INTENSE ASS NOTES ON REMODERNISM AND CINEMA FROM A NORTH AUSTIN FOUR PLEX
In response to your criticism of my screenplay, I want to address things you rashly pointed out as being “incorrect.” While I understand the material can always improve and one should remain open to suggestions that could actually benefit the piece, I feel that you mostly missed the very well considered intention behind what I’m doing here.
I’ve refined my approach to and stance on art for a long time. From the beginning, my urge to expand awareness has come into conflict with a desire to entertain. I think the head work and writing I’ve done in the past five years has brought me closer to a mature style - a synthesis of two great obsessions. I waver between a longing for a movie that is profound in its simplicity/rigid in its aesthetics versus an urge to play with “the biggest electric train set a boy could have.” I feel both can yield very great reward when done right. One can enrich the spirit and heighten consciousness and another can stimulate the imagination by putting dreams on display.
According to Pauline Kael, in cinema there is the artistry that brings the medium alive with self-conscious excitement (artifice) and there is the artistry that makes the medium disappear (realism). I have spent my time obsessing over both types and trying to reconcile them - to find a balance between the two, to find unseen connections and hybridizations that have not been done to death. As Guy Maddin said:
"The irresolvable tension created by the gap between documentary and melodrama."
I spent about three years trying to understand how to capture realism - the unresolved quality of life, the muted poignancy of played down, naturalistic moments. I spent about five in change contemplating artifice. Ever since you’ve known me, I’ve been looking for my own unique way to marry the two. My breakthrough came when I could finally oscillate freely between feats of the imagination and the richness of life experience. I learned how to buoy otherwise pretentious ideas with absurdism or poignancy. When I gave up trying to commit to one widely accepted style of “serious” film, I realized that my inner and outer reality did not have to exist in conflict with each other. And so I have learned to trust my intuition; to fret less and less about aesthetic, narrative, or tonal rightness. I felt that trying to adhere to a discipline only held me back, though it did force me to become more inventive. It forced me to reflect deeply on the things I did not want to do. I still believe it is very important to experiment with limitations, formal and budgetary. This creates a deeper understanding of the power of minimalism, austerity and elliptical storytelling. But we live upon the surface of over a hundred years of movies. There are so many tools in the toolbox now and each one has its sacredness. Even the most common moviegoer has a subconscious understanding of the grammar of cinema, knowledge of genres and stylistic approaches. This allows us to play. To not be afraid to sometimes create realities that can be “Life, but better.” To move beyond limitations of commercial or art, beyond genre and tone. This familiarity opens us up.
Though I think biologically we are hardwired to respond to and produce myth, I strongly agree with the Remodernist guy when he said cinema shouldn’t always derive from other art forms like literature. Because we are able to frame experiences in time through filmmaking, the medium should be able to reach a sublime, an aesthetic arrest - the purity of inexplicable moments that are best captured via the medium of film: the arrangement of shots in a sequence. To me this goes beyond myth (which pushes morality) and into a realm of pure being - post-myth, a wordless understanding where images, not plot points, rhyme with each other. I’ve experienced these moments everywhere from Tree of Life to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (though ToL is obviously more potent). There is something that elevates certain moments in a film beyond any moral judgment or preconceived idea. I always just call it poetry. When something is made lyrical and profound and weird and wild and sacred and horrific and hilarious all at once in a way that isn’t moving the narrative machine forward. These moments illuminate a vertical dimension, where linear narrative exists in a horizontal one. I’m a vertical man through and through.
My tumblr focuses on a certain type of film because that certain type isn’t discussed as much as others are. There even seems to be a fraternity of foreign art jams that everyone must talk about and reference endlessly. I try to avoid that in the tumblr even though I like those movies too. I like to shed light on lesser known masters and masterpieces. Cult heroes. The marginalized. Minor poets. Vertical guys. These guys have become my favorite filmmakers.
I appreciate classical storytelling and the hero’s arc. I feel like the oldies like Bergman and Fellini had no choice but to first master a classical dramatic form by making their early films under this stricture. They didn’t have film school or this contemporary splintering of niche audiences we have today through our myriad access to all different kinds of movies, which allows new directors to directly pursue their vision and have a venue for their work. Dudes like Spielberg wanted to master the classical form because he wanted to make classical pictures. Then there’s Linklater, Jarmusch, Korine and Lynch, who came out of the barrel with unconventional art films. They had done the head work. They had watched and absorbed and catalogued their own obsessions from very early ages and followed their bliss in communicating these ideas in unique ways. They never wanted to destroy classical movies, they just knew there was room to offer something different and that if they didn’t attempt something different, then classical style films would be all we have. And we’d be missing many colors from the spectrum. I feel a kinship to them, although I think the movies I want to make are much more commercial than theirs. But I am deeply informed by their approach to storytelling.
I’ve thought long and hard about what it means to heighten consciousness through film. I love comedies and I love movies that aren’t overt comedies yet have a great sense of levity. I love subtlety and austerity. Local Hero is my favorite movie of all time. It has a regular three act structure but its manner is extremely relaxed. Character and locale begin to take precedence over the story. At times it even ceases to become a story and becomes more like a lived experience. It has very few belly laughs but moments accumulate and catch up to you by film’s end. The first time I saw it, I thought it was merely “Okay.” But those little details kept niggling at me and the more times I saw it, the more I realized it was a masterwork. That’s really the way I want to heighten consciousness - not through any didactic imagery or overwhelming passages of humanity and beauty - but through poignancy. And levity. Measured pace. Well observed moments. And the occasional El Topo freakfest. The natural world contains enough beautiful vistas, creatures, faces; the world of man has enough architecture and interiors to thrill and inspire. So I’m not interested in capturing that beauty perchance. The beauty or the magic should arise through how the whole piece is arranged – through the cuts and the story. A kind of pragmatism buoyed by the occasional hypnotic digression. Not just a collection of stereotypical beautiful images. Without a wildness, a sense of the unprecedented or something deeper to say - that shit is just a life insurance commercial.
In that Tark Criterion piece you linked me to, he talks about making his first film, Ivan’s Childhood. I found this to be profound and it made me feel at peace with all these “seemingly” fruitless years of writing and head work, trying to solve brain puzzles and find my unique place in the history of cinema:
"The completion of IVAN’S CHILDHOOD marked the end of one cycle of my life, and of a process that I saw as a kind of self-determination. It was made up of study at the Institute of Cinematography, work on a short film for my diploma, and then eight months’ work on my first feature film. I could now assess the experience of IVAN’S CHILDHOOD, accept the need to work out clearly, albeit temporarily, my own position in the aesthetics of cinema, and set myself problems which might be solved in the course of making my next film: in all of this I saw a pledge of my advance onto new ground.
The work could all have been done in my head.”