The relevance of film in a fragmented world… blog for March 8th

We recently went to see a couple of films at the cinema, one Oscar nominated and billed as a comedy. We hated it. It was frenetic in pace, relentlessly depressing as the protagonist progressed through his Sisyphean existence, and it literally lost the plot towards the end by throwing in a facetious comment that shattered the viewer’s suspension of disbelief…

In discussion of this later with friends, someone said that this is how films are now. Because social media – of which this blog is a part (the irony doesn’t escape me) – requires so little concentrated attention and requires the distraction and diversion of focus, it’s expected that film will follow the same pattern. The result is fragmented storylines, cinematography and a rollercoaster ride that abandons rationality altogether.

I wouldn’t object to this if the film was still a vehicle for meaning-making, but there’s no meaning here. I’m not looking for a moral, nor even the cohesion of the plot – many works from the surrealist period – Luis Bunuel for example – possess the coherence of an ulterior motive.

So let’s stick with that. Why make a film? Ultimately to make money. Secondary to that might be the desire to entertain or inform. Even if a series of unconnected events are recorded, the very recording provides a thread linking them all. So how random is random?

The human mind looks for patterns and connections. There’s a lot more to say about this from a Deleuzean perspective – namely, the roll-out of time. Deleuze was fascinated by cinema, seeing it as a form of thought. Film is the indirect and direct movement of time – classified into movement and time.

Mambrol summarises this not as a philosophy of cinema, ‘but how cinema gives us a new philosophy of subject and object and what moves between them: time’. (Mambrol 2018). The brain is a screen on which the movement image and the time image are played:

‘…since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ […] it has to split the present into two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls towards the past.’ (Deleuze 1989: 81)

Deleuze writes about the different images in play. The definition above refers to the crystal image… there’s not really enough space here to discuss images in the way he conceives them. I will say tho that there is a difference between fragmentation and bad…

Is my concept of bad created by my experience? Possibly. Do I have outdated expectations therefore of what a moving image is or should be? Possibly. But at the end of the day, isn’t storytelling a cultural universal, and aren’t there certain ways of making it impactful? If those are not acknowledged, maybe the story telling fails.

People today may expect fragments, as the advent of the computer screen and the visualness of current communication have so influenced our perception. But fragments have always been used in storytelling, as stories are mostly not linear – some of the best films I’ve seen have taken this approach – vignettes that the viewer then stitches together in their own way to make meaning. A mistake- such as the introduction of an intervention that doesn’t fit, threatens to destabilise the entire foundation, ruins the suspension of disbelief (not belief) and, although tiny in terms of time and shape, ruins the film.

So it was with the introduction of the vampire theme at the end of Marty Supreme. Pointless, unexplored, ridiculous in a ‘verismo’ setting, and the effect was to make me stop taking this storytelling seriously. There’s no excuse for such a thing – it’s just bad.

Here ends the sermon!