Story, Spectacle, and Soul

Over the last 9 years since film school, (has it really be that long?) I have made many attempts to synthesize many of my thoughts on film as an art form, industry, and entertainment product. While I am nowhere near being able to say that I have finished my cinematic journey, I do feel that there are some things I have begun to figure out about my own personal taste in film. One of these things is what makes a film interesting to me or, I guess, three things that make them interesting to me.

Typically, I do not go into a film thinking about these things almost at all. Rather, they are things that when I look back at my viewing, my likes, and my dislikes I realize that they have these tendencies toward films that have quality Stories, impressive Spectacle, or move my Soul. These are by no means the summation of what I like in film but it is a good start toward that end.

Story

From as early as I can remember, I have always loved stories and I was lucky because both my Mom and Dad loved them too. Whether it was my dad convincing me that a Dinosaur was walking down the street on April Fool’s day, making a paper puppet and doing funny voices to distract my brother from an injury he had, or gathering around the TV for Star Trek, it seems inevitable that stories would have a power in my life that few other things posses.

Hundreds of chapter books, short stories, my own writing efforts, and TV shows later, I would find myself in film school writing classes that were talking Story Structure and discovered that the vast majority of the information was old news to me. I had even already read, because of my interest in philosophy and sociology, the core book “The Hero of A Thousand Faces” years before I was handed, for school, “The Writer’s Journey” which was derived from Joseph Campbell’s classic work.

Needless to say, if a film doesn’t have a good story, I just don’t have time for it. That isn’t to say that I don’t like character driven movies. I just see even those movies as stories in which the primary conflicts are interior rather than exterior. The same general story structure rules, accepted or broken, still function much the same way for me in that kind of film and, indeed, have become some of my favorite stories of all as I learn that those movements are often more familiar to me and recognizable.

Spectacle

My favorite movie, for years, has been “Ben Hur.” As a child, admittedly, I found all the talking in the movie to be mostly boring, and, while someday I would appreciate those scenes, even as a kid I loved the incredible scenes of Roman Legions marching in triumph, the Galleys fighting the Pirates on the Mediterranean, and the Chariot Race to end all chariot races. The thrill of excitement in those scenes and knowing that they were all performed by real people who were really that skilled in horsemanship and were risking their necks with every take translated into a feeling that, till I was older, would only be matched by films like “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Then came “The Phantom Menace.” I was a sophomore in high school when it released and I could not help but be caught up in the spectacle of it. I saw it 11 times in theaters and it would be years before I realized that it was not a good movie. It didn’t matter. That lightsaber fight looked so cool and the Jedi were so much more super powered than I had ever really imagined before.

Thing is, I did sour on it. In many ways it is because, while I still love an action scene spectacle that is done well, I had now begun to see spectacle in more than just the action. Spectacle could be seen in camera work, production design or acting that was….wait for it… Spectacular. Movies like “Fargo,” “Tree of Life,” and “The Passion of Joan of Arc” began to be just as interesting and even more so than the prequels which, while sporting plenty of CGI spectacle, lacked the story and soul that give meaning to the show.

There is always a place for straight spectacle. In fact the earliest films were little more. People found the technology itself to be the thing that was fascinating. No one was intrigued by the Story of “A Train Arriving” or “Exiting the Factory.” They were fascinated by the advent of moving pictures, perhaps just as fascinated as we were by “Avatar.” The tragedy of such films is that, while they push the art form forward, their lack of depth relegates them to the annals of history in which film historians may be interested but very few audiences of the future will be.

Soul

The last thing (which I have trouble even naming so please forgive me) I find in almost every one of my favorite films, is Soul. Again, from an early age I have had a strong sense of what most people call Spirituality. Whether it was as a little Sunday School boy, rebellious teenager, or searching adult, I have always had a sense and fascination with what is hidden, whether that come in the form of mysteries that unfold, the future of sci-fi worlds and concepts, mathematics, religion, and relationships. By now, it is no surprise that my love of the grand mystery is one of the driving factors of my interest in film.

I’m about to borrow heavily from concept which are more fully fleshed out in Adrrei Tarkovsky’s “Sculpting in Time,” but part of that is because I have found in him, one who is interested in cinema’s relational potential in a similar way to me. One of the most unique things about cinema, that may only be matched, in the future, by virtual reality, is that through it we are able to glimpse experiences in a way that cuts to the core one of the primary ways we naturally experience the world.

Through sight and sound we are able to begin to understand and connect with people as we almost experience what they do through movies. By watching movies like “12 Years a Slave,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 days,” and “Tokyo Story,” I was finding that the movies I was watching were helping me make up for the limitations of my own existence as a White Heterosexual American Christian Male. It could never make up for my lack completely or give me the actual reality of another’s experience but a good film would engage the best of my spirit and move it to understanding and love in a way that I had not even found in books, despite my love and appreciation for that art form.

Sorry This Article is So Long

I could go on forever about these three concepts and the way that films, in my opinion, in order to be masterpieces, need to have a healthy dose of all three and the various forms that Story, Spectacle, and Soul may manifest themselves in film since they are as varied and myriad as the number of Directors making cinema.

In many ways, True Myth Media, as a whole, is my attempt to relate this reality to others and encourage them to not settle, as often, for films that only work in 1 or 2 of these crucial criteria.

It is my hope that the little scribblings of a few cinephiles and the relationships we form would move you to think about what in film is really worth putting in front of our eyes for hours upon end. Should we make those decisions by impulse, fomo, and laziness or can we harness the power of media, which corporations and studios employ for their own ends, and make it work for us in ways that benefit our eyes, mind/heart, and spirit.