Film and Art: Message and Intent

What is the purpose of film?  I always thought that film was an extension of literature, a new medium for the art of storytelling.  The purpose of literature is to teach and to entertain.  Even those stories which seek to avoid being didactic at all still offer us something of an insight.  It's more the audience's effect on the art, than the art's on the audience.  What's the phrase, even the observation of a system can effect the system.  

Film is an educational and informative tool.  Sometimes this is overt, as is the case with documentaries or films made specifically for academic use.  Film can also be educational and offer insight in a subtler manner.   Let's take The Lion King, this is Hamlet told through the animal kingdom of Africa.  Now the whole 'Is Hamlet crazy?' theme is not as prevalent.  But other themes are still there: Simba is trying to find his place in this crazy world, like Hamlet;  revenge is obviously still a big theme; the importance of birthright.    When I first saw this movie in the summer of 1994, at 11 years old, I didn't know any of this.  I knew that Unlce Skar was a real sonofabitch and that Simba needed to man up and be the king that he really was.  (Here is the theme of royal birthright in the outcast, which has been a literary theme since at least The Castle of Otranto).  

This is all to say that these themes and basic lessons underscore all films even if unintentional, we can't escape our racial memory.  These archetypes have been the vehicles of morals and messages for centuries.  They are the equivalent of brand recognition, we know what to expect.  Spring is rebirth, winter is death. (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). The quest myth (The Lord of the Rings, Shaun of the Dead) has been used in countless stories.*

My point here is that works of art draw on our racial culture and memory and that they evoke these archetypes, morals and messages regardless of intention.  The artist doesn't matter.  Once the art is out there it sprouts its own tentacles independent of any pencil or celluloid.

*References to these myths and archetypes are pulled from Northrop Frye's The Archetypes of Literature

The Beginning of Frustration, Disappointment and Marginal Success

When I first created this, I wasn't sure what the point was.  I mean, who's going to read it?  And now five months later I find myself asking the same question, and returning to the same answer, probably no one.  Why write?

A lot of writers claim to have this insatiable urge to write.  One I know claims that it's like breathing.  I guess it just happens.  Well for me it's a chore.  The desire to write is fleeting, usually rising at moments of great emotional overflow in which I create some vague piece of shit that I regard as poetry or art.  Days later I come back only to find drivel, big words and questioning, "What is this!"  

Ultimately the desire to create is not there.  And even if the desire is there, the likelihood of exceptional execution is small.  It's that whole Icarus thing.  

So with all that said, I seek, through this blog, to write about film and by extension all the arts.  I hope also to maybe entertain, write well and maybe learn something.  

I love film, and I want to make my love a creative one as anyone good love is.  So, if anyone ever reads this I hope it doesn't suck.  

The First

This is a test.  This is only a test.