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Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Around the campfire with Roma

It's not surprising to anyone who studies media why Steven Spielberg seeks to not allow certain films produced for Netflix to compete in the Oscar competition.

It's expected, then, that a new distribution and production system such as Netflix will provoke alarm from those invested in the traditional systems of film making and exhibition. 

In the 1950's and 1960's, media scholar Marshall McLuhan studied the way a new medium like television will overtake another, such as radio, by adapting and supplanting its parts (soap operas and sports programming) the way all conquerors dominate new territories.

Newspapers and TV, mediums that once held the reins on information supply to their mass audiences also cried foul when the Internet turned their booming business model into a splintered spectrum that offered specialized news and information, in unlimited supply, 24-7, to infinitely specialized audiences. 

Mass mediums such as books, newspapers, magazines and movies are by definition in the business of reaching the masses. In this model information is in short supply (limited pages, movie houses to exhibit in) to its audiences. Netflix, which is also a mass medium, has a different system of supply and demand that guides its business. Digital movies are not housed in warehouses or distributed in trains and trucks. They are easier to store and distribute via streaming.

The Alfonso Cuaron film, Roma, does more than leap-frog cinema's established structures.  By telling a worldwide audience the story of a Mexican household and its struggles in Spanish, and in black and white, it actually returns us to the communal campfire from which all story-telling was born. The need to tell the mainstream story for the you guessed it mainstream audience that was inherent in mass media and which held sway for more than a century, is no longer important.

Roma is an artist's work.  Roma is a highly personal project that is also politically damning as it both rips the bandages from the Mexico's wounds to its college students from 1968 and 1973 while also telling the story of displaced indigenous peoples that is just as timely today anywhere around the globe.  

Are you catching a whiff from the smoke of the campfire yet?  I think we can expect more intimate story-telling in the future if the Netflix model for Roma is any indication. 

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