i uncanny do it

i saw it's a wonderful life a few days ago. to call it wonderful would be like jabbing van gogh in the eye with a spicy sausage. to call it simply wonderful would be like squating and shitting on the grave of monet.

there is a point in it's a wonderful life that shakes you. it's the freeze frame of james stewart, the very first moment we see him. i learnt something the other day about the nature of art. it's call the uncanny. the uncanny is defined as something that is known, but is invisible in your everyday life. it is something you already know which you choose to ignore or is oppressed. an example is blood. when we see blood, it is sometimes an uncanny moment. from this we know, like we have known all along, that we are indeed flesh and blood. mortality and pain. apparently the nature of any art is to expose the uncanny, or perhaps to have an uncanny effect.

i've always thought of freeze frames to be a modern innovation of film making. i am an idiot. here is capra using it before they even had colour. it rocks the screen like a crashing piano falling from the sky. god is represented as a flashing light and angels by bells. he can stop time and lead us in the right direction and he bloody does.

and james stewart! what a star! if you could bottle james stewart the jars would outsell domio and ragu put together.


movie book

i read a book about movies called going to the movies by syd field. it's about his personal journey through films and especially screenplays (he teaches it you know). he worked with sam peckinpah when he was writing wild bunch. he used to read screenplays for a living and maybe still does. this is what he has learnt, movie-wise, during all those screenings.

at first i didn't like it. what inspired him to write it was what a 16 year old girl told him about titanic. what his gleans from her comments is that all the teenaged girls all over the world didn't see the film over and and over again because of leo or the special effects. it was the emotional response to rose. young woman; trapped by mother and bad man; shown the way by leo, who dies very heroically and selflessly; and finally she can create her own destiny: thanks to luck and a big iceberg.

field begins the book like he is writing to 16 year old girls. he explains every symbol, metaphor and subtext. he starts to grate like my old english literature teacher (not her, the other one with fuzzy brown hair), over enunciating every word like they were droppings from jesus. but once all the rudimentary are out the way he delves into the good things: the 3 acts, plot point one, plot point two, the mid-point. setup, confrontation, resolution. 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes. whammos. and by god he's right.

nothing he says is really new and he knows this. he quotes plato about the 3 act story telling form. even the youngest child knows it must have a beginning middle and end. it made me think of stories and how, well most of the ones i thought about, really do follow this age old system and how there must be something in it. it's applicable to films, novels, plays, songs and even blog entries.