The Next Generation of Filmmakers

Jordan Peele, Director of "Get Out" and "Nope". Credit: Canburak via Flickr

There have been many distinct eras of Hollywood filmmaking from the silent age through New Hollywood and into contemporary Hollywood. Experts and scholars have long followed the ebb and flow of cinema creation and the trends associated with the industry. However, there is a large unclassified new generation of artists. To understand the emerging class of modern auteurs, it is important to look at past generations and see how they changed the history of motion pictures.

In the beginning, there was quiet. The first images put together to give the optical illusion of movement were a series of pictures of a man riding a horse. This sparked the idea of using photographs to create moving images and tell stories. Thomas Edison was inspired by the creator of the first motion picture, Eadweard Muybridge, to create the kinetoscope. From there, motion pictures caught on. The silent era was a new entertainment industry and art form. The likes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton led to some of the first film directors. While there had been stage directors for centuries, the film director was different. Silent film directors could use the magic of the camera to tell stories more effectively.

After the silent generation came the Golden Age of Hollywood. Movie stars took over American culture, and massive releases like “Gone With The Wind,” “The Sound of Music” and “Casablanca” helped make the movie industry the greatest show on Earth. Directors employed new techniques to make their films better. John Ford, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Lumet and many others were a class of artists that are revered today for their artistic styles and careers.

After the Golden Age, there was a decline in cinema. The studio system in television, as well as film, was breaking apart. The Hays Code put massive limitations on the type of content artists could release in pictures. This inspired more creative solutions to visual storytelling problems and limited films. 

After the Golden Age decline and the Hays Code, there was one of the most interesting artistic renaissance of the 20th century, New Hollywood. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese. The New Hollywood movement led to a truly overwhelming amount of work from legendary filmmakers. These films were dangerous, violent, real and refreshing. It was a cultural overturn that reflected the time in the country, the long sixties. This era is hailed as one of the most important periods in cinema throughout the world. 

This period is easy to compare to the new generation of filmmakers —the Neo-Realism Post-Internet age. These filmmakers are a class of artists that invoke the ideas of New Hollywood. In response to the censored 1950s, the late 1960s and early 1970s are an amazing revival of cinema. After another low during the 1980s, the 1990s became kind of a “1970s part II,” as Director Quentin Tarantino put it. After a superhero-filled, largely artistically devoid 2010s, there may be another revival for the 2020s with the post-internet directors. The Safdie Brothers, Ari Aster, Damien Chazelle, Greta Gerwig, Chloe Zhao, Noah Baumbach and many more are leading a post-superhero bubble culture of filmmaking. The fatigue that audiences are beginning to feel around superhero movies may lead to moviegoers turning back to real cinema. These films show colors of Italian neorealism, New Hollywood and German expressionism. With artists like these working in motion pictures, cinema is in good hands.