Simile For The Camera
March 6th, 2009 by Rick 4 Comments
I’ve been having an ongoing dialog/freakout with myself regarding authorship and creating content.
My degree is in folding metaphorical envelopes and I’m tired of licking them. I want to be a letter writer, but I have nothing to say.
But maybe that’s the point. For the sake of argument, there have only been a dozen or so original (archetypal) films ever made. Following those have been scores—six hundred or so a year—of genre films. Many of which are formulaic, the smarter of which do that reflexive meta Charlie Kaufman thing, where they acknowledge the formula. Fifty or so years of French films have used the modes of production over plot as vehicles for morality.
Maybe this is ok. Our brains are relational. We make connections and use them to process new things based on our previous experience. In the animal kingdom this probably helps animals decide what to do when they encounter an unfamiliar predator. In graphic design, museum art, music, film, and literature this is called vernacular. With culture ever reproducing, remixing, co-opting, we need these similes and metaphors.
When reviewing a movie for a friend I say, “it was sort of like Alien, but with that drug-stupor Spike Lee steadycam thing.” Or a band, “they’re kind of like Black Dice, but fun like Black Eyes, with the train wreck theatrics of Black Lips.”
At some point the snake might finish swallowing itself and we’ll be released from this cycle. For the time being I’m just going to have to keep making better envelopes with totally rad security patterns.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
If I’m reading this correctly, the snake will not ever stop swallowing itself, and no, we will not be released from this cycle. It is nature, and you acknowledged that. Striving to create something ‘archetypal’ as a conscious act is a product of going to art school; its what happens when art becomes art history becomes the history of art history. Rejoice in making the rad security patterns on the envelopes. There ain’t a damn thing wrong with putting a little more radness in the day of envelope openers everywhere.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
I think it’s pretty much always been this way, since there was such a thing as culture. Any given film or work of art of music probably has more unique characteristics to it than it does characteristics in common with other works, but we tend to notice the 5 or 10 or 15 things that it has in common with the canon rather than what sets it apart. I think this is as true of bad art as it is of “good”. That’s why the notion of originality, to me, is so laughable. You have to work hard to make something unremarkable. In that sense, Godard is less original than say, some guy who made the Sci-Fi channel movie of the week about giant lizards. Self-consciousness tends to obfuscate true personality.
or not.
March 10th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Both really good points. Maybe I just want a new snake to start eating itself.
I think what I am most reacting against is my quickness in turning to parody or vernacular because there is a faster audience buy-in.
Godard is probably less filmmaker and more critic. I’m just trying to figure out which I am.
David Foster Wallace said something really great about the inability of irony to inject anything new into an equation. It’s the new warlord that knows all about overthrowing the old one and holding off the next, but never attempts to encourage social progress.
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