There's no doubt that "inspiration" is looked down upon, particularly since about 1965, in movies and stage.
I've been in groups where the leader would always frown upon something inspirational. In fact, every group of writers that I've attended, the leader did this, and the leader would swoon for something totally without merit.
Which is why we get some huge budgets for the worst scripts. Take modern comedies. There is absolutely nothing to like or care about in HIGH FIDELITY, THE HEARTBREAK KID, THE BREAKFAST CLUB. In fact, movies like this spend the entire production to turn people into stereotypes. Hitler would have loved these.
That's if you can stay awake through them.
The trouble is there is nothing to relate to in most movies. They spend special effort in alienating the viewer, losing all empathy, and then try to win empathy with great music. That's the worst possible movie, the misuse and mismatch. A movie that is just technically bad is not as bad as the one that abuses and wastes great music, scenery, and budgets.
Fortunately, the three I mention don't bother with scenery for the most part. That would make them even worse, to waste great scenery on crap.
But lets face it. There's no inspiration in them.
Take the spaghetti Westerns, particularly of Leone. Total waste of great scores. The music has inspiration, but the characters have none. They're all one dimensional caricatures that just kill everything they see. They're based on traditional Greek heroes, demi gods, so anyone who calls them anti heroes is either a liar or an idiot.
They alienate the viewer, except for completely brainwashed Beavis and Butthead types, who are fooled so easy.
The fact is that every director, and every teacher I've met in the arts, with very few exceptions, relish "control". They hate the "comrade" approach, and only like to manipulate.
They're all just like Eastwood as director of UNFORGIVEN, which is the prime example of manipulation. Feeble minds are manipulated into accepting a homicidal maniac, a killer of women and children, as "likable". Eastwood does a good job of manipulation. He still isn't an actor, as evidence by his gamut of emotions and expressions, all "one" of them, but he knows how to manipulate feeble minds.
This is not what art is about, and only feeble minds accept that it is.
s
I kind of agree. Kind of. I think a great director manipulates, but in the knowledge that he is being manipulated. Great directors take inspiration from all around, from the medium, from life, from spontaneous occurrences, and are willing to take a step back, but they still manipulate and control to a certain extent, but know that it all comes together through them, not from them by name and personage alone. Take Lynch for instance, who found inspiration everywhere. He didn't try to control and sculpt to some phoney standard of perfection, he allowed for mistakes, like the camera seeing Frank Silva in the mirror in Peaks, then deciding to use him, and seeing the neon gun firing sign in the reflection of the puddle in the car park. Of course much of his work is formed in his own mind, but just as much outside.
I too dislike it when films try to manipulate with music, terming certain music sorrowful or rousing and then simply tacking it onto a scene that has none of those qualities. With Apocalypse Now Coppola played with this deliberately; the helicopters go into battle to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, meant to be seen as a glorious battle, but then they screw it up and a lot of them die without glory and it's all intermingled with shots of less than heroic deeds like shooting a woman down as she runs away with her child.
As for films manipulating me into liking homicidal maniacs, well, I get what you're saying, but I do find certain movie psychos and villains endearing, but not from a worshipping point of view. Frank Booth has a certain innocence and charm. The brilliance of a film like Blue Velvet is that it doesn't separate any of these characters, they are all viewed as part of a collective psyche.
I don't seen anything wrong with a director being "manipulative and controlling," as long as it is not for its' own sake. Brian De Palma for instance is a very manipulative director, but in many of his films he realises this and makes fun of it. Body Double for instance, steals a lot of the techniques of Hitchcock, and builds suspense, then ends on something ridiculous or absurd. Add to that, the hero of the film is a feeble minded, weak willed wannabe actor who is basically a pervert/stalker who sees himself as a hero and good guy in the mirror of his mind. *SPOILER* at the end of the film when he is about to be buried alive by Sam, the man who set the whole thing up, Sam even mocks him and outright calls him an idiot saying "sometimes the hero has to die" and laughing as he he fills with hole in with dirt. It's a great film.
I agree that fascist, control-freak kind of films do not allow for inspiration and instead categorise everything into separate identities. Some films are aware of this and use it, like Elephant, where the names on the title cards in bold white plain lettering could make sense so we know the characters' names, but also seem unnecessary, as the characters are referred to by name. The names and seemingly separate identities are merely floating on the surface of consciousness. You can usually tell when a film blindly believes in it's own false system of categorising and you can tell when a film realises this and uses stereotypes and caricatures to illustrate this. When used in this way stereotypes and caricatures are often humanised and are infused with life.
So the director is in control, and puts his stamp on a film, but as long as he knows it's just a stamp, the film will turn out alright. Many great directors are specific, exacting, controlling perfectionists, but are also collaborators. As for the "comrade" approach, I'm not sure what you mean by that, it seems to allude to communism. As much as the vain attempt to rigidly control a film according to some self-imposed standard in the mirror is false, imposing a system of collaboration and equality is also false, and just another false system of control, the kind of precise, orderly, black/white/black/white turn taking mentality of the fascist state, as if a system can be made to control and manipulate the natural flow of life.
