Story vs. Collage
None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.
-Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation.
The 3-minute pop song has it’s roots in the ballad – a collage of words and sound given form with repetition and melody. We listen to most music (pick your favorite genre) over and over again not because we know what is going to happen next, but because our minds are turned on by the complexity of multiple inputs and the oceanic state beyond linear thought and meaning.
I am reading the new bio of Donald Barthelme, and getting reintroduced to his fragmented stories. For a while in the 60′s and 70′s, he was celebrated for a cinematic montage style where meaning was found (or discovered) in the juxtaposition of images, voices and genres. Everybody was doing it – The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Fellini, Godard. And then came a backlash, the collage style went out of fashion. Story and collage went their separate ways.
As I toil away at another draft of a screenplay, I get the heavy feeling (again) that the feature drama, like the novel, has lost much of its alchemical magic as an art form. I don’t think it’s a question of storytelling vs. a collage aesthetic. The traditional ballad and many pop songs, are fragmented stories. Some of the great storytellers of cinema (Welles, Hitchcock, Renoir) had a complex and somewhat fragmented style. Mainstream movies and novels have lost their power to connect to experience, which is more and more a collage-like messiness. As commercial art forms, they need to justify themselves to agents, publishers, producers and distributors. Every moment needs to be about something.
That’s why I love the fragmented messiness of net video. It is hard to find the magic and poetry, given the relentless and tiresome 20-something relationship dramas, but it is there. Here is a taste:
- Whisper To Me Gently | Robert Croma
- spacetwo : patalab: On chamber(work) and oblique conversations
- Renard Lumière | Pierre Wayser.
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