Narrative in film

I spent the holidays with my daughter, her husband, and my two grandchildren in California. I missed the Metro Manila Film Festival and, therefore, cannot comment on what many Facebookers have seen to be rather puzzling about the awards and the public response to the movies.

I did manage to watch several films on my Kindle Fire, because Amazon Prime allows free streaming of thousands of movies if you are in the USA. (That feature is not yet available in the Philippines due to copyright restrictions.)

There was one movie that impressed me very much, a 2011 Canadian film entitled “Take That Waltz,” directed by Sarah Polley, starring Michelle Williams.

At the Cantor Arts Center of Stanford University, I also managed to watch “Video Quartet,” a 13-minute film by Christian Marclay, on loan from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

These two films made me think again about the role of narrative in film.

At the Telluride Film Festival a long time ago, I infuriated world-renowned film directors by a wisecrack that, if I had wanted a story, I would have read a novel instead of watching their films. I argued then that film is not, as Hollywood experts such as screenwriting guru Syd Field like to put it, a story told with pictures. Rather, to me, a film is pictures period, with the story serving merely as a distraction.

“The Last Waltz” and “Video Quartet” made me more certain now that I was right then.

The Canadian film was nominated for various awards for screenplay, direction, acting, editing, and production design. It has a 78% rating from all critics and 81% from top critics in Rotten Tomatoes. In short, it is critically acclaimed as a good film.

One thing noticeable about the film is that it has very little plot. In fact, Wikipedia, which usually has long and detailed accounts of the plots of movies, has only a short paragraph that goes this way: “Margot (Williams) meets Daniel (Luke Kirby) while on a business trip, and although they immediately share some chemistry, she reveals to him that she is married. However, it turns out that Daniel is living across the street from Margot and her husband Lou (Seth Rogen) in Toronto. Although Lou and Margot appear happy together, it becomes clear that Margot is not completely satisfied with her marriage, possibly aggravated by encountering Daniel. She is initially resistant to Daniel’s advances, but as the film progresses they interact more and more until she ultimately leaves her husband to be with him. Lou is saddened, yet understanding. The audience is then shown a montage of Margot’s new life with Daniel, including several brief sex scenes.”

Even this summary, however, is misleading. The first two sentences apply only to the first five minutes or so of the film. Much of the film just shows various occasions when Margot and Daniel are together (in public, not in bed). The last two sentences refer only to the ending. There is, technically speaking, no plot.

“Video Quartet” is even clearer in its rejection of plot. This film (advertised as a “video collage,” perhaps because audiences find it difficult to classify it as a film) has absolutely no story. It consists merely of clips from various films (700 Hollywood films, according to the printed description), juxtaposed to make it appear that they are related to each other by sound and sight. Yes, by sound and sight, rather than by theme or meaning.

In the same way that I am annoyed by theater reviewers who talk about the story instead of the production (they should have read the script instead of watching the play), I am impatient with movie reviewers who rave about the story of a film. No film has even come close to the power of a novel when it comes to plot. Of course, the comparison is unfair, because the film has only two or three hours to enthral its viewer, while any novel has longer than that to hold a reader’s attention. But why praise a film for its story when the same story can be and has been told much better by novelists?

What makes a film good is what novels cannot do, which is to give us visual and aural images. No matter how good your imagination is as a reader, you cannot get the detail that a single film sequence or scene can give you (the composition, the color, the movement, the facial expression of an actor, the subtle notes of the musical background, the juxtaposition of two or more pictures or shots, the special effects, and things of that sort). It may not be true, as the cliché goes, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a single word can clearly not compete with a single picture.

I was once a judge at the MMFF, but was never invited again, probably because I insisted that theme, subject matter, and plot were irrelevant to the merits of a film.

Oh, yes, happy new year!