I’ve just been watching a 1921 short film by a bloke called Hans Richter called Rhythm.21. It’s little more than experimenting with the possibilities of early film, being lots of squares moving around the screen – are they going further away or is our perspective? etc. It’s very much the sort of film I would once have loved to make: Simple but experimental, with that wide-eyed freshness that comes with new art-forms. Like other films I’ve seen from round that time (Dali and Bunuel’s strange but beautiful Un Chien Andalou springs to mind), it’s a work based on pure imagination and child-like wonder at simple things – traits found in the very best psychedelic works of art.
I then realised that you couldn’t make a film like this nowadays, mostly because it’s so hard to appear completely unrealistic or ambiguous in film. Graphics are now developed to such a degree that even the most far-fetched of fantasies can look ever more ‘real’ (I’m sure you can think of your own examples of this). You don’t just have to look at films either, check out how far computer games have come in 20-odd years. I’m old enough to remember when Sonic the Hedgehog was the last word in graphic design and computers – now he looks, well, quite quaint – the relic of a more innocent gaming age, when everything was wide-eyed and fresh.
Then it struck me that one of the problems that contemporary entertainment faces is that the real and the imaginary have got mixed up. The more life-like the representations of imagination become, the more staged and artificial ‘reality’ becomes - be it reality television or the customer service in High Street shops. The more we can use computers to live our lives through, the more tenuous the relationships we build through them can become. The financial crisis was caused by the failure of money that doesn't physically exist, just numbers on a computer screen.
Will our imaginations destroy our reality? The bomb was once someone’s daydream…
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