Movies and Wonder
When the phrase “new forms of communication” is uttered, the first thing that comes to mind is film. What makes the viewing of such films so enjoyable is surely the abundance with which they are offered, but also the sense of wonder and interest that the director, the writer, can produce. Cinema is an art, by our standards, fairly recent but not for that reason little studied and explored. Cinema is not only the production of two-hour or longer films by major movie studios, but it can also be recognized in recording one’s cat purring, sending a video to a friend, or editing a 10-second video and publishing it on a social media platform.
In an era with an overwhelming amount of content, which can even be described as nauseating, it is not easy to distinguish what is art, an expression of a certain thought by an author, from what is simple and mere “content.” To mark a watershed in the definition, what Giovanni Battista Marino said in the seventeenth century comes in handy (here loosely translated):
“The poet aim is to create a sense of wonder.”
The means, the vehicles, in this case are not contemplated.
Only the author from whom the feeling of wonder brought to the viewer is considered. For a work of art to be seen as such and to stand out from the enormity of the content present on the web, it must evoke a sensation of wonder, of amazement, something that remains impressed in the viewer’s mind.
Applying this concept to video and cinema leads one to wonder what makes a film so wonderful.
In 1895, the Lumière brothers invented the cinematograph.
Believing that audiences would get bored watching scenes that they could just as easily observe on a casual walk around the city, Louis Lumière claimed that cinema was “an invention without a future.”
In the beginning, what created interest in cinema was its novelty, a science that people had never seen before and probably could never have imagined. Along with wonder, there was fear (in front of a film, people were trying to escape at the sight of a train on the screen). These emotions were the ones that created interest, not the story or the use of a certain angle in directing.
What the first viewers experienced was wonder, but more than a century later, the situation has changed: cinema is the norm. We are no longer frightened by an animated image and we are no longer surprised by the technology behind it. For this reason, capturing the audience’s attention requires creative, original, new work from the director, the screenwriter, or the amateur recording with their own cell phone. How do these abilities materialize?
How can one look with a new gaze at something saturated, and rich in interpretations?
What makes cinema so wonderful? Cinema is a language; it can say great, complex, and abstract things.
Poets have the great ability to speak with words, but cinema has its own characteristics and is capable of storing a thought that can only be conveyed in that way. Video is made to transport the images of the mind into reality, but before being anything else, cinema is an idea. Many argue that it is much easier to create wonder through cinema than through writing, and this may be true. Cinema presents the opportunity to use special effects, fire and flames, and therefore it is able to elicit adrenaline in the viewer. However, adrenaline is not wonder. With technology advancing and special effects blending with reality, viewers are not amazed by such images.
What truly creates wonder is the ability to offer a new perspective on what was previously written (or imagined): every film, short movie, or video first found a place in someone’s mind and on a piece of paper.
A film that perfectly embodies this unique ability of cinema is “The Tragedy Of Macbeth” by Joel Coen.
The source material is nothing new: Macbeth has been interpreted and analyzed under a thousand eyes, by a thousand people, and the story is known to everyone. The wonder of this product is therefore not given by the story or the words but by everything around it: the cinematography, the actors’ interpretation, the lighting,…
The director creates a deliberately fake, artificial, and rarefied world. Shot entirely with dense fog banks, and minimalist architecture in an environment that has nothing of Macbeth’s land.
The film is at the same time very theatrical, with limited sets and attention to performance captured in agonizing close-ups, and far from a filmed spectacle, thanks to the black and white photography.
What sets it apart from the written word are precisely these choices that Shakespeare had not contemplated.
Upon meeting the three witches, they become one, then three. They are first in front of Macbeth, then they are reflected in the water.
The colour palette is in black and white, bloody murders are not seen, and the brutalist cinematography is one of the features that make it different from all other adaptations.
An important aspect is also Denzel Washington’s interpretation of Macbeth; the complex and structured phrases of the seventeenth-century workflow naturally from the actor’s mouth, as if the character were thinking them at that moment. Many would prefer a more poetic, more theatrical interpretation, but this is a choice, inherent to the actor and the director, that only new forms of communication can provide.
There are other novelties in the protagonist but the most evident one is his age: usually, Macbeth is depicted and thought of as a young man too ambitious and even instinctive, but this age, along with the cadence of the words and his continuous whispering, gives a new motivation to the character his and his wife’s.
THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH is not a film of other times. It is an experimental film in which the greatness of the literary source is such that it can always be modern, and in which its polished language is not an obstacle to understanding, but appears as original and counter-current compared to current trends.
The intent to navigate in minimalism leads to a sense of surrealism. The search for this aesthetic with black and white, and the use of sets similar to those of the Hollywood epics of the past, are formulas that, yes, look to the past, but only to achieve an absolutely modern and innovative solution; architectural brutalism appears extremely modern, as do the characters who are naturally inserted in their historical period, but do not find themselves on other levels than the viewer.
It is not explosions or special effects, but it is the essence of cinema itself that creates wonder; the idea of a director, an actor, or a cinematographer that finds a place and becomes reality, and that makes new a product centuries old.
Wonder is an end, which various means can accomplish, but that must always arise from an author, a poet, or a director, and not from adrenaline or fury; it is interpreting something old, or outdated, so that it speaks to a new audience.
Macbeth does not use blood or violence, colours and sounds, to attract the audience’s eyes. It uses a story and a point of view, giving a sense of surprise and novelty that only humans can give to things seen and seen again, putting their experiences and their emotions into it.
