Hacker Cinema
Au Hasard Balthazar
Au hasard Balthazar
1966 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Robert Bresson
The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.
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1 comment on Hacker News
Sometimes I wonder if maybe there are enough movies. As in, we don't need to make anymore. This applies to music as well in some ways. Music in particular is relatively timeless, transmits well across history, and doesn't suffer technological obsolescence, which means that great music accretes over time. You can't listen to Beethoven and think "Not bad but it's woefully out of date." Old music is also remarkably accessible when you think about it, and one can ejoyably listen to the same music over and over again. Eventually there will be too much to listen to, if that is not the case already. At any rate, the proportion of music to which nobody listens is growing rapidly.
Movies are a bit different, so reaching saturation point will take longer. They depict the world and the world changes. It certainly is possible to watch an old movie and find the not so contemporary context quite jarring. I doubt the next generation will enjoy 1990s American sex comedies very much. Improving movie-making technologies also means that new movies can have something unique, but this seems to have had relatively little impact in the last 50 years and tends to be anti-correlated with quality. Another point arguing against reaching the saturation point is that old movies do become inaccessible. I wanted to watch Au Hasard Balthazar [1] recently and could not find it anywhere.
But the number of movies being made goes up all the time and the world isn't changing so fast anymore. Taxi Driver is nearly 50 years old now but the setting is almost completely familiar. It is in no way diminished by the fact that Travis Bickle doesn't have an iphone. Technology is also going to improve to the point of democratising movie making, where a small team or an individual can make (and even remake!) a feature length movie with relative ease, without leaving their bedroom. So perhaps we will reach the point where there is just too much to watch for people with average consumption rates.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au_Hasard_Balthazar