Today’s big scoops will be tomorrow’s big news, and yesterday’s big controversies will continue to fill newspapers day after day. I often remember a slogan that can be read on banners at feminist demonstrations for decades: “I can’t believe I’m still protesting about this shit.” For example, when the controversies between film and television come back to the fore. Are we really still going through the same old thing? I’m afraid so.
At the Venice Film Festival, that great film director named Alfonso Cuarón has presented Observed (Apple TV+), his miniseries starring that great actress Cate Blanchett. There he declared: “I don’t know how to film for television. And probably, at this point, it’s too late to learn. So there was never a conversation about how to do something different. We did it as a film.” I wonder what would happen if a television director, at the premiere of his first film, confessed: “I don’t know how to shoot films, so I did it as an episode of a series.” I also wonder if Cuarón could have directed episodes of series as different and as demanding as Rome, Deadwood, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Sex and the City, Game of Thrones and The Pacificwith the needs of television —even the very expensive and prestigious kind—, just as Tim Van Patten did.
Of course, Cuarón is not the first to invest television with the magical properties of cinema with the intention of dignifying it, this is already a meme. As if television needed them. I hear “My series is a movie of x hours” and I roll my eyes. And they keep saying it! Maybe they do it with the intention of, starting from their prejudices, avoiding the idea that they have taken down the artistic pedestal of pedestrian audiovisuals. As if there were no bad movies. As if there were no fabulous formula series. In this no excuse required Even the creators of Game of Throneswho said their series was a 73-hour movie, hold on. They could all learn from Bergman, an unapologetic TV fanatic who declared: “Television is simply the most amazing thing. It opens up the whole world to you.” One of his favorite series was Sex and the City and he loved Samantha, something that reconciles me with the world. Don’t bring him back to life to make him choose between Cuarón or Tim Van Patten.
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