catapult magazine

What is so magnetic about film for our current culture?

Movies have been around for little over a hundred years. Looking at how much human beings seem drawn to moving pictures, it’s hard to believe they weren’t invented sooner? What is it about our cultural context (or the context of the late 1800’s) that makes (made) movies a necessary form of artistic expression for this day and age?

The harnessing of electricity and invention of the lightbulb would be key elements. Without them, you can’t really have movies. Cave men had to be happy with dancing shadows on the cave walls. Which I still find fairly amusing.

Like drama, movies combine so many different art forms — writing, acting, cinemetography, music composing, lighting, Computer Generated Stuff, and so on. It is a type of art that can involve the work of hundreds and hundreds of people, and as a result, the cumulative effect (when unified under a coherent direction) can be pretty amazing. One wonders how novelists (a single person working alone in a garrett) are supposed to compete with such hoardes. They do though.

Yeah, I guess movies are something like dancing shadows. But we weren’t satisfied with dancing shadows. We had to have color, more movement, better action sequences.

Incidentally, Francis Ford Coppola talked about how novelists can’t compete with the spell-binding power of film. With film, one sits in a dark room where the screen lights up the room. There’s nothing else to see but that big screen. With books, however, noise and outside influences can distract much easier.

Thinking again about the way film developed, I don’t think it’s enough to say only that technological advancements are behind the rise of film in our society. It is entirely possible that cave man could have invented film (or something like it) using fire and colored filters but for some reason cave men found little need for such things.

More than technological advancements, film could only be developed and accepted within a certain kind of society. Just as people weren’t really ready for Bach until a few hundred years after his death, so film had to come into popularity at just the right time and place.

I’m not so sure about this idea that cavemen could have invented film if they had felt a need for it. True, they probably didn’t feel a need for movies, seeing as they were perpetually on the brink of starvation, but fire and coloured filters (assuming they can even make high-quality coloured filters) don’t make a movie. Coloured dancing shadows are kewl but putting a moving image of Denzel Washington into coloured glass is pretty darn tough when stone and wood tools are the limit of your technology.

In fact, the more I learn about history, the more I’m becoming convinced that our modern global culture is completely dependent on the industrialized use of fossil fuels: coal and oil. Without these we wouldn’t have electricity (even solar and hydro power require fossil energy to set up and maintain), cheap ocean transport (diesel), cheap land transport (oil), cheap food production (oil) — we wouldn’t have movies, we wouldn’t have mega-churches (gotta have a sound system), we wouldn’t have rock and roll (horror of horrors), we wouldn’t have had the sexual revolution (no pill, no latex condom), and we most certainly wouldn’t have *cino. We would still have theatre! Perhaps this is another advantage of theatre over film…

Movies? — sure we could come up with a non-electric system if you give us time, but the very invention of a new system will require plastics, steels, and semi-conductors which can only be produced with the help of fossil fuels.

So I’ll stick with my original argument that the invention of film required certain techologies and energy sources. On the other hand, I’m not saying these factors necessitated the invention and subsequent popularity of film. But they allowed it to happen. Why it happened when it did (early 1900s) and why it’s still so popular is still up for debate.

a friend of mine told me that most forms of pleasure in this world are in one way or another a form of relief. relief from the depravity of society, and relief from the daily stresses and discontent of our lives. weather its drug use, alcohol abuse, or zoning out in front of the television for hours at a time, mankind is searching for something to fill the space in their minds. movies are just the latest incarnation in a long history of such distractions.

…at least that’s what my friend thinks…

They are more than destractions though, right? They actually communicate meaning sometimes, don’t they? (excepting Adam Sandler and the dumb and dumber(er) movies.)

hmm.. i think you make a good point. i guess there’s a lot that’s communicated through movies. things that interest us and things that spark our imaginations. along the lines of what David Bazan was saying at the Calvin festivel regarding every individual’s temporal calling and interests… movies appeal to our temporal callings, and through watching them we receive a temporal fulfillment…