Trending Now! Cinema Studies panel
Photo by Katherine Rountree
Written by Tristan Lueck
At 9 a.m. Tuesday Oct. 28, five Cinema Studies panelists, three professionals and two graduate students lined up to discuss current and rising trends in the film industry. The panel, titled “Trending Now! Exploring Today’s Film Industry From a Cinema Studies Perspective,” started with a brief introduction of the panelists and a short overview of what exactly Cinema Studies is.
Cinema Studies, according to Professor Tracy Cox-Stanton, is basically the analyzing of trends — what they refer to as “history.” Throughout the history of film there have been a number of separate trends, usually falling into different types of genres. Andrew Terhune, a SCAD alumnus and the creative executive of Sycamore Pictures, works to identify trends and perhaps forge the way for new trends.
The panel listed some of the trends as dark superhero movie, such as Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy or “Man of Steel,” or dystopian movies, like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent.” Terhune said he believes movies that are made to directly address a trend for the money are “like a bad game of telephone.” Each story is just different enough to not be exact copies, but are still all the same.
While money is the main goal in following along with these trends, Terhune said, “The trick is, really, to make a movie that is so good that it starts its own trend.” This is what Sycamore Pictures strives to do.
Cox-Stanton went on to discuss how those trends die.
“There is a theory that the end of a genre is when it starts making fun of itself,” she said. “So ‘Scream,’ the horror film — it sort of signified that something new was happening in the genre. The genre is so self conscience of its own characteristics, of its own sort of tropes, that now it can make a joke of these things.”
There are certain trends in the film industry that will never really die. Movies tend to reflect what is happening in the world’s recent past or just ideas that are pulled from life. According to SCAD Cinema Studies professor Chad Newsom, a current trend in American cinema is that Americans are proud to be American.
“I’m thinking about movies that are very much connected to the American experience, whether it’s ideas about what it is to be an American or the American dream of success,” said Newsom. “This is something that I’ve noticed in two movies I’ve seen here so far. ‘The Homesman’ is very much about America and the frontier and the pioneer experience. And also ‘Foxcatcher,’ which is about a lot of things. But if you’ve seen ‘Foxcatcher,’ there’s a lot of ‘Foxcatcher’ that is about masculinity and the American man.”
