On Narrative

James: Firstly I would like to thank John and the audience for an incredibly intensive Symposium session this afternoon. I am physically exhausted. My mind is also racing...

If I understand John correctly, he is advocating a lateral-thinking style of non-narrative cinema whereby provocation of ideas is the purpose, as opposed to a fixed polemic or argument. In other words – it is about the means, not the ends. I present you with random, discontinuous sounds and images and YOU detract a meaning as opposed to the filmmaker foisting a meaning upon you.

I am actually a huge fan of Edward De Bono’s work on lateral thinking and I can even be convinced that this would be an avenue to explore to see whether it reignited audience interest in cinema. I understand that John wants it to simply be a broader church, and to include the provocative, lateral cinema alongside the narrative kind, just to offer more challenges to disillusioned audiences.

My problem is that this kind of filmmaking is still only a means, and not an end. It draws no conclusions and makes no points. It is a process and an exercise to provoke you into thinking and engaging. At best, it can only provoke, it can never resolve. Furthermore, at its most pretentious moments, it works on the assumption that you are not capable of this exercise in ordinary life, as if you must be woken from some kind of passive slumber. You can feel alienated as an individual for ‘not getting it’, as if there was some higher, conceptual meaning. But I’m imagining John argues “No! There is no higher meaning, there is only whatever you want it to be!”

And there lies the crux of my argument. The audience wants to share a collective experience. I quoted Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Monday’s “Everything You Know Is Wrong” lecture – “it is hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community”. Walking out of the cinema and into the bar with your friends to try and interpret the provocation seems like a valid example of community, but I would argue that this is not missing from narrative cinema, and can in fact be far more precise and focussed in narrative cinema.

The temptation is to ridicule narrative as a failing model, that we have run out of stories and the audience is bored. I believe this is not the case. There are plenty of stories that are still to be told, and can in fact be reinterpreted and retold in fantastical fashion (e.g; Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’). If cinema is failing it is because Hollywood believes that technical spectacle and big stars are the only advantages over other media. If studios woke up to the potential of cheaper production and the possibilities of digital media in the exhibition sector, we could see challenging, thought provoking, entertaining narratives that fulfilled audiences time and time again. At that point, I believe that the lateral-thinking non-narrative experiment will be exposed for what it really is – a lazy way of filmmaking that carries no purpose other than to provoke thought.

I therefore believe that it has limited appeal, limited audience and limited lifespan.