Breaking Molds in Film & Pastiche
There are not a lot of purely original movie ideas left, aside from looking at independent movies.
In fact, the last really original movie that sticks out in my mind is Inception, which came out in 2010–6 years ago.
So what does that mean for ‘original films’ if we’ve seen them all in some form before?
Well that’s why pastiche is so important in the world of film-making. Pastiche a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists, in a way that celebrates the similarities instead of mocking them like a parody.
Pastiche is important for film because it relies on the assumption there was one piece of media in particular, that will deeply affect an audience who resonates with it.
Take Inception for example! Many of the scenes are openly molded off of James Bond films, of which were hugely influential to Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker. But the real strength of pastiche comes when you have something familiar and flip it on it’s head with a change.
The hallway fight scene with JGL and a faceless goon recalls a number of Bond encounters where the titular spy wrestles a quick victory in messy fashion. The main twist to it, for Nolan, is to compromise the integrity of the one thing that was constant in Bond fights: the setting itself. Causing the setting to actually flip on it’s head creates a new kinetic intensity that isn’t available to the more realistic Bond movies.
This is more of a benefit than a crutch for films as one might assume. The fact that we as audience members are so well versed in the styles of making film and cinematic techniques, it only means we are better prepared to unpack films made by film-makers with the same critical eye that we have.
This thesis, if that is what you want to call it, is why I believe we don’t get to study modern films in film classes. It is that much harder because we’re on the same playing field as these modern film-makers. Doctoral students are probably more prepared to dissect modern films because they at least have the base training that we’re still learning and unpacking.
And this is a fantastic thing that there is this limited base of film technique with a galaxy of pathways to figure out what to do with them. Feminist film theory was essentially created in the 80s. Today, we get to see films that incorporate ideas of the male gaze and sexist stereotypes for Golden Age Hollywood films, because the minds behind the film deeply understand how those things interact with the old system of making films.
You get that with movies like It Follows, which directly embraces the sexism of the horror genre by making it the reason everything goes wrong in the film; and the upcoming Moonlight, which takes the cinematic techniques of Terrence Mallick films like the Tree of Life as tools to talk about sexual identities that are not really represented in film.
Even Clint Eastwood understands this to some extent as the purpose of modern film: His newest film Sully, is really a type on hagiography (a biography of a saint) like all of his films released in the 21st century. The idea of this thousand-year-old form is re-purposed to talk about fame and personal struggle in the modern world.
In my mind, this is what film will be from now on: complex reifications of form. Movies like Inception, It Follows, and even Sully exist as cinematic examples I guess what it boils down to is all modern film is essentially slouching to post-modernity.
Which is a pretty cool thing, and says a lot about how creators trust us with their product. Are there hiccups? Sure, there will always be a Grown Ups 2 for every Moonlight. But the important thing is that these films are becoming the norm, and not the exception.
