WHY 2022 IS THE YEAR FOR CINEMA TO COME ROARING BACK by Craig Hammill

Headwinds? Check. Nearly insurmountable obstacles? Check. A funky time in American culture? Triple whammy.

But that’s exactly why 2022 can be the year that cinema, movies, the movie going experience comes roaring back.

I’m not writing this to convince you. I’m not writing this to persuade you. You need to convince yourself. You need to persuade yourself.

But I am writing this because all the elements are there for a new American cinematic renaissance. And I want us to make the most of it.

F.W. Murnau’s 1924 The Last Laugh somehow captured post WWI Germany’s psychological breakdown in breathlessly inspired cinematic language. We can do that with new cinematic language in 2022.

Cinema has often made its biggest leaps and bounds after periods of intense real-world struggle and strife. Once everyone had gone through the hell of World War I, the cinema of the 1920’s advanced stylistically, thematically, formally by leaps and bounds. So too did literature, art, music. One senses that movies like F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, Carl Theodor Dryer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin were directly born out of the upheaval, psychic, spiritual, secular struggle of the first World War and its aftermath.

John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinback’s Depression era The Grapes of Wrath somehow brought nobility and humanity to one of America’s toughest moments. There are voices who can do that again for today’s trials and tribulations.

When the Depression hit and stayed, movies worked to find a way to both address the massive upheaval AND somehow provide an escape from it. Filmmakers as disparate as Busby Berkeley (42nd Street), John Ford (The Grapes of Wrath), Luis Bunuel (Land Without Bread) made movies that looked at the poverty, social forces, social dynamics that upended the world.

After World War II, movies got darker. Noir was born out of the soldier’s PTSD, the newly independent female worker’s demand for equal footing, and the homefront’s malaise. Filmmakers who had mythologized now began to examine. The Cold War birthed 1950’s sci-fi parables like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 1962’s Cuban missile crisis and the brink of extinction by nuclear war brought us one of the funniest most damning satires ever made-Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

And of course, the death of the old studio system in the 1960’s paired with the civil unrest in the country and the political disillusionment that a decade of assassinations then presidential corruption that ended in Watergate and Nixon’s resignation brought us a new kind of 1970’s American cinema of anti-heroes and a country struggling to find itself again. And masterworks like Paddy Chayevsky’s & Sidney Lumet’s Network, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest just to name a few somehow miraculously were funded by big studios.

Jack Nicholson gave one of the towering live wire 70’s performances in Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail. Performers are out there ready to give the great 2020’s performances.

Gene Hackman and Francis Ford Coppola somehow channeled 1970’s disillusionment and paranoia in The Conversation. Our filmmakers today can do the same for this moment.

So what’s my point? It’s this: we are in a moment of tremendous stress, anxiety, uncertainty, upheaval. Cinema and movie making and the movie theater feel like they teeter on the precipice. They’re fine of course. Cinema will survive. I have full faith in that. But for everyone who ever wanted to jump into moviemaking and be part of a new moment, a new era, now’s an exciting time.

There’s no way to know how things will pan out. Eras and moments only become clear in retrospect like supersonic sound wave barrier pops. We feel their power only after they’re in full bloom or have passed. But if fortune favors the bold, now is the time to be bold.

It won’t be by aping your favorite moviemaker or trying to get people excited about your movie by saying it’s this meets that. I say we have to leave the post-modern moment in the past (if you’ll forgive the contradiction). I think it may be time to embrace again a real daring with form and content. A real commitment to trying to think for ourselves about the world around us and put that on the screen in an interesting and different way.

Great art, great movies are never EASY. But they are, as Akira Kurosawa often said, a joy to create.

Lord knows we’ve been through a lot of sh*t the past two years. Now’s time to root in that sh@t and find the gold.

Let’s pick up a camera and start making things. There will be as much glory in failure as in success. Because 2022 is the year to realize everything is in the dynamic act of the sincere attempt to bring a movie into being.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.