Nobody gives a shit. But it is silly. It is as silly as putting a short story as the best novel of the year. "But it's really well written and special and that writer has written a lot of novels!". Well? It doesn't matter because as Jenkins said we all know it is a TV show and it won't change anything. There is some disdain in it, too. It shows how embarrassed some movie critics are at loving a TV Show. It can only be noble art if it is cinema. That will probably die away soon. I mean, Les Cahiers did three covers in a few months about The Return. They wrote about it. They can write about TV too even if it's rare. Great cinematic work is being done in different mediums. That kind of Top is not serious in itself, but it is a sign that there is a tendency to refuse that fact. Which I find weird.
Cinema in itself isn't better than a TV Show. The Return showed us that. And I don't think that you can define a TV Show only as able to do more like you said, JB. I find the argument: "But you can do more than a movie because you have more hours" is absurd. You can also say that a TV Show can do less than a movie because it's shorter. It's not that. It's entirely factual. The mediums are different. More. Less. Whatever. It doesn't matter. We stay in a conflict between movies and TV...
We fear that TV is taking the place of cinema. I worry about that, too. I don't think that a great director of movies can make a great TV Show. A great novelist might not be able to write a great short story. An art form often dominates another: look, nobody gives a shit about short stories, the novel is the respected art form these days in literature. I hope we could escape these symbolics forms of domination. In literature: more people read novels than short stories or poetry, right? Even I...But these days while cinema stays what's respected the most, TV Shows are massively watched. That's why some people are trying to say: "TV is what good now!" Which is also an idiotic way to think...
That's amazing that a new cinematic medium truly became cinematic. Watching The Return, I was amazed at what TV could do. And not in a "oh, TV can be cinematic" way! I knew that. It was more about the work can...work. You can often watch The Return as a meta commentary about TV series. Yeah, Lynch, don't bullshit me about making a 18 hours movie when you clearly know what you are doing...
That Top—silly in itself, not deserving shits to give—is nonetheless a sign of what's happening nowadays concerning the...what? cinematic world? camera world? le monde des Lumières?
