MINOR MOVING IMAGES
Brief notes on an obsession by Charles Everett Elmore II
A "Major Motion Picture", as defined, means any film which is financed or distributed by a motion picture studio or distributor, at least according to lawinsider.com.
"A Major Motion Picture Event" is how films were often advertised during the flurry of trailers that flickered across shopping mall movie screens, drive-ins of my adolescence of the mid 80s and 1990s through the eventual corporatization and big boxification of movie going in the later half of the 90s on into the 2000s.
If you were going to be talking about a movie that fall when school started again, you made it a point to make it to the "movie event of the summer", lest you be caught with your proverbial movie pants down when everyone else laughs about the thing the guard does to Linda Hamilton in T2 and you look like a cheap dupe. If you didn’t want to seem like some simpleton at the Tupperware party, you know the idiot who thought problem child 2 was great, you’d better have seen Neil Jordan’s Crying Game before the second week of its theatrical run.
I was sat in front of a screen with a variation of a channel switcher at an early age. Practically at birth though not quite. While not my "first", an early "first movie" memory is watching the opening minutes of "A Nightmare On Elm Street" at the age of 5 (circa 1985) while no doubt at a party my mother, still barely in her 20s, dragged me along to. I made it to Nancy in the hallway in the bodybag and well I haven't been able to turn a terrified eye away from a flickering screen since. A universal baby sitter for many of my generation, the ubiquity and affordability of cable TV in the early 90s made for a (mostly) 24/7 media buffet for this unattended latchkey kid. Fill in the rest of the bored childhood of a single parent, working poor household with weekends in multiplexes, peak MTV and prime 90s comic books and my career choices seemed inevitable although in my case growing up in Claremore, Oklahoma especially narrow.
With what little my father was able to scratch together to send me to the only school we could afford I set off to learn a skill that could perhaps put me professionally and creatively in the arena where all this magic that I'd been captivated by all my life - an 18 month AA degree in Media Production at a tech school for art nerds called The Art Institute of Seattle. I’m sure in my fathers eyes all those hours watching anime on Sci-fi, 5 for $5 fridays at popcorn video or VH1s docs that rock weekend marathons instead of reading or excelling in athletics and academics like my classmates would be worth it. I fell in love with the craft as much as I fell in love with the language of the medium. I grew up with everything from Fern Gully to where the red fern grows, from Millers Crossing to A Clockwork Orange, been to all the cinematic wars and even brought the war home with John Rambo but it took college to expose me to Kurosawa, Bergman, Maya Daren, Un Chien Andalou and so much more. 99 was a titanic year for movies and being a lonely kid from a small town in Oklahoma going to school alone in Seattle and to sooth my isolation I occupied the scalloped environs of the cineplex odeon, the pacific place general cinema. I saw Pi at the broadway ave cinema. I remember seeing the trailer to Magnolia before Kevin Smith’s catholic scat comedy Dogma at the Uptown Theater and thinking about nothing else but those whip pans for the rest of the day. If it weren't for Harbor Video on 3rd and Lenora in Seattle, around the corner from my apartment, I never would've discovered Noah Baumbach, Wes Anderson, Lynn Ramsey, Godard, Truffaut! If David Satlin my film theory professor hadn't declared in class, spring '99, that Verhoeven's Showgirls, still camp at the time, would eventually be heralded as a masterpiece of capital C cinema or that films have a language and grammar and often times are saying lots of things at once I might never have seen this medium beyond anything more than just some pop trifle to be consumed, judged and ultimately discarded in slavish anticipation of the next impermanent bauble of gratification.
Wether it was the cafeteria before 1st period or after the thursday-midnight screening, the conversation revolving around the film both leading up to and after was as much a primary part of the movie experience as watching it. Now it seems the conversation around these major motion pictures, these sources of magical inspiration and entertainment, the dialog that this medium that speaks no language yet speaks to all and gives a language to those who find it hard to speak seems to be ever increasingly turning into minor moving images. Where all we offer in commentary are cursory and fleeting observations, snark or bon motts on the misfires or ambitious failures. Like faded photos in our parents house we no longer revere these works in the same honor they seemed to have once held decades past.
Now in 2022, as the year comes to a close, many critics, bloggers, film twitter, the purists, all of them are clutching their pearls, wringing hands and waving handkerchiefs with a case of the vapors at the tenuous precipice that cinema finds itself in the current zeitgeist. Now some 135 years since the first sequential image of an object in motion (see this years NOPE from Jordan Peele for that cinematic nod to our mediums history) it seems MOVIES, and movie going itself, are at a fraught crossroads of relevance in our society. While the film twitter phalanx exchange opprobrium about Marvel this and Sight and Sound that the capitalist everywhere are figuring out how to turn this art-form into yet another consumer deliverable good that can be tailored direct to consumer (in this case the extreme viewpoint consumer; think hallmark movie or more dour and extreme, in the case of my home states industry, the hallmark movie for the hobby lobby crowd)
Film is such a special form of human expression in that it has the most universality in speaking to us as a race of beings. It is the lingua franca for when we are incapable of deciphering foreign tongues or voices. Much like the experience of human interaction itself, seeing a panoply of films from a tapestry of regions and cultures and storytellers can broaden the spectrum of your empathy. These empathy machines, as Roger Ebert coined them, have not only been there to entertain and anesthetize us to an extent but also to hold a mirror to ourselves. A reflecting mosaic holding ourselves accountable to history, to our community, to our culture through the same storytelling tradition as the pre-industrial oral storytellers and culture keepers. To diminish this art-form and how we view it in our culture to such minor and insignificant relevance in our culture would be analogous to letting a language - and the understanding of it - die out forever in favor of turning it into just another commodity to be profited off of. You know like it’s always been.
when I was at peak watching age, movies - and movie going itself - were always as much socially driven as they were driven by any force of marketing. You'd see a movie people were talking about as much as you'd see the movies the TV, radio or newspapers dedicated the most advertising ink or airwaves to. This has all certainly changed since the advent of streaming, and while streaming predates COVID, the 2020 pandemic will certainly go hand and glove with the historical significance of this era in movie going and movie watching, not to mention and probably more significantly, the impact on the the movie making side of the artform.
So at this perilous crossroads of the medium and the form’s manufacturing it is honestly an exciting and thrilling time while equally a bit disheartening. This is the time where, what does Miles Bron call them, the disrupters can come in and inject new life into this language, bring new stories through this medium to life, new myths given the cinematic treatment to edify and enlighten us, because films while always a portal into the current moment while also a reflection into the past are more often oracles of where we can be headed as a society and race. Like all art it can be a Molotov cocktail in the hands of the put upon, the abused, the marginalized, the obscure, the foreign, the beautiful, the necessary.
This art form matters too much to let it be discarded to the 5 dollar bin of human history and consumer culture. Where “new blood” can bring a new life to the form. Maybe we can bring them back to being major motion picture events.
It’s why I chose the name Minor Moving Images. In my adulthood, now 20 on years in a profession I honestly never thought I’d make it in let alone get to write thoughtful and impassioned criticism on, this artform matters more now to me than ever and my hope here at this outlet is to post observations on the artform, hot takes of current offerings, some thoughts on the medium’s history and occasionally maybe stories or anecdotes from my experience working on various film and television projects that I’ve been fortunate to work on and the artists and colleagues I get to work alongside.
- CEE II, 27 12 2022