Steve McQueen cannot direct five movies in one year

There are currently 73 titles in my Letterboxd watchlist, which tracks the current year film titles I still hope to catch before I close off my rankings the second week of January. 

That may seem like a lot, but it's about typical for this time of year. There are always plenty of movies I can't get to, either because they're on a service I don't subscribe to, or I missed them in the theater and they have not yet become available for rental, or simply because they were once forecast to come out this year but never did. That last is obviously happening a lot in 2020, as titles like Dune and Black Widow are still in my watchlist, mostly because at the end of each year, I roll over the leftovers, as long as their release dates are still in the future.

A series of 2020 (films? TV shows? let's talk about it) I do have access to is challenging whether that list should really be 77 titles long, or maybe only 72.

And this seemingly trivial decision could end up being a landmark moment in the erosion of what we call cinema. 

A while back I added to my watchlist Lovers Rock, a new Steve McQueen movie I'd heard good buzz about. At the time I added it, I noticed the poster also made reference to something called Small Axe, but I didn't know what that meant until later. I just knew McQueen was a filmmaker who demanded my attention, as I've never disliked one of his films and they always engender plenty of discussion.

Small Axe, as it turns out, is a series of five "films" McQueen has directed for Amazon Prime. That service is certainly promoting them as films, as that continues to be the more prestigious moniker, at least for the time being. However, they are not all what we would consider to be feature length. 

As my true awareness of Small Axe has only dawned on me in the past couple weeks, it has presented me with quite a dilemma. When you're already focusing down your choices at the end of the year, and even starting to informally slot your remaining movies into available viewing slots, it throws quite a spanner in the works, to use the Australian phrase, to suddenly be presented with five new movies you hadn't been planning for. 

Of course, part of this dilemma involves actually deciding whether these are movies.

The easiest way to decide is just to go with how they are being marketed, which is as films. If Small Axe had come out earlier in the year, I likely would have just gone with that categorization, and sprinkled my viewing of them throughout the year, as I did with the Amazon-only Jason Blum series Welcome to the Blumhouse, which featured four films of its own. 

But facing the end of the year -- and the prospect of not being able to include these for consideration in my year-end rankings -- I'm forcing myself into the position of really examining their bonafides as genuine pieces of cinema, and not just an anthology TV show, like we get so many of these days.

For one, right at the start of the Wikipedia description, it refers to the series as "an anthology film series." That description contains conflicting terminology, if we are to think of an anthology as primarily a television term. But the weekly release dates of these "films," starting on November 20th and finishing on December 18th, lend more credence to the notion that it is a limited television series with regularly recurring drop dates. 

Then you've got the running times. The first release, Mangrove, is 128 minutes, leaving no doubt as to its appropriate designation as a film. But from there things get more dicey. Lovers Rock, the one I first heard about and the second release in the series, is barely half that length at 68 minutes. Then you've got Red, White and Blue (80 minutes), Alex Wheatle (66 minutes) and Education (63 minutes). 

Only two of those "films" meet the standard definition of a feature film, and at 80 minutes, Red, White and Blue is only barely squeaking in. (I draw an imaginary line of demarcation around 75 minutes.)

Maybe this would seem more clear cut in favor of labeling these as films if we didn't have so many examples of streaming television shows that have very long individual episodes. Many series that are clearly defined as television shows have no trouble issuing single episodes that exceed feature length, or at least my stated 75-minute lower end of that range. Some of those shows are even anthology shows, in that the episodes don't share any characters or plots in common. The most obvious example is something like Black Mirror, which has isolated long episodes among mostly ones that are under an hour.

I'm not sure why McQueen gets a classification exemption. And if Mangrove weren't as long as it is, maybe he would not. If you are promoting five different units of filmed entertainment that are all between 65 and 75 minutes long, are you still calling them films?

Given that many of my arguments are rationalizations enabling me to avoid watching all five of these different units of filmed entertainment by January 12th -- because I feel like I need to watch all of them or none of them -- there's one final argument that truly convinces me, which I have already alluded to in the title for this post. 

I can't think of another example in history where the same director has made five films in one single year. Two, for sure; probably three or maybe even four back in the golden age of Hollywood, when films were made in like ten days and the director's role was limited to the period he was actually on set yelling "Action!" or "Cut!" But five? No director can direct five films in one year, especially in this day and age.

You know what one person can direct five of in a single year? A TV show.

It may seem like a meaningless distinction, but at this time of year, I'm trying to find meaning in meaningless distinctions.

It's generally easier for a director to direct multiple episodes of a TV show, even if some of those episodes reach feature length, because they tend to rely on the same sets and the same assemblage of talent. Maybe the best example here is something like True Detective, whose first season was directed entirely by Cary Joji Fukunaga. And those were certainly cinematic episodes, sprawling in nature and ambitious in technique. It may have been harder for Fukunaga to direct eight episodes of True Detective even than for another director to direct two films in one calendar year. But there is still no doubt that this is a TV show, not a series of related movies.

I suppose there's a degree of difficulty introduced to McQueen's feat in that he changed casts between each project, as well as, presumably, locations, though I have not seen these so I can't state that for sure. I also reckon Small Axe is probably not as technically ambitious as True Detective, though again, I am only speculating.

However I arrive at my conclusion, and even if making decisions according to precedent is a faulty process, it's a conclusion I can rest easy with for now. Then, sometime in 2021, I can watch Small Axe at my own pace, and take in their undeniable pleasures without it feeling like a cram session.

The question I'll have to tackle then, though, will be whether I add them to my various film lists or leave them off. And that's the part of this that gives me long-term categorization fears. There are so many signs of the way movies are ceasing to be considered a vital entity, or collapsing into the mechanics of television if not yet their label as a distinct art form. If something like Small Axe further blurs and starts to erase the line between movies and television, well, at the very least it will throw cinematic loyalists and list-makers like myself into a tizzy.

A question for another day ...