by Stryder Simms | Jul 31, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Nature and the Machine - Sci-Fi Cinema
In his 1966 film “Fahrenheit 451”, Francois Truffaut illuminates ideas Ray Bradbury laid down in his 1953 science fiction novel of mass media, information control and personal privacy, thus anticipating our current debate on net neutrality by more than 50 years.
In “Fahrenheit 451” written knowledge is the enemy. Guy Montag is a man whose job it is to burn books, not just some books, all books.
In Montag’s world, televised media is recognized as the legitimate source of information. Instead of reading it for themselves in their voices the citizens of Montag’s world get their information from neat looking, prerecorded talking heads blandly reciting prepared statements. This intel comes in over the large monitors in every room of Montag’s home and in all the public places as well.
When Montag becomes interested in the books he is burning his superiors immediately attempt to seduce him back into conformity. Thus we learn that those ubiquitous monitors also provide the authorities the means to eves drop on Montag.
The opening credit sequence is one of the most brilliant and powerful moments in the film consisting not of the customary flashcard of lines of text crediting writer, producer, director, and keys. This movie begins with an audio track of the credits read aloud to you by a deep, officious male voice. This soundtrack is accompanied by still shots of houses and buildings with row upon row of television antennas mounted on each of them. Even before the story unfolds Truffaut ignites the audience with this flash of genius, an immediate, visceral example of how our world would look, sound and feel were the written word outlawed.
Montag reads enough to see through the media seduction and retreats from his status as book burner. The former enforcer slips out of sight of the monitors. He joins a secret colony of rebels dedicated to memorizing books and preserving them.
What “Fahrenheit 451” illustrates brilliantly is how people are the source of knowledge, not books (nor the Internet). Flash backward from Montag’s to my day and to this time. The Internet is not so much an invention of man as a deepening awareness of our agelessness interconnection.
The Internet will not thrive on greed alone. The Internet will be equally infused with common sense, or else the Internet will die. Same goes for the human race. Knowledge is born and lives in minds, not on hard drives or digital screens. Humans cannot be masters of the Internet any more than humans can master nature.
Attempts to capture and control the truth are futile. Common sense teaches all people the important lessons. Still, we are all curious to know each others secrets. Don’t we all know our dirty little secret anyway? It comes down to this. We are all to some degree, selfish and calloused toward the fate of each other. The net neutrality debate is a perfect example. Those who attempt to control information do so for selfish reasons, then make up excuses for why it is a good idea.
It should not surprise us to find ourselves in this predicament over privacy. We were prepared for the digital revolution’s profusion of lenses well before “Fahrenheit 451” aligned minds. In one of our much older and more popular science fiction stories, John’s hallucination in the “Book of Revelation” describes a lamb all covered with eyes. In that prophet’s endgame, we stand naked before God and the Devil and all eyes are watching.
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.
by studioxadmin | Mar 15, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
Along with the securing of food and shelter, storytelling is at the center of the cyclical rituals of human survival. Here in New Mexico ancient civilizations left behind superb examples of cyclical rituals in which storytelling was central.
The origins of movies begin this far back. Theater was born when the first hunter put on the skin of the animal on which he and his companions had just feasted. He danced around the fire with his imagination aroused by the animal’s sacrifice, his belly filled with its meat.
Documents of these same events were drawn on rock faces and cave walls emphasizing the primacy and immediacy of the visual in transmitting tales. Written language came later, developed from these early markings.
Spoken word falls somewhere in between the first performance and the first written language. Spoken word is overused in commercial film making. It’s original place in storytelling was an adjunct to the performance of the dancer, issuing forth from the dancer himself or those watching him. Early chants intoned to the beat of a log drum, or the clapping of hands, became songs which eventually galvanized into words, imposed upon by the natural rhythms of the human body, breath and heartbeat.
Handicrafts and tool-making advanced storytelling further towards film making when the same tales of animal and human fates were spun out on rugs and pottery surfaces, articulating cinematic mysteries long before the first movie cameras or hard disks ever whirled.
This brief history of storytelling can be used as a road map into the human brain regarding which stimuli the mind is most apt to be open to and what priority the mind gives to a given stimulus.
The primeval stimulus is theater, which explains why acting is given such emphasis in cinematic storytelling. Song is second in order of importance. No one would argue against the potential power of music in motion pictures. Even movies that utilize no music at all often rely on rhymes and rhythms derived from music and adapted to film editing.Next comes drawing and handicrafts, which have evolved into the illustrious aesthetics of the visual image that we have today in motion pictures.
Spoken word is last in order of importance in a movie script, but must be invested with the highest degree of craft. Spoken word must not convey what performance, or image, or editing, or music has already conveyed. In order to realize its full potential, spoken word must come out of the collective unconscious. It should reveal to the viewers what is on their mind before they realize it themselves.
by studioxadmin | Feb 22, 2010 | HD: Film Commentary, Miscellaneous
Do we apply to the lens for mere reflection? No. For that we have mirrors. We subscribe to the motion picture for precisely what the mirror cannot do, illuminate the mystery of our existence.
When we watch a motion picture, we allow what the camera has recorded at a previous time and place to interpose itself into our perception of the present time and place. For an entirely alternative reality to be allowed to supersede our ordinary reality like this has been, in the past, reserved for pagan enchantments, shamanistic ceremonies and high-church rituals.
Motion pictures, dreams and rituals share several artifices in that respect, such as plasticity of time and space, the occurrence of vivid, uncanny detail and situations where unconscious fears and desires are expressed.
Dreams work by relying on the suspension of waking consciousness. Motion pictures work by relying on what is often called “the suspension of disbelief,” which also accounts for why we forget we are looking at a flat screen and become absorbed in the story. More importantly, motion pictures of the highest order convert our most sovereign beliefs, if only momentarily, to the extraordinary order or belief system imposed by characters and situations within the story we are watching.
Motion pictures record and compose artificial realities using sound and image. Seeking meaning to our lives, we reach out with the light of cinematic language into the unknown; similar to the way a flashlight extends into the darkness. The cone-shaped beam of the movie projector casts an enchanted luminescence over ordinary things, turning a dim room full of nothing but chairs into a portal to the next dimension, a temple for the collective consciousness to merge with the unconscious.
As a hollow, dark and mostly empty space, the motion picture theater represents the mind and motion pictures bring to light the chaos and conundrums that take up space in our minds.
If movie characters stand in for us, the camera often stands in for God. It is one of our oldest habits to imbue that notion of a great eye that watches us with the authority of God. Could it be that, after a long time of searching for God outside ourselves, through religion and war, motion pictures enable the eye of God to open up inside us? The camera watches and we see through its eye, while it peers out in every direction from inside the mystery of our existence.
