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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  CINEMA CURRENT: Herd effect
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CINEMA CURRENT: Herd effect

Computer-generated gimmickry shows off advances in technology rather than transporting movie-goers into other worlds

Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’Premium
Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’

Hollywood studios have perfected the art of churning out live action fantasy adventures that don’t have anything fantastic about them.

The most recent examples that were released in India, Jack the Giant Slayer and Oz the Great And Powerful, betray their intent to shock rather than awe through their video-game titles. Despite being 3D-enabled, neither movie creates a sense of wonderment.

They are part of a herd that concentrates on generating effects rather than affect, about showing off advances in computer-generated technology rather than transporting movie-goers into other worlds. There are big-budget exceptions like Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, whose visual poetry and machine-aided contemplative moments help overcome its banal spiritual theme, but more often than not, visual effects are an end unto themselves.

Years before the arrival of computer-generated gimmickry, directors like French multi-hyphenate Jean Cocteau created their own bag of tricks. In Cocteau’s movies, inanimate objects spring to life and mirrors are passages to other worlds. Cocteau’s 1946 version of Beauty And the Beast remains one of the most enduring adaptations of the fairy tale. When Belle’s father enters the beast’s castle during a journey, he is greeted by candlesticks held up by human hands and statues that can turn their heads. The knowledge that there are real people standing behind artificial backdrops and holding the candles doesn’t take away from the strangeness of the sequence or dilute the unnerved reaction of the father. She jumps through time and space by simply putting on a glove.

Cocteau’s Orphic trilogy, comprising The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960), explores the theme of atrophy and renewal. Orpheus, Cocteau’s inventive interpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, is set in France in the 1950s. Orpheus is a Left Bank poet obsessed with a mysterious woman who represents Death. The most stunning visual effect is from the sequences set in the underworld, where the film stock is reversed to make the characters walk backwards. Several years later, the music video for the Enigma song Return to Innocence used the same reversing effect.

In Testament of Orpheus, which concludes the trilogy, the director plays a time-travelling poet who revisits his aesthetic preoccupations and wonders about the consequences of letting fictional characters question their creators. “A film is a petrifying fountain of thought…. A film permits one to give the appearance of reality to that which is unreal," says the poet, who bent the time-and-space continuum much before the blokes from Star Trek.

Beauty And The Beast is one of the stated references for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Coppola’s 1992 movie isn’t technically a fantasy adventure, but it makes judicious use of simple camera tricks. His adaptation of a much-filmed text spins on the erotic potential of the story of a vampire who pursues his love across the centuries. The madly zooming camera, quick cuts, Eiko Ishioka’s wonderfully bizarre costumes, the lurid colours and imaginative backdrops add up to a movie that heaves with unresolved passion.

You don’t need a computer to jump from this world to the next when you can use old-fashioned sleight-of-hand techniques. In Chilean-French director Raul Ruiz’s Three Lives And Only One Death (1996), Marcello Mastroianni plays four characters in tenuously interconnected stories. Backgrounds slide forward and backward; a line of dialogue indicates that characters have aged.

In Ruiz’s final movie Night Across the Street, released in 2012 a year after his death, the past, the present and the imagined future all unfold at the same time in the same space. A character thinks of Beethoven and the composer appears before him. It’s fantastical and fantastic.

This fortnightly column looks at how the cinema of the past helps us make sense of the present.

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Published: 16 Mar 2013, 12:04 AM IST
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