What makes a great film? Mark Kermode, Film Critic

[Music] yeah I apologize to anyone who was expecting Mart Lamar it's become really common it's it's guy came up to me the I'll get on to the point this guy came up I'm just gonna press start on this because I have a time limit which is 20 minutes and it given half a chance I'll just go on for an hour so I'm gonna press go there we go somebody came up to me they said you're Mart Lamar I said no they said yes you are I went I'm not and they went yes you are I went alright they said why did you deny it I was in a hotel in Edinburgh this bloke came up to me this is not a stand-up act instantly this is Justin this guy came up to me said oh hello welcome back I said thank I've never been that before I said thank you very much how lovely to see you again and I said it's nice he said would you like it we'd like a coffee I said he don't be lovely and he came back with a coffee and I put my hand away should know sits on the house I said well that's really nice he said incidentally my wife was gutted when they cancelled El Dorado that's an age specific joke so neither Jesse Birdsall nor Mark Lamar now I'm on the subject of the the most trusted thing I should say this at the beginning this is this is not an entirely specious fact although it is one that has no weight there was a YouGov poll in 2010 that concluded two things both of which are equally terrifying the first one was that I am in inverted commas the most trusted film critic in the UK so believe me I'm going to live on that the second one was that less than 4% of the people that they asked trusted me what that tells you is that film critics are not the most trusted profession certainly in terms of what people go to see into in the cinema film critics actually don't make any difference at all I know there's a great um there's a great body of opinion that thinks that film critics are opinion formers they're not the people that actually matter in terms of you making a decision to go and see a movie or not ah and this is no surprise your peers your friends so people who follow each other on Twitter will take Twitter recommendations from people they follow because people that you follow on Twitter are kind of friends I mean I know they're not literally friends I know Danny died doesn't literally have 1.2 million friends but this is how it works so film criticism is a really weird thing it doesn't actually have any weight in terms of marketing and I don't know very much about film marketing I do a radio show with Simon Mayo on Radio 5 which some of you may have heard the only thing which we have ever concluded about film marketing is if you see a film advertised on the side of a bus it's probably not a good sign but be I don't know why that is it's like on a bus bad movie it's like if you go to if you go to press screenings this is a really strange thing you got a press screening sometimes they do catering and there's a general rule which is the better the food the worse the film I went to a Medusa film there was like chicken satay and you know flambe this and flying that so this film must really suck badly and it did but the food was great but what I was going to talk about was kind of partly related to what's happening at the conference a day as I said I'm no expert in terms of the advertising world and in terms of film criticism I don't think film critics are actually experts in what sells or what doesn't I think the whole purpose of film criticism is just to talk about movies in a way which is kind of interesting and engaging but there is a general worry at the moment I believe it's happening in your industry it's certainly happening around the film industry that in inverted commas creativity is not in a wonderful place a lot of people say you know you go to the cinema now and it's all just sequels and it's all just superhero movies and if you follow the entertainment press you will have seen recently that Martin Scorsese in the course of an interview about the current state of cinema said that he didn't think that Marvel movies were cinema he said they're not cinema this is nonsense they are cinema they may not be his cinema but they are cinema they're moving pictures with sound playing in a cinema that cinema I mean you might not like it but it's a factual truth the thing is the idea that everything in the cinema world is sequels and comic strip fare isn't true it's it's an illusion it is true that if you go to your local multiplex or megaplex in you you might have ten screens they might all be showing a different version of the latest sequel or comic book franchise film now a film is available in 2d 3d 4d X you know it is possible for a small number of films to occupy a very very large number of screens and when you look at the end-of-year figures for movies you realize that there is a small number of movies that do really really well and then there's everything else and these are now referred to in Hollywood is in tentpole movies they're the movies that theoretically holding up the industry but it's not the case that that's actually what's happening in cinema more movies are being made than ever before at the moment partly because technology is trying to democratize the moviemaking process and partly because actually people's interest in cinema has continued to thrive there's a long discussion at the moment about whether or not people need to see movies in a theater in a cinema for it to be cinema or whether streaming services a cinema if you watch something Amazon or on Netflix is it a movie is something like Roma which goes on to be a huge prize winner but had a problem with playing it can because can said it's not a movie it's a Netflix production so this is there's a lot of debate about what actually constitutes a movie but movies are being made and more of them are being made and more diverse movies are being made than ever before the industry is changing there was a project just recently called calling the shots which was doing number crunching on women in the a film industry over the past I think 10 15 years and they were just crunching the numbers on how many women were working in key jobs in film production in the UK and the jobs were like director producer writer the statistics were terrible in terms of cinematographers it was something like 5% of cinematographers were women and that was way up on the previous figures but crucially it was up so the industry is changing and nowadays people if you see an award ceremony in which every single nominee is a middle-aged english-speaking white man people actually notice it's not that it's changed yet but people have noticed it and it is starting to change if you look at a year like this year people talk about well there's these Marvel movies and there's these superhero movies and there's these sequels and there's these remakes and the reason you get sequels and remakes is to do with brand awareness if you're a studio putting money into a movie if you put it into something that there's a name that people recognize your investment is safer there used to be a rule with sequels that didn't matter how bad a sequel was as long as it had the name of the original movie if the original movie did okay it will probably take 2/3 of the amount of money that the first one took that's why the Exorcist which is the greatest movie ever made that's a fact incidentally as a personal opinion spawn Exorcist - The Heretic which is the worst movie ever made and yet it still made enough money to wash its face despite the fact that it features Richard Burton flying to Africa on the back of a locust and I'm not making that up so there's a there's a reason for making sequels and that sort of stuff because brand awareness is a saleable thing but if you actually look at the films that have been playing in UK cinemas beyond the multiplexes this is the year that bate became a huge independent hit bate is a film made in Cornwall where filmmaker called Mark Jenkin who up until now had basically made shorts he shoots his films on black and white film on Clockwork cameras without sound and he produces them all in his studio in newland he develops the film using a formula that he'd developed himself which uses instant coffee so it doesn't produce any sort of toxic side effects and this is great for making short films and when Mark said to me that he was gonna make this as a feature film I said it's a great idea you are completely crazy you will never get it done he made bait and it's become a really really big hit in terms of what it cost and what it made it is one of the standout hits of the year and in fact I would think that when we get to the end of the year two awards it's you know it'll be something that will win I hopefully will win the awards at the BAFTAs we've had Joanna hogs film souvenir in cinemas recently we've had a really great movie by Shola aloo called the last tree in cinemas just recently all these films are playing in cinemas but they may not be evident okay so firstly it's not true that what's happened is that creativity has had a bad period in terms of the cinema industry there is a huge amount of diversity and creativity it's just that sometimes you don't see it Barry Norman famously said that in any one year the percentage of good movies versus bad movies is pretty much the same it just depends which films you go and see however there is a perception of a sort of stagnation which as I said I don't think has any truth in it but this is also a kind of weird thing in terms of what film criticism is meant to do one of the things that film critics are meant to do is to look at films and in inverted commas analyze them you know make sense of them talk about them in a way that's interesting and intriguing and one of the first things that I learned when I was I mean I'm I'm I'm as old as the hills and I'm so old that I actually remember the Leonard Rossiter Joan Collins adverts but I can't remember whether it was Chin's Arno or martini I'm sorry but that's how old I am and when I first started there was a film discourse which was that what you did was you talked about films in a kind of intellectual way in a rational way and in a way that was meant to be objective and there is an idea that there is such a thing as objective film criticism this is good this is bad this is why it's not true there is no such thing as objective criticism all criticism is completely subjective but what does tend to happen is that critics can fall into this ploy of praising something that has an intellectual rational thoughtful response and being slightly down on anything that produces a physical response and by a physical response I mean films that make you laugh films that make you shriek films that surprise you films that scare you films that maybe arouse you anything that creates a physical response has generally been considered to be slightly less than a film which makes you go hmm now ideally of course what we do is we'd understand that cinema as Roger II but once described it is a machine for creating empathy I think it's a lovely phrase and we would celebrate cinema for doing all the things that sometimes highbrow criticism criticizes it for so if you look at words like melodrama if you look at words like sentimentality if you look at was like schmaltz these are generally used by critics in a negative term or if somebody says the movies really funny it doesn't mean it's great it means it's really funny it's not you know doing anything beyond that it but it's really funny it's really scary when I say The Exorcist is the greatest movie ever made people often correct me and they say you mean the greatest horror movie ever made I say no I mean it's the greatest movie ever made but that is my opinion I know that it's nobody else's opinion but it's my opinion and I'll you know I'll stand here for three hours and defend it if given the chance but there is a sort of suspicion of anything that creates a physical emotional response in a Frank Capra who's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time there was this phrase used about Capra movies which was capricorn capricornianas that was used to sort of denigrate some of his movies when people talk about It's a Wonderful Life which in my opinion is one of the greatest movies ever made they'll go yeah well you know it's mult C and it's sentimental and every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings and yeah boohoo but it's not and then they'll name an Ingmar Bergman film or you know whatever no it isn't but it is absolutely from my point of view one of the greatest films ever made and the reason is because it has an emotional response because it hits you in a way that is not rational one of my favorite films of all time is film called silent running which is directed by a guy called Doug Trumbull Doug Trumbull is right at the very forefront at the moment of experimenting with what you can do with cinema in high frame rate 120 frames per second 3d experiential cinema which I have to say doesn't do anything for me at all but Doug Trumbull made a movie called silent running which is a science fiction movie that's an absolute weepy it's got music by Joan Baez it stars Bruce Dern and it's Bruce Dern and these tiny little robots walking around in space being sad and lonely Doug Trumbull made that film in response to having worked for several years on Stanley Kubrick's 2001 now Kubrick's 2001 is generally regarded as one of the greatest films ever made it isn't it's brilliant but it's not as good as Silent Running and I'll tell you why because silent running actually makes me cry and 2001 doesn't and I like a movie to have an emotional impact now 2001 is an extraordinary piece of art it's also visionary in terms of its view of science in the future if he went to the design museum's exhibition the Kubrick exhibition recently look at our incredibly forward-looking Stanley Kubrick was I mean the research that went into that the work they did with off see Clark work that he did with there's a reason why people think Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings because he's the guy that NASA would go to if that's what they wanted to do silent running makes no sense whatsoever he's the story Bruce Dern is out in space with the last of the Earth's forests there are no forests on earth anymore okay point number one find the Earth's dead no forests no oxygen everyone's dead doesn't matter the forests are floating out round Saturn why we should put him in orbit around Earth Saturn's more picturesque Bruce Dern is walking around in a spaceship that has gravity why he's in space doesn't make any difference because he didn't want to float around and the special effects to do that there are so much to die and Bruce Dern who is the best botanist on earth doesn't realise that the reason they're dying is that there is no sunshine the thing is none of this matters when I'm watching the film and the reason it doesn't is because the film gets to me emotionally every single time when I first saw it I was a kid and I was just in pieces after seeing it and I have fixated about it for years and years afterwards of junk you know decades afterwards because it had an emotional effect on me I know rationally that 2001 is a better film I know that 2001 was the thing that pushed the boundaries of what the industry could do creatively I know that in terms of its science and its in the objects sense artistry 2001 you know it's like it's up there with you know the Sistine Chapel I don't care Silent Running which makes no sense is the film that works for me and the reason it does is because of the emotional connection now I think that there is you're going to have a paper a bit later on about the sort of psychology I'm just making sure that I'm not massively over running no I'm fine I'm doing good I got like 4 and 1/2 minutes um about what's happening in terms of creativity and advertising and I believe that one of the sort of key thrusts of that is to do with this kind of tension between information and creative affect something which is intangible to some extent something which is that you know that thing that I'm talking about with silent running and it's a wonderful life and Casablanca and Mary Poppins and singing in the rain and every other film which is for me great cinema cinema will only work at its fullest potential when it engages the emotions along with the intellect you look at the film like bait on a technical level it's extraordinary somebody in the 21st century has made a proper feature film using Clockwork cameras 16 millimeter film home developed sound dubbed on afterwards it's the kind of thing that you would have been doing back in the 1930s that's not why the film is a success the film is a success because it has a story that is grabbing people emotionally particularly people you either live in or are familiar with Cornwall and familiar with what's happening to Cornish fishing villages in comers coming in and changing the the nature of a place and incidentally it's not a film which is one side it actually does see both sides but it's works because it's firing people up emotionally now from a film critics point of view I wrote a long piece about it in the observer in which I spent most of the time talking about it's brilliant technical achievement and why it is that it's artistically important and why it is that it's but the none of that would matter if I hadn't watched the film and laughed at the jokes be made to feel tense by the the kind of you know the the the the plot as it unfolds in this strange and mysterious way and I hadn't actually felt powerfully emotionally engaged with the characters because in the end that whole thing about information you know rational discourse and that irrational other thing they're not separate they're part of the same thing but if you only have one of them you don't get the best possible response I know loads of films that intellectually satisfy me but don't make me laugh don't make me cry don't make me scared one of the reasons I think the Exorcist is the greatest film ever made is that I think there are really good reasons for saying that it's a really profound theological tract I think there are really good reasons for saying that it pushed the boundaries of what was possible in cinema in 1972 1973 I think that's the most avant-garde and inventive soundtrack of any film I've ever seen but none of that matters because it scared the living daylights out of me when I first saw it and that's the thing that welded it into my consciousness and I love horror movies Isaac was mentioned before I did do my PhD on horror fiction it's a real thing you know I there we go you know I am a doctor of horror you know ask my wife but for me that is kind of one of the reasons I love horror cinema is it has that kind of primal engagement so to draw things to a close I think brilliantly to draw think super close with 90 seconds to go I'm nothing if not a good time keeper that's what years are working with Radio one will do if you cry if you crash things vocals they fire you is to say that I think the one of the subjects that you're talking about in terms of creativity and in terms of information versus whatever that other thing is this is something which is happening across a whole number of different areas and the honest truth is firstly it's not as in crisis as it looks at least in cinema isn't in fact near cinema I think cinema is an extraordinarily good shape every year when I do my you know lists of top and top and bottom 10 films of the year it's quite hard to find the bottom 10 but the top 10 it's like you know this 4050 targets will be contenders the other thing is that in the end you know telling a story or selling a story it doesn't make any difference if that story doesn't hit you somewhere emotionally because if it doesn't you're just telling it or selling it to yourself thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Institute of Practitioners in Advertising

Views: 18,944

Rating: 4.8870058 out of 5

Keywords: advertising, effworks, effectiveness, marketing, effweek, mark kermode, film

Id: -8aK4E20bVo

Length: 20min 35sec (1235 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019