From "Thilia" to Facebook: What the new generation can not stand is the broken screen
Hitchcock shot The Noose in one takeeyeο. Το πτώμα βρισκόταν κρυμμένο σε ένα μπαούλο, στο κέντρο των τεκταινόμενων, κυρίευε την caution, organized the agony. The film had density and an excellent pace, without resorting to speed, changes of scenery and acting exaggerations.
With a closed, tight structure, dramatic material was produced from a perfect script. In "Thilia" everything was restrained and compact. Under the current conditions of the immense iconography of social media and cyber-virtualism, Hitchcock's film (and many others) is dramatically inactive. How to withstand the low and almost "poor" spectacular growth, my daughter's generation and Facebook literacy? How can the accuracy of the mature post-war cinema, stereos (though somewhat sophisticated in the case of Hitchcock) build characters, the well-designed lighting? When you do not with viewers but with users of an expanding cartography, with infinite, unknown contacts, requests, connections into a vast digital lycopophilia and smuggling, can you be simple? To subtract instead of inflation?
And yet, with an extreme filmic austerity, Steven Knight, today, shot a highly daring work, a still road movie. "At the wrong time." The whole thing unfolds inside a car, developed with close-ups on the face of the protagonist, Tom Hardy, and on a bluetooth screen. Gradually, with a sequence of phone calls (the other persons of the play are the names on the device, and the characters, developed in the few dialogues), the director opens up the terms of a dark middle-class contract (marriage, fraud, within a rigid field of hyper-professionalism).
The play cracks the solid family and professional edifice (the protagonist is an engineer of superstructures) precipitates the hero, his family identity and the professional system, in a relentless delinquent funnel. How can an extreme pictorial austerity, in the first place, describe an extreme situation and then how can it find an audience, ready and willing to shoulder the responsibility of the austere, the "black", the non-figurative, the non-representative premise and a plot so stroke?
Are the two forms of iconography, the filming of the historically different examples (Hitchcock and Knight) and Facebook 'pluralism', forming a common sense context? A perceptual training has been formed and a cultural field has been synthesized, which may naturally contain the narrative limbs. The cinematic screen (either full and adventurous or "empty" and low-pitched), fully aligned with the stifling, simplistic and flowing of Facebook. And rather the second, it prepares and tames the former.
Η συνεχής ολίσθηση στις face-σελίδες, οι αγωνίες για αναρτήσεις, οι χορτασμένες επιβεβαιώσεις από τα likes και τα αιτήματα, παράγουν μια νέα οφθαλμική παρθενία. Σαν να αποκαθαίρεται ο χρήστης από τα πάθη και μπορεί να ανοιχτεί πιο βέβαια, πιο αθώα, πιο ανεξίθρησκα στη φιλμική περιπλοκή. Η υπερ-εικονικότητα των μέσων ανασχεδιάζει την picture, παράγοντας μια τεχνο-αφήγηση τελικά. Το ίδιο, δηλαδή, το μέσον αναπαράγεται ως αξιακό σύστημα, ως μια δομή υποκείμενη κάθε παράστασης, κάθε αφήγησης. Κάτι σαν μεταχρονολογημένη αξιωματική του μοντέρνου, όπου η μορφή είναι δομή. Η ρυθμική, οι δομικές κατηγορίες, οι νοηματικές επικράτειες των social media, εκπαιδεύουν σε μια κινηματογραφικότητα που μπορεί ευρύχωρα να δέχεται τα πιο απροσδόκητα είδη πειραματικού ή αποκλίνοντος κινηματογράφου.
The mechanics of the media eventually settles every cinema. This perceptual ethos seems to retain in my life and the examples I treat and every film construction. It also renews the power of a theme and a cinematic form - like the one that suggests "In the wrong time".
My daughter easily accepts the Spanish "Black Bread", the British "Selfish Giant", the Belgian "Kid on the Bike", the steep Greek "Little Fish" among the acquaintances from the other hemisphere and the endless "Facebook kisses". of Economides et al. A pan-cinematic situation seems to emerge from the vast pop art concase of the media and High Cinema is also legitimized within it.
What my daughter and my generation can not stand is the broken screen. The insatiable hunger for the illuminated frame creates the circumstances no longer of fiction but of mythology. And this from cultural evolves into a political problem.
