Beginning with the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon, on which Ryan Goslin and Emily Blunt joked about during Oscar awards ceremony [1], it seems that in recent times there has been a real return to the movie theaters, despite the proliferation of digital platforms where to consume, in a different way, serial products or otherwise intended for the more or less small home screen.

It has been the year of auteur films that have won over the general public, intercepting a category that lies between blockbuster and signature, as in the case of Cristopher Nolan's Oppenheimer but also in the more ambiguous one of Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, which will probably open to the Mattel Cinematic Universe.

It was also the year in which long-form films were produced, bucking the trend against serialization and especially the fragmentation of audiovisual consumption into increasingly shorter segments, as in the case of Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, also an Oscar nominee, or Ridley Scott's less convincing (but not because of its duration) Napoleon.

This unusual ferment could also materialize as a firm response of the cinematic medium to contamination with other, shorter, quicker, surface media languages, reclaiming its ability to plumb the complexity of the contemporary.

A cinema that knows how to think

Indeed, in all the works in the running for the statuette, we see a cinema that knows how to think.

Beginning with Nolan's latest effort [2], which showcases an America reworking one of its original sins, which, at the same time, enabled the ultimate assertion of its power. How are philosophical and ethical questions to be rethought when man, who albeit remains a finite being, can now potentially "burn up the sky" and jeopardize the continuation of life on the planet?

Nolan's film, between the farcical trial secretly conducted by Lewis Strauss and Oppenheimer's journey through Oppenheimer's inner images, strained between eroticism and scenarios of destruction, asks what kind of physicochemical reaction triggered this new possibility of man, which, far from being a controlled experiment in a deserted area, wiped out thousands of lives.

Nolan, and with him Oppenheimer (and with them, perhaps, America) do not show us the event of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it returns in the form of a phantom and foreboding in the nightmares of the inventor of the atomic bomb, who increasingly understands that that act did not sanction the end of the war, but opened a new era where man becomes increasingly responsible for his own destiny.

But even more than Oppenheimer, it is Jonathan Glazer's extraordinary The Zone of Interest that insists on the situated human gaze, on the fact that we always find ourselves observing the world through selective exposure.

With a work on sound that will go down in film history, Glazer shows us the well-kept garden of a "normal" German bourgeois family on the edge of the Auschwitz camp, where everyone looks at the flowers, the vegetable garden, the small pool for the children while the smoke of the crematorium is seen in the background and the screams of the prisoners are heard. When the main character, Rudolf Höss, asks a colleague "Did you hear that?", we viewers think he is referring to the horror of the screams of the Jews, while he quietly refers to the cry of the grey heron that seems to continue to ensure a kind of goodness of nature.

The film reveals all the devices of adiaphorization and voluntary silencing of the moral compass of the protagonists, who appropriate the luxury items of the Jews confined in the camp, who order the efficiency of the crematorium as if they were talking about the growth of any other company, who illustrate to their guests the much coveted social prestige they have won in their limited and claustrophobic zone of interest.

Only the polarized and "negative" images of a Polish girl planting apples for the camp prisoners seem to us to escape this logic of denial and dehumanization, which draws a precise line between what is really happening, in all its horror, like the skulls returning to the river during an afternoon spent with family, and what one chooses to see and what one deliberately wants to ignore.

As the director also demonstrated during his acceptance speech for the prestigious statuette [3], his film is not just about the Holocaust, but is an appeal to our moral responsibility in the face of every act of dehumanization that is carried out in the world, justified and supported by certain military, technological, but above all rhetorical devices, whether it is the extermination of the Jews carried out by Nazism or the massacre of civilians in Gaza.

Questions of identity and emancipation

Finally, the cinema of this year's Oscars elaborates and rethinks questions of identity and emancipation both with regard to the theme of racism and what it means to be African American in the United States with American Fiction (best original screenplay), and with regard to the female subjectification journey of a grotesque experiment in a possible Victorian uchrony (Poor Things) in which Bella Baxter finds herself living in the body of a woman with the brain of a newborn baby - an extraordinary Emma Stone, awarded best actress.

If the former is a comedy that plays on the stereotypes that whites have towards African Americans (and vice versa), but especially on the easy need to wash one's conscience without concretely working toward equal integration, Yorgos Lanthimos' controversial film challenges us in a more brutal way to follow a path of emancipation dictated by experimentation without moral(stical) limits and a kind of mechanism of experience that questions us, again, about our social prejudices and all attempts at rationalization and castration of instincts that, theoretically, should guarantee a more peaceful social coexistence.

A cinema that thinks about these issues, unveils their contradictions, without wanting to propose an easy thesis or a simplification of reality, is surely a cinema capable of doing philosophy.

References

[1] Oscars 2024: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt exchange playful barbs at the Academy Awards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kriaFd5Sggk

[2] For a more specific analysis of Nolan's film on this blog see https://blog.unisr.it/en/oppenheimer-benefactor-humanity-destroyer-worlds

[3] Jonathan Glazer calls out Israel's weaponisation of the holocaust https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ymiyNmr1WY.