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Inspired after hearing a 21-year old coworker describe The Matrix as an "old classic" I'm really curious what other people consider the cut-off to be between classic and modern film-making, or between old films and new films (is there a difference between those two for you?)

Personally, I would consider the cut-off to be roughly the early '70s. Something from the late 60s would be "classic" cinema, something from the mid-70s would be modern and films like MASH or The Godfather would be on the borderline and could go either way.

I draw the line at the year I was born.

‘Classic’ could be a decade old in my opinion, but throw ‘old’ in the mix, and my mind goes to ‘60s and earlier.

The word classic has lost its way a little bit in films and television I find. Something's are declared instant classics and some "classics" only have a very small cult following. I would say the classics are defined as those films from the 60s 70s and now even the 80s that have universal love from audiences.

The above point about drawing the line at the year you were born is a good idea but for those born in the year 2000 which is now over 20 years ago that becomes much harder to define what truly makes up a classic.

We had a running gag in film school undergrad that anything made prior to 1994 was "too old".

It was facetious then (making fun of people who thought Jurassic Park was not modern enough). But with hindsight I'm kind of inclined to say it seriously.

Personally though I don't see "old" and "new" or "classic" and "whatever not a classic is". "Old" may refer to certain approaches in filmmaking style, tech, or tone, but the more recent cinema I see the more I realize a lot of things don't go out of style.

There are no "old" films yet. Cinema is still a new art form, which just happens to have been born during a uniquely hyper-accelerated period of history (and one in which people consequentially have a uniquely distorted perception of time.)

JakeAesthete wrote: ↑

Mon May 10, 2021 11:44 pm

There are no "old" films yet. Cinema is still a new art form, which just happens to have been born during a uniquely hyper-accelerated period of history (and one in which people consequentially have a uniquely distorted perception of time.)

Nice, insightful. "Old" only has meaning relative to something else.

My education is in Anthropology, so I also tend to look at things on much wider, geological-type timescales. "Movies? Psssh, seems like only yesterday cave people were figuring out how to extract pigments from plants so they could draw crude representations of animals on cave walls."

I've been thinking about this for a bit - it's an interesting question - and the conclusion I came to was black and white. Obviously not all black and white films are classics, but to me all classics are black and white. No matter how good I consider a film to be, if it's in color my brain can't reconcile it with the word classic. And modern black and white films like The White Ribbon don't count even though I think it's one of the best films ever made. Strange.

Respectable old stuff
Everything becomes "old" after 15 years or so. The time it takes from one generation of young kids/teenagers to pass and grow mature a bit.

In my mind I've always drawn a line somewhere in the mid 1970s, around the time of Star Wars and Jaws and the dawn of the big popcorn blockbuster era.