Decades in Film

In the comments section of the post I linked to in my last post, there's an interesting debate raging about when exactly the 00s started. There are those that hold the common sense view that the 00s started January 1, 2000. Then there are the wiseasses that point out that because there was no Year Zero, the 00s didn't start until January 1, 2001. (No one likes a math geek, Scully). More interesting is the position that the 00s didn't start until September 11. The reasoning being that it was a defining moment that split history into a before and an after. I do subscribe to this view somewhat, but only in the political realm. There's no reason September 11 should have the same impact culturally, especially since movies and TV have barely felt the change. I can only think of one movie or TV show that has even touched the cultural impact of 9/11, and that's Rescue Me, the show about New York firefighters.

When I think about the defining sensibility of film in the 00s, it's probably the blurring of the lines between mainstream and indie. It's the decade where Miramax stopped being independent and became "independent". How can you be an independent studio and throw tens of millions of dollars into fancy, big production, famously cast, Oscar bait year after year. But mainstream studios, like Warner Bros. or Paramount are making small movies with the independent sensibility, like Wonder Boys or Million Dollar Baby. Another trend in filmmaking is the honing of visual-effects techniques to make them a seamless part of the storytelling. Someone once wrote to Roger Ebert that visual effects were to modern movies what song and dance numbers were to movies of the Golden Age. This has become less and less the case in the 00s, with movies like The Lord of the Rings, where digital effects are so pervasive that they cease to become surprising and new. Nowadays, the only limit on filmmaker's ability to give life to his or her imagination is not available technology, but a studio willing to put up the money. Both of these trends really started to take shape in 1999; the former with films like Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, American Beauty, and Three Kings, and the latter with The Matrix. So really the 00s began in 1999.

This is not so unusual. I'd say it's pretty rare for film decades to conform to their actual dates on the calendar. The first "decade" of film lasted from 1896, when the medium was invented, to 1915, when The Birth of a Nation, the first feature-length film to nail down the grammar of editing, cinematography and the rest of motion picture storytelling. The '20s of film lasted from Birth of a Nation to The Jazz Singer, the first sound film. The thirties lasted from The Jazz Singer to Citizen Kane. The fifties probably began with A Streetcar Named Desire, when Kazan and Brando brought The Method to film. The sixties are tricky to pin down; I'd guess that they began in 1960 itself, when Psycho and The Apartment signalled a more frank, mature handling of difficult subject matter. The 70s started with Easy Rider (and an assist from 2001). The funny thing about the eighties is that they started before the seventies ended, with Star Wars and the beginning of the end of the age of the Director. While Raging Bull is often cited as the last movie with a 70s sensibility, it's more like it's the last good movie, with the legendary flop Heaven's Gate as the Film that Killed the 70s. The 90s started in 1989 when sex, lies, and videotape and Do the Right Thing kicked off the indie revolution. Which bring us right back to the 00s.