by studioxadmin | Sep 29, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
I was fifteen years old when I watched my first pornographic film and mostly recall being nervous. I was underage. Even after getting past that hurdle there was the fear someone might see me, so I wore my sunglasses until the house lights dimmed. The on screen scenario went something like this: a cowboy discovers a farm girl in his barn. She gives him pleasure through a hole in the planks between the stalls. Live horses loafed in the background munching oats and passing gas.
I loved it, but as a Catholic boy turned born-again Christian, the experience was spoiled when I peeped in at the projectionist after the show and came eye to eye with one of my fellow church members. The awkward moment left us both so embarrassed we never made eye contact again.
Around that same time, I took in my first foreign film, “Brother Sun Sister Moon.” Based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, it is about a man who renounces sex and dedicates his life to selfless service. The picture moved me more profoundly than any porn flick ever could.
No matter which side of the spectrum we are drawn to, most of us have a desire to express ourselves freely, sexually or otherwise, and we are drawn to examples of free expression in the movies. It is this same natural curiosity that draws us to pornography.
One can argue that porn promotes sexual slavery. It’s probably true, but marriage has taken at least as many prisoners, and as an adolescent I was touched inappropriately by a priest, so who, exactly, is responsible for more sex crimes? It is tempting to conclude that religion and pornography are two sides of the same coin. One could not exist without the other.
In previous centuries leaders maintained power by binding the populace with feelings of guilt and shame for our carnal urges, but the real goal was to enslave minds. They didn’t really want people to stop fornicating. How could they maintain power without overpopulation? They would not be able to keep raising armies and taxes.
When modern birth control blew away the Victorian fog and opened our senses, a cultural renaissance gave rise to the moon shot, civil rights, feminism, ecological awareness, religious ecumenicism and many other breakthroughs. Many motion pictures of that period foretold of this present quantum leap to global consciousness.
Pornography is bringing sex back out into the open where it was before the New Testament. It is teasing most of us into a collective openness toward sex; one that can be engaged without fear of damnation or disease. So why have porn profits on the web leveled off already? Because porn’s big secret is, there is no big secret. After the novelty wears off, most of it is about exciting to watch as animals in a barn.
The institutionalized repression of the past several hundred years is responsible for the sexual obsessions currently exploited by our modern media. It can’t last forever. Widespread sexual openness will ultimately neutralize our obsessive/repressive deadlock. Once this cultural wave crashes, pornographic movie making will either adapt or something even truer to our nature will take its place.
by studioxadmin | Aug 29, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
A picture is worth a thousand words and a motion picture is worth a thousand fetishes. The first definition given for fetish in my dictionary states, “A material object believed to be the dwelling of a spirit, or to represent a spirit. It may be induced or compelled to help and safeguard the possessor and to protect from harm or disease.”
The first part is clear; actors in a movie represent characters in a script in the same way that spirits inhabit an object. Actors confirm this with statements like, “I lived and breathed that role.”
The second half of the definition sounds superstitious. How can movies be induced to safeguard and protect us? Assuming primitive tendencies are played out everywhere, the ways of old are practiced at the multiplex too. Movies seem to safeguard and protect us primarily by confirming each person’s individual belief in what is right and wrong.
Under fetish, in my dictionary, definition number two reads, “Any object of devotion or blind affection.” If paying admission can be construed as devotion then audiences turn film into fetish simply by going to the movies. The suspension of disbelief that a good story extracts from us amounts to a kind of blindness.
Moving from the conceptual to the concrete, nearly every thing in a movie can be branded a fetish. Look anywhere and be prepared to find one. Set design, props, costumes, all are undeniable beachheads of fetishism. The stories themselves become fetishes the way they are presented. All the key elements of a movie are showered with torrents of devotion, and something like blind affection, as they are created, fit together, lit together, photograph and trafficked through the new media.
The camera itself is a fetish, as is the projector. Framed production stills from movies, become fetishes of fetishes. The big screen is an ultra-potent fetish. The small screen may eventually catch up. Before screens came along, mirrors were the most popular fetish.
There is a third entry for fetish in my dictionary, “Sensual gratification derived from touching a part of the body of a person, or a piece of clothing belonging to it.” Considering the glaring fact that sex is the most consistent theme in movies, is it too big of a stretch to connect movies to this type of fetishism? Observing the actions of dating and lovemaking in movies becomes a sort of participation in the rites themselves, in which audience members are touched by characters and receive sensual gratification from them.
Even watching something as tame as a romantic comedy in a movie theater becomes a kind of, soft-core group sex but with no added emotional baggage to deal with and zero disease. There must be something worthwhile about sitting together in the dark and watching other people touch and kiss. We make regular sacrifices for the experience. We pay for the privilege and we are doing it in dark rooms, with total strangers, at all hours of the night and day, all over the world.
by studioxadmin | Jun 19, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
Stories characterize, expound and explore our dual nature. They unite minds, and enlighten individuals. Stories help humanity thrive by emphasizing the value of cooperation and the necessity of independence. They recount the dangers of over-indulgence and forecast the promise of positive potential in the human race.
Western civilization was brought into the modern era with statements like, “In the beginning was the Word.” With all due respects to the scriptural masterworks of the great religions, our relationship with the divine reaches back to our dancing, predatory ancestors. This was many thousands of years before any widespread language systems had emerged. However, in deference to the passage quoted above, the stories of all the world’s cultures had their beginning as one story, an attempt to impose order on the chaos that we wrestle with everyday.
A movie is literally a light shining in the darkness. Movies mend chaos with order, fashioning realities with ideas and imagination to help distinguish what is good from what is evil. But order quickly disintegrates and chaos never sleeps, so storytelling is alive and thriving in the 21st century.
We continue to invent new ways to tell them, but the old stories influence all of the new ones. Movies that become an enduring part of our culture do so because they contain practical examples of common sense drawing from and contributing to the record of all that humankind has learned since our primitive beginnings.
Over eons the first stories morphed and multiplied into a myriad of stories. Now, through motion pictures and the Internet, the myths, legends, and histories of all traditions will merge back together again. Through the universal language of image and song, motion pictures are presenting the world with its unified story.
by studioxadmin | May 8, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
Humankind has been raised on a steady diet of stories. The impressive amount of resources and ingenuity that civilizations have devoted to storytelling attests to the fact that it is as important to feed one’s imagination, as it is to eat.
Like the Native American kiva, the great gothic cathedrals of Europe are early movie theater prototypes. The sophistication of both examples attests to the high priority with which folklore and mythology were endowed in earlier societies. The sacred kiva’s dim interior instills an attitude of silence and listening in its occupants. Burrowing into the earth, and enclosing it in darkness, brings its congregation’s attention to the central focus of drums, chants and stories.
The Cathedral owes its majesty to a skyward reach, developing visual and acoustic dynamics to new heights. Choirs resonating in those magnificent vaulted chambers sent the medieval imagination soaring in the same way that the soundtracks of today’s films influence our own. Meanwhile, the cathedral’s stained glass window was a proto-movie screen containing story frames of proto-celluloid, awaiting animation.
The modern movie theater is the next logical leap of imagination. The grandiose physical surroundings of cathedral are less essential now. The virtual reality inside liberates the audience from physical limits. Darkness and the code of silence have carried over from their primitive counterparts to the movie theater, as has the traditional focus on story and song.
Cathedrals took many years to build and generations of crafts persons working within a network of specialized guilds in order to bring about their realization. Modern movie-making methods make use of this same organization. Gothic artisans that provided ornate alters for the great cathedrals, had offspring who adapted the same skills in later periods to provide scenic backdrops for opulent operas and romance plays. The legacy continues in the artists, craftsmen and tradespersons working on location and in sound stages for our limit-pushing entertainments of today.
by studioxadmin | Apr 7, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
At the same time that we have found the technology to bring all humankind’s stories into the public commons, we arrive at the stage of technological advancement that allows those stories to begin to close around us in 3D. If this trend continues the story will eventually swallow us completely to the point that we will not be able to distinguish a motion-picture illusion from our ordinary reality. A strange future to contemplate perhaps, but it develops out of our very natural and most primitive propensity to tell stories. In truth, the old stories have already swallowed us. They come from the repository of our collective consciousness. If there is such a thing as “common sense” it can be learned from the old stories. The old stories shape all our thoughts and actions especially about geography, economics and law. The old stories are the explanation of how we got where we are now.
Filmmakers are not making up new stories. They are embellishing old ones. A camera is a filmmaker’s story embellisher. A photographer’s lens allows the artist to emphasize certain specific, meaningful, aspects of a moment in time. A camera records this. Once a moment in time is captured, the images are a lens document. When screened, the lens document is a kind of artificial reality. Lens documents can simultaneously be perceived as history which, like all recorded history, portrays a limited view of the details of a certain moment in the past. It’s still an artificial reality as all stories are. Recorded images can be screened without cuts in real-time, or be manipulated to represent some other moment in the past. Either way, the audience will allow it to take the place of their own present as they become absorbed in it.
We get lost in stories. Filmmakers get lost in telling them. The right story told to the right audience at the right time delivers a capsule of culture which becomes digested and assimilated into the modern mindset, then ripples out until it joins the old stories reinvigorating each in the process.
