Two ideas of art, which are superficially contradictory, are, speaking broadly, formalism versus abstraction. Sometimes it’s rephrased as content versus form. These characterizations have the handy flexibility of being able to stretch over almost any medium. In film, it’s kind of crudely construed as what the movie’s about versus how pretty it is. In painting, or in plotless filmmaking (I’m starting to think that there is no such thing as “non-narrative”), the visual style is seen as the definitive trait which differentiates formal from abstract.
For example, early European paintings doggedly pursued realism in form, even if the content was lushly fantastical or religious. This came from a fundamental understanding of what art was at the time. Art was not a outlet of the marginalized or a pursuit of new avenues or even personal fulfillment (not to say this wasn’t a byproduct). Art was generally commissioned by a monarch or religious leader to depict specific ideas. Namely, religious anecdotes or the glorification of the state. That’s what it was, and that was fine. The point is not necessarily that the content was realistic, because it often wasn’t, but that art subscribed to certain rules, and those rules had the agenda of furthering the mainstream ideology.
So the popular understanding of subversive or critical art is that which fiddles with form. In this country that was comics, which still has the stigma of being un-intellectual, and then the abstract expressionists of the 50’s like Pollock, Motherwell, Krasner, Kline. Music did the same thing with people like Coletrane and Davis. But that’s just
That’s why the art that I really find interesting is work with abstracted content, but a rigid adherence to form. Magritte was big on this. Sure, his stuff was stylized, but it was stylized into a kind of smoothness, a sterility. His paintings look like early computer animations. They lack the dust and the scuffs, the wildness present in other avant-garde artists. It was his content that got you. It was the subtle play on light, the painting dissolving into a field, the macabre transmutation of the human face, therein lay the subversion.
So I find the Third and the Seventh interesting in the same way. And this must have been conscious on Alex Roman’s part. I scoffed inwardly the first time I heard someone say that this film visually references Magritte, but on second though, yes of course it does. And true to form, it’s entirely computer generated.
This allows the “camera” to enter impossible spaces, and then later to create spaces which are impossibly constructed for use by humans. It depicts a serene and almost lifeless hyper-modern landscape, where life is preserved but not lived, like a beta fish frozen in an ice cube. Humans, where present, are only glimpsed. They are distant machinations, shadows and sounds softly overlayed with the slowly breathing orchestral score.
“arquitecture as art”, solid letters suspended in space, give us the only verbal cue.
The content grows increasingly surreal. Now we are in nature, which seems to exist in a utopian balance with mankind. Old wood framed buildings have Bauhaus rigidity. Enormous water droplets crystallize over floors and fields. The one human depicted, much less a protagonist than a fellow observer, calmly unfolds a black umbrella.
But what interests me more than anything is the focus on cameras. The camera as the subject may seem masturbatory, and maybe it is. In this case though, we can’t even call it self-referential. The camera is a tool for seeing, but here it is being seen in isolation. It can’t even look back at you. It’s not real. It was created by a staggeringly complex system of vectors and algorithms. It has been separated from the herd and hunted down.
The Third and the Seventh is one of the most painstaking efforts I’ve ever seen to delve into those impossible angles and heights through CGI, to render visually possible all that was previously constrained by physical limitations. I mean really, just to see. The film alludes to this with one shot of an old and unmanned film camera perched intrepidly on the precipice of the long and dangerously sloped rooftop of an ultramodern building. Who put it there? Or was it always there, finding the edges? Maybe this is a film about seeing. I think it is.
And that’s really why I’ve brought it up. The Third and the Seventh is a perfectly clear example of what art should be, not in terms of aesthetics or of content, but of purpose.
Someone told me once (in the middle of an argument about Avatar, of course), that “if you want to send a message, write a telegram”. In other words, it is not for movies or art to tell us things. I would go so far to say that this guy was implying that movies should be for entertainment value only, and that’s a beast I’d like to brutally slaughter on another day. But for now, yes, I agree with the idea. The purpose of art is not to send a message. In storytelling, good art is a hypothesis. A hypothesis is really question. A hypothesis is a truth on trial. Scientific method aside, there is no better way to explore our ruts, our habits, our prejudices and culture neurosis than through fiction.
But zooming out, the purpose of art, if there can ever be one, is to reflect the latent world of inner life, of subjective vision. Even if it is about outside events, say, in the famous
It is sometimes the feeling, the taste of another’s life in your own mouth, communicated in synchronistic forms that nearly every human understands without words. Words, those silly, limited things, get closest to the truth when even grammar is subverted. That’s poetry. The truth is that language is never translated correctly, and people have even less trust in wordless communication. In my mind that mishap of meaning is both the beauty of life and the reason art is undervalued as part of society. It is inefficient, and therefore seen as a useless frivolity.
I vehemently disagree, and I will all of my life. Art says that life can be seen and understood in ways you have not seen or understood it before. That is absolutely, practically crucial to the development of a critical consciousness about oneself and the world. It assists the development from solipsist to participating human being. Because if one can get so close to the subjective consciousness of someone else, one is forced to recognize a sentience in the “other” that is similar to that of the self. And that if we deign intrinsic value in ourselves, we should logically deign it in others.
The examples are clear. Societies without art, or for whom art is relegated to another purpose like entertainment or propaganda, are ethnocentric, intolerant, exclusionary and incapable of critical analysis. The
We could start by looking at the Other right here at home. I think in many ways, marginalized groups in this country have the most to contribute to American art. Not only can they provide a subjective vision that is ancillary to the common narrative just by virtue of living outside it, but it is they from whom we’ve not yet heard. Mountains of silence waiting to move at the slightest noise.
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