.
This is not a comment on the film The Last Class itself, which I haven’t seen. Nor is it a comment on the filmmakers’ posting of the pope’s comments, which they reprint in the post linked here, and which is meant to highlight the inspirational nature of the pope’s words. If you read the comments, you’ll see that this was successful, so, great.
However, an alternate viewpoint is appropriate.
The tricky thing about cinema is: it is inextricably bound to money. More so than painting, writing, theater, or any art form that came before it, making cinema simply requires a large amount of essential tools that cost money, including: cameras, film, computers, sound equipment, projectors, real estate, electricity, climate control, and (ideally!) pay and food for actors and crew members. In cinema, if there isn’t money to pay for most or all of these things, a project won’t get made. I think it’s fair to say that money is the main reason a film that doesn’t get made, doesn’t.
If there is widespread concern about a lack of quality in cinema, as alluded to by the pope, it’s because films of truth are not getting made. Other kinds of films are getting made instead, whose focus isn’t Art or Truth, but something else: entertainment, propaganda, or any number of other things. Filmmakers have good ideas; artists everywhere always have good ideas. But there are fewer and fewer ways to get films of truth made, then get them seen by audiences, thus making the whole enterprise worthwhile. That is to say, the sources of money that fund cinema aren’t supporting films of truth, by which I primarily mean Hollywood studios, Netflix and major streamer-funders, granting organizations, private funders, the government, etc. And money is required.
Instead, they’re funding capitalist projects, because they are capitalists, and the film industry itself was conceived as a capitalist project. When films of truth are getting made, they often aren’t reaching audiences enough to justify supporting the film industry, from creators to specialized laborers to movie theaters, which, as the physical location where a film is watched, are an essential piece of the cinematic experience, but which, due in part to the Paramount decision, are on their own when it comes to figuring out how to keep the doors open.
From the American perspective, funding for arts organizations exists without any safety net, and our arts nonprofit ecosystem seems to be breaking down. There are many reasons for this, but there’s a lie to the entire system: the funding side is entirely voluntary. In return for donating to nonprofit arts organizations, you get a tax writeoff and perks, but more and more entities are acknowledging/realizing/deciding there’s no obligation to donate. That obligation belongs, in an increasing number of minds, to someone else. Examining that dynamic, it’s clear that our entire moviemaking system is indeed deeply out of balance, that the big players are serving their own capitalist interests instead of artistic ones, and that there are fewer and fewer midsize or smaller players.
I think of a forest. Increasingly, we have a small number of large trees, with less and less smaller plants and ground cover that supports all the activity that’s not in the canopy. What the pope is saying here is, Aren’t forests nice? We should appreciate forests. Look at these big majestic trees. What he needs to be saying is: here’s what people with money and power need to do to take care of forests, to keep them healthy.
With cinema, the problem is that the solution is money. Someone has to fund independent filmmaking and nonprofit arts presenters like cinemas. Fewer and fewer entities are in a position, either by necessity or by choice, to be that someone.
The pope’s high-flown comments show a profound ignorance of, or interest in, the material realities of cinema. For an independent filmmaker, funding sources are increasingly scarce and often crushingly competitive. For a typical nonprofit movie theater, ticket sales make up less than half of the annual budget. Where the rest of it comes from, there are fewer and fewer options. How are you going to be a light for Art and Truth if you can’t pay a staff, or keep the literal lights on? If you’re an independent filmmaker of truth, how can you pay all those dozens of specialized laborers on a film crew—too many for Pope Leo to even keep track of!—for their work?
In conclusion: people need to get paid. Some should be paid less than they are, and some should be paid more than they are.
To paraphrase Shoshana Zuboff: who decides? Who decides who decides?
Also, the pope quoting D.W. Griffith…I was shocked, actually, because while he was an extremely innovative filmmaker, many readers know that he was a fervent racist—his most famous film, The Birth of a Nation, unabashedly a love song to the Ku Klux Klan, was notorious even in its own time for glorifying racism. Quoting Griffith here is like quoting Hitler on his views on painting: possibly interesting or valid, but it would be tactful to highlight literally anybody else’s opinion instead. As an American, the pope couldn’t have chosen a worse person to represent cinema in this context.
Thanks for reading.
