…to be the fad it already was. Roger Ebert, my Chicago favorite in film criticism, lays out a powerful slate of reasons for the medium’s irrelevance to the actual development of new and better cinematic experiences. You can read the entire Newsweek article here, but I’ve quoted the follow section as of particular food for thought for Artistic Energies:
Whenever Hollywood has felt threatened, it has turned to technology: sound, color, widescreen, cinerama, 3-D stereophonic sound, and now 3-D again. In marketing terms, this means offering an experience that can’t be had at home. With the advent of Blu-ray discs, HD cable, and home digital projectors, the gap between the theater and home experience has been narrowed. 3-D widened it again. Now home 3-D TV set may narrow that gap as well.
This last line is especially salient as we wrestle with how to develop new technology that isn’t just a marketing gimmick:
What Hollywood needs is a “premium” experience that is obviously, dramatically better than anything at home, suitable for films aimed at all ages, and worth a surcharge.
Just watched two amazing films recently: Man on Wire, and Into Great Silence. The films could hardly be more different – what connection is there between a tight-rope walker and Carthusian monks? – but I felt a deep sense of affinity between them. Both films draw you in. Both films give a radical picture of a different, transcendent way of life. Both films depict intense individual and communal discipline and focus, and yet also, incredible fruitfulness and creativity.
In a sense, Man on Wire is the more artistically inspiring of the two. It is incredible to see someone do something so beautiful, so surprising, so dangerous. It becomes inconsequential that the act is illegal – in fact, that only contributes to the surprise and beauty in a positive way (even the NYPD and the district attorney at the time, 1974, had to admit this).
Into Great Silence also manages to capture some of the same spirit of radical, beautiful departure from the norms of society. At first, I had the thought How do they get anything done? There’s so much praying, silence, waiting, chore-doing. But by the end, I had changed my tune. There was a real sense of liberation in the monks’ ascetic lifestyle (at least in the film). They had the freedom to do things that mattered – all day, every day. It seemed the exact opposite of my obsession with “getting things done.”
The most significant commonality I was able to see between these two films was that both show a discipline of being overwhelmed and re-inspired toward the highest possible aims. Both the monks and Philip Petit (the wire-walker) displayed a lack of self-consciousness made possible by the hugeness of their aims and surroundings – the utter absence of false humility.
A friend was recently in Jerusalem and had the chance to see a show called The Night Spectacular. It’s an outdoor, projection-based show that takes place on the walls of the Tower of David museum. The projection and film work were done by a French company called Skertzo (you can see other interesting installations of theirs at their website – apologies to non-Francophones). The trailer is pretty over the top, which actually makes it harder to get a good idea of the experience. My hard-to-impress friend reports that it actually was quite good.
Is there Cube relevance here? At least in regards to the communal story experience, set in a spacious area, without all the gimmicks of air-jets and lurching floors (this is the type of thing you write when you just know you’ll never make any compromises – pre-foot-in-mouth prose). Probably the most exciting thing here is the ability of filmmakers to do a new kind of story on a new kind of canvas. There is something irreducible about the palette, something very enabling. What we’re ultimately going for is not the abstract advancement of technology, but rather, the right use of new technology to do good art in more and better ways – for more and better purposes, in other words.
It’s been a little too long – especially given all the great things to write about from the past few weeks. I suppose we’ll have to look back in bullet point form:
Other friends who’ve visited commented on the simplicity and accessibility of the experience, but also the surprises to be found there. Those type of comments remind me of the desert experiences that keep coming back to mind in our brainstorming meetings: Is there a way to simplify film (while also making it huge) that clears the mind of digital distraction, opening people to profound experiences of the world around them? That’s why I like the tagline for Eliasson’s exhibit so much: “devices for the experience of reality.” It’s not so much “fantasy” that we’re interested in, but a new way of seeing what’s really there, and imagining what could come next.
In Eliasson’s work, I kept being taken back to the experience of nature. That seems so obvious, in a sense, but it was striking on many levels. As Wittgenstein writes in his collection of aphorisms Culture and Value, “You must say something new and yet it must all be old….You have got to assemble old bits of material, but into a building.”
I’ve watched the presentation by Global Lives executive director David Evan Harris, and really enjoyed what I saw. If you’re interested in hearing him talk about the project, I’ve embedded the video below. You may find yourself skipping around a bit, but the most Cube-related material comes about 21 minutes into the video. Part of the goal of the Global Lives project is to make an art installation to allow viewers to wander through various 24-hour long films of interesting but non-famous people throughout the world. This is a great idea, in my book anyway – and seems to be something worth celebrating and keeping track of for future viewing (so long as it gets made).
Between a dawn airport run and my 9 o’clock appointment in the loop, I killed a couple of hours watching a great film that’s been on my shortlist for a while: Tokyo! (dir. Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, & Bong Joon-ho – in three parts, each overseen by one of the directors).
View the trailer from youtube here:
The whole set of three made for an enjoyable experience, but especially the third, Shaking Tokyo (dir. Bong Joon-ho). The lead character (Teruyuki Kagawa) retreats away from the sight of other humans for a decade, until finally breaking out of his “perfect” world into the real, larger, brighter, but still frightening one, in pursuit of another extreme introvert (the pizza delivery girl – played by Yu Aoi). My favorite quote from this segment of the film comes after Teruyuki Kagawa’s character has finally rushed out into the city, only to find that everyone else in the city has fled in doors, into their isolated lives. As one of the characteristic earthquakes shakes the apartment building, a man yells out, “It’s collapsing! Everyone come out!” This isolation cannot continue, but is difficult as anything to escape from once it becomes more and more controlled, less painful.
Even as it participates in the technological world, our goal for the Cube is to find ways to re-connect people, to reverse the trend toward diseased isolation we can so easily see in increasingly mediated lifestyles. Tokyo! itself works this way, but also calls out for us to find more ways to break free from our fear of each other, of sunlight, of reality, of all things beyond our control. The movie’s tagline is instructive: “Do we shape cities, or do cities shape us?” It’s a both/and, but the exploration of that question is very important. It’s interesting that it is the incursion of the “real” environment (sunlight and other humans) that presents that greatest threat to our sense of control, yet also provides a pathway out – far enough to recognize the pallid, small, dirty place we’ve so long called ideal. One of the early inspirations for the Cube was to bring people (who might otherwise never leave the city) as close to the complete experience of nature as possible. Among so many other possible routes, this is still one that drives our vision.
It would seem apropos to write this post on a milestone anniversary of the release of the film Koyaanistqatsi, but instead, it came to mind today, a Tuesday, 26 1/2 years later. This has been one of the most significant films of our time on the subject of life in a technological environment. Jacques Ellul’s thoughts figured heavily into director Godfrey Reggio’s vision of “life out of balance”. Ellul is also often on my mind – partly because his perspective is radical enough to be memorable: the city is doomed, so flee from it. Prophesy against it, but also pray for it, because though doomed, it has covered the entire earth, and swallowed much that was innocent. Though its dark heart (the prison, sharing some with Foucault’s thought on that) is irredeemable, there is yet something to be done – a meaningful mission into the technological simulacra that is not optional; we stay afloat or sink always deeper under its crushing pressure (these summary references are from The Meaning of the City).
Beyond Ellul, Reggio’s film explores the insanity of modernized life, the strange beauties within it, and the possible sources of fresh ideas in nature. A connection comes to mind again from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (obviously, my favorite book of the summer). Somewhere in the neighborhood of page 29, Scarry makes the argument that beauty is so important for living well and with justice because beauty gives us the experience of being wrong and liking it. Natural beauty can do this same thing: cause us to realize that we’ve been profoundly wrong about life. When we stand in the wilderness of nature, we get to choose again whether we will be alive in person or by proxy – whether we will exist for the sake of our technology, or whether we will use it rightly in the service of others and the blessing of the earth. Koyaanistqatsi stands out to me so much because it brings me into contact with a different pace and horizon of life – the fast, the massive, the insane: these are all more so in this film, a hyper-reality of experience. But because of beauty, I desire this challenge instead of running from it in fear and escapism.
The whole movie has been posted to Youtube, but I don’t at all recommend watching it on any less than a large screen. Besides, product placement does not mix well with this film.
