"When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays"
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Bernstein is really talking about touch, but he’s also talking about what touch stands in for: trust, friction, shared time in the same room. As a film composer who came up when studios ran like loud, imperfect factories, he’s noticing a cultural shift that movies didn’t just record but helped normalize. When “that kind of contact” disappears onscreen, it isn’t merely a change in blocking or propriety; it becomes a visual grammar for distance. The camera starts treating people as islands, and the soundtrack is left to paper over the gap.
The sly move in his phrasing is the double alienation. Films are “about alienation” because the characters don’t connect; then he flips it, suggesting the industry itself has become alienated, with creators less embedded in a collective process. That’s not nostalgia for handshake-era masculinity so much as a diagnosis of professional atomization: specialists siloed, colleagues turned into vendors, collaboration mediated by schedules, lawyers, and later, technology.
Context matters: Bernstein worked across Hollywood’s mid-century machinery and its later, more corporate phase. He knew what it meant to sit with directors, editors, musicians, to argue in person, to build a shared emotional language. His subtext is that cinema’s emotional temperature is linked to how it’s made. A culture that gets less comfortable with closeness - in workplaces, in friendships, in public life - will naturally tell stories where contact feels risky, rare, or scripted. And when that happens, alienation stops being a theme and starts being the default setting.
The sly move in his phrasing is the double alienation. Films are “about alienation” because the characters don’t connect; then he flips it, suggesting the industry itself has become alienated, with creators less embedded in a collective process. That’s not nostalgia for handshake-era masculinity so much as a diagnosis of professional atomization: specialists siloed, colleagues turned into vendors, collaboration mediated by schedules, lawyers, and later, technology.
Context matters: Bernstein worked across Hollywood’s mid-century machinery and its later, more corporate phase. He knew what it meant to sit with directors, editors, musicians, to argue in person, to build a shared emotional language. His subtext is that cinema’s emotional temperature is linked to how it’s made. A culture that gets less comfortable with closeness - in workplaces, in friendships, in public life - will naturally tell stories where contact feels risky, rare, or scripted. And when that happens, alienation stops being a theme and starts being the default setting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Loneliness |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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