| 2HousePlague |
04-09-2006 01:57 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by rmethod3642
Didn't make sense to me.
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As the film's creators no doubt intended.
For most of the history of cinema, movie "plots" have adhered to a narrative structure that derived straight from theater. And theater, with a few but notable exceptions, like Beckett, etc, has used the same form to tell a story for the last 3,000 years.
Gustav Freytag came up with his famous "triangle" to conveniently illustrate for us the traditional plot structure, which applies to most novels, most plays and most movies...
http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/images/freytagpyramid.gif
While experimental departures from the above have always been undertaken by the adventurous among all three mediums (stage plays, novels and movies), these were generally appreciated only by the narrow band of society comprising academics, intellectuals and media obsessisives. So, they'd never really been much to speak of at the box office. But, I am going to guesstimate here, in the mid-late 90's or so we began to see some bigger budget movies that began to "flirt" with non-conventional narrative structure in a very exciting way.
In my mind, there is one writer that stands above all the others...
CHARLIE KAUFMAN
http://ia.imdb.com/media/imdb/01/I/69/31/63m.jpg
Let me explain what he did -- and the best example of that is Adaptation -- that nobody had done before.
Once you begin to look for ways to depart from the conventional, LINEAR narrative structure, you quickly become aware that there are two dimensions on which you can operate. Time and Space. We have had for a very long time the concept of "flashback" which is simply showing something from before action that has already occured in your story. This fits naturally with human memory, where we are accustomed to being able to re-visit scenes from our past. A little more daring is the "flashforward". This is exactly like the flashback, but a little less natural for people, since so few us have any experience with predicting the future.
But, what Charlie Kaufman has done that was so revolutionary was he began to exploit the capabilities of the film medium, both as capture and replay medium and as a medium through which "visual surrogates" are presented to our sight. In other words, in his movies actors become filmmakers themselves, the concept of the nested movie is born, and once you add the potential for time and space displacement to such a THIRD axis, you quickly get into tangled confusions like this:
SCENE1 (Movie A, ActorB, 1955, Algiers)
SCENE2 (Movie B, ActorB, 1977, Toronto)
... and so on.
It's not hard to see why these kinds of cinematic experiments had a tough time finding audiences in the early days. That more recently, in the works of Kaufman and his usual Director-collaborator Spike Jonze, they have had BIG BOX OFFICE success is really kinda huge.
The reason these movies have been succeeding is that they don't just turn an intellectual's brain into a pretzel (for those who like that - :) ), but they seem to succeed in delivering something more "experiential" -- something more like an amusement park ride. And that is a direction that movies on what I am going to call the "other side" of the spectrum have also been moving in. By that I mean, the Mindless Hollywood Blockbuster.
As budgets have climbed and more and more of that has gone to special effects, savvy Hollywood producers have noticed you don't really have to tell a story anymore, at least not in the traditional sense. Now, I don't mean to rankle the traditionalists who will argue that a great script and great acting and great directing will always make a great movie. Sure, that's true. All I am saying is that you can do most of that on the stage, and therefore that is not, in my mind, the most exciting evolutionary direction for the medium.
To see that these 2 disparate genres of movie should be moving towards each other is quite exciting. To me it suggests all kinds of things for the adult indusrty, also - :)
2hp |
