Welcome to Movies That Changed My Life – a weekly column in which I take a look at a film from cinema’s storied history that changed the way I look at movies.
Even before it was released, Avatar got branded a game changer. Early viewers reported that the movie created a viewing experience like no other; invading their dreams and changing their life. Now it’s out and it’s a financial juggernaut, but is it a game changer? And what does “game changer” mean anyway?
Nothing in Avatar is new, strictly speaking. 3D? Saw Captain E/O when I was a kid. CGI lead character? Roger Rabbit and then some. Digital sets? George Lucas got there first. Like most change, innovation tends to happen in small increments rather than giant leaps.
If you look at movies that have changed the landscape, most don’t include all-new elements. Like everything else about the movies, innovation is also about business. A movie made simply for the sake of innovation could never find enough of an audience to pay back whatever development the new technology required. That’s the realm of the avant-garde, and those movies break ground but don’t change the game. That’s why the great innovators in movies are always great popular storytellers. Real game changers tell a story that makes the innovation seem necessary. The deep focus of Citizen Kane, the brash Technicolor of Gone With the Wind and the speed of spaceships in Star Wars are all necessary elements for telling their story.
In the early days of cinema basic elements like close-ups, cuts, fades and pans were still wild new innovations. Then a Russian named Sergei Eisenstein came along with a bunch of stories that required those cinematic elements in order to be told. Like James Cameron, he made innovation beautiful, engaging, and wildly entertaining.
Case in point: 1925’s Strike
A year after Strike!, Eisenstein would make the essential Battleship Potemkin, but since this isn’t a film class, I can suggest Strike, which, to me is a lot more entertaining – but be warned: as fast and fun as the movie can be, it’s got a heavy dark side as well.
The movie tells the story of a strike at a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia. While it’s communist to the core, in this case one can identify with the worker’s plight. They only want what’s reasonable: an eight hour workday and reasonable wages. Which is the point of the story: in early days of industry, workers needed unions in order to secure basic human rights.
A master of film editing, Eisenstein cuts the movie to roar forward, then slow down, then explore one idea, then another, using the tools of film to show us the anatomy of a strike. You probably didn’t notice the cuts in the last movie you saw, but in this one they call attention to themselves.
The shots demand attention as well, all of them machine-like In their precision. One of the greatest images of the movie, and one of my favorite images of all time, shows a train engine sliding sideways beneath the mammoth skylights of a factory, gliding towards the camera as workers scramble up its industrial bulk.
The tricks are so brazen that they call attention to themselves, making you aware that the movie itself is a product of industry – which of course is the point. Eisenstein uses a tool of industry to make a point about industry itself. It would seem somehow inappropriate to use soft-focus or lingering shots or invisible edits to tell a story that is all about revealing the way things are built.
Avatar is about a guy who escapes into his dream of a different world. Cameron shot Avatar in what he called “the volume” – basically a huge empty room with a bunch of laptops, filled only with the dreams inside his head. The medium matches the form. Every innovation and workflow solution Cameron used is so that he can tell the story he came up with over a decade ago; which is why something as stale as another 3D movie seems like a fresh new experience.
Strike and Avatar are game-changers not because they use innovative tools, but because their stories make those innovative tools seem inevitable, galvanizing them into the minds of audiences as the new standard for storytelling.
Check out a few minutes of Strike, below:
Next week? Our first talkie.
Check out last week’s Movies that Changed My Life
