1. "Tell me a story... or don't": Jim Emerson ponders the importance of story in cinema.
["In the words of Isaac Hayes: "Rat own." I always come back to the principle that Roger Ebert has phrased so succinctly: "A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it." To me, that's as eloquent a definition of movies, and film criticism, as anybody's ever articulated. And it seems to me that we don't take the storytelling -- not the contortions of the plot, but the shot-by-shot construction of a movie (the telling that is the movie) -- seriously enough most of the time. To put it in literary terms, I wish people would concentrate more on ill-formed (sloppy, repetitive) sentences and paragraphs and less on plot holes or improbabilities. Story is optional; style is what's there, on the page or on the screen, from moment to moment. (Just so I'm clear: I'm not talking about criticizing e.e. cummings for improper capitalization and punctuation, or complaining that Hitchcock put too many cuts in the "Psycho" shower scene. I'm interested in how and why they do what they do, and what effects they achieve in doing it.)"]
2. Two Happening post-mortems of note: Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot & Erich Kuersten at Bright Lights After Dark.
["It's not M. Night's fault really, is my point. The siren song of media is sweet to the ear -- how simple and easy to become the set of easy signifiers the lazy journalists paint you in? The only problem is, they help you climb the perch and get a crowd to gather, and then they sell them eggs to throw at you. Oh Shyamalan, you fool! You eternal sucker at the troph of ego. Oh mighty critics, next time you throw a rock at a director who dared to dream too big for his britches, ask yourself, who convinced him he should? Wasn't it you? Shouldn't you have to go watch THE HAPPENING? Again and again and again?"]
3. "Just Say ‘Mariska Hargitay’ and Snicker": Bravo, A.O.
["The movie’s takeaway catchphrase is “Mariska Hargitay,” which is used by the title character as a fake-Hindi spiritual greeting. This is almost hilarious the first 11 or so times he does it, but by the time Guru Pitka (Mr. Myers) says “Mariska Hargitay” to Ms. Hargitay herself, it’s somehow less amusing than it should be. Which might sum up “The Love Guru” in its entirety but only at the risk of grievously understating the movie’s awfulness. A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again."]
4. "Felon Fest: Notes on Camp": House contributor Steven Boone's latest column for Spout. Watch your back, Susan Sontag!
["Susan Sontag wouldn’t know what to do with us. No such thing as camp down here, unless you mean tents and canteens and shit. What’d she know anyway? In Notes on Camp, a condescending tastemaker’s primer from 1964, she dissed both Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Sherwood Anderson’s lovely old book, Winesburg, Ohio. She didn’t know shit."]
5. "Ex-cook faces jail after putting hair in steak": From MSNBC.
["A former restaurant cook has pleaded guilty to inserting hairs in a steak before giving it to a dissatisfied customer. Ryan Kropp, 24, of West Bend, Wis., was fired along with another cook after the incident Feb. 23 at the Texas Roadhouse restaurant. Kropp was charged in Washington County Circuit Court with a felony of placing foreign objects in edibles, carrying up to 3 1/2 years in prison. ... According to the complaint, a second kitchen worker told police Kropp had put a slit in the cooked steak and pushed something inside, then stated, "These are my pubes," referring to pubic hair."]
Quote of the Day: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): The disembodied head of Eugene Pallette compels you...
Clip of the Day: Always best to be Pennywise.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Links for the Day (June 21st, 2008)
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12 comments:
And another link I forgot to include: "US fishing town struggles to come to terms with pregnancy pact".
Re #1: It was already mentioned in the comments section of Emerson's piece, but plot seems to be more what Emerson is talking about rather than story.
To me, I don't see how a good movie works without a story, whether it plays by conventional narrative rules or not. Plot, however, is overrated and sometimes gets in the way of a good story.
That said, I often feel some critics react defensively insisting there's a visual poetry that others are too dense to understand in certain movies.
Sometimes visual poetry can be bad visual poetry. I feel some critics I respect sometimes lack a genuine critical eye when it comes to visually driven movies and give them a pass for telling a story through images that can be just as empty as any plot can be.
Steven: Fair enough -- but what of movies that aren't so much a story as a collection of incidents, or a bare wisp of story giving pretext for atmosphere? In such films, visual poetry -- filmmaking -- is the entire point of the experience.
When defending such films, my complaint is not that viewers are too dense to understand visual poetry -- it's more often that the marketplace conditions, and has conditioned, viewers to react with distrust and hostility toward any movie that's not goal-oriented, with a three-act structure and all the expected beats falling in the expected places.
Movies are great at telling a story with a beginning, middle and end, and a goal that is realized or not realized. But there should be more to cinema than that. The Hollywood model of storytelling is often likened to that of a sonnet -- the point being that it's a challenge to see how you can use the same ritualized form and adhere to it while still surprising and exciting people. That's a good analogy, but when we talk about cinema, which I believe is a language more than a medium, we're talking about a language that is employed, 90 percent of the time, to write sonnets. I've seen oodles of proof that the sonnet form is viable and that many different sorts of people can do good work within its strictures. But one can do more with language than write sonnets; that's why I tend to get excited, maybe irrationally exuberant, whenever some filmmaker departs from the straightforward, linear commercial narrative model, even for a little while.
PS: In movies of the sort that I allude to above -- much of Wong Kar-Wai and Antonioni's output, and a surprising percentage of the Coen Brothers' (especially "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Barton Fink") what we're looking at isn't a story (in the sense of goal-oriented beginning-middle-end w/clear resolution and easily explicable themes) but more like a situation, or a series of situations, with a lot of poetry woven around it.
Interesting, I actually prefer plot to story. For me, story is just surface, and a good story can be made abysmal if told wrong while a seemingly uninteresting story can be unreasonably exciting if told right. A great medieval history professor I had in college could talk about clocks for an hour and hold his students spellbound. Compare that to a professor (or Hugh Hudson) who makes the American Revolution drab and uninvolving.
Plot, on the other hand, is something that I get involved in, even lost inside. Perhaps Hollywood has ingrained into us certain structures and expected beats, but it's always surprising and unexpected when somebody actually does it well. L.A. Confidential is one film that comes to mind. All the familiar crime genre tropes are there, yet somehow they come across as fresh and kept me off-balance every time. Great as Hanson's visuals (and the performances) are, it's the structure of the script that makes it work.
Radical departures from the model are riskier enterprises, and I can't always predict my reactions to them. I'm not a fan of David Lynch and his much-ballyhooed "dream-like" narratives. (My favorite rebuke of Lynch is Peter Dinklage's hilarious tirade in Living in Oblivion: "'Oh, it must be a fucking dream, there's a fucking dwarf in it!'") On the other hand, I saw again and really enjoyed I'm Not There. Even though I'm not a Dylanophile and probably didn't understand 80 percent of the references, it worked for me on an inscrutable poetic level (much like Dylan's music), and as a refreshing departure from the standard connect-the-dots biopic.
That said, I do generally agree with Steven that sometimes visual craft tends to get overpraised, that it doesn't suss out poetic allusions in a plot (or story) so much as tries to camouflage a dearth of them.
I certainly understand where you're coming from, Matt. We all have loved movies that are a collection of incidents or about atmosphere and have been in the position of having to defend its merits to those who simply don't see a story there, due to, what you refer to as marketplace conditioning.
This may also be a question of how one defines story, as I feel atmosphere contributes to it as much as or sometimes even more than anything else.
Since you bring up Wong Kar-Wai, "In the Mood for Love" is one of the movies where the visual poetry was the movie. I'm still trying to understand why those images brought out certain feelings within me.
You also have to acknowledge what personal experiences or personal outlook on life factors in when reacting to an image. It takes us a bit back to the Sopranos discussion where interpretation of the final scene reflects more about who you are and how you feel about Tony Soprano. Which is why when someone attempts to define an image with the "right answer", they're negating one of the director's true purposes: asking what does a viewer bring to an image?
Something like "Inland Empire" I can admire for aspiring to visual poetry and not adhering to rules of cinematic storytelling and still feel it was a movie with atmosphere that didn't amount to much of anything. In essence, to me, it was more visual than poetic which led to a an empty viewing experience for me.
It may have been some of the reactions from this movie's supporters that fueled my statement about critics defensively suggesting that there was visual poetry as fact rather than opening up the discussion to those who didn't quite see the poetry in it.
Wheww! Sorry if that was rambling a bit...
Steven: Something like "Inland Empire" I can admire for aspiring to visual poetry and not adhering to rules of cinematic storytelling and still feel it was a movie with atmosphere that didn't amount to much of anything. In essence, to me, it was more visual than poetic which led to a an empty viewing experience for me.
I love that movie, but I can see your point. More so than any previous Lynch film -- and that's saying quite a bit -- Inland Empire seemed a feature-length experimental film, more similar in spirit to Stan Brakhage's work than to anything Lynch has done previously, in the sense that it remains deliberately unbalancing and obtuse throughout, sadistically so, giving you all sorts of hints as to what it's about or what it's trying to "say" and then snatching them away. I loved it but don't begrudge anybody who rolled their eyes.
Craig: I do generally agree with Steven that sometimes visual craft tends to get overpraised, that it doesn't suss out poetic allusions in a plot (or story) so much as tries to camouflage a dearth of them.
I agree with the second part but wish to offer a tangential argument against the first. Absolutely, individual writers may overpraise a movie's formal aspects from time to tim. And on this blog and such sites as ReverseShot and Scanners and their ilk, you're quite likely to see an appreciation/defense of a movie on technical/formal/expressive grounds (the arguments about whether Speed Racer is incoherent tripe or a bold if unsuccessful experiment being Exhibit A this summer).
However, it is possible during any given week to read every film review published in the ten largest newspapers in the United States and not see more than a total of a few paragraphs devoted to any sort of analysis of technique, however cursory.
I guess what I'm getting at is, even if the form-inclined contingent of film bloggers wrote about nothing but form indefinitely for a year or two, and gave nothing but praise, the sum total might still be only a drop in the bucket compared to the vast majority of film criticism, which concentrates mainly on plot synopsis, comments about performances and celebrity image, guesses as to what a particular film says about, or will do to, a director's career, etc. Overpraise of a particular film's formal qualities seems to me a fairly minor sin compared to the more global problem of criticism that virtually ignores form altogether.
Regarding Keith's extra link at the top of this thread: I really, really want to see Sofia Coppola take a crack at this. A bookend to her first feature: The Non-Virgin Pact.
Matt...regarding the Coen brothers: I agree that they defy standard modes of "Hollywood" storytelling.
Which, as it turns out, was my issue with "No Country For Old Men."
Don't get me wrong, I mostly liked NCFOM and had no problem with it's unique narrative twists and dark brooding theme that culminated in absolute hopelessness.
But the character of Anton, with his ghost-like personna and air-tank killing device was just too "cinematic," dare I say "Hollywood-ish." For me, he seemed somewhat out of sync with the non-linear story they were trying to tell.
When it ended, I felt cheated. And to be fair, perhaps that was their goal.
I ultimately concluded that I felt cheated because they established the idea that metaphysics (for want of a better term) are nothing more than a dream in a story dominated by a metaphysical character (Anton).
Had Anton been a more "down-to-earth" sociopathic killer, I don't think that I would have felt like I was being delt a hand from the bottom of the deck.
I'm sure I'm in the minority on this, but there you go. :)
The Hollywood narrative isn't a sonnet. It's a verse/chorus/verse/chorus pop song.
For me, INLAND EMPIRE elicited a stronger emotional response than any other films I saw last year, whether visual or narrative driven. Just because a film is obtuse doesn't mean it can't work.
And on Speed Racer, what if I thought it was a fully coherent, bold and successful experiment? By the way, what did you think of it Matt?
I loved it, by the way, but you probably already figured that out.
The problem with arguments in discussions like this one is that many participants, especially those in dissent, do not know what the premises of the original argument are and therefore don't really know against what they are arguing or even for what they are arguing. In this case, the problem is that we haven't established what is meant by story, plot, and narrative, which are usually regarded as synonymous but can actually hold distinct meanings.
Story refers to the course of events that are recounted in order to show a goal being accomplished or not, some sort of journey, or some moral lesson to be taught. Causality is crucial to the telling and parsing of a story. There is a clear sense of "everything happening for a reason," and there is always a beginning, middle, and end.
Plot refers to the actual sequence of events usually employed to tell a story. The best illustration of the idea that plot is distinct from story is the case of non-chronologically-told stories. Once you figure out all of the details in Chris Nolan's Memento, you can then explain what actually happens in the story in a way that completely contradicts the reverse-chronological plot structure. You can tell that story in any number of ways, reordering details however you want—as long as the result remains comprehensible and doesn't contradict any of the story's facts—but you would still have the same story.
The plot itself has certain effects on how an audience reacts to the story, as much as the events of the story themselves affect the audience in their own way. Thus, you can find examples of well-told bad stories or poorly-told good stories.
The distinction between plot and story leads to the well-established semiotic terms "fabula" and "sjuzhet," the former referring to story and the latter referring to plot. "Fabula time is pluridimensional, since a fabula is not a thin narrative line but a volume of relationships progressing in time" (Garcia-Landa, Jose Angel. 1990/2005).
Robert McKee has a great explanation of how stories work and how they are constructed. The foundation of stories is something called "story value," which refers to some quality or state of being that's important to the characters, an extreme example being life or death. A story always has tight control over story values and manipulates them in fluid and strategic ways for entertainment and/or didactic ends.
Take, for example, the generic romantic comedy. It establishes a relationship and introduces a number of complications that change the nature of the relationship—the story values—before uniting the central couple for a happy ending.
Story values are strongly tied to emotions, and therefore a change in a story value is called an emotional event. A break-up is an emotional event. A reconciliation between old flames is an emotional event. A story is a series of emotional events that flow from each one to the next.
Using the above explanations of plot and story, we can find some superficially paradoxical examples. You can have a plot with no story or a story with no plot. A great example of a plot with no story is a shaggy dog tale: A lot of exciting things happen, but it all amounts to nothing of significance. Story values are minimal in number and impact and don't see much change; there are almost no emotional events. Story is thus not the point of a shaggy dog tale.
On the other hand, the best example of a story with no plot is flash fiction. For instance, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote a six-word flash that conveys an intriguing story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
Narrative is a more general term referring to any piece that recounts a collection of related events involving characters. Narrative can be used to describe a "plot with no story" or a traditional story. Thus, "Un chien andalou" is not a narrative. A joke that involves characters and something that happens to them (e.g. the classic "priest, rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar") is a narrative. A documentary that is not merely an explication of cold facts can be a narrative. Hoop Dreams is the epitome of a narrative documentary. A slice-of-life piece that merely recounts a bunch of episodes from a few characters' lives also can be considered a narrative.
The point of Jim's argument is that story is not what makes or breaks a movie, as is the case with plot and narrative. A movie should be enjoyed and appreciated on its own terms, not what you think that "movies should be." Cinema is about creating an experience, and we're not merely talking about stories or visual pleasures. (What about aural pleasures?) Stories, plots, visual and sound effects are all aspects of the total experience. So the pleasures of cinema are not a choice between engaging stories and "visual poetry" (again, what about sound?). We might like to watch a movie for a great performance or for some particularly fascinating interactions between the characters. We might also just want explosions. None of that has to do with story or visual poetry.
And by the way, visual poetry is by definition not empty, unless you want to assert that poetry itself is empty.
Regarding #1, you folks are snobs. Or there seems to be a needless attack on mainstream movies which, no matter how you want to defend or promote more artsy movies, many have the same visual or whatever poetry, or using story as excuse to develop incidents or series of incidents: blending in pop tunes, action sequences, or beautiful faces of actors.
Early, someone mentioned shifting critical perspectives (in the podcast). What is the different of the Hulk using the plot as an excuse for the big rumble vs In the Mood for Love using the plot as an excuse to show Tony slow motion chain smoking?
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