Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Advice Finally Taken

Welcome to my blog. I realized that I spent too much time on Facebook writing lengthy critiques of films and plays when I should have been posting photos of Korean dinner plates or drooling kittens. The discussions that emerged from my analyses amused and enlightened me, for the most part. On occasion, however, I would receive that chilling comment, "You're reading too much into it," or that withering note, "you ARE obsessed, aren't you?" I usually heed the advice embedded within scholar Jacqueline Rose's quote, "[i]interpretation of a literary work is endless," from her brilliant and controversial The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, but it doesn't stop me from questioning my willingness to continue mining a film or theatrical text for further insight, when even those who love me the most question my interest in interpretation. 

Rather than surrender to their questionable request to "stop talking about that [play/movie/documentary/____], I have decided to continue the conversation, or the lecture, elsewhere, which brings me to the creation of this blog.

I chose to call this blog "Form is Function," because I believe in the principle. When I examine a cultural text, I make sure that I have a clear understanding of the genre in which it is located, so that my discussion proceeds from the text's proper placement in, or employment of, that genre. When it comes to communicating with an audience, each genre has its own purpose. Yes, one can argue that all genres have the aim, even the obligation, to entertain. Even so, the musical comedy relates to an audience in a different way than a detective novel, or an opera, or a social network posting. When the genres are markedly divergent at the very level of form, then purpose becomes a critical question to pursue. 

Photography, from the still image to the motion picture, has the capacity to record life in a detail impossible to achieve in the novel or the theatrical play. Realism is the function of film, and it haunts the form; the manipulation of elements such as editing, camera angles, mise en scene and sound may accentuate or diminish the realism, but it will not eliminate the realism from film. 

Theatre has a much more complex, and painful, relationship to realism. A play is both closer to life, and further removed from it. "Live theatre" is the experience of producing a text in front of a group of people at a certain moment; both players and audience are gathered together in the moment, and they breathe from the same source of oxygen. When the play ends, the experience is over. The actors remove their makeup backstage; the audience members exit the theatre. The play will never exist again, unless it is preserved on film, and if it is preserved on film, it ceases to be pure theatre. This ephemerality distinguishes theatre from film, and it is the most successful connection that theatre has to realism. Problems begin when theatre attempts to replicate reality, particularly through narrative structure but also through "realistic" sets, costumes and styles of acting. No matter how detailed or "authentic" a play's realism might be, it will always remain a temporary construct, obviously "pretending" to be something real, but always clear to the viewer that the play consists of actors dressing up as other people, moving around on a stage separated from an audience for two to four hours at a time. Performers and audience members enter into a contract, and agree to accept the play as it is, and "suspend disbelief." A fire alarm, an earthquake or a sudden heart attack in the sixth aisle can stop the play in an instant, and everyone is suddenly made aware of the fragility of the agreement. That is both the curse and the blessing of theatre. In my opinion, the more successful theatrical works will use the artifice of performance to its advantage. Any attempt at realism will be seen as a self-conscious attempt and not a given. The show will exploit the space of the stage and employ the distance and closeness between performers and audience, in whichever way seems appropriate. 

I begin this blog with a rather generalized definition of realism and its comparative relationship to two similar but clearly different forms (film and theatre) in order to establish the terms of my analyses. My objective, in this blog, is to explore movies, television shows, plays and musicals, some of which have overlapping relationships through the act of adaptation from stage to screen and vice-versa. Adaptation from one genre to another is a problematic enterprise, yet it is an exciting field of interpretative exploration if one comprehends the function of the varying art forms, and what can happen if appreciation for the differences is deficient in the adaptors. I am also interested in revivals and remakes, and how changes made are usually the result of a misunderstanding of the stakes involved in the consequences of those alterations. 

So...I have begun. Hopefully this explanation will make it easier to follow my readings of the texts I choose to explore.

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