Shake it Up

The film medium is the most powerful medium human beings have access to, whether to experience or to create. What it has done since its inception over a century ago was to combine elements from all other arts; it has poetry and opera, it has music and prose, it has sculpture and architecture, it has ballet and interpretive dance. But it is in combining those element. It has been said that music, probably the previous holder of most powerful medium, has been given a subject obvious; that might be opera, but not like this, not with a universal pen. No, like Woodrow Wilson said, this is writing with lightning.

Some might say that the medium has rarely if ever regained its ability to be an experience; that to much of it is trapped in narrative and drama. Those might be right; the works of Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Malick, along with avant garde filmmakers Brakhage and Snow, are too unsung to be promising exceptions. And instead, imitators of superficial artistic value take the glory year after year, robbing human beings of new dimensions in artistic feeling. Will we ever gain that feeling?

I believe, finally, we have that chance. Strike that; a second chance.

Baby? Perhaps; it feels like the medium is just gaining its legs. Genius? Indeed.

Recently Viewed:
Manhattan Murder Mystery, Trouble in Paradise (Wed.)