I signed up for a Screenwriting class last semester, but wound up dropping it after the first class when the professor referred to Happy Go Lucky as “unconventional,” used Juno as an example of a film with a good screenplay, and said that although the school at large tended to focus on “film as art” (bullshit), this class wouldn’t take that approach. (What other approach is there? If film isn’t art, what is it?!) It really bothers me that there seem to be so few people interested in narrative film that aren’t completely boring and traditionally-minded; so few people that believe that narrative film doesn’t have to mean Hollywood (or worse: “indie”) and that art film doesn’t have to mean Brakhage. I was required to write a film manifesto for another class; one excerpt: “My cinema strives to discover new modes of storytelling.” So I was excited, then, to learn of MIT’s new Center for Future Storytelling.

As the Center is an MIT project, it comes as no surprise that its focus is on new technologies: “low-cost holographic TV, […] new imaging technologies for movie studios, [and] emotionally engaging synthetic actors.” Many of the proposed new methods of storytelling rely on interactivity. I wonder: is the traditional, static, single arc/outcome, single author, non-participatory mode of storytelling slowly becoming irrelevant? Slowly becoming replaced by other models? The seeds have been planted for a long time: collaborative and interactive art, post-modernism and Barthe’s death of the author… Walter Benjamin’s idea of a book composed entirely of quotations from other authors now seeming not only a possibility but an unavoidable and obvious option. But is mass media already beginning to catch up to theory? In some ways it may have already surpassed it: hypertext, Tivo, DVD easter eggs, MMRPGs, Second Life, ARGs*, cross-platform viral marketing, social media, participatory/psuedo-democratic television (i.e. American Idol). Even the ever increasing Hollywood tendency to recycle old material could be compared back to pre-modern models - when griots and bards would recycle the same stories over and over, imbuing them with new interpretations and local flavor. (My dad was telling me once about how some pop songs are released in different parts of the country using slightly different instrumentation and production to appeal to that particular region. Could some of these new technologies, in combination with new modes of distribution and the theory of the Long Tail, be used to create region or demographic-specific versions of films?) Is this all pointing to something? Is narrative film as we know it going to go the way of the dodo?

And this all sounds very exciting, sure, but what does it mean for me, the filmmaker? Usually film is far behind other mediums when it comes to enormous cultural shifts like this (auteur theory was outdated before it even existed, having only been theorized 30 years after the start of New Criticism) but now, in what may already be the advanced stages of the information age, it seems that film, video, and television are leading the way. For a while now, I’ve been feeling somewhat dissatisfied with straight narrative film as my chosen medium of expression. It’s limited. Passive. Even anti-social. I find myself drawn instead to the internet, to relational aesthetics, to collaboration and interactivity and social art. To living art. Art that can change and be changed - evolve, adapt, transform… even reproduce (fan art?). Cinema, at least in the conventional sense, can’t do any of these things. (There’s “Expanded Cinema,” sure, but everyone knows that’s not really cinema, it’s video art) But what can be done about that? Despite these limitations, I still have a strong desire to make narrative cinema. Is there any way for narrative cinema to meet these new potentials, without becoming another medium entirely?

I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts!

*Related: this blog entry explaining/defining “alternate reality games” (ARGs) is worth a read.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 11:35 am and is filed under Art, Film, Internet, Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.