The Final Cut

On Contemporary Cinematic Late Style

by Cobi Chiodo Powell

Several of Cannes’ buzziest 2024 premieres were helmed by aging auteurist men. With Oh, Canada and The Shrouds, respectively, Paul Schrader and David Cronenberg premiered films whose central preoccupation was death. With Furiosa, George Miller returned again to Mad Max, the film that propelled him out of Ausploitation obscurity. Francis Ford Coppola premiered Megalopolis, an apparently unmarketable film from a filmmaker whose recent efforts, stunning as they can be (more people should see Twixt), have proved idiosyncratic for those most forgivingly euphemistic, haphazardly experimental for those most unforgivingly critical. And Jean-Luc Godard posthumously premiered a new film, Scénarios, shot and edited the day before his assisted suicide. These films garnered acclaim and confusion alike, with either reaction frequently related to one phrase: “late style.”

This is a phrase we have seen with some regularity lately. Over the last decade, myriad filmmakers who began careers in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s have released slow, meditative work that reflects, autobiographically, on their own tropes and, more expansively, on the medium. The aforementioned Schrader and Cronenberg, for instance, but Miyazaki (The Boy and the Heron), Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon; The Irishman), Varda (Varda by Agnès; Faces Places), Kiarostami (Like Someone in Love), Obayashi (Hanagatami), and even Clint (The Mule) have all released work one could sensibly call “late style.” Critics have run with this categorizational challenge, and Google Books’ Ngram indicates a dramatic increase in usage of the phrase beginning in the early 2010s. Such (admittedly not super rigorous) data suggests that, as more of our most beloved auteurs enter old age, interest in “late style” thereby expands. 

The interest in this phrase holds implications for cinema at large: specifically our relation to contemporary cinema. Insofar as late style belongs to the auteur, the interest in late style is inextricable from the increasing preoccupation with the mythology of the individual auteur, itself a vanishing archetype. As enunciated in Daniel Bressner’s recent Harper’s essay “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” idiosyncrasy is squeezed out of contemporary films to appeal to the widest viewership possible. In this light, the preoccupation with late style feels different from the prior half-century of auteur worship: almost anticipatorily mournful, a proleptic elegy for a world soon to be without strong perspectives. A cultural preoccupation with late style aligns with a growing fascination with the moribund auteur, a fascination concomitant with its increasing rarity. But given that late style is inextricable from decay and death, it also signals an anxiety to appreciate what we have before it disappears. 

Megalopolis