By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
On Art and Emotion
Tonight for my birthday my guy took me to The Round, an amazing monthly collaboration of songwriters, improv musicians, spoken word and live artists painting on stage. I’d been wanting to check out The Round for a while because I’m feeling strongly the need to infuse more art into my life generally to fuel my own creativity (mainly for my non-movie writing, although it doesn’t hurt in crafting film criticism either), but I especially wanted to go this month because Round 61 featured one of my absolute favorite songwriters and artists, Ken Stringfellow (The Posies) He was in town from Paris doing some studio work on The Posies new album (due out in September!) and playing a Posies show at the Sasquatch music fest, and The Round landed him to come perform while he’s here.
Tonight, Stringfellow was onstage with Rebecca Gates from the Spinanes and Lincoln Barr from Red Jacket Mine. I’m familiar with the Spinanes music, of course, but I was unfamiliar with Red Jacket Mine; after hearing Barr perform tonight, though, I will definitely be checking their music out.
Seattle slam poet Jack McCarthy was on-hand as well, and I have to say he was most impressive. I used to compete in poetry slams back in the day, and I enjoy listening to a good spoken word performance. When it’s done well, by a true artist, the words are meaningful and connect with the audience, but it’s the delivery by the poet, the way the words flow smoothly, like water burbling over rocks in a stream, that creates the emotional connection between artist and audience. McCarthy knew exactly how to hold the audience in his hand, but the words themselves were magical and artfully wrought.
One of the reasons I stopped competing at larger poetry slams (although I still like smaller slams at bars and coffee shops) is that often, the poets who make the cut are not necessarily the ones who write what I would consider to be the best poetry artistically, but the ones who know best how to manipulate the audience to get the response they want. They know how to read the mood of a crowd, and to pick a piece that has the tone a particular audience is likely to respond well to, and then play that emotional chord to reel them in.
And it’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with an artist reading his audience and choosing to put before them something they’re most likely to like, I suppose, but to me the best, purest art shouldn’t just play to the choir, it should be more concerned with challenging the audience, with just putting out there some truth the audience can connect to and then allowing that energetic flow, that collaboration between artist and observer, to happen naturally rather than setting up a contrived emotional conduit.
How does this tie in with movies? How many movies at, say, Sundance, do you watch and think within ten minutes, “Oh, this one has ‘Sundance movie’ written all over it” — that is, it feels from beginning to end like it was crafted with the sole purpose of getting accepted into that lofty festival, to play to a particular sort of programmer who’s programming for a specific sort of audience. Or think of a movie that you watch and it feels completely like “Oscar” bait — doesn’t that just piss you off? (Revolutionary Road, I am looking at you.)
Anyhow. McCarthy, in my favorite of his pieces, “Careful What You Ask For,” (go watch it now, I’ll wait for you … it’s well worth the time it will take you to watch it) talked in part about his emotions being manipulated by movies:
In movies I despise the easy manipulation
that never even bothers to engage my feelings,
it just comes straight for my eyes,
but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it,
and I hate myself for it.
This got me thinking about art and emotion generally, and specifically why I dislike films in which the set-up feels deliberately contrived to illicit a particular emotional response from the audience, rather than just telling a story and allowing the audience to connect with it more organically. For example, I found Million Dollar Baby to be overwrought and contrived and deliberately structured to extract a particular response, and that just pissed me off. Whereas with, say, Frozen River (with the possible exception of the bit with the baby), my emotional connection to the film came more from my response to the characters and the story. On a completely different emotional level, Dogtooth is unflinchingly, brutally honest in its storytelling, but there was never a moment in that film where I felt the director was attempting to pull me one way or another, to sway me to feel a particular way about a particular character.
I think this is why my favorite films tend to be by independent filmmakers. Studios tend to seem more comfortable aiming for the widest scattershot in connecting with an audience, and therefore tend to overgeneralize the emotional impact of a story while manipulating the audience to feeling a certain way. Hence, we get a lot of lame rom-coms that are supposed to connect with you because they’re about Relationships! And everyone has those, right? Or we get crap like Transformers, whose purpose seems to be little more than the “Robots blow shit up! Cool!” reaction of a 10-year-old boy. Or a blockbuster like Titanic, which I suppose I like well enough in certain respects for what it is, but good lord, Cameron couldn’t have jerked the tears from his audience any more deliberately in that final segment if he’d killed a kitten in front of them. But, you know, they make money, and studios like that, so it’s all cool, right?
On the other hand, if you’re working as an artist independently you have the freedom to just weave your story, put it out there, but leave it to the audience to figure out what to do with it. Which takes a certain amount of chutzpah, really. If Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo had been a big studio film, I bet there would have been some guys in suits wanting that ending changed to be all happy-happy and soaring violins. Which would have made it, well, not such a good film — or rather, more like the vision of what studio folks think audiences want to see (depressing endings, generally, equals BAD) and less like what Bahrani envisioned the film to be about.
And of course, I’m also generalizing in this post, because it’s certainly not true that ALL studio films are bad (they aren’t) or that all indie films are awesome (they aren’t either). But it seems to me that the purest, most artistic visions come from independent filmmakers telling their story, their way. Long live indie film. Long live artistic integrity, and the joy of emotional collaboration between filmmaker and audience.
Bringing it all back to The Round: The Round is art and collaboration, without (for the most part) emotional manipulation, and it’s worth checking out if you live in Austin, Portland or Seattle.
You’re too busy being your usual hater self. It doesn’t matter whether the film is indie or studio- it boils down to DOES THE FILMMAKER HAVE A VISION. The rest is just the tools he uses to paint.
Full disclosure: Don Murphy = Producer of Transformers.
Only you, Don, would read a post that’s about love of artistry and find it me being my “usual hater self.” You must read my stuff exceedingly selectively to overgeneralize to the extent that you characterize me or my writing as being “usually” about hating anything.
The only thing I tend to “hate” on is crappy, lazy movies — and I’m far from the only critic who wasn’t wild about either Transformers film. For the record, Rotten Tomatoes has Transformers sitting at 57% and TROTF at a whopping 20%.
You don’t want to be criticized for the movies you make, then make movies and show them only to your family and friends who are interested in kissing your ass. Or just cowboy up, take (or better yet, ignore) the shit from the critics, and be happy counting the mounds of money sitting in your bank account from all the folks who think your films Kick ass! Dude! and ignore the people who don’t like them.
Why would you even care what I think or say about your films? Criminy, get a life. But whatever; if you make a movie I actually like, I’m certainly not going to hold your for-whatever-reason petty vendetta against me personally and review it badly just because you produced it. Promise.
(Actually, I did like Natural Born Killers quite a lot, and Apt Pupil wasn’t bad either. See, it’s not all hate.)