Ever since streaming services have spearheaded the moving picture business, there has been hope that their takeover of the market could also bring a second life to the cinema they're suffocating.
Because while the art-house film theaters are gradually disappearing from the small towns and soon also from the metropolises, more and more directors are producing their works for the providers on the Internet.
Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, Luca Guadagnino, they've all shot for Netflix or Amazon, and the Netflix production division in particular has won the Oscars for Jane Campion's "Power of the Dog" and Alfonso Cuarón's " Roma” pocket the symbolic interest on their financial transfer payments.
Andrew Kilb
Feature correspondent in Berlin.
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The most presentable of all Netflix directors, if one may use the expression, is the American Noah Baumbach.
Baumbach, whose films regularly run in competition in Venice or Cannes, has made his three most recent works under Netflix supervision: The Meyerowitz Stories, Marriage Story, and now White Noise.
And while the streaming service remains silent on the commercial success or failure of its feature film productions, the Oscar for Laura Dern's supporting role in "Marriage Story" was a clear mark of recognition for a cinematographer who has once been considered the most important talent in recent American independent film.
Baumbach, who became known in 2005 with the divorce drama "The Squid and the Whale",
has consistently sought his artistic path away from Hollywood for twelve years.
Then he came to Netflix.
The question is what this change has done to his style, his view of the world and the tonality of his paintings.
The eighty-million-dollar production White Noise provides the answer.
Adapted from a 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, White Noise follows Jack Gladney, a history teacher at a small-town Midwestern college, and the blended family he raises with his fourth wife, Babette, and their four boys children from her previous and current marriages.
Jack is a lecturer in Hitler Studies, a subject unique to DeLillo, but everything else in the novel stems from his author's experience: the description of consumer society, the cafeteria conversations among half-educated teachers, the uninhibited insecurity of married life after the sexual revolution and finally the "airborne toxic event", the poison gas accident at the center of the plot, which is modeled after the chemical disaster in Seveso, Italy.
Literary criticism has attested to DeLillo's prophetic gifts, for feeding his characters conspiracy theories like those circulating on social media today and depicting television as a state-run appeasement machine, but when rereading it, "White Noise" tastes more 1980s than '80s poisons of the future.
The suburban world of John Updike and Philip Roth is around the corner, as are the flickers of ET, Star Wars and Halloween, Dallas, Seinfeld and the Denver clan.
The film feels historical even before it really begins
Baumbach's film, however, does not begin with television images, but with cinema images.
We're in the lecture hall and Jack's colleague Murray (Don Cheadle) is performing a compilation of car crash scenes that he describes as the epitome of American optimism.
Blood, tin and civilization theory, that's the sound and spirit of DeLillo, and Baumbach could easily win the game if he continued on that note.
But he has to retell a 500-page classic, and that's why he's becoming a professor himself.