I started this blog some years ago, always having wanted to write a movie review/criticism blog. I always liked movies, but became great fan of film since coming of age in the mid 1990's. This especially was the case after I took a screenwriting course. I used to frequent the blog of Barbara Nicolosi in the early 2000s. A catholic screenwriter who's blog was titled "Church of the Masses." With a subheading ""Theatres are the new Church of the Masses--where people sit huddled in the dark listening to people in the light tell them what it is to be human." Attributed to an unnamed "1930's theater critic". This idea was definitely true for a great many people in the United States and elsewhere. Film, and television had definitely replaced the printed word as the litera popli by the end of the 20th century. With adults my age more familiar with the Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo + Juliet than Shakespeare's. And in that vein, one of the films that I fell in love with, about the time I started this blog, was Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, because it was more literate. At least in my feeling.
The etheric wispy dreamlike poetic nature of that film, that is also prevalent in the rest of his post-hiatus work is what really held my attention. Even far after viewing it. And the same comment has been made, I think, by most people who came to favor his pieces. This YouTube critique of Malick's visual style by YouTuber Thomas Flight does a great job of explaining the visual and other aspects of this style. And within the video is revealed a dogma compiled by Malick and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (aka Chivo) when they undertook making The New World:
- Shoot in available natural light
- Do not underexpose the negative
- Keep true blacks
- Preserve the latitude in the image
- Seek maximum resolution and fine grain
- Seek depth with deep focus and stop: "Compose in depth"
- Shoot in backlight for continuity and depth
- Use negative fill to avoid "light sandwiches"
- Shoot in crosslight only after dawn or before dusk
- Never front light
- Avoid lens flares
- Avoid white and primary colors in frame
- Shoot with short-focal-length, hard lense
- No filters except Polarizer
- Shoot with steady handheld or Steadicam "in the eye of the hurricane"
- Z-axis moves instead of pans or tilts
- No zooming
- Do some static tripod shots "in the midst of our haste"
- Accept the exception to the dogma ("Article E")
Source: ALL THINGS SHINING: AN ORAL HISTORY OF TERRENCE MALICK
And this I think is what movies are all about. While the films are amazing and nearly rapturous. It is still a film, an intricately constructed story. A preset narration set on a foundation of rules and guidelines. Malick's second round of films are quite amazing, though I've only seen one and parts of others. I believe this is particularly due to these above guidelines, as well as others apparent. The aforementioned Thomas Flight video does a far better job of describing this than I could here. And he also goes somewhat into the exceptions to the rules, how the rules were formed out of necessity due to shooting schedule, how the narrative and editing exchange priority with the visuals and incorporate improvisation and discontinuity as a means to seek out truth as apposed to story, at least in the standard sense as lead by Hollywood/US Studio cinema. And this style I believe is particularly emulated and reflected in much of the video artistry in the last couple of years. Especially by independent younger videographers (who are additionally less restricted than Malick physically by today's camera technology). The result is a more tonal and emotionally inquisitive approach as opposed to structured, composed narration.
And this brings me back to me.
In the last 5 years since the previous post on this blog, my life has taken a multitude of different turns and alterations. Some of my own desire and choosing, many more not so. And my morals, perspectives, motivations, and priorities have taken a near opposite turn. And I have found through experience and observation, that cinema, film, literature, etc. Is not real. It never was real. But I, and many others intended to make it real in our lives and perceptions because of fear or incapability of truly understanding of the "real world." Or perhaps, because of preference to live in a life of fantasy and illusion, for a gamut of reasons, one of the greatest, to implicate oneself with a sense of purpose and meaning that could not be found outside of the theater. Such a modality is commonplace in all of society ever since people told mythological tales by firelight in between arduous treks, hunts and harvests. Story is structured meaning that helps us as human beings organize and make sense of our thoughts and emotions; their causes and effects. And the ripples those emotions give and take from the lives of ourselves and those intimately and distantly related to us, and the environs we inhabit. Because the world in itself is a big gigantic infinite song. A poem. A story we are telling each other about who we are and what we are doing and what we mean when we speak, and say, and do, and drive, and die, and devour, and desire, and divine, and divulge, and demean, and delight, and destroy, and delude ourselves into thinking that we are alone with our thoughts and ourselves here in this place. And through these stories that we live out every day, we can reassess and reassign meaning in our lives and ultimately return to where we came from. And ultimately restore what we lost, or what we gave up out of hopelessness and despair or coercion. Repenting from the falsehoods and lies we have been carrying within our beings for so very much of our lives, all the way back through our ancestral train. Back to their stories, which all came from the same place of emotional sourcing that Malick so endeavored to relay to those who saw his visual representations, of this whole meaning of the tree of life and the stories which make up its branches and its thorns and its leaves.
But the movie, is just a representation, a cave within a cave. A further iteration of shadows backwards on the walls in the dark where the viewers sit huddled en masse thinking they are going to church when the church they seek is really all around them in each other and in the outside world from which they breathe life daily. And by looking at each other, truly seeing, they would realize that what is on the screen is not real, it is only a shadow. And the meaning coming from it is not a reflection, but only a narrated echo of truth. And I have to be honest in order to look people in the eye..
So I am going to delete this blog. Pretty soon I think. I haven't intentionally watched a full movie in two years that I can recall. Save an occasional rerun of something on TV. And many of the views on previous posts, I would disregard or disagree with now. But I am posting this here, because I wanted to "say it."
The end.
Thanks for reading my blog.
