By DAVID DENBY | THE NEW YORKER
The great directors—Griffith, Chaplin, Renoir, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, De Sica, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Bergman, Scorsese, and the others—did not imagine that they were making films for a tiny audience; they thought that they were making films for everyone, or at least everyone of spirit, which is a lot of people. But, over the past thirty years, the movies have split, increasingly, into mass and class. The conglomerates, through marketing and maximum use of cable, DVDs, and other ancillary markets, have perfected the task of catering to the ever-emerging young audience—the audience they want to sell to—while older people have been cordoned into the fall season, to wander aimlessly the rest of the year like downsized workers; or they have decided simply to look at movies at home. To put it crudely (and I admit there are many exceptions), we now have a spectacular mall cinema that favors sensation over emotion, and a small, intense art cinema, for the remaining art houses (and, more recently, cable and the Internet), centered on intimate relations and difficult, crabby, even painful themes. As for myself, I’m still trying to bridge the gap, looking for art that speaks to a sizable audience, the dream community of our national theatre....
