catapult magazine

has anyone else seen Signs?

I kind of liked it…..

I would recommend it. M. Night does some fine work here. Pulling on some of that good ’ole Hitchcock stuff.

Yes we can talk about Star Wars and The Matrix, but I want to briefly state that my obsession is not metafiction as such. I can understand being bored to tears with metafiction as a critic’s fad. As a form of criticism, it limits what art can do by defining stories, books, movies according to occasional tendencies of self-reflexivity. My own problem with metafiction as a critical theory is that it doesn’t allow films to speak for themselves, to forge their own identities so to speak (the inadequacy of critical theory often is displayed when Kubrick comes out with a new movie that doesn’t fit with contemporary film theories; many critics initially hate his movies, then come to understand them for what they are). This is why I want to say that, ultimately, film-making is a showing of what film can do. This does not mean that film has to take film-making as its subject-matter (though many do) or that films are always self-reflexive. Rather, a film is what it is and the critic must talk about it according to the rules or limitations the film has set for itself.

Now, having spoken my piece, I too had this gnawing sense about the newest Star Wars movie as I was watching it. While I was seeing it on digital projection, simultaneously thanking God for letting me live to experience movies like this, I started to think that the eye-candy of the new Star Wars was working against, rather than helping, the strangeness of the world created in the Star Wars films of the seventies and eighties. If Tara still visits this site, I think that’s what she was saying also. But, could this be just a nostalgia of my own for the old days? I also feel like the new Sesame Street Theme Song does not communicate the same mystery-street-hidden-somewhere-in-New York feeling that it once had; now it’s just a bunch of kids dancing around on animated buildings, but I think that must be my own sense of wanting things the way I knew them.

After watching Bresson’s Pickpocket again and The Diary of a Country Priest and Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, I see what you’re trying to say, DvdSchp, about the art film versus popular movie distinction. Do you think that Shyamalan was really trying to bring art house themes to a low-brow genre? If so, that would explain the strangeness of putting those two sides of the movie together in one.

Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t like using those terms exactly: art house and low brow, but I know what you mean. My questions were more along the lines of Does Shyamalan have the right, because he’s working on a mass market scale, to beat the audience over the head with this point, assuming (probably correctly) that most people wouldn’t get it otherwise? Should a filmmaker even make such a drastic point, subtley or blatantly? Are “art house” films better because they are subtle with their points? I generally don’t like any sort of art that so brazen about pushing its ethics onto the audience, but I just can’t help admiring Shyamalan. he has such market power and he weilds it so dangerously. Signs would have NEVER gotten made if 6th Sense hadn’t been as popular as it was.
Anyway, I’m not so sure he’s bringing “art house” themes to popular movies. In fact, no, I’m going to say that he isn’t, primarily because he being quite straightforward about his ideas in all his films. Of course, I working under the definition that “high art” defines itself by being mutlifaceted, more complex, and asking questions rather than providing answers. I mean, to me, Unbreakable seemed like a morality lesson on the responsibility of being one of the elect, with no room for debate, no questioning. I’m using Calvinistic terms here, but it’s about the same. Same thing with Signs. Shyalaman is just so straight forward and driven to an inevitable solution, a solution that is intentional and very much the authors. This is why I brought up Bresson. Bresson may use different tactics, may be thicker, but he’s just as intentional about where he wants to bring the audience.
I don’t think that answers the question, but I have to go.

A very engaging discussion.

I liked Signs prefer the more mysterious Unbreakable. Unbreakable also uses sound design in really fascinating. The train scene at the beginning and the scene in the train station were finely crafted.