One of the great delights of being a grownup is watching movies on a school night. Last night’s post-dinner offering was the gorgeous Tree of Life by Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line).
The film was a triumph in many respects. Director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki tipped his hat to French Impressionist cinema through his point of view shots and the soundtrack is simply breathtaking. The film was a 139 minute visual and audio feast that possibly changed my expectations of the medium forever.
What bothered me about the film is how the story was told. In addition to the film’s unusual visual treatment, solid soundtrack and difficult themes, the disrupted narrative seemed excessive. Disrupted narrative is not an unfamiliar narrative style in modern cinema, but bothersome when coupled the film’s richness in other respects. The film lacked simplicity, which is why it won’t feature on the very important Kristia’s Top Five Films Of All Time.
In life, in cooking, in emotion, one can afford the luxury of grandeur and complication, but it takes only a basic knowledge of art to understand the great artist values simplicity. Michelangelo, Renoir, Picasso and Marlene Dumas belong to completely different movements, have vastly different styles and yet all share simplicity, either of subject, form or style.
Marlene Dumas
I am a firm believer in simplicity in writing. My belief was strengthened by a recent reading of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged – a book in which a simple concept is communicated through repetition, an inordinate amount of adjectives and structurally complicated sentences. Imagine my delight and relief when I started on Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, clean and clear in language and form, yet rich and rewarding in subject.
In my research for post I found this incredible essay by American novelist Frank Norris, dealing with simplicity in art in such a simple and effective way that I strongly encourage everyone to read it – whether you’re involved in the arts or you’re simply trying to be good at your day job.
Here’s a small extract to whet your appetite:
“Elaborate phrase, rhetoric, the intimacy of metaphor and allegory and simile is forgivable for the unimportant episodes where the interest of the narrative is languid; where we are willing to watch the author’s ingenuity in the matter of scrolls and fretwork and mosaics-rococo work. But when the catastrophe comes, when the narrative swings clear upon its pivot and we are lifted with it from out the world of our surroundings, we want to forget the author. We want no adjectives to blur our substantives.”
As always I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter. You can comment by registering on the site or tell me what you think on the Facebook page. Take that, spammers!
