When I was asked to come up with a central organizing principle for my film, I did not dismiss the exercise. I merely treated it as one, instead of the defining aspect of my film. The COP in my initial development document went something like "We create our fear," which is not actually a COP as defined by Egri. If anything, it is a message, and I am not making a film about messages, but merely creating a scenario for ideas to flourish; ideas about belief, technology, evidence, and the digital image itself. There is no great lesson to be learn from the film. Which is why the exercise seemed particularly difficult. In class, Charles proposed that my project's COP was, "Technology defies reality." Not bad, and it is one of the things I want to explore with the film, but there was something, to me, lacking in that. It has a subject, a conflict and a resolution, but I never thought I wanted the film to say just that.
Pascal's Wager is not just about the wager that since God's existence cannot be either proven nor disproven, it is best to bet that He does. More than that, it is about the crisis in man between reason and the unknown. Pascal say about religion, "If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous." In essence, Pascal says mankind's ideas are limited by reason. He says mankind is a finite being trapped within an incomprehensible infinity. Perhaps this is why the COP is so important. In art, there are so many interpretations to be had, we need to limit the work to an understandable idea.
On the other hand, why can't I have it both ways? Why can't I explore the infinite from a finite point of view? I decided the best way to do this was to broaden the scope of my COP. I started with my original 'message': "We create our fear." Why did I write that? I suppose because the film is about a man searching for evidence of the supernatural in a house. I liked the idea that the man was in this house for the exact same reason the audience would be watching it: to get scared. 'We create our fear' is about the people watching the film as much as the film itself. But I had to go a bit deeper, and adhere to Egri's formula. 'Technology defies reality' was a good place to start, but what was I really trying to say? That is where I came up with my central organizing principle: "Illusion becomes reality." If there is any kind of grand resolution in my film, it is that, and it is something I wholeheartedly believe too. The illusion of religion, of the supernatural, of the recorded image, of interpretation, all of these become a reality not just in film, but in our everyday life. You post something on Facebook, a name with a picture next to it says it 'likes' it. You interpret this as your friend reading something and enjoying it. Illusion becomes reality. You see footage of a robbery, you know that robbery took place. The camera, though, is simply recording 0's and 1's, creating pixels interpreted by the human eye. Illusion becomes reality.
You make a wager. The existence of God can not be proven or disproven through reason, but since there is much to be gained from wagering that God exists and little to be gained from wagering that God doesn't exist, a rational person should simply wager that God exists and live accordingly. Illusion becomes reality.
By broadening the scope of my COP to something universal, I can have it both ways. Having a finite COP that is broad enough to explore infinite ideas. The ambiguity of the film remains in tact, though there is a resolution. Does this exercise work? For me, it yielded results. The only danger is locking oneself into a constrictive COP that can stifle the vastness of the material. That is kind of the same danger between God and religion.
No comments:
Post a Comment