From an artistic perspective, the past decade in movies is the decade of mumblecore. The movement of intimately scaled, often improvised, low-budget dramas and comedies that pull their actors from the lives and milieux of filmmakers who build stories around their personal experiences has become the energy-giving core of the American cinema. All decade long, aside from the reliably surprising masterworks by established filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Frederick Wiseman, and Paul Thomas Anderson, there has been a profusion of daring films by younger filmmakers who are part of the mumblecore constellation, as well as a bunch of actors (and cinematographers and other artists) who emerged from those films.
The mumblecore generation has now entered, and in many ways transformed, the true mainstream of movies: Greta Gerwig, Terence Nance, Josephine Decker, Andrew Bujalski, Amy Seimetz, Barry Jenkins, Joe Swanberg, Lena Dunham, Adam Driver, Sophia Takal, Nathan Silver, Shane Carruth, David Lowery, Kate Lyn Sheil, Alex Ross Perry, Kentucker Audley, Lynn Shelton, Robert Greene, Ronald Bronstein, and the Safdie brothers, to name just a few. I could nearly have filled my decade list with their films—but, in the interest of spreading (and acknowledging) the love, I included only a few exemplary ones.
Of course, what’s overarchingly important in this decade in movies reaches far beyond the movies themselves. Most crucially, this has been the decade of the public acknowledgment—with the activism and advocacy of the #MeToo, Time’s Up, Black Lives Matter, and #OscarsSoWhite movements, along with the accusations against Harvey Weinstein and many other men in the media—of the rotting foundation on which the film industry and society at large are built. The misrepresentations, whitewashings, banalizations, and exclusions that have sustained the Hollywood system have begun to come to light, and there have even been consequences for some of the perpetrators.
The response of the movie industry to this heroic and pain-filled activism has been not even quarter-assed. The Academy has taken much bruited yet minor steps to diversify its membership (which still named the white-savior movie “Green Book” Best Picture). Reboots of mediocre so-called classics get made with women in the leading roles and, often under men’s direction and studio supervision, improve the rancid source material incrementally. Superhero productions feature three women striding silently into battle rather than none, and reliably include actors of color in roles of ahistorical and impersonal substance. There are the noteworthy exceptions, such as “Black Panther,” which, as good as it is, remains the one film that the system’s defenders trot out as its justification.
Yet this decade has also seen, in surprising ways, the convergence of these two currents of activism and aesthetics in ways that I hope will continue in the next decade and beyond. Many of the substantial changes in the industry have come from the new generation of filmmakers—yes, mumblecore. Its creators put into bold artistic action the fundamental premise that promises to turn minor shifts in the industry into a sea change: namely, the idea that the personal experience of filmmakers and a film’s participants is inseparable from the film’s process, its subject, its contents, and its style. (The idea is at work in documentaries, too.) The necessity, the urgency, of diversifying the ranks of directors is inseparable from the diversification of the spectrum of experience—and of artistic inspiration—that the cinema can offer. The first-person accounts, the daringly original artistry, and the self-aware and group-oriented activities of these filmmakers have opened the cinema to far more varied voices and ideas.
The rise of this generation of filmmakers has coincided with the rise of independent production, which has taken the place of studios for director-driven movies. At the same time, this shift hasn’t helped many independent filmmakers from earlier years whose artistry is among the treasures of their times and whom the industry has nonetheless ignored. This decade was also the decade in which Julie Dash, Wendell B. Harris, Jr., Rachel Amodeo, Leslie Harris, Zeinabu irene Davis, and Billy Woodberry still didn’t make their second features. Spike Lee long found himself shut out even of independent financing, using his own money for “Red Hook Summer” and then turning to Kickstarter before being, um, reëstablished, at a time when he was already long established and his projects should have been prime productions.
Nonetheless, independent productions, including both new filmmakers and the generations of veterans, have, for the most part, proved to be liberating for filmmakers, and that system is one of the reasons why American filmmaking has been so artistically innovative all decade long—even if much of that filmmaking has been an economic sidebar to Hollywood product.
The decade of independent filmmaking not coincidentally parallels the decade of the Marvel juggernaut, which began in 2008, with “Iron Man,” and soon thereafter came to dominate the box office, the release calendar, and multiplex screens—three factors that are askew to the art of movies. What renders the Marvel trend significant is that it has come to command the so-called discourse and has marked the careers of directors and actors. Superhero movies themselves may offer a modicum of pleasure, and, on rare occasion, even more. Some of them feature delightful effects, moments of symbolic resonance, playful humor, and even a few striking performances that mesh well with the stark (or, rather, Stark) writing. These pleasures—yes, authentically cinematic—are, however, secondary to the over-all tone that these movies convey: highly managed production to the point of inhumanity. The superhero movies seldom transmit more than a glimmer of personal sensibility, and almost never do so through the essence of movies: images and sounds. The green screen and the computer graphics take precedence. That’s why many directors of less-than-distinctive visual sensibility get hired by Marvel to make superhero movies; they basically direct actors, while the “visuals” are farmed out to technicians and specialists. That’s also why the Marvel movies are, over all, deadening.
Many critics bemoan another of the decade’s trends, a related one: because the studios have turned to superheroes, children’s movies, franchises, and assorted other bombastic spectacles, they’ve stopped making (or, actually, drastically cut back on) so-called mid-range dramas for adults. I find the complaint misplaced: there are plenty of good and substantial movies being made, not often by the studios but, rather, by independent producers, and also by streaming services. Meanwhile, that category’s place in the mainstream has been taken over by serious-minded television series—and, with only a handful of exceptions, they’re basically the same thing: script-delivery systems, minus discernible directorial originality or inventiveness. When studios were the only game in town, directors went to them hat in hand, knowing that, with large budgets at stake, their films had to be commercial. Most of the best ones weren’t (one timely example: Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” from 1983, cost nineteen million dollars to make and took in two and a half million dollars at the box office), and, as a result, the best directors’ careers were imperilled, often stalled, even completely shut down.
Now such ambitious movies of substance are rarely being made by studios but by independent producers, and they’re not being made on a mid-range budget but on low budgets. In exchange, directors are freer than ever to make movies without the distortions and the trivializations that the heavy hands of studio executives imposed. Filmmakers themselves, and their personal visions, are what’s being sold by these independent producers, and, as a result, they can make movies as they see fit—which is why there are many more American movies on the decade list than I expected going into it.
