Motion picture stories
Colin Marshall had an interesting piece in the New Yorker the other day (word to the wise - not sure if that will be behind a paywall or not. I was able to read all of it for free but YMMV).
As a film school kid, McKee is pretty much a household name (and if you weren’t a film school kid but you did watch Adaptation then you saw Brian Cox play him in that).
For a generation of screenwriters (and probably writers in general), McKee was the guy. The go to. You want to know how to tell a story and what narrative structure is… McKee is the shining light.
Like Marshall, I have some issues with McKee but I do think that in some ways what McKee was doing was a meta review of storytelling structure which was taken up as the way of telling stories.
There are two quotes that really jumped out at me in the piece:
“We have not seen any cinema yet,” Greenaway writes, in a 2001 essay published in the magazine Zoetrope: All-Story. “We have only seen 105 years of illustrated text.”
As for filmmaking, it remains voluntarily confined to a cramped corner of the virtually infinite creative space at its disposal, like a farm animal growing bony and haggard as it perversely grazes the same small, barren patch of a vast, open field.
That second quote in particular is straight fire.
(For a parenthetical, is it just me or is Peter Greenaway just not someone that we talk about much anymore? And if it’s not just me, why is that? I know he hasn’t made anything in quite a while and that probably has something to do with it but the man made some indispensable pieces of film that I worry may be getting lost. Or perhaps he’s just filed away in the same place where Stephen Frears is these days - someone that was seen as important at one time but we’ve all moved on).
Because there is this thing where we assume that film must be a medium that is used to deliver stories. We don’t really do anything else with the form.
But isn’t that underthinking things?
Cinema is one of maybe two art forms that by its nature can overwhelm the audience (and is designed to achieve as much - the other form here would be music).
Sure, if you wanted to disintegrate books as a storytelling medium, it wouldn’t work. You can be experimental with a book but ultimately, you need to do something that is in some way in dialogue with storytelling (even if it is rejection of it). You can’t simply put random words down on the page because that ends up being nothing. Sure, you will end up with some juxtaposing words that have an element of meaning that the reader will glean but generally it will just be noise.
But cinema isn’t like that. You can have random images, you can overwhelm the audience with noise and it will be something, even if that something is simply an experience.
I’m not saying that all films should be that but I wonder if the reason that it doesn’t happen more is due to an expectation from audiences over the history of the form that it exists to deliver narrative (which in turn means that those that might seek to explore the form in that way are dissuaded from such ideas or try it and then find it is not sustainable given the monetary requirements of the form).
As an example, the other form designed to overwhelm an audience (music) does not have a similar expectation place on it. While music can deliver a story (and in fact there is a rich history of it), we don’t necessarily have an expectation that it will - we go for the experience of it, we go for it sending out neurochemistry wild.
I’m not sure I have an answer but it’s something to ruminate on.
In another world, is going to the movies a vastly different experience? Is everything like Baraka? Is it a form that plays with its unique structure to examine the movement of time? Is it essentially music videos? I don’t know but sometimes I wonder if that would be greatly more interesting than what we have now.