The Slavery of Narrative and the Ivory Tower Dilemma

I found Peter Greenaway's film roster to be both slightly disturbing and fascinating (and as a reference, The Pillow Book is apparently one of his warmer films). Up until this point, I had considered myself to be adequately in-the-know when it came to the 'Art-house' genre, but I had never heard of Greenaway or his films. (Sidenote: in the Salon interview the journalist mentions that Greenway thinks "most movies are empty and sentimental -- and that includes art-house pictures, which Greenaway treats with as much disdain as mainstream Hollywood products"—so with this statement, I guess I don’t feel quite as bad.)

What I found to be most interesting in reading through his interviews was this notion of the narrative in cinema, and his feelings of enslavement by the very idea. Usually when someone critiques a film (not necessarily a professional critic, but maybe an average consumer of this popular art form) you will hear them say something like, “it was a little slow”, or maybe ‘it was too fast paced’, (the latter being less common I presume). I think it’s safe to say that these critiques are really of the narrative structure of the film, rather than the actual visual nature of the movie (this is just my idea, and I could be wrong). I found his discussion on the narrative nature of cinema to be very interesting, as he doesn’t feel like it is conducive to it. Or maybe not that it’s not conducive to it, but that it should transcend storytelling to achieve other ends.

“These may be heretical opinions, but I don't think that cinema is a very good narrative medium. I think if you want to tell a story you should be a writer -- it's far more powerful. I think that cinema should be allowed to get on with other things.” He says that like music and painting have done before it, cinema also needs to explore other elements apart from the narrative. He even proposes that cinema needs to ‘dump’ narration altogether. He explains that there is and should be another purpose for cinema aside from just telling stories. He does however qualify this statement by saying, “I'm not against narrative, I enjoy storytelling. I do think that cinema has so much to offer outside the slavery of narrative.” I think his choice of words here are quite audacious: it’s slavery.

Enter the Ivory Tower conundrum: Greenaway says, “I would continue to push in that direction [away from the narrative], though John Cage suggested if you introduce more than 20 percent of novelty into any artwork, you're going to lose 80 percent of your audience. And I want to go on making movies, so -- without any sense of condescension or patronage -- we have to work at a certain pace, otherwise I'm going to disappear into the outer darkness and never make another movie. And I want to make mainstream movies. This might sound very strange, but I don't want to live in an ivory tower, I don't want to be an underground filmmaker. I want to make movies for the largest possible audience, but arrogantly I want to make them on my terms.” Herein lies the dilemma of every indie (or art-house) filmmaker (or musician, artist, etc) out there: How can you get your work to reach a lot of people (which is always the goal, because culture is shared after all) while protecting it from the agendas of those with the money and power (Hollywood, production companies, etc) to do so? I feel like this struggle for credibility and audience, and let’s face it—money—is one that may have no end. This problem of course is not unique to cinema, and exists in all realms of cultural production.

This brings me back to a little earlier in the discussion to the idea of the slavery of narratives. The Pillow Book, although highly stylized visually by integrating all different types of cutting edge technologies, is very much a narrative, and not only does it have a definite narrative structure, but it was in a sense adapted from a preceding text (although the film is set in the modern day and the stories are different). When confronted with this in an interview, Greenaway said, “One shouldn't start a discussion of this film by referring to a set text because the origins of the project are much deeper than that, and respond to, I suppose, my general sense of anxiety and disquiet about the cinema we've got after 100 years -- a cinema which is predicated on text. So whether your name is Spielberg or Scorsese or Godard, there's always a necessity to start with text and finish with image. I don't think that's particularly where we should organize an autonomous art form. That's why I think that, in a way, we haven't seen the cinema yet, all we've seen is 100 years of illustrated text.”

I think this is a very interesting point, and I will definitely keep my eye out for Greenaway’s next projects, and hopefully he will produce the breakthrough in cinema, not just ‘illustrated text’. Just to relate these ideas to my own very recent experience, I saw the second installment in the Twilight franchise: New Moon (along with 5,000 other screaming girls at the Georgetown theater), and I must say I was a bit disappointed. I will admit (for the purposes of this blog) to being part of this subculture of fanatics surrounding the franchise, and I found myself identifying (if only slightly) with Greenaway’s analysis of cinema as a poor medium for narratives. I felt as though (especially in the second installment) that the book was infinitely more satisfying in this respect than the highly anticipated film. You always hear that the ‘books are always better than the movies’ but on the flip side there is always a delight in seeing narratives take on a visual form. I guess I will conclude by saying that although it is very difficult for me to envision a world and cinema culture in which narratives are obsolete, I still welcome the prospect of a cinematic departure from the narrative into something new.