play, performed by an English theater troupe under the direction of actor/manager David Garrick (1717–1789). What Diderot saw on the stage amazed him. Gone were the phony histrionics, presentational style of delivery, and mannered theatrics of more conventional acting troupes. The more subtle, naturalistic style of Garrick’s performance not only fascinated Diderot but also planted the seeds for a new type of stage drama that he began to envision.
Diderot was also a huge fan of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), whose work featured ordinary people in recognizable, domestic settings. Although many of the paintings include melodramatic exaggerations of emotion, their general subject matter was divorced from the over-the-top grandeur of more traditional approaches to the visual arts.
Diderot imagined a new type of drama—one that would combine the quotidian situations and domestic settings of Greuze’s paintings with the more naturalistic performance style of Garrick’s troupe. He also eschewed the idea that dialogue should be written in verse, and instead proposed the then-revolutionary notion that dialogue should be written in a manner that more closely approximated colloquial speech. The effect would be akin to the audience observing the action through an “invisible fourth wall,” as if it were watching an actual “slice of life” play out before them in real time.8
Broken Eggs by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1856)
The sum total of these prescriptive elements laid the foundation for Realism, which would reach a full fruition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the groundbreaking plays of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), and many other celebrated European dramatists. Its influence would be staggering, and neatly hospitable to a burgeoning cinema that was still figuring out the best ways to locate and present dramatic content on the screen.
The Stone Breakers by Gustave Courbet (1849)
Simultaneously, however, a wide array of more avant-garde movements began to gain traction in the arts—movements that highlighted and celebrated more stylized, nonrealistic elements. Modernism, a self-conscious philosophical and artistic movement, which attempted to create new forms of expression that might better reflect the dynamic, fragmented, sometimes violent character of the modern, industrialized world, became the umbrella heading for a diverse group of artistic trends.
Central to Modernism’s peculiar conceits was a vigorous rejection of the sentimental, saccharine nature of late-Romanticism’s artistic output, and an interest in illustrating the fractured, fragmented nature of the modern world. The Modernists embraced abstraction over realism and placed importance in highlighting process and technique rather than disguising them. The approach produced, perhaps, audience responses that were more intellectual than emotional, experiences that were pondered more than they were felt. But the dislocation evident in the work was a penetrating reflection of man’s increasing feelings of isolation in a chaotic, random, violent, and seemingly unforgiving universe.
Composition #VII by Vassily Kandinsky (1913)
Another conspicuous feature of Modernism is irony—an oft-used but seldom understood term. While there are many different types of irony, its core characteristics represent a fracturing between language and meaning, between expectation and material result, between illusion and reality. While the ironic mode can sometimes degenerate into wry, lazy cynicism and pedestrian self-reference, it also has the power to achieve a penetrating, multi-perspectival outlook with serious, sometimes profound, implications.
One might argue persuasively that we, in the twenty-first century, are still negotiating the interplay between the decaying remnants of the Romantic sensibility and the fragmented nature of a Modernist idiom.
Regardless of the degree to which a given artist is self-consciously aware of his/her aesthetic leanings, or interested in codifying a particular aesthetic stance that permeates his/her work, and regardless of whether or not audiences have defined the criteria by which they judge another’s creative output, certain ingrained assumptions do, in fact, inform and govern the three stages of the artistic process:
1.Conception: An artist cultivates an idea for an artwork in a given medium.
2.Creation: The artist translates the idea into an actual, manifest object.
3.Reception: Audiences respond to their own engagement with the artwork.
Each of these three stages of the artistic process emerges in a cultural/aesthetic context that is characterized by established, sometimes unconscious, sets of assumptions and expectations about what constitutes beauty, truth, quality, and entertainment—and as we have already established, these contexts are not static; they are fluid and dynamic. They differ from one culture to the next, from one subculture to the next, from one epoch to the next, from one geographical region to the next; and the artworks they produce are directly affected by these amorphous contextual ideals.
The following chapters examine a series of four ostensible dichotomies that govern the aesthetic foundations of storytelling:
1.Myth and Parable
2.Realism and Abstraction
3.Classicism and Romanticism
4.Escapism and Formalism
Each dichotomy is designed to locate and examine a particular mode of narrative and the manner in which that mode can inform and widen the aesthetic choices of the filmmaker or graphic storyteller.
It should be noted that none of these aesthetic modes are mutually exclusive—they can often overlap or be combined in interesting and novel ways. Nor are any of the films featured in the following case studies pure examples of any one mode of expression; rather, they are illustrative of certain tendencies that are present, to greater or lesser degrees, in the films that this book examines.
Because of the nonexclusive nature of these distinctions—and the character of this type of analysis—the book necessarily includes many overlapping observations and certain redundancies whose import should emerge as self-evident.
Wherever useful and appropriate, the book will attempt to examine how certain aesthetic strategies are connected to the larger sociopolitical/historical contexts in which they were deployed, contributing to a deeper understanding of the relationships between cultural perspectives and artistic output.
While the book does not assume familiarity with any of the films discussed in the following chapters, screening the films before reading is not merely highly recommended but also crucial to any deep and comprehensive understanding of the respective analyses.
1I use the term “Romantic” to connote characteristics indicative of Romanticism as an artistic tradition (which will be defined and examined subsequently), not its more common and colloquial usage.
2See Stephen Halliwell’s Aristotle’s Poetics for a more detailed and comprehensive analysis.
3Marvin Carlson’s
