To Infinity and Beyond

The more your mind thinks about the same task, the more it dances around possibility. Do we need to do it this way? Must we satisfy expectations? How can we change things, yet retain some of what we seek?

Filmmakers must feel this more than most. It was once said that everything that could be filmed has already been done so, and this was during the birth of cinema, perhaps nearly one hundred years ago. Yet, filmmaking proceeds onward.

Most films progress along a narrative. There's a plot. There are characters in the plot. There's a beginning, where we're introduced to the characters, some dilemma that the characters must deal with, and an ending where that dilemma is typically resolved. That outline, for example, describes romantic comedies. Boy meets girl. Boy breaks up with girl. Boy makes up with girl.

Newbie filmmakers, even talented ones, often stick to these conventions because those are the films they've seen and enjoyed. To break away from those conventions means you must think of new ones to replace them. If you don't have a plot, then what do you have instead? Maybe longing looks at vistas you've never seen. There are films like Koyaanisqatsi, meditations on modern day life, shown in images and minimalist Glass music, but no dialog. Or the experimental films of Stan Brakhage.

Just as Picasso's paintings took away from what people wanted, either romantic or realist paintings or even the impressionist paintings, and gave them odd angles, and odd shapes, so some modern filmmakers take away from the usual pleasures in watching film, and challenge viewers to use new criteria to enjoy film. Film need not be happy, or be intellectually comprehensible, or have characters that make sense, or have characters at all.

This shouldn't take away from those who seek to work in the best forms of genre filmmaking. It was said that Bach came along at a time when his kind of contrapunctal music was falling out of favor, and brought it to towering heights, reinvigorating a fading genre of music, and that too is one way modern filmmakers can proceed.

Yet, it's the independent filmmakers that push our world view, or really, our world film view away from what's comfortable, that challenge our notion of what film is, and in so doing, opens our minds to what's possible.