Issue 09: This Aesthetic Experience Has Been Sponsored by the Luxury Industry
A couple of weeks ago, 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen's latest project debuted online. It's not the TV series he was at one point attached to at HBO (apparently that's been chucked in the garbage bin), nor is it a Kanye music video (which, apparently, actually made it through completion, but has been pulled from the web).
No, it's a 3 minute-long ad for a Burberry fragrance.
Now, movie directors do commercials all the time. Heck, David Fincher more or less got his start that way and has gone on to do some great work in the format since his feature filmmaking career has taken off. What gives me pause about McQueen's commercial—to say nothing of its titlecard, “A Film by Steve McQueen”— is the big deal being made about its being shot on 70mm film.
Those who were paying attention to Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight will know what the hullabaloo over this antiquated film format is all about. The film stock of choice for filmmakers shooting super-widescreen epics and Westerns, 70mm film can capture vastly greater detail than industry-standard 35mm filmstock (and gives even the best digital cameras a run for their money). However, since the film was so costly to produce, develop, and exhibit, it largely went out of fashion until truthers like Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Christopher Nolan leveraged their popularity to help the format stage a comeback.
What bothers me about this Burberry ad, which in the style of your standard luxury fashion commercial features beautiful people inhabiting beautiful spaces cavorting around to the background tune of a sensual singer-songwriter, is the implication of its aesthetic underpinnings.
Tarantino went to great lengths to reequip movie theaters nationwide with 70mm projection capacities so he could roll out The Hateful Eight in a special “Roadshow” edition, replete with intermission and commemorative booklet harkening back to the glory days of the studio 70mm Western. His movie did fairly well at the box office, lending some hope to the pipe dream of more 70mm movies being shot in the future. But in the meantime? If a filmmaker wants to shoot a project in that format, it looks like their best bet lies in the hands of megacorporations with the money to spare.
Steve McQueen is a talented filmmaker—I deemed 12 Years a Slave the best movie of 2012 back in the day—so I'm on the one hand happy for him: if Burberry has the money to spare to let him try out 70mm film, great, I guess! But on the other hand it's annoying to see this artistic tool siphoned off into a commercial sector; it's as though the only art worth making in this format must serve a purely commercial end.
Look at the history of 70mm films—Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, to name a few—and you'll find movies that were made with commercial viability in mind, but which endured through time because of their artistic and aesthetic value. Could you imagine Gucci forking over the money to Stanley Kubrick to shoot an abstract collage of images in a costly film format to promote their newest line of alligator leather handbags? (Well, maybe; if the window displays of the Gucci store in Rome are anything to go by, I wouldn't put it past their creative director.)
The point I'm getting at here is that 70mm film is a format that ought to be more readily available for filmmakers to use for projects of any flavor. To see it commodified as a resource deemed opportune for promoting a luxury fragrance is distressing, though perhaps in the long run I'll be thanking Burberry for helping keep the format alive at a time when filmstock is in danger of going the way of those pre-vinyl sound cylinders people used to record and play music on. (See? I have a few at home in Boston yet I don't even know what the heck you call those things.)
This past week I was traveling so articles, news, interviews, and movie posters will return in the next issue.