First mention: "Avatar" and reductionist story theory

When someone says "Avatar is just Pocahontas" they mean the movie's just a re-telling of the story of the relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith. This is meant as a put-down. As if to say, "Well, this 3-D multi-million-dollar pic ain't really new after all, because the story is old."
As if every story hasn't been told before. But that's reductionist.
It's good to talk about reductionism because you don't want to be accused of doing it unintentionally. (It's a classic criticism of undergraduate theorising.) And, it's good to talk about reductionism because it's funny.
This reminds me of John Gardner.
John Gardner was the most famous professor at SUNY-Binghamton when Mary and I were there in the late 70's and early 80's. No, I never laid eyes on him, although you'd think a white-haired, over-weight motorcycle-riding professor would have stuck out. He died in a motorcycle crash in 1982. He's most famous for writing "Grendel", the story of Beowulf from the monster's POV, but in academic circles, I think he's well-known because he wrote two books that are often assigned reading in undergraduate writing classes: "The Art of Fiction" and "On Becoming a Novelist." I know I liked "Grendel" so much that I wrote a treatment for a screenplay based on it.
Anyway, John Gardner said (I'm paraphrasing here) "there are only two stories: "you go on a journey" and "a stranger comes to town."
And, to belabor the obvious, this is a joke, because, if you're being reductionist, then there's really only one story, because the difference between Gardner's two stories is just POV. The other reference is to Homer because there's the Iliad ("a stranger - the Greeks - comes to town") and the Odyssey (the biggest, bestest journey of all).
Laugh all you want, but there are people today who use the comedy of reductionism to make millions of dollars for themselves, and these are people who pitch movies to studio executives. You know: "It's a romantic gangster movie, like "Goodfellas" meets "Pretty Woman."

"Rashomon" and the structure of time

Mike and I watched "Rashomon" a couple of weeks ago and the thought of Narrative Cinema makes me want to list the ways movies structure time in the telling of a story. I'd like to keep a running list, so I'm open to entries.
"Rashomon" tells the same story four times in four extended flashbacks. It's 60 years old and it hasn't been done better yet - although this time I found the Western-style music really annoying (Mike was OK with it.)
"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" has been made into a movie three times and they've all been bad. In high school they called it "circular construction": the bridge collapses at the beginning and then you follow the lives of all the people who died on the bridge.
Flashbacks are more often mis-handled than not, as they slow down forward motion for (frequently) needless exposition. They frustrate the basic story-telling question: "What happens next?" The "whole-movie flashback" has been done dozens of times. The classic is "Lawrence of Arabia" where the main character dies in the first scene and then we're told the story of his life in one extended flashback. The best flashbacks are those in "8-1/2": pure cinema-as-memory.
"Memento" has to be on the list. Telling the story backwards has been used before - but in the theatre. The movie was definitely worth the effort, but I have to admit to being disappointed with the boring ending.
Two movies try to tell the story in real time: "High Noon" is one. We studied it in NYU writing class because it's very well constructed, but Gary Cooper sure does look at the clock a lot.
"Run Lola Run" combines "Rashomon" with real time: three versions of the same story are told and each version, and the action of the story, lasts for 25 minutes. Definitely recommended.

Brakhage - 1998

Brakhage - a documentary made for Canadian television

A very good 1-1/4 hour documentary, if any one's interested, from Netflix.

In the documentary, an elderly American critic says, "Film is just about over now." This is a very old-fashioned distinction which will soon be lost: he could have said, "Film as an analog medium is giving way to all the digital media out there." This distinction is most important to those who use the chemistry and physics of the plastic piece of film to create images. Still, just as CD's have not wiped out records, there are other considerations more linked to the quality of the image than to the "art" of Brakhage-style film making.

But the most interesting comments were those that applied the label "abstract expressionism" to what Brakhage was doing. Thirty years ago, this would never have occurred to me because, no matter what camera trickery is employed, I knew the camera was pointed at something in the world around us. In fact, no one can claim that every second of Brakhage is transcendental: sometimes you're sitting there just trying to figure out what the camera is pointed at. I figured he was closer to Georgia O'Keefe (get close enough to that flower and it becomes abstract) than he was to the Abstract Expressionists. But now I'm coming around to the "look, don't think" philosophy. It's abstract. It's expressive. It's expressively abstract and it's abstractly expressive. I'm thinking in particular of everything he did after "Dog Star Man" (which, after all, told a simple story) particularly "Text of Light" and on to the later films made with scratches and noxious chemicals.

Although Brakhage's life fit the counter-cultural mold of the 60's (without the drugs and the rock and roll) his personality really makes him seem closer to those Abstract Expressionist painters of the 50's: the emotional intensity, the high-seriousness, and the urge to "make it new." And here's the point where his personal life makes sense. I've said before that American avant garde cinema didn't disappear, it's images simply flowed out into the very real world of TV advertising, the impressionistic pitchmaking of the 21st century. Abstract Expressionism, in contrast, met a very real death, when Pop Art killed it in the early 60's. But Brakhage, the oblivious filmmaker, just kept going and, sure enough, starts suffering from the filmic version of writer's block. It may have been bad, but at least he didn't wind up like Jackson Pollack.