![]() ![]() True to their roots as cultivated by Thomas Ince and his cohorts, most multiplex movies today are simply a means to sell something, whether it's a star, a soundtrack, a video game or a television show. It's this emphasis on the script - not as an artistic template but as the armature of the cinematic-industrial complex - that has rendered most movies so visually inert, so emotionally impoverished, so spiritually dead (and, ironically, so incoherent). All the while, everyone who tinkers with the script is quoting jargon about "arcs" and "beats" that they no doubt picked up at one of the myriad script-writing workshops that are held throughout the country on any given weekend, like so many Amway recruiting conventions. All are overseen by the bean-counters in the front office, who are less concerned with art than with weekend grosses. ![]() One may be good on nailing a solid three-act structure, one may be hired to inject "whammy" moments of suspense or action, one comes in to provide the jokes, one "polishes" what is by now a thoroughly stale enterprise to make it sound fresh. Today, it's not uncommon for a big-budget motion picture to be worked on by more than a dozen screenwriters, each one bringing a particular expertise to the project. Inceville, the director's movie studio, perfected the now-standard system whereby producers commission writers to create scripts for stars, attaching directors less for their artistic vision than for their ability to execute what is on the page and bring it in on time and under budget. The master of modern production was Thomas Ince, whose mysterious death was at the center of Peter Bogdanovich's "The Cat's Meow" earlier this year. The thing itself - the miracle of luminous motion - became a means to record essentially static theatrical productions and, later, reenactments of popular novels.īy 1912, a nexus between Henry Ford's assembly-line production practices and audiences' craving for stories featuring newly minted stars created a rationalized, script-centered movie industry. As the first mass entertainment medium, film quickly went from evanescent spectacles to an increasingly elaborate means of storytelling. ![]() From cinema's first flickerings, when the ephemera shown in cafes and music halls still reflected their roots in magic shows, pantomime and vaudeville, it didn't take long for the medium to be co-opted by marketers and big business. With few allies along the way, for the past half-century Brakhage, 69, has been holding the line for non-narrative film in the face of a movie culture that has increasingly come to be tyrannized by narrative. Brakhage also turns the film itself into a plastic medium, scratching, painting and marking up the emulsion, using tape to fasten objects to it, and otherwise manipulating its surface to create works that are more akin to music, poetry, painting and sculpture than what people have come to understand as movies. To make these vibrant, deeply expressive works, Brakhage swings the camera to and fro, pressing the lens up against what he's photographing so that the camera itself, usually a recording device, becomes a physical extension of the filmmaker, an instrument of intuition and the subconscious. (Brakhage has described his own work as trying to capture "closed-eye vision," as good a description of my youthful experiments in seeing as any.) In "Yggdrasill," as in many of the mostly short, mostly silent works that will be shown in the series, audiences can see Brakhage's cardinal interest in - indeed, obsession with - capturing emotional, psychological and even physiological states on film. "Yggdrasill" will be shown Saturday as part of a 75-film Brakhage retrospective at the National Gallery of Art that began last weekend. But those early visions come back to me every time I see "Yggdrasill Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind," a 1997 film by Stan Brakhage, the most important and influential maker of experimental films of the 20th century. I didn't keep the habit up for long, figuring it couldn't be good for my nearsightedness. At some point I realized that it worked even better if you pressed down on your eyes with your fingers for as long as possible. Scrunching my face as firmly as I could, I'd wait for the stars and flares and kaleidoscopic patterns to explode across the screen of my eyelids. I remember a summer night, decades ago, when I discovered that if I closed my eyes really tightly, I could create a movie in my own head. ![]()
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