2001, A Space Odyssey: From bone-as-tool to
space station in one edit point.
Herky-jerky
World
The Short Shelf-life of the Motion Picture
by Scott McComb
Art (well, when it comes down to it, everything) requires a certain way of
looking.
When early anthropologists were first nosing about in the more out-lying Pacific island
and archipelagoes, one of the things they noticed (pace, Margaret Mead) was that they
could take a picture of a native, but when they showed it to her, she wouldn't react. The
anthropologists thought about this and eventually figured out that the natives had never
had the occasion to learn how to "read" a two-dimensional representation of a
three-dimensional scene. This mindset came to be known as the Carpenter World-view (named
after one of the anthropologists.
Further, consider the medieval narrative frescoes
that line the walls of so many old European churches. Filled with figures doing often
obscure things, out of whose mouths come ribbons of text that float confusingly all over
the surface, this is an art form that leaves us at best mildly entertained. We have
neither the piety nor the knowledge of the Bible nor the visual skill (or desire) to
interact meaningfully with the paintings. Given how many of the frescoes have survived,
they must at some time have had a wide and appreciative audience.
Fast-forward now to us and our arts, the biggest, the most expensive, the most
time-consuming, and the most popular of which is of course movies. Or, as some would say,
motion pictures. Or, as others prefer, film.
Immersed wholly and deeply in the culture that created-and still nurtures-movies, we glory
in them, praising the successes and bemoaning the failures. For, indeed, there are great
movies, just as there are dud movies.
What we fail to realize is the intense visual training we undergo in order to be
able to enter, accept, and enjoy movies on their own, very odd visual terms.
It is no accident that an age which has been so clever at, and taken such delight in,
taking stuff (read: nature) apart to figure out what makes it tick would have as its
primary art form the motion picture.
Ah, the motion picture. It is a picture, but as everybody learns, it is certainly not in
motion. Take a number of still pictures, string them together, show them at the proper
rate (flip-book or Imax, doesn't matter which), and we perceive motion.
Add a story, and voila, movies!
Except-and here's the time-bound rub-for one small, often overlooked detail:
editing. That is, how the stories that movies tell are put together.
In a word: cut, cut, cut. Paste, paste, paste.
You take a story and you film it. Simple, right?
Wrong. Because stories have lots of characters, turns of events, points of view, and,
above all, the nettlesome, unstoppable, on-going flow of time.
So, to film your story, you wind up shooting bits of story here, bits of story there,
still other bits of story one day, more bits of story another day. Finally, you take all
the filmed bits back and… you edit.
Cut and paste, cut and paste.
The vast, smooth organic flow of reality has been reduced to a herky-jerky world
which we call "a movie."
When you're through cutting and pasting, you often add a music score, one of whose primary
functions is subliminally to distract the viewer from the herky-jerkiness and constantly
re-assure him that the world he is seeing is metaphysically whole and (usually) safe, just
like the one he inhabits outside the theater.
If, as a filmmaker, you've done your job well, humans, by the million, will react
positively, and happily pay money to immerse themselves in the tiny, herky-jerky
world you've created.
Which is all fine. To each art, its own.
What's worrisome, when you think about it, is how the future will see movies.
Assume that the future (I mean, five hundred or a thousand years from now) has
the technological means to display movies. With what eyes will they see them?
Is it not likely that their eyes, untrained in our way of seeing, will view a world that
has been cut into tiny pieces and then pasted back together in the most bizarre mix-up of
time and space as at worst a primitive hodge-podge, and at best a kind of later
version of those comic-book paintings we have such trouble deciphering in old European
churches?
Yes, there are great movies. And yes, there are great edits in movies (Kubrick's cut, in
2001, from the bone the man-ape flings skyward to the spaceship). Movies at their best
work in all the ways, both obvious and mysterious, that all great art works.
Knowing no other world, we take for granted and don't even think about the mental and
visual skills necessary to watch a movie. Maybe what some clever and articulate film buff
needs to do is to write an esthetic guide to "the motion picture", not for us
today but for that helpless, unknowing would-be viewer a thousand years in the future, a
"Movies for Dummies in the Year 3000."
END
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