This Is Not A Movie

This is not a movie.  This is not some crappy film projected onto a moth eaten screen in some shit-hole theater with a bunch of morons laughing at all the wrong jokes and wiping their fat, sugar-coated, hands all over the hideous burgundy velvet-wrapped seats as they spill popcorn all over the poorly lit aisles.  This is not some high-definition top-of-the-line technology on a wide format flat-panel television in my friends’ living room where the cheap beer and cigarette breaks interrupt us constantly.  This is not some ripped download on my laptop in my bedroom at two in the afternoon when I’m trying to pretend I’m not hung-over, but unwilling to use my head for anything that resembles thought and avoiding movement because of the shards of glass that shoot throughout my blood stream with every cough and shudder. 

This is not a movie.  This is not overblown special effects distracting you from a razor-thin plotline and dialogue written by a hydrocephalic teenager on Ritalin being phoned in by hack actors who get by on good looks and back room blow jobs.  This is not a soundtrack anchored down thoroughly by shitty songs from today’s popular bands to create emotional responses that the horrible script and banal actors couldn’t evoke if their life depended upon it.  This is not chopped up strips of film slapped together by an editor fresh out of the UCLA film department with a worthless degree and delusions of grandeur pretending that non-chronological structuring is avant-garde or anything more than pseudo-intellectual pretension.

This is a play.  This is a real theater, with a hand built set back dropping the actors who have spent weeks perfecting their motions for hours of lines that they have memorized.  Night after night they perform in front of an audience, and only have one chance to get it right for each member of the audience.  They have no cutting room floor for their mistakes to dissolve into.  They have no photo processing effects to disguise the faces they make.  They have to convey line after memorized line with clarity and timing more precise than the atomic clock in order to evoke the emotions of the audience, no matter what emotion, be it humor or tragedy, appall or shock.  They have no green screen to create the illusion of scene long after they have retired to their trailers to snort lines of cocaine off transvestite hookers’ asses.  They have to pretend like little boys and girls playing in a fort built of couch cushions with such intensity that the audience is sucked in entirely, forgetting that they are sharing this space in a building in downtown wherever, with their lives on hold for an hour, maybe two.  This is where audience members have a sense of participation, throughout their stifled coughs and intense fascination.  This is where actors have to time their lines to react to the audience’s laughter or gasps of surprise.  This is where thespians truly perfect their art.

This is a play.  This is art.

Comments

[vurt834]

I've encountered the attitude among some theater proponents and academians in the past that theater is superior to film, at least as far as narrative is concerned, precisely because of the former's immediacy compared to the latter's quality of being essentially canned and infinitely reproducable. That as far as acting goes, theater is better because the actor is relating to an audience that is actually present, versus acting for the camera, where the audience is imaginary. Though I think what each is lacking, that which restrains it, is acknowledged by directors and writers in both media. The limitations being the proscenium arch in theater and the film frame. Someone like Samuel Beckett, who seeks to challenge the boundary of the play, and make the audience aware of the fact that they are in fact watching a performance, that actors are acting. The thing theater and film have in common, regardless of which is supposedly superior to the other, is that both create a state of absorbtion or hypnosis in the viewer into the story. There are artists in both media who try to break that fixation, in the case of film, someone like Andrei Tarkovsky or Bela Tarr, who use extremely long shots that make people hyper-aware of the fact that they are sitting in a theater watching a film, or experimental filmmakers like Michael Snow or Andy Warhol, who create films with 20 minute long zoom shots or a person sleeping for an hour. Or experimental theater, where the story and acting is stripped to its bare minimum, or where the story is non-sensical or even absent, shows that theater and film have a lot more in common than one would think. Plus, the boundaries between both are becoming more and more ambiguous. Often, performance is combining with video, projections, happening in non-traditional theater situations, et al. Both film and theater are simulations, and film is driving mainstream theater to become more and more epic, with ambitious sound design, more and more elaborate sets, special effects, etc. Resisting the play and film as simulacrum is becoming more important every day I think, where people more immersed in fantasy on almost a minute by minute basis. Inventing fantasies that call themselves fantasies can help more than simply feed more into the machine of spectacle, of consumption of distracting entertainment. As the Brave New World encroaches more and more on everyday life, where our cities are being turned into post-apocalyptic Disneylands, stuff that shatters the illusion becomes the necessary rule, yet is, depressingly enough, society's exception.

[Penemue]

You should check out the ODC theater in the Mission District, or the Aurora theater in Berkeley. The ODC has simply eliminated the proscenium arch from around the stage, while the Aurora has placed the stage in the middle of the audience, giving it a much more traditional Greek theater feel. By doing these things, both theaters have partially eliminated the "suspension of disbelief" effect that many feel is necessary to produce theater or film. Though theater itself has been adopting some newer technologies and incorporating them into the performances, the ultimate differentiation is still the live action on-the-spot performance where the (good) actors can recognize the type of audience, and thus play to it to enhance the comedic or dramatic elements of the play up, which is simply impossible for a film actor to achieve. As you've said, some in theater are also attempting to create more grandiose, spectacular, and increasingly complex presentations (Spider-Man being the perfect example), but pandering to the basest sensibilities of the lowest common denominator is the surest way to nullify any artistic quality, relevance, and respectability. Hollywood has mastered the art of catering to the ignorant and idiotic with mindless drivel for decades, and in doing so has damaged the reputation of film in its entirety. Though the examples of artists you mentioned are accurate, and displays that some do try and produce quality, they are merely the rare exception among the millions who seek to produce a commodity, rather than art.