“For as there are persons who, by conscious art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium of color and form, or again by the voice; so in the arts above mentioned, taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or ‘harmony,’ either singly or combined.”
For some reason, this particular sentence seemed to have had an effect on me. When it comes a narrative, we often think of it as something that is linear. The only participation we engage in is the watching of the movie. The rhythms and flows are extrapolated and rearranged in a way that makes the viewer subconsciously aware of the inner meaning and psychology of the movie.
More recently, however, theater productions have taken a different approach and made the play interactive in a sense. Viewers are able to walk into sets and see events as they unfold as long as they do not interrupt the performers within the space.
Another example would be in the form of exhibitions and conventions, and instead of a few disjointed sets and the limit of viewing things in a particular lens, i think directors could utilize the three dimensional space and let the environments themselves do the talking.
“The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.”
After watching recent reboots of the star wars franchise, and having read the expanded universe, i could not agree with this article more. The reason why the force awakens and rogue one, is because the plots were so convoluted and jumbled that they produced weak characters with nonsensical character motivations. We have rey, a mary sue character who has been established as a strong fighter and a pilot so nothing is left to progress with her. We have finn, a garbage disposal personnel who is suddenly able to fight off trained pilots and fight a trained swordsman without prior experience, all of it mixed into a convoluted story about fighting a vague ominous threat that was never established properly. Add that to the fact that the plot progression steals from the original trilogy and you find a movie that is completely broken. Nowadays, it seems that directors care more about nostalgia and diversity quotas, trying too hard to prove that women can do things just as well as men, instead of asking who they are as a person, what their struggles are and how they overcame it.