Turner Classic Mummies

In one of his articles for Film Comment, Guy Maddin observed that the booming DVD market and TV stations like Turner Classic Movies tended to "mummify" older films, making it harder for audiences to critique or find insight into these movies. I completely agreed with him as I watched the TV premiere of TCM's Edge of Outside, a terse one hour documentary on the history of American independent filmmakers (the broad term includes directors like Sam Fuller or Stanley Kubrick who worked “within the Hollywood system”). Like all TCM docs and commercials, Outside’s collage of film clips were deliciously polished to jazz music, enticing me to find out more about the movies shown. Yet this gloss is that the doc turns the films discussed into pretty pages of a coffee table book. This equating of old movies to class and sophistication insists that viewers need to love these films with a proper nostalgic reverence, not with a critical opinion.

Of course, this approach is designed get viewers interested into less well-known films. An hour long documentary can’t go too in-depth. But Outside, doesn’t stimulate debate or discussion. Contemporary auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Darren Aranofsky wistfully recollect their influences, but I couldn’t see the artistic compromises or choices that made their forebears such daring Mavericks, or why they made the decisions that they did. The doc simply says that realism and experimentation are good, directors like Orson Welles and John Cassavetes are geniuses, and producers and studios are petty bad guys. This is strange , especially coming from TCM, whose constant airing of 30’s-40’s MGM and Warner titles have done so much to maintain the allure of the Hollywood studio syste.

It’s not just TCM that uses the same tactics, but practically any venue or company that caters to curious film viewers Landmark Theatres, The Criterion Collection, etc. They don’t just advertise films, but a kind of erudite lifestyle which appreciating these movies allows a viewer to possess. I fall for this marketing all the time. But I feel that by perpetuating this snobbery, I'm only dulling my critical abilities.