This is as good a time as any to ask: What is a movie?
Is Steve Mcqueen’s five-part anthology one big movie, five little ones, or something in between? Chris Knight
Ihave on the desk at my home office a number of work- related books, including David Thomson’s How to Watch a Movie as well as his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Denby’s Do Movies Have a Future? and The Film Club by David Gilmour – and those are just the Davids! But it occurs to me that I could not write a succinct definition of what a movie is. Like art, I just know one when I see it.
The question arose recently with the news that the Los Angeles Film Critics Association had named Small Axe the best picture of 2020. Directed and co- written by Steve Mcqueen, it’s a five-part anthology about the lives of West Indian immigrants in London in the 1960s and ’ 70s.
But is it a movie? Or more to the point, is it just one movie, or five? The first episode, Mangrove, runs to more than two hours and tells the true story of the Mangrove Nine, a group of Black activists tried for inciting a riot during a 1970 protest against police harassment.
The other four chapters are between 63 and 80 minutes each, with separate casts and storylines, so each could qualify as its own movie. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a feature film as anything over 40 minutes. It sets no upper limit, as evidenced by wins in 2017 for the seven- andthree- quarter- hour O. J.: Made in America for best documentary, and by the seven- plus- hour War and Peace, which won the best foreign language Oscar in 1969.
Adding to the confusion, the Chicago Film Critics Association nominated Mcqueen for best director, and gave three other nominations to Small Axe – but only the episode entitled Lovers Rock, which is a 70-minute romance. The group also nominated Letitia Wright for best supporting actor for her role in Mangrove. (Does the series even have any lead actors, given that no one appears in more than one episode?)
Meanwhile, North Carolina critics didn’t officially nominate Small Axe at all. Executive member Kenneth Morefield says individual group members wanted to recognize Mangrove, Lovers Rock and the entire series, but in the end other films got more votes, perhaps because some members (including Morefield) saw Small Axe as a TV series and didn’t vote for it at all.
Oh, and another thing: The L.A. critics also nominated Small Axe for best score — but only the Lovers Rock segment. This would be like naming Wonder Woman 1984 best picture, but only nominating Hans Zimmer’s score for the middle third of the film.
In other years, the cinema- orTV debate has often been settled by whether works appear in actual cinemas or on television. Streaming services Amazon and Netflix, which have made great inroads into the Oscars, have done so by mounting qualifying cinema runs in addition to their on-demand offerings.
But the pandemic has thrown those considerations out the (theatrical) window, with the Academy saying that any film that intended to have a physical release in 2020 will be eligible for awards. So, for instance, the animated film Soul (a masterpiece, by the way), which debuted exclusively on Disney+ but had originally been tapped to premiere at Cannes ahead of a June release, is in the running for best animated picture.
Of course, the line between television and movies has been blurry since television began. In the 1960s, “made- for-tv movies” became a term, although one of the first, The Killers ( starring Ronald Reagan), was deemed too violent for broadcast and was released in cinemas instead. Steven Spielberg’s directing debut was the 1971 made-for-tv thriller Duel, which proved so popular it too got a theatrical release.
In 2015, the Toronto film festival introduced a new program, Primetime, described as “serial storytelling: television in its artistic renaissance.” That first year included episodes of TV shows from America ( Casual), Iceland ( Trapped) and France ( The Returned) but also a standalone 92-minute Netflix doc, Keith Richards: Under the Influence.
Last year’s pared-down pandemic version of TIFF did not separate its films into programs, but the closing-night offering was Mira Nair’s A Suitable Boy, a six-hour “episodic adaptation” of Vikram Seth’s novel, now available through the streaming service Acorn TV. Mini-series or maxi-movie? You decide!
The debate would seem to be a critical one for filmmakers, but many of them have shied away from it. “There’s nothing to talk about, really,” Mcqueen told Rolling Stone magazine recently. “These films were made for television. They can be projected in cinema, but Small Axe was all about the generosity and accessibility to these films. From the beginning, I wanted these films to be accessible to my mother, I wanted them on the BBC.”
There’s also the fact that almost everything comes to a small screen sooner or later. Back in 2018, when the Netflix movie Outlaw King was the opening- night film at the Toronto festival, I asked its director, David Mackenzie, how he felt about the fact that so few people would see it in theatres.
“The vast majority of my films unfortunately have not had massive theatrical windows,” he said. “So people who do see them tended to see them, back in the DVD days, on DVDS, and on streaming services now.”
Even so, the decision last month by Warner Bros. to release its 2021 slate of films on the streaming service HBO Max as well as in theatres rankled many, including Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, whose science- fiction epic Dune is slated to open in October. “There is absolutely no love for cinema, nor for the audience here,” he wrote in a scathing essay published shortly after the decision. “Warner Bros. might just have killed the Dune franchise.”
The vitriol wasn’t surprising. Back in 2018 at the Cannes film festival, Villeneuve told me he was “traumatized” by Netflix’s decision that year to remove Alfonso Cuarón’s new film Roma from the Cannes lineup. It eventually received 10 Oscar nominations and won in three categories including best director.
“I don’t know what Cuarón thinks of being released on Netflix,” Villeneuve said at the time. “Maybe he’s happy. But I want to see his movie in a theatre.” As to his own work: “All my movies are made for the big screen. If I make a movie for an ipad, it’s not the same. Time doesn’t have the same impact. The way you read an image does not have the same impact.”
This much is true. While a good many films can live quite happily on screens of almost any size, there are some that have been designed for the biggest canvas possible. Tenet, which released in theatres to middling crowds during the summer dip in pandemic numbers, is out on DVD now, and aside from being able to read the subtitles and understand all its muddy dialogue, I see no reason to watch it again at home.
Similarly, Wonder Woman 1984 was made available on demand in Canada last month as most cinemas across the country remained shuttered. It was fun to watch, but I could tell the opening scene, an Olympic-style contest among Amazons, would have played much better on a giant screen, as would the Indiana Jones- inspired car chase sequence. And when I went to see Casablanca last summer at my local rep cinema, I found even the experience of watching an old, wellknown movie changed for seeing it on the big screen for the first time.
Movies, TV, streaming options and mini-series will no doubt continue to evolve. A wealthy TV connoisseur, warming up her 10- inch black- and- white RCA model in the 1940s, would be astonished at the scores of channels, running 24 hours a day and delivered by cable, that is modern television at its most basic. IMAX movie screens would be similarly awe- inspiring. Only a genius from that era would have been able to wrap their head around streaming services.
So perhaps the best definition of a movie is also the broadest, and the most simple. It’s a story on a screen. It moves, and it moves us.