Dear Readers,

There are moral repercussions to all acts of violence. Art that depicts realistic violence and deliberately omits the moral dimension of the act, is dehumanising and wrong.

Two recent examples come to mind. The first is ‘Underbelly’ – a TV series based on real-life criminals who wrought violence and misery on the Australian East-coast. The events of the story are based on fact but the true horror of the facts are glossed over and given a treatment that glamourises the perpetrators. The show aspires for titillation and nothing greater.

A much more interesting and honest take on the story would have portrayed the true horror of the acts and the true nature of the criminals. It would make for a richer, more complex and maybe also a much darker story. Instead they’ve taken serial-murderers and distorted their character to such a degree that you might expect to find them on the set of Neighbours.

The second example is Kick-Ass, a film that Roger Ebert, among other critics, found morally reprehensible. The film never appealed to me anyway, but I made an effort to read the script (an early draft) to see what the fuss was about. Here’s a line out of page one, just after an aspiring superhero plummets to his death from a tall building;

We needn’t look closer to be sure that he’s dead. But what the hell. We track in.

The violence in Kick-Ass is highly-realistic, brutal and gratuitous. There is nothing wrong with depicting highly-realistic, brutal and gratuitous violence*. But it is cynical and dehumanising to omit the moral dimension of the acts. If the violence is realistic, the moral dimension should be realistic. And I don’t mean that the villains must be punished.

Ebert observes that;

This isn’t comic violence. These men, and many others in the film, are really stone-cold dead.

There is no mistake in this, the script is calculated to shock and provoke. But to what end? And what comes next, when films like Kick-Ass no longer shock or provoke?

The corrupting influence of the media is often exaggerated and audiences are usually more discerning than credited. That doesn’t mean we should bow down and be unquestioning of the media. Indeed, I find it sad and even terrifying that ‘moralistic’ has become a term of derision in some critical circles.

Artists should strive to be righteous, this doesn’t mean that Art should preach. But Art should frame the questions, allowing the audience – by their own reason, feelings and conscience - to arrive at the Truth.

1. If the media is appropriately classified.

I must re-emphasise, if just for my own benefit, that the films that I’ve been most impressed with and most engrossed in, pay attention to detail.

‘A Prophet’ is another great film that is rich in seemingly* authentic detail**. This creates the illusion that you are watching real events, real people, in a real world – so you really care about them.

1. I can’t verify that the detail is authentic. But if it’s convincing, does it matter?
2. I would like to point out some examples, but I don’t wish to spoil. Go see it!

There is a nice quote from Leonardo Da Vinci which goes something like this: “Think about the surface of the work. Above all think about the surface”

– Bresson in ‘Excerpts from an Interview with Robert Bresson’ (James Blue, 1965)

The following may seem obvious to you, my esteemed reader, but for myself I’ve enjoyed having these concepts laid out – articulated. For this reason I highly recommend The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott, which I’m paraphrasing:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

A happens, then B happens. So A must cause B, right?

No, not if you’re a scientist (unless you’ve eliminated all the other variables). But Barthes calls this fallacy “the mainspring of narrative… the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by“. Ordering events in a sequence gives the impression of cause and effect.

Sometimes this sleight-of-hand isn’t the malicious sort often practised by advertisers, lawyers and politicians. Our mind seeks order. We tend to assume a causal link unless we’re told not to. Take the sentence;

“The King died and then the Queen died.”

Do you think it was it grief that killed her? The plague? An assassination? Just a co-incidence? Maybe we’ll never know…

(Image from Tarkovsky’s magnificent film ‘The Mirror’)

…literature does not recognise Reality as such, but only levels.

I’ve also enjoyed Italo Calvino’s ‘The Uses of Literature’, in particular his essay ‘Levels of Reality in Literature’. It’s fools errand to try distill Calvino’s lucid argument into a blog post, but this is a scrapbook after all - so here is the vibe of it;

Different levels of reality also exist in literature; in fact literature rests precisely on the distinction among various levels, and would be unthinkable without an awareness of this distinction. A work of literature might be defined as an operation carried out in the written language and involving several levels of reality at the same time.

He goes on to demonstrate his thesis through analysis of the classics. How, for instance, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the aristocratic, supernatural and comic characters occur on three different levels of reality that intersect. Think about what it means for suspension of disbelief;

…the credibility of what is written can be understood in very different ways, each one corresponding to more than one level of reality. There is nothing to prevent anyone from believing in the encounter of Ulysses with the Sirens as a historical fact, in the same way as one believes in the landing of Christopher Columbus… Or else we may believe it by feeling ourselves struck by the revelation  of a truth beyond perception that is contained in the myth.

Calvino proposes the following sentence as the most complete and compact model for connecting links between levels of reality in works of literature;

I write that Homer tells that Ulysses says: I have listened to the song of the Sirens.

Now, chew on THAT next time you’re raking your sand garden OR you can read the 20-page essay yourself…

An old friend moved cross-country and left me with a bunch of film books that I’ve been flicking through recently. I really like this idea of orchestration from Lajos Egri’s ‘The Art of Dramatic Writing’;

When you are ready to select characters for you play, be careful to orchestrate them right. If all the characters are the same type – for instance, if all of them are bullies – it will be like an orchestra of nothing but drums.

Maybe one of the reasons ‘The Wire‘ is so successful, is that the characters are so perfectly chosen – so perfectly orchestrated.

I’ve been writing with Sam and we’re up to a sequence set in a forest. I don’t live in a forest, or even near a forest, so sometimes I forget what a forest looks like.  I wish I could spend a couple months trekking through the wilderness to address this problem. Photos are a more affordable solution.

Sam put me on to this fantastic resource that I’d like to also share with you, dear reader: www.ffffound.com. It’s called ‘image bookmarking’.

One of the arguments recently levelled against Australian films is that they tend to be too bleak or too miserable (Last Ride, Beautiful Kate, Blessed, etc.).

But many of the greatest films ever made are incredibly dark to the point you might label them ‘bleak’ or ‘miserable’.

So what makes a film ‘too bleak’? I don’t really know, but maybe;

• Relentless Suffering Without Reprieve
• Characters With Absolutely No Control of their Destiny
• Characters Who are Absolutely Powerless to Act
• Monotonous Story Rhythm (Boring)

Imagine ‘Dancer in the Dark’ without the dancing… that might qualify as ‘too bleak’.

In the most terrifying moments in film, there is always a face

• The face of someone who shouldn’t be there. (Bob, at the end of the bed in ‘Twin Peaks’)
• The face of the dead. (The girl in the jar of formaldehyde in ‘The Kingdom’)
• The face of the old. (The old woman in the veil in ‘The Others’)
• The face that changes.(The woman in the bathtub in ‘The Shining’)
• The face of the unknown. (The creature in ‘Aliens’)

Gore may be repulsive, but it is not frightening. Nothing is as frightening as a face.

And many others that I’ve yet to see, and more that I’ve no doubt forgot to mention. All in all a great decade for cinema.