Effortless
Sunday, 20. December 2020 21:17
In the 5th edition of American Cinema/American Culture John Belton says that American cinema is essentially a narrative machine that uses “high artifice” to produce work the style and structure of which are “largely invisible.” That invisible machinery delivers narratives “effortlessly and efficiently.” In other words, there is lots and lots of machinery working behind the curtain, but the curtain is never lifted.
Since American film has been remarkably successful from its beginnings to the present, both as popular entertainment and high art, there may be lessons to be learned here. The first is, of course, that to make art good requires high artifice. That is, there needs to be structure, and that structure will contain the expertise and the style of the artist and the time. This suggests that behind the novel there does need to be an outline, at least as a starting point; behind the painting and the photograph there needs to be principles of composition and color; really good music has to be backed by solid music theory. As artists we must know what we are doing and employ the very best practices we can bring to the computer, the easel, the drawing board, the photo session.
The second lesson is that that artifice that we employ should be invisible. The audience should never be aware of the structure of the play or novel, the principles of composition, the theory employed to develop the work of art. We should never allow the audience to be aware of the hours and hours of planning and practicing, of trial and error that went into mixing that particular shade of blue, getting that exact characterization right, finding exactly the right words for the third line of the poem, developing the ending for the essay, the short story, the novel.
Rather, the audience should see a work of art that looks completely effortless, a piece of work that stands alone and communicates its story or meditation or vision in a way that makes the audience completely unaware of the work that went into it. Michelangelo certainly did not want those looking at the Sistine Chapel thinking about him standing on a scaffold to do the painting. While Stephen King sometimes talks about writing, he certainly does not want you thinking about his working methods while reading his latest novel. Anne Brigman did not want her audience to wonder about the darkroom manipulations she used in order to produce the images she made. Martin Scorsese does want the audience to be thinking about the technical aspects of lighting and editing while they are watching his films. All these artists want us to be focused on the content they are presenting, not their methodology.
And this same attitude should be a goal for our own art. No matter how much time, work, and planning we put into the work, what we finally present to our audience should appear completely effortless. We might want to talk about the planning, time, and effort that went into a creation—during the marketing of that work, or perhaps when we are teaching or studying a work. But when showing our work, all of that needs to remain completely invisible to the normal audience member; we need to make it look effortless.
Category:Audience, TV/Film | Comment (0) | Author: Jay Burton