Walking up Charles St. after a revival inevitably leads to a vaguely cliched “They don’t make ‘em like they used to” statement that turns to a “They can’t make ‘em like they used to” conversation. There’s any number of reasons a film like John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941) couldn’t be made anymore: taste, trends, or simple technical innovations that necessitate different filmmaking practices. The meat of it, though, the storytelling, the mise en scene, the humanity, seem like a timeless sentimentality that theoretically could materialize at any point by any artist—yet they don’t.
There’s first the material reasons that seem circumstantial, but do inform Ford’s approach to directing. There’s a classic anecdote about a shot sequence in How Green, where Maureen O’Hara walks down the church steps, veil billowing in the wind, with the man she doesn’t love. As they drive off in the wedding car, the man whom she does love appears in tragic silhouette on the hill in the background, before walking out of frame too. Someone asked Ford if they’d like to grab a close-up of Walter Pidgeon as he’s standing on the hill. “Jesus, no. They’ll just use it,” Ford responded. Part of what made Ford such an exceptional filmmaker is knowing what he wanted and not wasting time. He was part of the Fordist machine of cinema that earned the movie business the title of “industry.” That industry also doesn’t exist anymore.
Being interviewed for the Belgian film journal Sabzian, Portuguese director Pedro Costa makes the observation that “[Film] is not an industry, it was an industry, in Hollywood, in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s—and then it was over. Now it exists here and there, a little bit, but they are groceries, run by grocers.” It’s true, and the slow dissolution of Hollywood's vertical integration, star system, and a studio-dominant market that was subverted by the arrival of Easy Rider (1969) and “independent” films rose to prominence, all were pointers to the factory shutting its doors for good. While today’s Hollywood is one of the last bastions of the old world of union labor in the US, it's a diffuse world of contractors rather than home to a bunch of specific shops—Warner Bros doesn’t have their proprietary set of actors, directors, writers, and editors under contract anymore, they hire people case-by-case. There’s plenty of oppression in the old system, but the massiveness of its machine did allow plenty of art to slip through the cracks. It’s not unlike how ostensibly the Soviet Union had a repressive system of censorship, yet its machinations enabled droves of artistic masterpieces to be made and funded by the state (see Andrei Konchalovsky’s comparison between working as a director in the USSR vs US).
All the great old Hollywood filmmakers worked around the conveyer belt that afforded them little control over their pre- or post-production processes: Howard Hawks often ran his dialogue sequences in group shots, Curtiz told editors where the important moments would be by emphasizing them with dollies, and Ford simply didn’t give studios any material he wouldn’t want ruining the moment. Their film-form was informed by the amount of control they had over their whole film. It’s not until after these directors’ styles were made obsolete by the assembly lines they used to crank out multiple films a year on shut down that things like directors fighting tooth and nail for “final cut” over the wholistic product became a big talking point in Hollywood. Directors from the film school generation are fundamentally different than the artistic workhorses that came before them—French critics did well to make “auteur” a proper artist in the states, but they also were fighting in a fundamentally different film world than the ones their heroes used to be able to make three masterpieces a year in.
In a way, the collapse of old Hollywood and its replacement by multinational corporations treating cinema like a piece of a portfolio acted as a precursor to the way Reaganism would gut American industry out of contempt for worker power and replace it with the solidification of investment capital, an economic paradigm shift that’s led to the non-real world of venture and crypto that’s turned the American market into a massive Ponzi scheme. Film is more a victim of the “censorship of money” (as Konchalovsky calls it) than ever before, and it bled into aesthetics themselves.
With a room full of product-oriented executive producers calling the shots, everything in cinema gets homogenized into proven, focus-driven content. Anything that raises an eyebrow, anything that’s original, gets coded out like what engineers have to do to an AI program if it has something that could appear as an original, unexpected thought: it’s an error. It’s a part of why AI products could never make art, and also why our art “industries” are producing what looks more and more like AI every day. The more immediate, clear, and quick an image is the better, it’ll make it run nicer on social media.
Film, television, or any other kind of moving-image “content” has started to coalesce into similar set of images of actors in reverse shots with different backgrounds thrown on to give the illusion of difference in location, setting, or mood. Digital technology has advanced in a way that was to open the doors of creativity and instead led to studios printing out the laziest-looking films like a movie camera was a copy machine for making counterfeit bills. Look no further than Industrial Light and Magic, which was founded with the intention of creating brand new kinds of special effects for Star Wars (1977), and whose more recent, groundbreaking LED backdrop StageCraft has turned the production of every forgettable Disney+ series looking like they dropped someone in a Party City costume in front of the most well-lit, boring-looking matte painting imaginable. People used to complain about George Lucas directing everything in the Star Wars prequels from blue-screened backlots, but at least his images had depth. It’s not the that this technology has to be used this way, either: just look at the dynamics Steven Spielberg achieved using StageCraft for The Fabelmans (2022).
Back in 1923, the Soviet filmmaker-theorist Dziga Vertov was complaining about his contemporary cinema being “a mere literary skeleton covered with a film-skin.” Now we can swap out those film-skins with a click of a mouse. There’s a crisis of mise en scene that has come from this consolidating of production into the simplest form of assembly line, wherein even the placement of actors is just dragging and dropping them in the middle of a frame. What was a technology designed for unlimited imagination has been harnessed for the flattest, most useless, and infinitely repeated images of people standing on an empty stage with the possibility being which film-skin to put on today, whether that’s a desert planet, water planet, or forest planet. Cinema has regressed back into its womb of cheap stages with plain lighting, favoring efficiency of shooting and attempting narrative clarity with no apparent understanding of the hundred-some-odd years of theory that have developed the medium into its own artform.
John Ford probably wouldn’t have survived as an artist in the landscape of MCU movies the way he was able to making studio westerns. His “They’ll just use it” attitude wouldn’t have gotten him far when already-shot images of an actor could be inserted straight into a shot and digitally dressed up to fit the scene in question. Soon, this will become possible just using 3D scans, and even the physical actor will become obsolete with their costumes generated by overworked animators and their voices replaced by AI approximations. This doesn’t seem to bother mass audiences however, which have become even more passive participants now than ever before. Their films are made up of recognizable signifiers like “Iron Man” or “ghost buster” rather than complex emotions or the ineffability of life or the poetics of an image that sticks with you but you can’t explain why. Cinema as an art form, or even an industrial form, has been replaced by basic advertising, and increasingly the companies that are pushing that this is the way images should be understood. Perhaps that’s why so many are impressed and fooled by Sora AI demos, the AI is meant to generate the approximation of what it thinks people want in a film image, as pushed by the same sort of tech investors that increasingly have a stake in real film production.
AI images, however, with their 2D approximations of what it thinks what three dimensions of light (not to mention time) focused-in on a flat emulsion should look like means that AI will never have a mise en scene—it cannot “place within the scene,” there’s no scene within which to place. Not that that matters, as the “scene” has already been de-emphasized by the modes of filmmaking now becoming dominant due to pushing for all of filmmaking to be an advertisement: Marvel movies have to be teasers for the next, Star Wars is a merch sale with 10-episode limited series showing off the products, and Barbie has to be shot a certain way so that the car chase scene can fit into a neat 30-second TV spot showing off the new Chevy Blazer EV. They can’t make a John Ford movie like they used to, because his industry of filmmaking is as dead and buried as he is, replaced by an army of six-figure salaried executive producers looking for the next film-skin to throw on their ads they insist on calling content.