Hon 3013 Week 2 - Arendt and Benjamin

Mass Culture and Film

As a filmmaker, the first question I ask before starting any project is, "Who is my audience?" Not, "What is the value of this piece?" or, "What does this say about the world I live in?" but, "Who is my audience?" Along every step of the creative process, from conceptualization to finishing the final cuts in editing, consumption of the product is at the forefront of my mind.

This is not to say that I don't consider the other questions, But the nature of the film business in its current state, and really the nature of every entertainment industry, has so conditioned its producers to think of consumption first, content second.

As I read Arendt's essay, Society and Culture, this was all I could think about. While mass society has blurred the class distinctions and afforded someone like myself the opportunity to pursue a career in the arts, it has also brought into question the role and intentions of arts themselves.

While this is only a portion of what Arendt discusses, it is the topic that struck me the most. In particular, I felt the following paragraph on pg. 283 was noteworthy: "The entertainment industry is confronted with gargantuan appetites, and since its wares disappear in consumption, it must constantly offer new commodities. In this predicament, those who produce for the mass media ransack the entire range of past and present culture in the hope of finding suitable material. This material, however, cannot be offered as it is; it must be prepared and altered in order to become entertaining; it cannot be consumed as is."

Even though it was written in the 1960s, the message perfectly describes the current state of the film industry. Film is but a facet of culture, yet the audiences are just as hungry as the audiences of literature, music, photography, art, etc. As mass society grows so does the hunger for more, more, more mass culture. New films are kept in theaters for mere weeks instead of months as they were in the past, and the turnaround between theatrical and home release has shrunk to nearly nothing.

From this constant desire for more, the film industry has turned to the second part of Arendt's quote. It seems the vast majority of films released these days are remakes or reboots, each reimagined in some way to repackage the same product to resell to the same customers.

The truly visionary filmmakers, those that put content and meaning before consumption, find there is scarcely room for their work in the mainstream system. Their films, if they can find investors willing to fund and distributors willing to release a less consumable product, are relegated to art house theaters and limited audiences.

But perhaps this is not a bad thing. While the place of the producer, the intellectual, as Arendt states, may be one where the "sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to make them palatable to those who want to be entertained...," there are still those that make art for arts sake.

So while culture may have dubbed the Michael Bays and McGs of the world "intellectuals," there is still room for inspiring and fresh material. Society transforming into mass society, in turn transforming culture into mass culture, has made the intellectual more of an intellectual of, and maybe just as importantly, for the proletariat.

edit: Published before discussing Benjamin. His essay was written in 1934, a time in which film was just beginning to reach its potential as an art form and vehicle of culture. While he does not discuss film in depth the way he does literature or theater, a point he makes about good intellectuals in literature applies to film as well.

He states that for a medium to flourish and remain relevant to a culture, it must constantly redefine itself, building upon the successes and improving upon the failures of past work. He exemplifies this by comparing opera and epic theater. Opera, he wrote, had done little in the way of evolving, and was becoming stale in culture. Epic theater, on the other hand, imported techniques from film and radio to give the viewer an entirely new experience, one that kept it important to culture.

A similar trend is currently presenting itself in film. The revitalization of 3D has taken over almost every current release. In some cases, 3D (specifically every film converted to 3D in post-production) is just another means of making the product more consumable. In others (films shot and designed around 3D, such as Avatar or Tron: Legacy), 3D is being employed as a tool to further the experience.

While 3D has yet to really be properly explored as the next step in filmmaking, the possibilities exist, and it may bring new relevance to a media mired in the drive for consumption.