Nostalgia and popcorn: the cinema is seen in the rearview mirror

At the beginning of the fifties two of the classics that have best reflected the decline of old Hollywood and the traumatic transition from silent to talkies coincided.

(

), by Billy Wilder, was released in 1950.

, signed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, two years later.

If Wilder found in the decadent and feline beauty of Gloria Swanson the tragic incarnation of the lost Olympus, Kelly and Donen evoked the end of that glorious constellation of stars with a storm of baptismal rain: the water blessed the present through a choreography that trampled like angels all possible puddles.

Hollywood looked to its past, but without fear of the future.

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The same cannot be said of the series of films that, seven decades later, look back to vindicate the origins of the seventh art before a new turning point in the history of an industry condemned to mutate with each new technological advance.

The earthquake that caused the arrival of sound is replicated now, when the last straw of a pandemic has widened the gap between movie theaters and a considerable part of their viewers.

If television precipitated what we know today as the New Hollywood, the digital revolution has dynamited the very nature of cinema, supplanted by the pre-eminence of the audiovisual and the creed of the algorithm.

Spike Jonze, in a tank top, as Otto, Erich von Stroheim's 'alter ego', in 'Babylon'.

All of which has led to something that the critic Caitlin Quinlan defines in an extensive article for Art

as a tiresome "love letter to cinema" in which they fit from the latest film by Sam Mendes,

(premiering in Spain, on March 31), with the image of Olivia Colman alone in a deserted stalls crying before a screen that illuminates her face, to the final

of

, Damien Chazelle's excessive film that closes with a montage of a couple of minutes in which Manny Torres, the character played by Diego Calva, loses himself captivated in the chicken coop of a large room while iconic fragments of the history of the cinema.

In his hodgepodge, Chazelle looks especially intently into the mirror in

, even though the infectious optimism of the Kelly and Donen musical is light-years away from the hollow baroqueness of the

director .

“The concept of 'love letter to movies' has become so ubiquitous in film

and criticism that it's become something of a joke,” Quinlan notes.

In that nostalgic letter that closes

, a still appears that also appears in

, the amazing Jordan Peele film that does offer an exhilarating reflection on our visual exhaustion and the monsters that the digital dream creates.

The daring cocktail of references from

, open to all kinds of interpretations, intersects with

when quoting the image pioneer Eadweard Muybridge and his horsemen in motion.

Although in his deconstruction of the blockbuster, Jordan Peele points directly to the father of the phenomenon, Steven Spielberg, and the film that in 1975 gave meaning to the term,

.

With his latest film,

, Spielberg adds to the autobiographical fictions that have filled the screens this season.

His wonderful film, however, is more melancholic than nostalgic.

The filmmaker doesn't want to go back to his troubled adolescence, but the discovery of cinema is there, in that boy, Sammy, who his parents take to see Cecil B. DeMille's classic The Greatest Show on Earth (also from, precisely

1952 ) and who, bewitched by the invention, will end up turning his small hands into an intimate screen, a plane to remember.

The future filmmaker already has the world in his hands.

As the theoretician Santos Zunzunegui explains in his 2017 essay

(Cátedra), “cinema and melancholy form an indissoluble couple” due to that unique ability to summon images “of vanished worlds”.

Thus, from

, by James Gray, to

, by Paul Thomas Anderson, or the closest to the pernicious industry of nostalgia,

machines

, television and street antics that evoke the end of the innocence of a cultural powerhouse, the United States, in crisis.

Paul Dano, Mateo Zoryan and Michelle Williams, in a still from 'The Fabelmans', by Steven Spielberg.Merie Weismiller Wallace (EFE/Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment)

The films that appear in the rear-view mirror to portray the origins of a sentimental education that passes through movie theaters transcend the ideological space of Hollywood.

From the diptych

and

(2019-2021), in which the British Joanna Hogg recreates her years as a film student in London, echoing a masterpiece from 10 years ago, Goodbye

, by Tsai Ming-liang, which appears in the recent and precious

, by the Indian Pan Nalin.

One of those who opened the ban from within the American industry was Quentin Tarantino with the fabulous

(2019), a film about the guts of a community of winners and losers that this year has imploded with the controversial

, by Andrew Dominik, who expresses the myth of Marilyn and the most spooky Hollywood.

They say that nostalgia is a defense mechanism in times of crisis.

Spielberg himself has confessed that he would not have made

without "the awareness of mortality" that assailed us during the pandemic.

"That feeling of great fragility gave me the necessary courage."

Unfortunately, that noble feeling lends itself to dangerous manipulations or drifts in that delusional industry that crystallized in series like

and that has resulted in countless

,

and

.

The rear-view mirror strategy has peaked this year with the film that, according to Spielberg himself, could save movie theaters.

It is, yes,

, the return of Tom Cruise to the kingdom of heaven and a new form of nostalgia with popcorn.

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