3 Decades of Fincher | Video Essay

Exploring "auterism" and David Fincher's evolution of style from the 90s, to the 2000s, to the 2010s and now.
Patreon: / mindtheater
Music:
Blue Dot Sessions: sessions.blue/
- Building the Sled
- Slider
- Tartaruga
- The Caspian Sea
- Hedgeliner
Sources/References:
- www.filmibeat.com/celebs/davi...
- • How David Fincher Hija...
- • David Fincher - And th...
- • David Fincher Ranked
- • Why is David Fincher a...
- • Fincher on Fincher - H...
- • David Fincher - Invisi...
- • The Social Network | M...
- www.filmibeat.com/celebs/davi...
- fincherfanatic.blogspot.com/p...
- thefincheranalyst.com/tag/essay/
- / if_david_fincher_never...
- www.insider.com/how-screenwri....
- filmlifestyle.com/david-finch....
- deadline.com/2021/02/mank-scr...
- www.moviemaker.com/david-finc...
#davidfincher #videoessay

[@TheJedHung]

I'm a sucker for video essays that retell history with an analytical sense so loved this. Also enjoyed your deconstruction of tying Fincher to the auteur label. Considering how collaborative he is (bringing along the gaffer for Gone Girl to be a Director of Photography on episodes of Mindhunter and Mank via the recommendation from his usual guy) we could almost say labelling him as an auteur says more about us than his work. Valuing the aesthetic over the craft of filmmaking, measuring only what we can notice etc. In truth he might be most similar to Steven Soderbergh another great collaborator. Keep up the good work.

[@Vagran]

I'll admit I didn't understand all of the things discussed, but I was absolutely entertained by your presentation and delivery. Keep it up, you're onto something with this channel.

[@mindtheater]

thank you!

[@JDHDoveton]

Great video. I never thought about Fincher in this way. I'm starting to hate the term "auteur" because of the obvious gender issues, the erasure of collaborative process of all films and when reading post-war film theory, it's bandied about as the antithesis of the ideological Hollywood film. It's quite transparent at this point that Marxist and Althusserian film theorists wanted to make exceptions in their policy of painting all Hollywood films as "pure capitalist ideology" because they loved some of the films. They thought "ah but this film was made by a great genius, not by the capitalist machine, it has humanity" in doing so they further venerated the idea of the individual artist which makes collaboration and the compromise inherent in all film production as "ideological" (where ideology is sinister) and therefore not worthy of critique. We've shaken a lot of this off now, but I still see politically-conscious critics return to this idea.

[@andreymagnuss]

"Seemingly gets tacked on to films during the middle of production"
It wasn't even the case with Alien 3. Sure, he wasn't always the first choice as the director because some projects boil in a pot for a long time (e.g. Alien 3, Benjamin Button), but he's always been there at least some time before the production began and is even mostly the one who's in complete control of pre-production i.e. story development, location scouting, costumes, set or even script revisions. He's not a screenwriter, but even when working with the best writers like Sorkin he still makes changes to their scripts or rather develops the script together with the screenwriters. The only reason we got Se7en that we got is because Fincher pushed for it and got Pitt on board with this version.
Fincher's films are also not in any way style over substance. The style serves the story, it's never about just being flashy with him. And it's not about some sort of perfectionism, the notion is simply ridiculous. The weird thing is the later things you present in the video are in complete opposition to those notions you first introduced and I agree with a lot of the later sentiments.