Snob Cinema and how to survive from this

Sentences cut off of the colossal work by Friedrich Nietzsche have always been a highly convertible cultural currency, but many times their use is over-used as a free malt whiskey at an official reception. One of these Nietzsche quotes, however, fits like a silk glove on my adventure in the dark world of film snaps: "if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

The hubbub of supreme cinema "claiming" includes many gray conformists, obsessed with the idea of ​​innate superiority of their own preferences and film appetites, and I was dangerously close to becoming one of the subordinate representatives of this caste.

The Sect of the snobies drew my attention at the dawn of my smooth evolution from a connoisseur of explosions, stunts, monsters, epic fittings, and heroic stories to admire deep psychological portraits, philosophical insights and works wide open to viewing interpretation.

The military action games withdrew from my menu and gradually gave way to the military dramas, but they gave way to the social dramas, which in turn were replaced by existential dramas. Physical monster films have changed with works of psychological and moral monsters. Michael Bay has gone, Kim Ki-duk comes.

Nicole Kidman in "Dogville" by Lars von Trier

My fullness arrived on the experimental wings of the evil provocateur Lars von Trier and his crude and subversive opus magnum "Dogville". I dived into the deep ocean of art, but I still did not have the most precise orientation and navigation tools in this new and rich world.

The brothers Darden, Takeshi Kitano emerged on the horizon as the new filmmakers. The avant-garde cinema consumes my attention, my interest dramatically changes my trajectory. In the process, I met an extensive collection of people who thought in the same way about the seventh of the art, liked the same "non-standard", "non-commercial" writers, and had identical hostility to the studio, "staging" cinema.

At that time, I was trying to reconcile my attractiveness to stylized performances with the emerging passion for "meaningful" films that "say something" and have a "mission". Such code words filled the dictionaries of my new snobbish environs. At first I thought these people were right for many things, and the narcissistic self-centered in me especially liked their insistence that their taste was not just different from plebis, but better, superior and, in fact, the only one right. This totalitarian approach to cinema, paradoxically coupled with the post-modern insistence but Jacques Derrida, that "everything is an interpretation" sowed the seed of the snooze in my mind. That's how my unfortunate identification begins with the "layman of the enlightened."

I still did not want to emancipate myself from the first and most important major directors who were the leading incentive to sophisticate my film quests before I crossed the threshold of pretense - Kubrick, Spielberg, De Palma, the Cohen brothers, Scorsese, even Zemeckis .

Alas, I met particularly strong and sharp resistance against these tyrannazures of quality cinema in the midst of the snows. They thought Spielberg was a staunch capitalist surgeon who waved the American flag of cadence in each of his opus, and De Palma was packaged as a hollow Hitchcock imitator. Not even Hitch himself was at a sufficient height in the circles of the "enlightened and progressive" art poets.

"Two days one night" by Dardenne brothers

They packed the Cohen brothers as overestimated and replaced them with the Darden brothers. Scorsese was ignored as a writer for prostitute and mute movies, I was given serial tips to stop admiring "The Goodfellas" and focusing on Wenders' essays and films.

Only the great Kubrick was still highly valued in the world of professionally pretentious self-made "alternative" cinema connoisseurs. Eventually, even the broken clock would show the right time twice a day, and the denial of "A Clockwork Orange", "Dr. Strangelove", or "The Shining"would be too ferocious and unforgivable act of transgression even for those " smart and beautiful "art guards.

For a few months of filmmaking, my aesthetic appetites began to mutate. I felt bad about Spielberg and the Jurassic Park sacred for my childhood, I realized I had been involved in conversations whose sole purpose was to lower the meaning of John Carpenter or David Cronenberg. I was hearing some of the most sterile clichés of the snake sect, such as the "early Tarantino" or "Woody Allen, who has been filming the same annoying film for 10 years."

At some point in a heavy cultural hangover, I began to realize that I had overcome the home-made brandy of local art snobs. It was time to go back to the malt elixirs of my true and organic film maturation - Scorsese, Cohen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson ... Reason began to return with the first "The Goodfellas" watching for at least a year. "Casino" will always be a better quality piece of cinema than anything Wim Wenders ever did. And he has done some solid and worthwhile things, indeed. But the Darden brothers are still full amateurs before Joel and Ethan Cohen. We can not even talk about a comparison.

Not every film by Wong Carvai, Bella Tar, Ken Loach, or Kim Ki-Duk is a magnificent visual revelation, and Jackson's King Kong remains a glamorous adventure action. Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" is a more grandiose and graceful example of a cutting-edge artistic imagination of 99.99 percent of the average festival offerings.

Without a drop of guilt, I triumphantly returned to the land of magnificent cinema, and with a blend of mockery and anger I remembered one of the snacks that they considered "Jurassic Park" to be garbage. Both the book and the movie. Ah, what a tragicomic figure, what an embodiment of the farce!

And thinking that I could sink into the sands of the claim for a while. But I, like Henry Hill, in "The Goodfellas" survived to testify about the crimes of an organized group of crooks.