Interview with Professor Terry Flew and Associate Professor Bruce Isaacs
Mon, Feb 09, 2026 3:49PM • 47:46
This transcript was generated by AI from the original audio, and we apologise for any errors that may have occurred in the voice‑to‑text translation.
Overview
In this episode of Time for Trust, ARC Laureate Professor Terry Flew sits down with Associate Professor Bruce Isaacs – film scholar, cinephile, and co‑host of the acclaimed Film Versus Film podcast – for a wide‑ranging conversation about cinema, culture and trust. Bruce reflects on how growing up under apartheid shaped his passion for film and social justice, and why podcasting opened new avenues for public engagement beyond academia. Together they explore whether cinema can still offer “truth” in an age of digital manipulation, and why conspiracy films, political thrillers and AI‑generated imagery resonate so strongly today. Bruce also previews his upcoming season on “cancelled” filmmakers and debates the role of art in contested cultural landscapes. From the decline of shared moviegoing to the rise of streaming and AI creativity, this episode offers a compelling look at the future of film — and what it means to trust the images we see.
Transcript
Bruce Isaacs, welcome to time for trust.
Bruce Isaacs 01:12
Thank you so much, Terry. It’s truly lovely to be here.
Terry Flew 01:15
Could you say something about your interest in film, and also, did you ever envisage that your interest in film would lead to having an academic job teaching students about film?
Bruce Isaacs 01:25
No, I never envisaged it. And if you told me that, I would have, you know, pinched myself. So I always see myself first as I love the word you used, a cinephile. I’m honestly first a cinephile. I could even say I’m first a film obsessive, and then I’m an academic. So my background in film is growing up with a love of cinema, primarily through my mum. I think that’s where my fascination with pop culture comes from. I was a child of pop culture 80s. I love the fact that it’s been possible to turn that into a career. And I guess the the attachment to just the love of movies and minnesida came from what could movies do? Like, what could we actually do with it? Could we have interesting discussions about it? Could we ask ourselves questions about art and politics and ideology and all these things that I, you know, because of my upbringing, I was always passionate about that.
I should say I grew up as a colored South African in the 80s, when the apartheid regime was starting to fragment, and so I grew up in a completely segregated society, quite literally legally segregated. So it’s impossible to grow up in that way and not be really passionate about values like equality and fairness and these sorts of things. And then when I discovered that people are going to let me love movies and then give me a job at a university that was, you know, impossible to believe. And so, hey, it’s privilege to be here, but also kind of to be in this role. And I’ve also used that to try to reach out into wider cultural circles, as you say, so the podcast, for me is as important as any of my academic work.
Terry Flew 03:06
You’re an early adopter of the podcast format, and film versus film is now in its fourth year. Is that correct?
Bruce Isaacs 03:11
That’s right. We are midway through our fourth season,
Terry Flew 03:15
Fantastic, and I’m an avid listener of the podcast. Why did you decide to do a podcast? What inspired that?
Bruce Isaacs 03:22
I have a very vivid, precise memory of that. So it’s early 2020, I was really affected by the first wave of covid. You know, with all the kinds of things, we were all affected by existential questions of, what is the future of the world, etc. I then also started to ask myself questions about what is the social function of an academic career. And I should also say I’m a huge consumer of media, so I follow many, many podcasts, and I follow many YouTube channels. Those sorts of things mean a lot to me, and what covid suggested was I knew that when we came out of it, it was not going to be enough for me to go back to my academic career as it existed prior to covid.
Craig Anderson, who’s a filmmaker, comedian and an old school friend, and he said, Would you be interested in developing a podcast? And I got onto my brother, because we had been talking about something like this. And then we spent all of 2020 developing it at a cafe in Marrickville, where there was nobody ever there. It was just us. And then we did some testing toward the end of 2020 and when we discovered, or at least when we perceived that there was a rapport that we could rely on between the three of us. You know, I think podcasts are an interesting modality. They’re not just about content, you know, if I think of academic work, I think it’s primarily content based. Podcasts are so much about who you are, your manner, the kind. Of affect you represent, and the kind of outreach to a person listening, even though you know they’re not there.
When we discovered that seemed to work between the three of us, we got a few people to listen to it. It felt right. And then we started recording, and it’s been absolutely a pleasure. I mean, I can honestly look it’s a lot of work, but the reward is not monetary. The reward is something much deeper than that, and the fact that we’re still going after several years, and the fact that I still do it with probably greater regularity than I do most of my current research academic work means that it does something I think for me, but also for what I’m trying to achieve in the academic space.
Terry Flew 05:44
For those who are listening, who haven’t listened to film versus film previously, please do the format is the two films in a similar genre compared to one another. Can you say something about why you chose that format, and also, what have been some of your favorite comparisons?
Bruce Isaacs 05:59
Oh, yeah. Okay, that’s good. I could talk about this stuff all day, right? I should say at the outset, we never wanted to do an explicit academic podcast. We wanted to do a film culture podcast that could speak to people who had not done a degree in Film Studies. And then what film this film became, was pick two films that you would not necessarily put into a relationship, and it was up to the three of us to forge the relationship. Invariably, it’s to do with art, and increasingly, I’d say, from season two, it’s to do with kind of a political valence.
So favourite comparisons, I loved the conversation, which is a Francis Coppola film, versus a film called the lives of others. And it was all about surveillance, and comparing 1970s paranoia cinema to, if you’ve not seen the lives of others, check it out. It’s wonderful. But about the East German starsi, surveillance, fascism. And I just loved that discussion, because it was we were all trying to figure out what was happening with Trump and America and levels of surveillance and paranoia. So I really loved that.
I like some of the really philosophical and intellectual stuff. I liked the arrival versus Back to the Future, and I got off on talking about different models of time that are central to philosophy, but that nobody really talks about in mainstream Hollywood movies, right? So I would say that a rival, if anyone seen this, a Denny Villeneuve movie, is maybe one of the most philosophically experimental films ever made in America. But most people see it as a kind of sci fi action movie, but if you just scrape under the surface, it’s projecting some pretty weird stuff. So I really loved that.
And I should say, just recently, and Terry and I were just talking about this, we did rocky four versus white knights, which was the three of us dipping into our mid 80s nostalgia. So those are three that I’ve really enjoyed. We also do Christmas specials, which I love as well. And we, each year, we do a thing called the draft episode, where we rank our films for the year. We get into lots of debates and discussions and controversies and so on.
Terry Flew 08:11
I thought it was great last year as this you gave Love Actually, it’s due as probably…
Bruce Isaacs 08:16
Actually, a lot of people I know hate it to death. I’m a bit of a sentimentalist, I guess
Terry Flew 08:22
Now I’m going to ask you academic, philosophical questions that would probably never be asked in Hollywood. This is a podcast about trust. Is film corrosive of trust, given that, by its very nature, it involves, unless we’re talking about some forms of documentary, the manipulation of images and the artificial staging of truth.
Bruce Isaacs 08:44
What a tough question.
Terry Flew 08:46
I’ve always wanted to ask the Frankfurt School question…
Bruce Isaacs 08:50
Okay, if we talk, there was a very deep perception that movies, especially Hollywood, were themselves, a kind of false ideology, right? And especially popular cinema of Hollywood. And I agree with that. I’m not saying that’s the entirety of Hollywood, but, you know, I just watched Forrest Gump with my son the other day, and the degree to which that is towing a certain kind of American Manifest Destiny ideology. It’s so transparent, right? But it’s enjoyable, and that’s what Hollywood does. It packages ideology in the way that it can persuade you to believe what it’s seeking you to believe is film corrosive of trust.
If we think about what a film is, it’s a capture in an image of something, ironically, some of the very influential and I would say impassioned theorists of cinema, especially around the 40s and 50s, would say it’s precisely the opposite, that what film did was it gave us not only a faithful but a kind of ontologically stable record of the moving world around us. You know, for. To grass. Had not been able to do it. Animation had not because it was not live action. It didn’t conform to the way our bodies moved or the world moved, but cinema could do it.
I think the key question is, what do you use those images for? What are the purposes you attach to it? Cinema, very quickly, from about 1910, was an entertainment medium, entertainment, I think, can’t ever, in my opinion, be separated from a kind of ideology or politics. Within all of cinema, there are discourses like all their traditions, film, realism, cinema, verite. Some of these are my favorite traditions, because they rather than corroding reality, I feel they reveal something to me that otherwise I couldn’t access. So I think images can give us a kind of emotional and even internal life that otherwise we could never access. And in that way, I’m part of the, you know, those philosophers of the 40s and 50s.
I think there’s a truth that the image can give you what I see. Increasingly, it’s not just cinema, though. This is the way that the image, especially in the advent of digital media, has moved from a kind of belief in the image to show you something, a belief in the image that can curate or manipulate or choreograph something, and in digital technology. And you would know this better than me, Terry, you can make anything look like anything or sound like anything. I think what we have seen, and I’m kind of channeling a bit of Martin Scorsese here, I think we’ve seen a decrease in our certainly in my capacity to believe in what I’m looking at. And I’ve got to say, at the moment, if I go on Instagram, the amount of AI junk, and I’m asking myself constantly, not Is this real or not, but can I know what is real? And if I can’t say that categorically, what kind of social, cultural, political investment do we make in questions of truth or questions of reality? I think cinema kicks in some of that door. I think Hollywood does. I think when we turn to digital tech in the 90s, Hollywood kicks it in further. And I think where we’re at now is we are starting to see a genuine kind of synthesis of what I would call cinema and what scholars like yourself would call mediated images. I don’t really see a distinction anymore. You know, between those two fields.
Terry Flew 12:39
You read a book on the art of pure cinema, talking about Hitchcock, and I wondered from there, is there such a thing as cinematic truth, and was it what directors like Hitchcock and others who followed Hitchcock were aiming for?
Bruce Isaacs 12:54
The Hitchcock idea of pure cinema is really interesting, because they saw themselves first as artists. So unlike, for example, take the neorealist in Italy after World War Two, they saw themselves as artists, but absolutely as political commentators. That was not really Hitchcock, if anything. Weirdly, in Hitchcock’s career, even as a British filmmaker, he distanced himself from that cinema should show us the world in truth. So his idea of pure cinema was kind of going back to what I said a few minutes ago. He truly believed cinema could see the world differently, and he wanted to show it differently, which is why, you know, anybody can go and look at silent era Hitchcock of the 20s, and you can already see this guy is experimenting with the medium in ways that other filmmakers are not.
And I would say that of FW Murnau, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, so for them, pure cinema was let’s see the world through the cinematic eye. But you’re absolutely right. I don’t think it’s Hitchcock. I think once we hit the 40s, once we have World War Two, there’s a spate of filmmakers and artists and intellectuals so just emerge who very explicitly say, we want to use cinema to show you the truth, and we’re going to show history through cinema. We’re going to go back and look at events and event like fascism under Mussolini, and now we’re going to show you it in a movie, and we’re going to show you the truth of that in a way that you’ve never seen it.
There’s a wonderful debate in the 90s between two, well, more than two. AMAZING film. Well, historians first, but who started to work on film, asking each other, can film give us a greater truth of history than, for example, an academic textbook? Sure. And there’s this enduring tension between those so pure cinema I take to be this artistic obsession with the form of cinema, but I take the notion of film realism to be maybe the most continually fascinating search for. Filmmakers, even if I, you know, sometimes I do work at AFTRS, the Australian Film and Television school year, and I work with young, kind of masters level directors. It always astonishes me that most of them are there to use cinema to tell the truth. They will say this to you sure, like Terry, I’m gonna make a movie to show you the truth of something. And it astonishes me that 100 years on, we still truly believe that cinema can show us the truth of something.
Terry Flew 15:27
When I was a high school history student, this is going back a long way. We used to watch the World at War. Yeah, the World at War was a BBC documentary series narrated by Sir Lawrence Olivier, outlining the history of the Second World War in Europe. And it’s really, really powerful documentary, any cinematic depiction of World War Two, it seems to me, has to do something different to that.
Bruce Isaacs 15:53
I think so. I have a colleague in Melbourne who works in this kind of thing I’m fascinated by. So I will candidly say, I don’t really believe in, for example, historical truth in the film image. And I don’t think cinema looks for that. What it seeks to show is a kind of esthetic truth. So I think films straddle this very interesting tension between being truthful to history and yet in some way intensifying that experience. I mean, I remember the whole talk around. Do you remember Saving Private Ryan with Spielberg’s film? You know, he had done chin to his list, and that was purportedly the truth of the Holocaust, then Saving Private Ryan apparently was the truth of the storming of the beach. And I remember going to the film, the movies, and watching it, and for anyone who’s seen it, and you will remember the opening 25 minutes, which is just staggering, but not for what I would call historical realism, but for a kind of sensory bombardment.
Spielberg, who is one of the truly great pure cinema filmmakers, I would say, understands that Spielberg doesn’t want to show you the way war looks when you come onto a beach. That would be really boring. Well, it would be horrific, but would be banal. Let’s put it that way. What he needs to show you, or what he needs to have, you feel is the experience of it. And that’s what cinema can do in a way that, for example, a text can’t do on the page. And so I think what cinema, you know, whether it’s Malik’s in red line, or Spielberg, or even if it’s, you know, a bridge too far. I don’t even those sorts of 60s movies that I…. Oh, absolutely, they have to, in a sense, guns are never owned…. Guns have no… I love those sorts of films. We’re eagles. There’s another one that I adore. They have to take the image of war, especially nearer to the end of the Second World War, when those images were still quite raw, I think, in people’s minds. And they have to, the term I would use is they have to aestheticise those images, and how they do it serves really different ideological and political ends. But I think you’re right, like even a documentary is not a documentary. You know, I would say that once makes documentary so fascinating is the relationship to the real, not the fact that it’s a reproduction of it. The real exists somewhere in the past, right? We need quantum theorists if we’re going to go to that. What cinema gives us is the way of saying, Okay, let’s reimagine this thing. And what might that mean for us?
Terry Flew 18:31
So cinema may give us truth. Cinema is also a great vehicle for conspiracy theories, and my list, of course, has Oliver Stone’s JFK here the magnum opus of conspiracy theory cinema. But I have films from the 70s, such as the conversation and the parallax view later, films such as Arlington Road say something about conspiracy theories in cinema, recalling from your podcast you were not a JFK fan.
Bruce Isaacs 19:00
Well, okay, let me put it this way. I love the film, and I have a lot of time for Oliver Stone, but as a formalist, as a person who has such a grasp of film language, and look, let’s talk about a very mediocre film like any given Sunday, which is about American football. Go and watch that film if you want to see how to cut action. It’s astonishing. As much as I love JFK, the movie, I don’t think there’s one iota of truth in anything we’ve seen. And I’ve got to say, I was that person in the early 90s watching films like JFK, fascinated with paranoia. And so my brother and I, my twin brother, on the podcast, we went down that rabbit hole, we would read stuff. You know, I’ve read accounts of JFK, and, you know, he and I have both read the garrison account of it, and I’ve read the great Don DeLillo novel called Libra and so on.
I don’t think there’s any truth to what Oliver Stone says, But what Oliver Stone really fundamentally understood was that you could take cinema and make it anything you wanted. And I think that’s why cinema is so perfect for conspiracy. Someone asked me this the other day, what do I think of all the conspiracy things going on in the world at the moment? And I think it’s natural, it’s human. I myself, all of us, seek to want simple answers to the sheer chaos of, you know, the material and kind of intellectual world we live in. So I’d like to believe that there is the deep state that’s like controlling everything, and Elon Musk sits in a corner with everybody running things. I would like to believe that, but it’s kind of sloppy if I just do a little bit of research.
So what cinema enabled people to do… I don’t even think it starts with cinema. I should say, though, I though, I think the critical moment is the 1960s tension between a kind of American right and a counter culture really leads to this binary perception of the other. I think you can see this happening. And then I think by Watergate, we see that kind of binaristic conspiracy clarity attach itself to, I guess, what I generally call the media establishment. I don’t only mean the fact that Woodward and Bernstein are journalist and covering it, but that this is All the President’s Men, all the presidents, sorry, I should say All the President’s Men, but even going back the actual Watergate incident, it always interests me that this is the moment when we’re actually bugging people’s rooms to listen to what they’re saying. And a few years later, Francisco Coppola makes the conversation, and it’s all about, what if I could listen into what people are saying? I mean, what makes Coppola so fascinating is it asks that kind of really fundamental philosophical question, can I know what I’ve ever listened to? Can I be deceived? But I think that’s the moment when conspiracy becomes front and center in American cinema.
So you named some of my favorite parallax views, just incredible. All prisons, men, Three Days of the Condor, we see this intersection of the American big state. So the CIA, for example, the FBI. And now we understand surveillance technology to be a part of it. It’s the rise of mass media. The newspapers are thriving. And I think it’s just a perfect, you know, it’s like a hotbed of course, this is where America is going to go, this is what conspiracy does. And then for me, the critical moment for let’s say, our generation, the post 70s, is a show that I love to death, called The X Files. And I just think the X Files was very important because it took us into the mobile communication era. The creator of the series once said, you could never have made that show without mobile phones. It was the early moment of being able to communicate all the time and permanently that made conspiracy a 24/7 you know, rolling image.
Terry Flew 22:54
I think the other thing about conspiracy theories and their relationship to film is that in terms of political theory, they rest upon what’s known as elite capture, theory and elite capture theory, which is different to say, theories of totalitarianism. You know, if you know who’s running things, you don’t need a conspiracy. Yes, the issue is around a system that presents itself as having these normative ideals and the reality of whatever it might be, which connects up to an idea of an ideology, yes, the idea that there’s something going on behind the scenes that you don’t know about and will be revealed.
Bruce Isaacs 23:39
And I think that’s the yearning that we have. I mean, look, I was at an impressionable age watching The X Files, and I always remember David Duchovny’s character Fox Mulder in his office, because he had been demoted down to the dungeon because he believed in Aliens, which was not cool, obviously, at that time in the FBI. And he had this big poster, I don’t know if you remember Terry. It had a flying saucer on it, and it didn’t say anything about UFOs or real. It was not making a categorical statement. It was kind of like a plea. And what the poster said was, I want to believe it wasn’t we know it’s real. It’s, I want to believe. It’s a choice, to believe in what is not known, and what has been covered up. And I think it’s the desire to want to be part of the conspiracy that is so alluring today, even, I mean, I look at all the stuff around Charlie Kirk’s assassination, for example, the desire to want to be part of the conspiracy, I think that’s very much part of our contemporary culture. Absolutely.
Terry Flew 24:40
Also think just in terms of field Media and Communication Studies. For those who aren’t aware, I have an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship on trust, or mediated trust. And what I note in the field is that there has been a lot written about truth, and particularly about misrepresentation of truth. Or ideology, you don’t find so much in this field, as compared to, say, sociology or political theory around trust. And I think that’s something I want to explore further, because, to use Jurgen Habermas term, the facticity of statements does not, in itself, form the foundation of trust.
Bruce Isaacs 25:21
I mean, that’s fascinating. I think what an amazing line. Because I think that’s a critical statement in the context of where we are just at at the moment, you know, discussing previously simply differing versions held not only passionately, but almost in a sense, as sacred objects by different political poles of the spectrum of an event that took place in space and time that was recorded. It just seems to me everywhere at the moment. You know, we were talking before about the assassination of Rene Good by the ice agent. I saw the footage. Everyone’s seen the footage. I saw Kristi Noem standing on a podium describing what she saw, and I have no idea how she could have seen what I saw. So we’re really going back to a kind of epistemology year. It’s a question of, what are we going to use media for, to know things, not to interpret, not to speculate or hypothesise, but actually to come to knowledge? And, I mean, I find it quite terrifying, actually.
Terry Flew 26:32
So I think we’ve long had a notion that most people don’t know these things. That’s why they’re subject to ideology. So they have to come to, you know, Sydney University, or watch a film or something that will suddenly reveal the truth, and that’s of course not. It’s not how it works.
Terry Flew 26:49
It’s the lucrative business model. Now, I was going to ask you something about in the forthcoming series of film versus film, you’re going to talk about cancel data, yes, and your whole season on films. Can you give us a preview of what you’ll be talking. So will Woody Allen be in this?
Bruce Isaacs 27:05
Woody Allen will feature in episode one. So obviously my background is in film studies, but I should say that I think of myself much more as the kind of as someone who works in esthetics. So I’m very interested in what is the purpose of art? How do we determine what it might be? How do we define it? How do we share with other people and so on? Is there a common definition I have been and continue to be very troubled by the desire to I mean, I’m kind of using scare quotes here, cancel that which runs counter to what I either feel is permissible, or even I mean kind of socially productive, or however you want to describe it, because I take as a starting point, I’m going to say that I think art and discourse has in built in it a kind of slipperiness, a kind of inherent subjectivity. And what I find powerful about that is, is that you and I can sit here and we can debate things, and I can go and research stuff, and I can say, hey, Terry, I don’t agree with what you said last week, because I just read this other book. And we can do that, we can continue this dialog.
But my concern is, if we close things off, what it effectively does is it artificially interrupts the capacity to actually discuss an artist, their work, the relationship of the work. The other side of this, for me, is something more radical and potentially controversial, that nothing is an absolute so that I can have an opinion about Woody Allen, which I do have, let’s call Woody Allen the social identity. I can have an opinion. Why can’t I hold that separate from the filmmaker, the author, the artist?
And so I would say that some of the best films made in America in the 1970s and 1980s are films directed and written by Woody Allen. I think Manhattan is one of those glorious films, partially because it is really challenging and problematic. So we’re going to do Polanski. Obviously, I think that’s a person that has to be discussed. I remember vividly a few years ago, I taught a film called repulsion, and got in all kinds of trouble for it, from students, but also from my own tutors, who were, you know, horrified that I would program this film on the course. And I should say, I’m sometimes I find myself really deaf to some of that stuff, because that’s just not how I evolved as, you know, maybe you and I from a different generation where that was not front and center for me. I didn’t grow up thinking, you know, I shouldn’t really listen to James Brown because he was such a terrible womaniser. I love James Brown, and I would never advocate for no lines, of course, you know. How we draw those lines is a conversation for another day. But the kinds of lines I think we’re seeing drawn, in my opinion, they lack adequate critical interrogation. I think we’re adopting positions because they are often socially and politically valuable to us. And I think that’s really dangerous. I think if you do that, then art itself becomes kind of opportunistic, and that’s not what it should be, although the passing of time is going to render some problems.
Terry Flew 30:29
You know, I remember you’d always tell you’ve got to watch Gone With the Wind. It’s the greatest film ever made. And sure, yeah, there’s some great scenes and but the racial representation of the movie is just unbearable.
Bruce Isaacs 30:45
I mean, I watch it like once every couple of years or so. It’s probably, it’s probably the most disturbing representation produced by Hollywood. I think it’s quite astonishing, because not only is it racist, it actually glorifies the mythology of the South, which is really problematic and contemporary. And was it 1939 it really, I mean, and so the fact that you know Victor Fleming and oselsi could actually want to make this film speaks a lot about the inbuilt racism and bigotry of the studio system at the time. Because it’s a racist film, I would never want to cancel that film. I love the fact that when Spike Lee made black Klansmen, he was able to open his film with a clip of scarlet walking across the wounded bodies from a battle in the Civil War. And he did it to make the point that this is not some kind of a political gesture by a Hollywood movie in 1939 This is highly politicized and racialized. If we cancel that film in 19 I mean, there were calls to cancel that, you know, for decades. Let’s say we got rid of that film in 1971 could you still use it as a tool to engender a kind of really ferocious debate that I think circulates now amongst really important Black Filmmakers. I don’t think so. And so for me, what we want to do with the podcast is interrogate canceled work to demonstrate the political valence of those works that will be great.
Terry Flew 32:14
Really looking forward to it. On cinema itself, we’ve watched movies in things called cinemas for some time, but we now watch them privately. I often think about this. You know, I had to take a film, you put me back onto The Departed? Yeah, I saw The Departed, but I watched it on a flight somewhere, so I had to watch it on a big TV screen. What does it mean for cinema as a collective experience, something we can talk about if we’re primarily consuming it privately.
Bruce Isaacs 32:46
I mean, I think you phrase that really well, because people often ask me, What does it mean to see movies on a small screen? You know, like once, I was teaching Lawrence of Arabia, and a student told me they watched it on their iPhone. And I was like, oh my god, this is one of those beautiful widescreen things ever made, right? But I think the way you phrase is interesting, because aside from what people like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino say, going to the movies is not just about the scale of the image and the spectacle of it’s about a kind of experience.
And I think we forget that you can look at source material people writing about the experience of going to the movies. And it’s this great stuff out there. People actually talking about, I went to the movies today, 1938 and this is what it was like. And we did this, and we got dressed up and and there’s a kind of social experiential element to the movies, in a way that we might think of, like going to the ballet. I went to David Byrne last night. There’s an experiential aspect to that, right? What I would say we’ve lost is a sense of sharing the film experience with communities that are quite far outside of ourselves. So I think, let’s say, going to, you know, a cinema, and watching a film with a full like going around big Ritz cinema, one, which I love.
Let’s say it’s full and you’re watching this film, yes, you’re in the dark and it’s quiet and no one’s supposed to talk, I mean, and again, there’s a lot of work on this. There is a sense of community and connectedness, and I think we’ve lost that, you know? I love going to the moves and feeling like we’re all in this. You know, I just, I just saw Anaconda the other day with my son. I haven’t laughed that hard for a very long time, but what was fun was when I was laughing, everybody else was laughing, and it was a sense that I was sharing in this together. I think that’s not only sad, but somehow kind of disfiguring of what cinema was when it was created. It was a social entertainment. It came out of, you know, pre existing art forms that were the stage or Woodville or whatever, you know, and it was about community. I think we lose that a bit. We also lose, you know, what people like Walter Benjamin call the aura of the work, which is, you. I’m as guilty as anyone else. I’m probably 20 minutes into about seven movies currently at home, because I subscribe to everything and I get access to everything. The problem with that is, I don’t think we address the artwork on the terms that it deserves, which is to say, and this sounds kind of silly, but the artwork is available to you. You owe something to it, and I think that’s what we lose as well. We lose that sense of being in a very intimate relationship to the artwork.
Terry Flew 35:34
I wanted to ask you about trust in recent Hollywood films. It’s quite a hot topic, yes at the moment, and my list includes Civil War, yes, one battle after another. Eddington.
Bruce Isaacs 35:45
Eddington, yes, probably my favorite film of last year.
Terry Flew 35:48
Could you say something about why these films? Why now?
Bruce Isaacs 35:51
Oh, look, I think it’s quite transparent, right? I think America’s institutions, and particularly what has long been taken to be the kind of inbuilt, unquestioned trustworthiness of America’s institutions, across the executive, the judiciary, Congress, etc. They’re just under attack constantly. There’s no trustworthiness. You know, I think there have been certain events, obviously Trump won, but then we had the January 6 storming of the Capitol, those images would have been unthinkable for me in 2018, 20, 2016 whatever, it would have been impossible to consider. So I think what has happened is filmmakers, and I should say, look, I would describe Hollywood, and this is whether we’re talking Warner Brothers or a 24 as kind of small l, liberal, moderate, slightly left. So what they do is they have, and I think it’s fantastic, they’ve decided to engage in a subfield of political filmmaking that always rears its head in response to a kind of dominant authority at various points, like post world war two and so on, or during the counter culture of the 60s, what I’ve seen is several films coming out quite near to each other that want to challenge, resist, deconstruct this untrustworthiness of the American establishment.
I think Eddington is the best. Because I think it’s by far the most sophisticated. One battle after another is, I think really, really good. I think the way, you know, it’s kind of the ICE agents are there right in one battle after another. And there’s this idea of the Christmas adventurous club, and again, that kind of conspiracy Deep State thing is right on the nose, but it’s very Thomas Pynchon. It’s based on a Thomas Pynchon novel called Vineland, which I love, and it’s very absurd, as Pynchon Civil War was, for me. I’m amazed. 824 even got that film made because it was such a clear and obvious attack on Trump as a sort of future despot, you know, a future authoritarian figure. And what’s interesting is, when civil war came out, Trump was still shackled to a degree. Well, certainly in the last few months, I don’t think Trump is shackled anymore. So it’s interesting to me that these films come out at a certain time when America is wrestling with these things, we see a lot of commentators on the left, not just in about cinema, but, you know, in the news, in podcasting, you know, in for the rest is politics. You and I follow that. We see all these people trying to find the trust in institutions and not knowing how to and I love the fact that Hollywood has decided we’re part of this battle. You know, my only concern is these films don’t necessarily make a hell of a lot of money. That is what
Terry Flew 38:48
I think there’s that. I think there’s also that the people who run the companies that own, the studios that make the films are not showing a huge amount of political backbone. No, to put it mildly, right at the moment, I think there’s also an interesting thing, and it strikes me particularly with, well, one battle after another. I think something that’s important to understand that movie is to understand the American left, and in particular, its inability to get real political traction. So Leo DiCaprio, character comes out of, you know, those scenes where they’re arguing about what the password is, and so on, rather…
Bruce Isaacs 39:26
Oh, my god yes. But also the fact that the film is willing to, in some sense, satirise the left itself. And I found same with Eddington. I, you know, when I watch Eddington, I don’t know where his political leanings.
Terry Flew 39:42
Yes, I have absolutely thinking that, because it’s quite different to say. I mean, if you know, take a political filmmaker like Ken Lowe, yes, or someone you know who the goodies and the baddies are, absolutely and the goodies broadly relate to some or other notion of the working class.
Bruce Isaacs 39:56
And that’s Italian neorealism perfectly. That’s where it comes from. Yes, the working class are the good labor.
Terry Flew 40:04
It’s journalists, yes, possibly, versus the working class, depending on …
Bruce Isaacs 40:09
It makes that film a really unusual entry point, because the film, I don’t know, I think there are aspects of the film where it kind of wants to cover its basis in many ways, I think it does some very interesting things with journalism, but in other ways, you know, the whole debate about analog and digital tech seems to me already 20 years old. No one’s walking around with a film camera as a professional journalist taking photos now, right? I mean, that’s that’s absurd. So I think there’s an acquaintance to civil war, but nonetheless, the image of an obvious Trump figure being gunned down by a kind of military force that was, well, I guess, in by definition, enacting a coup that was pretty staggering, you know, and I assume, very controversial.
Terry Flew 41:01
I want to ask you a few things, whether they’re good or bad for cinema. First is streaming …
Bruce Isaacs 41:04
… overall good. The current financial studio model, I think if it’s lucky, it’s got 20 years left, because financially just doesn’t make any sense. We just mentioned One Battle After Another, which is going to make about $200 million, but cost about $170 million. So that’s a loss for the studio, and that’s with Leo DiCaprio. I think streaming gives us wider potential access to diverse forms of art, and whatever people say about Amazon or Netflix or Disney, have a look at the let’s call it relative diversity in programming compared to what your big studios are putting out.
I mean, if you look at what Warner Brothers has put out over the last year, and look at the fact that Netflix has so much foreign language television coming out, so many distributed films from Spain, from South America, I think that’s wonderful. And I think without that, I worry about where any kind of independent cinema would be even today. So I think on the whole good my worry is, though, that streaming seems to be becoming very quickly, a kind of oligopoly, and that we start to see companies move in another so obviously Netflix was paramount at the moment. That’s really troubling, because what we’re going to see is, and especially using AI, I think you’re going to see far more engineering of content for the individual that can be now algorithmically mapped. And that’s really worrying.
Terry Flew 42:37
Is YouTube good or bad for cinema?
Bruce Isaacs 42:40
Terry, I consume so much YouTube that I could never say was bad. Look, I have a 10 year old. He watches a lot of junk on YouTube. I don’t know what the impact of these sorts of things. I think YouTube is one of the most profound revolutions in media that you can encounter. I mean, I follow stuff on almost everything you can imagine, right? If I’m interested in how to paint a portrait, I go to YouTube and I just watch a thing, right? I think YouTube is an important kind of social and informational revolution. I think it’s only been good for cinema because what I think, again, it’s given people the capacity for kind of literacy with images, I just worry again about the kind of content that we see exploding on YouTube, but I would never want to take it away, because I consume it far too aggressively.
Terry Flew 43:35
And there’s an obvious final question here. Artificial Intelligence, good or bad for cinema?
Bruce Isaacs 43:41
Really interesting. I’ve been involved with the company who ran the one of the biggest AI film festivals recently. It’s okay. So let me say that was a transformative moment for me, because I got to work with them. I got to work with the judging panel that included George Miller, the great filmmaker of the Mad Max franchise, who is very supportive of this. Yes, what I saw in the films that were shortlisted and then won was profound levels of creativity with AI. But interestingly, all of those creative artists who were individuals, for the most part, a couple of duos, perceived AI to be a tool that they were using in creative ways. That’s something very different from the kind of wholesale creation by AI of, let’s say, informational scenarios.
Or, as I said, when I’ve turned on Instagram, I don’t know what I’m looking at. I don’t know if someone’s just out there making an AI thing and then getting revenue from it. What I’m worried about is that it will severely compromise the current industry as we understand it. I think that’s already happening, and I don’t think we can go back. So I think it’s how we model the use value of AI, not for film per se, but for more artistic and expressive ends. I think we need to talk much more about that. That’s what worried me. People aren’t talking about the fact that AI can be… I’m currently working with a couple of people and trying to make an AI movie. It can be highly expressive. But no one ever wants to talk about the kind of shell, the mediation of it, the production of it, not the expressive potential of it, yeah.
Terry Flew 45:23
So, you know, it would seem a bit don’t have hypocritical is the right word, but for the film industry to condemn a technology that enables the manipulation of images given to return to where we were at the start. Cinema has always been about the manipulation of images.
Bruce Isaacs 45:41
Exactly. I mean, that’s my position. As I said before, I don’t really believe in cinema as a documenting of anything, but I will say I did an ABC segment on this question of AI, and I talked about the fact that I was at the screening identity cinemas of these works, and we surveyed the audience. We asked them, ‘how did you feel knowing every aspect of that image was an AI creation’. So many people called in having a go at me for simply suggesting there might be something creative in AI artistically. And I was so I didn’t know that was going to happen, but I was interested in it.
There was something really deep about the fact that I was betraying the art form, or I was betraying cinema, in some sense. Now, of course, I didn’t see it that way, but it was interesting to me that a number of people in a short segment on ABC Radio phoned in to say that, you know, and I think this is going to be a huge tension for us across, let’s say, the next decade. What does AI do when it encounters this still radically undefined concept of art that we all kind of live with? I don’t know if you follow AI music. I find that absolutely fascinating, the fact that you’ve got places like Spotify producing AI bands, yes, AI artists that have music videos. You know, for me, that’s already quite far ahead of where cinema is. Yeah, music has gone quite a long way. Advertising has gone quite a long way, and cinema is right at the start. So I’m actually excited to be present at the emergence of this, because I think it’s going to gain momentum.
Terry Flew 47:22
Bruce Isaacs, thank you very much for being part of Time for Trust.
Bruce Isaacs 47:25
Thanks so much, Terry. Pleasure to be here.
Terry Flew 47:29
Time For Trust is a podcast supported by the Australian Research Council and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. Post production is by Deadset studios.
