While watching a movie, just once at least: refuse to suspend disbelief. At every moment refuse to be transported away:
- View the characters as actors, see them acting, see them as Bard Pitt and Shia LaBeouf.
- Hear the speech as element of a script and the sound as components of a soundtrack.
- View the background as a backdrop, see it as a stage.
- View the cuts and pans and shots which are edited together to form a homogeneous narrative, as the disparate elements they are.
-View the movie temporally, and see, in every scene the director saying "Action" and "cut" and the actor saying: "how was that?"
- View the editor sitting there: splicing and combining and editing.
When viewed in this light, the historical continuity of theatre (stage, play, opera) to cinema (movie) becomes very clear. The line of Cultural History is clear and linear.
Film is a play in which there was a camera on stage. I mean this literally.
There is nothing disruptive in this: this is continuity.
On the line of cultural history: When film gained popularity, most people were nonplussed by their magic. Puppeteers were less impressed. Many of the 'cinematic tricks' employed by the filmmakers had been in use for ages in puppetry.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't the pupeteers be using analogous techniques to the stage actors? How different is it?
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