Dan Sallitt wrote:

> Is that because
>different people are going to the movies, and for different reasons?
>
>
Here's a highly speculative thesis, and one I'm not especially prepared
to defend, though I've long suspected it has some truth. Starting in the
late 1960s audiences became more self-conscious that they were going to
the cinemah. They became more conscious viewers, more appreciative of
distinctly cinematic flourishes. Even highly commercial films began to
project their "style" -- flashy cutting, nice decor, self-conscious
acting -- in a way that got viewers' attention, because viewers now were
a little bit more demanding than the average viewer of "Red River" or
"All That Heaven Allows." Superficially, this new situation might seem
to encourage creative and "artistic" film directing. But the great
masterpieces of classical Hollywood always worked on two levels: "Red
River" was an "oater," a standard Western that fulfilled naive
entertainment functions, as well as a film about the interrelationship
of landscape to character. On the genre level Hawks or Sirk had to do
certain things, whereas on a sub-rosa level (and in Hawks's case,
perhaps without even being consciously aware of it) they could do
something quite different. And since no one in the studios was really
able to see or understand the "sub-rosa level" (if there were such
people, then perhaps Harry Cohn could have written "The American Cinema"
a decade before Sarris), there were no Harveys who know they understand
"cinema" because they cut their teeth viewing a Truffaut movie telling
Sirk to cut down on the weirdly-positioned flowers at the sides of the
frame, and he had almost total freedom.

But as audiences became more demanding, their demands were not so much
for the profundity of Sirk but for the self-conscious and simpler
stylizations, of, say, "Far From Heaven," to choose a film that I quite
liked. This, paradoxically, encouraged directorial stylists whose
flourishes were more obvious, and in which the two levels are collapsed
into one, one that because it needs to be able to appeal to mass tastes
is almost by definition less profound. Hence we got more "style" but
less real art. This is a shift that may have helped Tarantino, but it
sure hurt Monte Hellman.

- Fred C.