In the 25 years of this century, masterpieces of the small screen coexist, such as ‘Breaking the Bad’ or ‘The Wire’ with directors who have inherited the best tradition like Paul Thomas Anderson or new visions like that of Sean Baker. And everything … with platforms as the great disruptor.
At ABC Cultural, we interviewed 25 important figures in the audiovisual industry – filmmakers, creators, producers, directors… – about the cultural canon so far this century. Here are the choices of filmmaker and writer Rodrigo Cortés:
Movie
Well of Ambition (There Will Be Blood, 2007)
A sudden classic
A sudden classic from a seventy-five-year-old master that Paul Thomas Anderson – the best of Scorsese’s offspring – shot, and was able to shoot, at thirty-seven. Giant and introspective parable, excessive, contained and wise. The monstrous nature of man written on biblical paper. Rarely has a screen been so crushed.
Director
Yorgos Lanthimos
Scorsese’s Creature
In the last fifty years, no one has matched the figure, size and teaching of Martin Scorsese, but let us salute a more recent creature, closely linked to his time (who, in cinema, is understood to be one step ahead): the Greek Yorgos Lanthimoswho, like a cruel chess master who loved to put his pieces in moral difficulty, made some of the most amusing, elusive and difficult to put together films (“Canino”, “Lobster”, “The Sacrifice of a Sacred Deer”, “Bugonia”) of recent years.
Orient yourself
Several
Streaming…and more
There are several and of unequal relevance: the endless shared universes, with Marvel at the helm; the highly produced neoclassicism of Nolan and Villeneuve; the streaming revolution and platform battles, global social realism… And what some have called “post-terror” or “high terror”, or, in the least favorable case, “turror”, each for its own good reasons; the girls of this mutant label that is A24, so deified that it will soon be depreciated.
The sometimes first-rate cinematography of Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Jennifer Kent, Jordan Peele, Julia Ducornau; with its few deformed bodies and organ aesthetics (Cronemberg’s shadow is elongated), its little authorial trauma and drama (also that of Nicolas Roeg), its little heavy atmosphere, its drops of symbolism. The legitimization of a genre which, in reality, never needed to be legitimized. Until the pendulum returns, which continues.
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