Continuity, cont'd

The point is: filmic discontinuity is invisible. This is despite/because of its position as the essence of the medium. Making a film seem discontinuous is almost a trick now because we are so quick to fill in the gaps.

On stage, discontinuity is essentially stunning because everything is out in the open. Consider for instance the blackout before the show begins. This is creating discontinuity. The lie it offers is that suddenly, you are no longer in the space you were just in. Fantastic.

Discontinuity within a play (real, black-out discontinuity, not actors running around with cubes discontinuity) works a little bit differently. We have created a world together, and then, in an instant, it is completely destroyed. There is no telling - absolutely no telling - what world we'll be in next. (Although, of course, if the last line of the previous scene is "Hooray, let's all go to the zoo!" we might expect the Zoo.) So theatrical discontinuity strikes me as the best way to present fantasy, delight, and possibility onstage. Especially if there really are changes to the set etc., a real blackout (no glowtape, no kidding around) that rises to reveal a real change will always surprise and delight an audience. Because there aren't any tricks. My friend Dash used to do this magic trick where he puts a condom up his nose and pulls it out of his mouth. People always asked him how he did it. Did he have a second condom in his mouth? Did he hide it up his sleeve? No: he just did it. That's the magic - confronted with remarkable reality, we will invent an impossibly complicated alternative.

I've heard complaints that blackouts break up a show's unity, but never an explanation as to why that's essentially bad. What if that is exactly what they do: break up unity. Imagine a living room drama in which the great secret is finally revealed. Then black. A moment. Then lights up again. Nothing has changed, everything has changed, what happened in between? Right? That's delightful.

We have so many tricks. So many tricks that litter our stages any-old-how. We use ming vases to hold paper flowers 8 times a week all across the country. Will the revolution come from something no one ever thought of over the last 2500 years? Maybe. But we could also try just thinking about all the jewels we're overlooking.

Continuity

I've been thinking a lot about continuity recently. It's a line of thought ignited by helping a friend working on a TV pilot, and it's interesting because it highlights an important and often ignored difference between theater and cinema.  Cinema is essentially infinitely articulated.  In a single second, 24 individual images strike the eye.  These images are only ever implicitly connected, each could have a life of its own as an entirely different medium (photography). When strung together they become cinematic.  Even a strip of film comprised solely of 1,000 copies of the same image would be cinema when run through a projector.  

Our eyes and brains work together to smooth out the rough articulation of the form.  One thing so damn fantastic about Goddard is his jumpcuts; not really because they were "new," but because every cut is a jump cut.  The camera is choosey, or it can be, and all the fat that exists in cinematic forms (establishing shots, walking across rooms, zooms) all of this can be thrown out the window at anytime.  It's exhilarating.  It gives cinema the chance to be sort of effortlessly poetic, to insist on the utmost importance of every image to throw away every unnecessary flicker.

This is very different onstage.  If I enter stage right and want to be stage left, I'll be in full view at every point in between.  I'm not a ghost on a screen, I'm just a body and a brain in the light.

But, I've had a fascination with blackouts since seeing The Unseen at A Red Orchid Theatre last winter. On one hand the discontinuity that blackouts create is filmic, but it's particularly interesting since its object is a body rather than an image.  Let me be clearer, if I entered stage right and wanted to be stage left and there was a blackout in between - if you didn't see me cross - it would be kind of surprising.  An audience wouldn't necessarily know how to read it. Did something magical happen?  Did I transport?  Why didn't they see the middle?  The simple answer - that it wasn't interesting - probably would not occur.  Fantastic!

Theater is in this sense a continuous form.  Certain ridiculous persons with inordinate power at one time insisted that Theater be spatially unified, temporally unified.  Though these people are all dead, the amount of theater still produced that takes place in a single room over the time it takes to say the lines is pretty remarkable.  Conversely, movies like this (Rope for instance) are always notable.  

I think we should love the freedom to be discontinuous.  We actually have the technology to illuminate and disappear solid bodies onstage, to pop through time and space revealing only what is excellent.  So, let's do it.

Life of an American Fireman (1903)

This is the movie that obsessed me with media studies.   This is a completely amazing document. More to come.