If you're reading this you've either stumbled across it by mistake (googled "naked balls drawing" like at least one pervert has) or you spend too much time thinking about the nature of things -how and why they work.
I've admitted how "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" was central to my formative years, and how my occassional work with Ron Barrett, it's author, has been a highlight of my maturing years. How I hope the film does well.
Passing this broadsheet at the cinema on Friday night, though, I wonder -not about the success of the film but whether I'll enjoy it.
Art is all about me. Unless you're you, of course, then it's all about you. It starts with whether I "like" it and ends with "insight".
Film? Film, in its essence is a storytelling form. The descendant of Tragedy by way of the Morality Play, Gotterdammerung, and George Eastman.
Motion pictures first experimented with sports films and moving portraiture (like the Lumiere productions), the medium gained its form once narrative became the focus.
Later innovations only served to advance the fundamental goals of storytelling -synchronized sound, color, steadicams, CG effects. These innovations all served to detail the space of the film. Like its predecessors, film lives in a defined space. The theater exists (primarily) behind the proscenium, the snapshot on a flat plain, a symphony is performed on an array of woodwinds and strings.
The film's space is the screen.
One hundred years from now people will look back on today's experiments in 3D just as we look at nickelodeons and zooetropes -primitive attempts to express the power of an art form yet to be born.
1 comment:
To bad those primitive experiments have usurped all of the energy that was started on 2D animation. It had finally started to find a style and a subsance, when everything became about little viewmaster dolls moving to an ordinary beat. The "Art" of it seems to have been stunted. Now it's up to the poor (financially) likes of us to try to keep things going.
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