Qualities of beginner's work

>stiffness
>heaviness
>inconsistency
>grayness

Red Letter Media and Episode 1

Craig sent me a link to Red Letter Media's review of the Phantom Menace. It's extremely intelligent and entertaining but a bit misguided as film criticism. I love this kind of criticism as production theory. It sparks the creative process. It provides insights into what should have been and what could be. I do it all the time. But it's not film criticism. It's part of the creative process.

One take on film criticism is not to describe what would have made a better movie. Instead, it's to try to understand the film in a broader context that aims to enrich our understanding of a work. This can lead to creativity, but does not rely on a reworking of what a filmmaker has already done.

In this vein, I realize that I do have a "film criticism" of the Phantom Menace and it is this: Certainly, the Phantom Menace is filled with problems, but these are problems that stem from aspiration and process. The prequels are Lucas' attempt to make something along the lines of a David Lean film. In trying to show how "an empire becomes an empire" he bit off more than he could chew. This desire to integrate the macro of politics and the micro of human interaction is a lofty goal made more difficult by Lucas' determination to integrate experimental visualization and process into the work. Yes, the Phantom Menace is like a collage that doesn't make sense, but this is a result of the way that Lucas has tried to turn filmmaking into a bricolage-like process created in the editing. The PM wasn't script-driven, it was created via an action-oriented approach in which Lucas tried to reconcile the formal concerns of the images with the plot concerns of the Star Wars back story. If there are holes in the plot, it's because Lucas wasn't able to successfully navigate this difficult improvisation.

The stories of Lucas making an experimental film some day are a smoke screen. In fact, he aspired to integrate experimental filmmaking--the aesthetics of expressionism and improvisational abstraction--into the prequels themselves. The failure of the PM then, is NOT that he was unable to stick to a formula as the Red Letter critique suggests. Instead, it's that he was unable to improvise a successful resolution to the many visual, plot and character conundrums he created for himself. He tried to rewrite the formula of filmmaking itself but was just not skillful enough to pull it off.