The Storyteller's Aesthetic Part One

Improbable Basterds- So I saw my big summer movie last night and it makes me a little sad, because it means that summer's almost over and Quentin's best wasn't all I'd hoped it would be. I'm sensitive to the fact that I don't want to spoil it for others, so I'm going to wait awhile before talking about it.

I've settled on The Storyteller's Aesthetic as a title to describe how I want to talk about American movies. It's a very unsexy label, but it helps me describe a decade that has no name.("The first decade of the 21st Century" appears to be the best we can come up with.)

I see the impressionists making commercials for Cialis and the storytellers struggling along, trying to Make It New, but forgetting all the lessons of the past.

Which reminds me: everyone should see "Breathless" the Goddard film that really turned everyone's head around in the 50's. Here's the thing about Goddard: every shot represents an idea. His cameraman has said that Goddard would be referencing dozens of films every time the camera changed position and would drive him crazy.

The Germans seem to take their storytelling very seriously. They have two words, which have to be loosely translated, which they use to categorise their entire oral tradition.

Here's what Wikipedia says:

"Märchen," loosely translated as "fairy tale(s)" (though fairies are rare in them) take place in a kind of separate "once-upon-a-time" world of nowhere-in-particular. They are clearly not intended to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly defined incidents, and peopled by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When the supernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly, without surprise. Indeed, there is very little affect, generally; bloodcurdling events may take place, but with little call for emotional response from the listener.
"Sagen," best translated as "legends," are supposed to have actually happened, very often at a particular time and place, and they draw much of their power from this fact. When the supernatural intrudes (as it often does), it does so in an emotionally fraught manner. Ghost and lover's leap stories belong in this category, as do many UFO-stories, and stories of supernatural beings and events.

So - without meaning to - I'm back to Impossible Basterds again: the movie starts with the letters "Once upon a time..." on the screen, which the audience takes as a joke, but is really a warning about the ending.

So let's see how this works in the movies: I'm thinking "The Lord of the Rings" and "Star Wars" are Marchen, or fairy tales, because the characters and events have no direct space/time relationship to us. But all Westerns and war movies and even horror movies are Sagen or legends, because they "draw much of their power" from their connection to us, here in real-time.

So there, I said it: Impossible Basterds starts off as a Sagen and ends up as a Marchen.