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Created Realities

The kind of film that I have in mind today creates such an alternate reality that it results in some uncertainty in the mind of the viewer about the rules by which this film reality operates.  In these films when we watch we don't know what will happen next or how it will end because things that look familiar act in very unpredictable ways. All film begins as an idea in someone's mind and is imagined into being.  So my selections are obviously possessed of some extraordinary level of imagination in that a universe is created that is not quite the one we know and yet is so fascinating that it draws us in completely.

         The first film in this category is The Wizard of Oz (1939, Metro Goldwyn Mayer).  It seems an obvious choice but sometimes the familiar can be  overlooked.  

 The difference between it and the book by L. Frank  Baum from which it was adapted is that there is an unspoken agreement between the actors in the film and the audience where the actors acknowledge that they know the audience knows that they are really humans and not a lion, a tin man or a scarecrow.  The agreement is that everyone plays along as if they are.  This goes beyond the suspension of disbelief in other dramatic presentations where we know that characters are really actors playing roles.  Because of the remarkable synthesis of actors, director, costume designer, makeup artist, set designer, and the rest of the creative team, the characters in The Wizard of Oz become separate entities from the human actors who play the roles. I have seen Bert Lahr in other films, and he does not remind me of the Cowardly Lion, because in the role of the Cowardly Lion, he became submerged in the character in a way he never did before or since.  The same is true for Ray Bolger and Jack Haley, who play Scarecrow and Tinman, respectively.  All the other actors also went right on with their careers, never playing roles that resemble these characters, so that in this  one film, the characters remain unique.

    A great work of film art usually reveals more and more of its greatness each time we view it.  I have seen this film a dozen times and each time I have marveled at the humor and creative whimsy tucked into the corners of scenes, like the lyrics to "Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead" or the Lion pushing down his tail as the characters try to sneak unnoticed into the witch's castle.  It is an example of serendipity where all the elements come together at one moment in time (I know, it takes longer than that to make a film) to create a truly unique work of art.  It is true that it came out in 1939, that greatest year of the greatest era in American film, but it is quite different in style, even from other films of  that era that were meant for children.

I hesitate to recommend Jean Cocteau's fantasy, Beauty and the Beast (1946, DisCina),  particularly when the well-received Disney animated feature of the same title from 1991 is, for many, the defining film version of the fable.  But perhaps the fact that so many are familiar with the animated version is why it presents excellent opportunities for comparisons that will reveal the imaginative properties of the Cocteau film.  The first property that I require in this category of film that it creates a reality in which we are not sure of the laws, and so we cannot predict what will happen.  In the Disney reality, we know the rules, and while suspense may be created, and sad things sometimes happen, the end is predictably happy.  There is much more uncertainty in the Cocteau version.  The Beast sounds reasonable, but he is a beast.  Is he really good?  What will happen to the girl?  We cannot predict.

The Beast lives in a palace where the walls seem to be alive, as a malevolent force or not, costumes change as people move from room to room, and sometimes they move by magic.  It is a world of angles that is slightly threatening.  But somehow the Beast is sympathetic since we see him through the girl who is good.  It is harder to extract that meaning here than it is in the Disney film and that is its value.  The film requires more thought.  It is not a child's film but it can be viewed with different levels of meaning, including the fable that a child could understand.

       Continuing in the French vein, I recently saw again, Mon Oncle (1958, Gaumont Distribution), the Jacques Tati film that follows the adventures of Monsieur Hulot.  The strange thing about comedy is that one film you see when you're young and think is hilarious can turn out to be less so as an adult, and another film that made you laugh so hard it hurt still makes you laugh just as hard.  Mon Oncle is in the latter category.  Monsieur Hulot carries his own universe around with him, even in commonplace surroundings, but when he encounters the sterile, ultra-modern world of his sister and her husband, we expect chaos to ensue but just aren't sure what form it will take.  Hulot comes into this world to spend time with his nephew, who adores him, because the sterile world is not a child's world and his uncle takes him away from it.  With his uncle, he gets to play with other boys and get dirty and eat snacks from less-than-clean vendors, things that would make his mother faint.  But each time the boy and his uncle return, they are out of place, too human to fit into the mechanized efficient home of the parents.  The parents fume and fret over Hulot's influence, but they are kind people and try to find Hulot a job with a business acquaintance, which doesn't work out, try to find him a companion by hosting a garden party (I am laughing as it write this), and when this, too, doesn't work  out, the brother-in-law takes him in at his firm. This, also, hilariously, doesn't work out.  
       All the things that don't work out are never Hulot's fault.  He is always well-meaning and cooperative.  He just attracts disaster.  There is something so gentle about him, and the world he inhabits, however, that he is always able to go on his way, with his pipe firmly in his mouth, certain that he has done nothing wrong.  It is really the genius of Tati's creation that as disastrous as he is, nobody can dislike him.  He differs from Chaplin's "Little Tramp" because Chaplin's character is an instigator -- he creates mischief, he can become angry, whereas, Hulot never changes.  Chaplin's tramp is the man carrying the plank of wood that knocks people down as he turns.  Hulot is the plank.

Where Hulot calmly bicycles away from the scenes of chaos, in the universe of the Marx Brothers, there is no safe place.  In their world, the rules are not just different from ours, there are no rules. In A Night at the Opera

(1935, Metro Goldwyn Mayer), we see the familiar outlines of a plot, so we are more vulnerable to the surprise attack of the fantastic.  One night, I was watching  A Night at the Opera with some teenagers who had never seen it. When Margaret Dumont opened the door to the outrageously stuffed stateroom, and people spilled out like water, the teenagers collapsed with laughter.  I remember thinking that for fifty years people of all ages had been reacting the same way at the same moment.  It is precisely because this film is slightly more conventional than their earlier films that the unexpected absurdities, like people spilling in a heap and Harpo walking up a curtain, have more impact.  In this film, the brothers are dedicated to destroying everyone and everything with pretensions -- the arrogant tenor, the haughty impresario, the famous aviators, the police, the dignified Margaret Dumont, and finally, the opera, itself.  In my life, I have attended a few performances of Il Trovatore, the victimized opera in the film, and I can never listen to the overture without expecting at a certain point, the orchestra to begin "Take Me Out to the Ballgame", or a battleship backdrop to fall down behind a tenor singing in his fifteenth-century costume.

The madness that we associate with the Marx Brothers is really not madness but the characteristic lack of inhibitions they display in insulting or joking or breaking rules of convention.  All this happens at dizzying speeds of language and movement.  Real madness is not usually treated as humor in film, but there is one small gem of near-cult status, They Might Be Giants (1971, Universal Pictures), starring the extraordinary team of George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward, with Jack Gilford and an ensemble of excellent supporting actors.  

Scott plays a mad, but brilliant lawyer who thinks he's Sherlock Holmes battling Dr. Moriarty.  Joanne Woodward plays the psychiatrist Scott's brother has hired to sign off on his commitment, to get control of Scott's wealth.  The psychiatrist's last name happens to be Watson, and Scott's expression on learning this, alone, is worth the price of admission or the rental.  When Scott's character convinces "Dr. Watson" that he really has enemies, the two join in a mindless plan to escape and defeat his nemesis.  Their adventure takes them through the back streets of New York City where they meet with an assortment of eccentric characters who are all a little mad, or are they?  The literate script written by James Goldman examines the question, while creating a world where, as the expression goes, "there are more out than in".  George C. Scott is so brilliant in his madness that he convinces his psychiatrist and most of the other characters that he could be right.  The title of the film comes from a reference to Don Quixote, who the Scott character explains was mad in thinking that windmills were giants, but to consider that they might be giants is not madness, but genius.

     Stanley Kubrick's mastery was evident in all his films, but for many, his greatest achievement was 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968, Metro Goldwyn

Mayer). The film was written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, from whose novel it was adapted.  If you want imagination, you could not do better than the work of Arthur C. Clark, a man who literally imagined the future.  The images from that film, -- the special effects, the silence of space, the technology that it predicted made it so different from any previous science fiction film that it changed the genre forever.  Considering that the film was released in 1968 before digitalized special effects and before the first moon landing, it is a breathtaking creative achievement.  It has other qualities to admire, like the novel, optimistic view of the future, not the dismal, violent one we usually see. But it is not blindly so.  It also has one of the most frightening villains of all time -- HAL 9000.

 Filmmakers have given us many pessimistic visions of the future.  I don't particularly admire their dark visions and the generally oppressive look of the sets.  I often wonder why no filmmaker has thought to create a future in which someone might want to live.  However, science fiction is one of the most effective displays of creative imagination because it offers freedom from scientific reality (although the best of the genre is grounded in real science knowledge).  In spite of what I have written, I still like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982, The Ladd Company) because it is such an artistic version of the

dark future that it manages to absorb me into its reality.  This is a very detailed picture of the future Los Angeles with its permanent smog cloud, which is why it is always dark, although my personal recollection of Los Angeles smog is that it is hazy, but very bright.  It is hard to top Los Angeles in the present for a vision of where we're heading, but the visual effects in the film are quite stunning, from the tall skyscrapers to the teeming streets to the bizarre makeup.  There is a plot that involves renegade humanoids that is not about killing their human masters, but rather a more poignant reason that addresses the question of what defines the term human.

       One cannot talk about visions of the future without mentioning one my personal favorites, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (Universum), the 1927 silent classic. I saw this first when I was quite young and I found it mesmerizing.  The story

no longer works (if it ever did) as a political statement about machines and exploited workers, and the story doesn't make a lot of sense.  The familiar science fiction staples, like the mad scientist and the evil robot were original in this 1927 film.  We can still marvel at the scale of the fantastic sets, casts of thousands, and amazing special effects.  In this day of digital film making, Metropolis looks like a painting, its unusual camera angles and extremes of shadow and light removing it even further from reality.

        There is one more vision of the future that is neither dark nor pessimistic.  It is the remarkable animated feature of 2008, WALL-E from Pixar Studios.  Like other Pixar works (Toy Story, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo), there is outstanding artwork and crayon-box color, but in WALL-E, they have outdone former efforts and added a thoughtful plot with a serious theme.

 The theme involves an Earth so filled with garbage that humans have moved into orbit, leaving only robots to stack the garbage into towers of rubbish.  Only one robot remains in operation as the film opens, and we see it going through its daily routine, all alone except for a pet cockroach, in one amazing, prolonged sequence that is practically silent.  There is very little dialogue throughout as the robot is the main character and yet we don't notice because we are intensely involved visually.  It is difficult to compare this film to cartoons, the mastery of the medium has moved it to its own category..  There are scenes of such technical and aesthetic achievement that it is astonishing.  It is not strictly science fiction because it is witty enough to be comedy.  But underneath the laughs, there are heartfelt truths that make us empathize with an animated machine, in which we recognize the humanity of its creators.

          There is another animated feature that, for me, most closely resembles the experience of reading a wonderful story, where we are taken on a journey that we cannot abandon until it is done and we have found out everything.  It, too, is not necessarily a children's film, although children can enjoy it.  The film is Princess Mononoke (Toho Company), the 1999 creation of the master of Japanese animation, Hayao Miyazaki.  Miyazaki's films are quite well-known in the United States -- many of my students knew the ones  I have  seen.  The best known, the 2001, Spirited Away, is as amazing as Princess Mononoke, and I could have included it on this list of films of the imagination.  The  only difference is that with Spirited Away, it is necessary to listen to the dialogue to appreciate it fully, for it is a wonderfully intricate story.  But even those who are not following the story in Princess Mononoke very closely will still be dazzled by the breathtaking appearance of the action moving across the screen.  This is a beautiful film.  The detail in the landscapes is unequaled.  It has to do with heroes and humans and the natural world. It has action, adventure and ideas.   Although it takes place in a mythical past, and so is not about the future, it is a cautionary tale about what we sacrifice when human progress is seen in isolation from our environment. 

         This film is no less of an arts experience than watching a ballet or examining a painting.  It is as enlarging of one's horizon as listening to a symphony orchestra or watching a play.  In it, we enter another reality.  This is the essence of imagination:  the power to invent worlds, better worlds, and once imagined, created in art and reality.