If it is possible to whimper at the volume of a bang, then that is how this decade is ending on the big screen: with two high-profile, high-budget movies about the end of the world: Roland Emmerich’s cheerfully silly 2012 and John Hillcoat’s cheerlessly serious The Road, which arrive with a good deal of commentary to the effect that these movies typify the zeitgeist of the decade.
The Noughties — that jokey word coined in the carefree Nineties — are seen as damaged, injured, traumatised. The decade looks cracked from top to bottom by a sensational act of terrorism; by a reaction that achieved neither political palliative nor military success; by the confrontation between First World prosperity and developing-world poverty; by the coming environmental catastrophe that threatens to engulf both; and finally, by a financial crash that for the movie world is further complicated by an agonised inability to decide whether the digital revolution means liberation or calamity.
Did the cinema reflect any of that? Did it receive a boost from the new mood of uncertainty?
Disaster movies are in any case a complacent genre. Only when we start to relax and think that things are on the up can we luxuriate in the idea of things going terribly wrong. The horror of 9/11 made the movies look tame, however ‘cinematic” they may have been in conception. The films that emerged from it were very variable, although two brilliant pictures took on 9/11 directly: Antonia Bird’s TV feature The Hamburg Cell (2004) showed it slouching towards Manhattan, while Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) was the all-but-unwatchable recreation of the final hours on a crashing jet.
After a stunned silence, Hollywood’s response to the war on terror became the dullest and most exasperating sort imaginable. These were liberal-patriot fence-straddlers: well-meaning movies that seemed co-scripted by Josh and Toby from The West Wing, such as Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs (2007), Gavin Hood’s Rendition (2007), Peter Berg’s The Kingdom (2007) and Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005).
Actually, the best war-on-terror movie was the least anti-war and most pro-military: Kathryn Bigelow’s gut-wrenching The Hurt Locker (2008).
In factual cinema the English-speaking world experienced a sudden golden age, with a new type of issue-led picture: what Hollywood bible Variety called the ‘What’s Up Doc?” — an unashamedly partisan docu-blast.
With his Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Michael Moore put his boot through the cowed media consensus set by hawks and pro-war liberals who had overestimated their leaders’ candour and competence.
Moore triggered a fashionable new wave of campaigning cinema, with films such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which put global warming at the top of the political agenda, Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (2004), and Moore’s Sicko (2007), which helped put socialised medicine at the top of the incoming President Obama’s agenda.
Outside Hollywood, the Noughties began with Iranian cinema at the height of its acclaim, producing challenging films, often with a feminist slant. Abbas Kiarostami, whose The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) had taken him into the decade as perhaps the world’s single most revered auteur, made the superb Ten (2002), which looked into the life of an Iranian woman. His experimental quasi-installation film Shirin (2008), showing women’s faces in a cinema auditorium, was something I found opaque, but it became widely revered for the eerie way it appeared to predict the image of Neda Agha-Soltan, the ‘Angel of Iran” who was killed in this year’s Iranian anti-government protests.
The death of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni on the same day, July 30 2007, triggered a debate about whether we still had directors with equivalent moral and artistic seriousness.
My own view is that we do: people such as Pedro Almodóvar, Joel and Ethan Coen, Jane Campion, Pedro Costa, Wong Kar-Wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jacques Audiard — and, perhaps most importantly, the Austrian Michael Haneke, who has produced a string of lacerating movies: Code Unknown (2000), Hidden (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009).
In another era Haneke’s inexpressibly painful movies might have been dismissed as mere ordeal-miserablism; the Noughties saw him crowned as the Cassandra of the cinema, a ferocious moral conscience.
The problem is that, alongside its tumultuous political history, the Noughties have seen an extraordinary digital revolution. The creation of YouTube in 2005 enabled independent filmmakers to take their work directly to the public. High-quality digital cameras and editing software made the professional tools, if not the expertise, available to one and all.
But the downside is the download: DVD sales, long the economic engine of the business, are fading away and — as in music, publishing and every kind of media — it isn’t clear what will replace it.
The supposedly bloodless revolution of the digital age is creating an excruciating worry as we enter the twenty-teens. —