We always just sort of assume that art forms are fixed in the forms that we now understand them to be, so a film is around an hour and a half of narrative entertainment, with a handful of main characters. A song is just over three minutes, in the verse chorus format. A piece of classical music is played on traditional instruments and often adopts a symphonic narrative or applies variations to an original theme.
But much of this is just an accident of redundant technology, a vinyl single could hold around three minutes of music, an hour and a half was a reasonable period to sit in a cinema when people shifted to seeing just the one film, rather than a double bill. Many of the ‘fixed properties' are just repetition of what we are familiar with, there is no inherent ‘rightness’ to them.
It is now possible to listen to music all the time, when Beethoven was composing you could only expect to hear a symphony a few times in your lifetime, unless you were a member of the orchestra. We are now totally smothered in art forms that were only ever envisaged to be available in a very limited context. Classical music is applied as a bland background or mood music, pop music is chopped down into tiny fragments to play in the background of tv programmes, so they can evoke a period,or even just their title in a knowing reference to the action. Pretty Flamingo plays while a flock of flamingos take flight.
Art forms are resilient, we are not likely to stop listening to music any time soon, though we are listening to shorter pieces. If you listen to film music it is strong on mood and atmosphere, but it does not develop a musical theme across an hour of music. We are reading plenty of books, but it is probably no longer possible to write the great book that marks an era, would Catch 22, or Catcher in the Rye be possible now?
However my main concern when I started to write this blog posting, was with film. There is something naturally resilient about the format of an hour and a bit of narrative entertainment that just seems to stick. As with all these art forms, the format has become more, rather than less, fixed with time. Early film ranged from shorts to some very long films, Napoleon by Abel Gance or Greed by Erich von Stroheim are massive. Before television, the studios were rattling out films, some classics like Casablanca, and plenty more that are forgotten now. Today too, they seem to be making films like never before, every comic strip apart from Oor Wullie seems to have been the subject of at least one film. But as with tv, there is a real tendency to make films to fill a genre format.
Often it is the constraints that make for great art, at school I always preferred the challenge of writing a story under some onerous constraint, to writing about anything, it is the limitations that make for great architecture, not unlimited budgets. CGI has allowed people to put anything on screen, and once you can film anything, there is no spectacle, with no constraints, there is no challenge.
Although film is far from dead as an art form, it is now like a adjunct of video games, it lacks the widespread social currency and meaning it once had. Everyone would see ET or Jaws, we knew what they were about, but now? We are losing that element of challenge and stretch for the viewer, seeing something they had not seem before, thinking something they had not thought before, not just novelty for the sake of novelty, but something compelling and memorable.
Personally, I don’t tend to seek out many conventional films to watch, I like documentaries, or art house films. A lot of conventional cinema is no less predictable than the sort of generic action thrillers churned out Steven Seagal, once you understand the conventions of the genre you have a good idea of what you will get. If there are only so many plots, then is it time to abandon the convention of a narrative, to just create a film as a long musical video or a compilation of clips, or reform it completely into something / anything that we are not so familiar with. Will the best selling films eventually become straight footage of rail journeys, or busy city streets, or wordless tours of baroque gardens, or will we all just end up gazing endlessly at webcam footage of other.
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