Art has continued from prehistory to be a powerful way of knowing, feeling, touching, expressing, and effectively communicating something important, something special.
-- Janet Strayer (previous blog)
I’ve been hooked on movies ever since I can remember, and then some. Even as a kid, old black and white movies on TV especially captivated me. For some magical reason, I thought they were more “real” than those in full-color.
There isn’t even a particular movie genre I like best, that’s how indiscriminate I am. Give me westerns, chick-flics, action-movies,, sci-fi, documentaries, thrillers, romance, comedy, Hollywood, Bollywood, foreign, domestic, you name it.
Maybe this marks a strain of promiscuity that needs restraining. But I rather like having it. So I’ll name it something more positive, like a “generous or wide-band receptivity”. It’s not a bad quality. But it does leave one open to others thinking that you have little taste or discernment. I’ll risk being branded a cinema slut, though, just to keep the pleasure of my open options!
Not much of a critic in my early days, I was a glutton at a visual-narrative feast. I’m more of a gourmand now (and I see fewer films, alas). Still, I like many more movies than a cultivated person probably should. But then, I guess, for good or ill, I have a high quotient for suspension of disbelief -- that radical imaginative facility Keats and others speak of. I did and do respond to material from any direction that engages my mind and feelings and encourages imaginative participation.
There isn’t even a particular movie genre I like best, that’s how indiscriminate I am. Give me westerns, chick-flics, action-movies,, sci-fi, documentaries, thrillers, romance, comedy, Hollywood, Bollywood, foreign, domestic, you name it.
Maybe this marks a strain of promiscuity that needs restraining. But I rather like having it. So I’ll name it something more positive, like a “generous or wide-band receptivity”. It’s not a bad quality. But it does leave one open to others thinking that you have little taste or discernment. I’ll risk being branded a cinema slut, though, just to keep the pleasure of my open options!
Not much of a critic in my early days, I was a glutton at a visual-narrative feast. I’m more of a gourmand now (and I see fewer films, alas). Still, I like many more movies than a cultivated person probably should. But then, I guess, for good or ill, I have a high quotient for suspension of disbelief -- that radical imaginative facility Keats and others speak of. I did and do respond to material from any direction that engages my mind and feelings and encourages imaginative participation.
Today’s Thought: Imaginative Participation
Actually, imaginative participation may be a rarer quality in art now than in years past. This isn’t the same as knee-jerk interactive participation in a video game, or the scripted and conditioned responses we may be unable to resist in “tear-jerkers”.
Imaginative participation is more elusive, taking some time to experience and enduring, usually somewhat transformed, in the viewer’s mind . I think it requires some empathic engagement, an intersubjective bridge built from the artwork into the viewers' own esthetic and empathic imaginings. (I've written a chapter draft on empathy in the arts; write if you want to read it.)
I still love going to the movies But, like eating junk food, I don’t always come away satisfied. Recently, though, I saw two movies whose imagery was enthralling, sending me on a visual- imaginative-esthetic journey that pushed my critical boundaries out and away. They left me full of images rebounding in my mind, full also of enduring feelings and sensations, many of them hard to describe, and a sense of wonder.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Imaginative participation is more elusive, taking some time to experience and enduring, usually somewhat transformed, in the viewer’s mind . I think it requires some empathic engagement, an intersubjective bridge built from the artwork into the viewers' own esthetic and empathic imaginings. (I've written a chapter draft on empathy in the arts; write if you want to read it.)
I still love going to the movies But, like eating junk food, I don’t always come away satisfied. Recently, though, I saw two movies whose imagery was enthralling, sending me on a visual- imaginative-esthetic journey that pushed my critical boundaries out and away. They left me full of images rebounding in my mind, full also of enduring feelings and sensations, many of them hard to describe, and a sense of wonder.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Werner Herzog did us all a great favor by filming inside the prehistoric, but only relatively recently discovered, Chauvet Cave in France. Seeing the film was almost better than being there because of the intimate camera work (not special effects). The hand-held cameras provided shifts of perspective and changing contextual viewpoints on the marvelous animal images drawn upon the cave walls.
Human life is present in the Cave without itself being depicted. The human is present and suggested in the selective ways the animals are seen to move, and in how they affect us as we view them. It’s interesting to me that the humans we focus on in the film aren’t the film crew or scientists (stand-ins for our present-day selves). Instead, we focus on the mysterious originating artist/s -- our human ancestor/s who walked here, envisioning and inscribing images of animal life in which they , too, must have participated.
These images are alive forever in the way only art can be. The human artists are long extinct, their own presence depicted only in handprints, and in one rather amazing blend of human female iconography with an animal head. Yet they, too, continue to live through the art and through us.
This film hardly needed narrative, yet Herzog insisted on providing it, much of it (beyond the facts provided) seeming superfluous to me. For me, it’s enough to say:
Look, see, marvel in any way you like at this life that breathes in art 35,000 years after our ancestors breathed the air in this cave. How like them are we? How like the making of art then is the making of art now? What became of them and what will become of us?
Tree of Life
This film really surprised me. I had not read anything about it when I went to see it. Good thing, given I don’t typically enjoy anything with such a strong religious bent to it. Yet the imagery in this film, its lyrical and moving soundtrack, and the complex, elegiacally restrained emotional pull of it was, despite my admitted reluctance to follow any evangelical line, profoundly beautiful and moving.
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