Why Make Movies?
In cinema we have the unique opportunity to communicate through FILMSPACE, a kind of illusion specific to the moving image that can simultaneously suggest objective reality and subjective reality in a potentially transcendent gestalt.
In traditional Hollywood cinema, we see the reliance on suspension of disbelief, the premise that we are watching an objective reality with the privilege of omniscience or semi-omniscience. And yet, films often switch between objective and subjective (POV) camera angles fluidly, and because of our familiarity with cinematic language, we accept this discrepancy at a subconscious level. This ability to manipulate emotion through switches in perspective is one of the lynchpins of cinematic language.
But fundamentally, the PERSPECTIVE of the film is taken as an absolute. The reality the film presents is an absolute reality. The manipulation is precise: designed to make you feel a certain way at a certain time. It is instructive rather than suggestive. It creates the illusion of having had an emotional experience when in fact the film has simply pushed certain buttons, obeyed certain laws of cinematic language which move the feelings in a certain way. There is no room within the world of the film for interpretation, and the film is not interested in involving the audience by allowing them to interact with the material in a personal way. The film implies a RE-CREATION of reality rather than a representation.
Some filmmakers have tried to get around this pretense by employing a “documentary-style” of narrative filmmaking, where the camera takes on the personality of a subjective bystander. Though this method has attracted me in the past, recently I’ve been feeling that this method is an even greater lie than the traditional methods, because it implies a RE-CREATION of reality to an even greater extent. And yet most attempts to make the audience aware that they are watching a movie - through the meta or post-modern sensibility - tend to be exceedingly self-conscious and ironic, which destroys the film’s ability to communicate something personal, sincere, or even (dare I say?) eternal.
What I’m interested in is an effort towards representation that is at once 1) subjective (expressing a definitely unique or particular experience as opposed to a universal one) 2) subversive (in the sense of deconstructing ideological and cultural assumptions {read: GENRE} as opposed to relying on them as a shorthand) and 3) rooted in an emotional experience as opposed to an intellectual construct.
