The Ten Commandments is an old movie. Persona is not an old movie. Guernica is not an old painting. The Ten Commandments is an old movie. It doesn't reach beyond its time period because it doesn't take an artistic stance. It's just entertainment served to its contemporaries, so it never transcends them, it just stays old. In fact it dies with them. Future generations can keep The Ten Commandments around for a study of film history, but the spirit of the movie dies with the spirit of those for which it was intended. They're almost gone now.
I'm not excited about these deaths, I don't want people and things from the 50s to age, but we have to be honest. It'll be fascinating how organizations like AFI and Sight & Sound and the Academy evolve once people who grew up in the mid-century are gone. Will we still pretend the golden age was golden, or just age? The good old days good, or just old?
We have to be real: most classics are pretty worthless 20-40 years later, besides as historical reference. This is especially true of a medium like film, which is so dominated by the motives of mass entertainment, compared to forms more rooted in timeless artistic themes. Film often isn't driven by artistic vision at all, certainly not as a primary driver. Typically the primary is money or cheap stimulation, not emotional depth or artistic originality. So those films age very quickly, and we need to stop calling them the greatest ever made. Or we need to be more honest about what we mean by "greatest."
The Ten Commandments is entertainment for a 50s audience, and I bet it was grand. It even held my attention in 2025. But it aged very poorly, and doesn't boast anything very original or triumphant, just the technical feats of 1956 which are nothing in 2025.
I haven't got around to this one yet, but I've seen DeMille's '23 adaptation. I remember liking it a lot, but then being frustrated by choices near the end.
ReplyDeleteI, too, don't think of Persona as an old movie. Old movies are 1959 and earlier. This will remain the case forever.
I think DeMille was famous for being a sort of cinema chemist. He arranged everything in movies to maximize audience enjoyment. It's sort of strange that he didn't direct Gone with the Wind. It seems like his sort of thing.
Looks like I put in too many sort ofs. I still think it works though.
I'd say similar things about GWTW as Ten Commandments. Just an old movie that was too concerned with rapturing its contemporary audience to tap lasting artistic values.
ReplyDeleteI can see the 1959 thing. Coincidentally, perhaps causally, the modern era started for me when Bob Dylan joined the limelight, which was between Ten Commandments and Persona