updated to add reason number 7, also if you want to read the previous posts, simply look in the right hand column and click on them or, well, scroll down
AC Douglas weighs in again, hurtling indignation at our responses to why theater matters in the age of film. Money graph:
Let me make myself clear about this, if I haven't up to this point (and I think I have), by stating the matter in the bluntest of terms. The above quoted declarations of humanist faith notwithstanding, the audience doesn't count. The actors don't count. The director doesn't count. Even the playwright himself doesn't count. Nothing counts but the created artwork: the play itself and its aesthetic realization; a realization determined -- determined exclusively -- by the requirements and dictates of the play's text alone in which is contained what's necessary for the achieving of the "aesthetic transcendence" George above speaks of if the play is worth the paper it's printed on. ... In my previous post (linked above) I made it clear that my initial question -- Why should live theater survive as an art form today when film seems better able to do a play justice? -- was framed strictly in terms of the aesthetic realization of the only thing of importance: the play itself. That question has yet to be answered, or even addressed, by any of the above respondents"
There's a number of issues with AC Douglas' counter argument, many of which are adressed eloquently here by Mr. Hunka.
Let me raise my own:
AC Douglas asked us what was unique about theater that film doesn't have, we answered that experience of watching a play, at its best, contains within it something that film doesn't have by virtue of liveness. This is what keeps us coming back. But because the answer isn't what he wanted (an aesthetic answer) he's thrown it out. It's hard to discuss with cotton in your ears.
Secondly, he assumes that we didn't address aesthetics because we were afraid to. This (at least for myself) is untrue: I didn't address the aesthetics of theater vs. the aesthetics of film because what makes theater matter for me is that it is local and it is live.
Also, Douglas gets upset because he wants us to evaluate a play as an aesthetic object completely separated from the idea of specific performance. True, theater cannot repeat the same experience exactly the same way over and over again across the globe. Theater is not, in any way, shape or form, perfectable. This is, to me, what makes it interesting, rather than repugnant.
But if I were to address the aesthetics, as Jack Shaw does here I would point out a few of the following things:
Let me just say that I don't necessarily think theater is better than film or TV. When I point things I think theater can do better, it's simply because they're different art forms. There are plenty of things that film can do better than theater, and I recognize that. One of them (I'm not being catty) is to be bad. A bad film is enjoyable. A bad play makes you want to kill yourself, the playwright, your children, your dog and your grandma. Anyway, here we go:
1) Theater is in three dimensions, film is in two dimensions. This means that theater has a different relationship to space than those flickering simulacra on the screen. The most obvious example of this is that you can place characters in the audience (or have them enter from there). Theater thus offers more compositional opportunities than film because no matter what film cannot actually exist in three dimensions, it can only simulate it.
2) To continue point one: You cannot, as a theater director, lead the audience's eye the way a film director can with editing. Anything that's lit can be looked at, this creates a different kind of creating experience and a different kind of (sorry to mention them again!) viewing experience, more akin to looking at a painting where there's a lot going on. This allows for a great range of visual creativity. The only way for a film director to achieve anything close to this same effect is to have scenes shot by one camera with not editing and no movement, and even then it only approaches an imitation of it (with one notable and brilliant exception: Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor where each scene is so well designed that the eye wanders all over the frame). Or, as Richard Foreman put it, explaining why he doesn't direct movies: "I don't know where to edit". What this means is that while film exists in the world of close ups, theater involves the entire body, and multiple bodies in space at the same time always. If you want to express something, you can't cut to an actor with glycerine in his eyes pretending to cry, you need to you the whole picture to accomplish it.
3) Live music sounds better than prerecorded music and you can't have live music at a film unless you're seeing it at, like, BAM or something.
4) There are things you can do in theater that are almost impossible or unacceptable to most film audiences. In writing, you can (for example) work in rhythmic verse like Van Italie's The Serpent or Daniel MacIvor's Never Swim Alone, play around with simultaneous speech, mash together different kinds of writing a la Shakespeare's Winter's Tale or Chuck Mee's Orestes 2.0, have characters break into bizarre modes of expression (singing, dancing, etc.), have entire pieces with only one person in them, directly adderess your audience, create room for ad libbing etc. For directors you can totally reimagine a text without changing a word of it, you can create whole worlds out of mere suggestion, you can create a world divergent to and commenting on the text, you can use expressionistic physical movement.
5) Good theater relies on the impressiveness of the human being, film (increasingly) relies on the impressiveness of technological objects and techniques. I love film directors who can fully take advantage of this, like Soderberg or Gilliam, but I find someone walking in slow motion on stage thrilling and I find someone slowing film down so people appear to be walking in slow motion less exciting.
6) Theater relies on a kind of imaginative magic. Shakespeare understood this in Henry V when the chorus walks on stage and tells us to imagine that these few men are actually several thousand. Directors understand this through (for example) the use of something called object substitution, which actually as far as I can tell comes from the clowning tradition. So here we have a book, and the actor opens this book and it becomes a dove, not through any technological marvel like morphing, but simply through seductive skill, asking us all to come along for the ride. Or, to put it bluntly, film seeks to trick the imagination, theater seeks to take advantage of it.
7) Here's what I think might be my most controversial argument: Theater can incorporate actual film, film can only incorporate fake/dead theater. Again, you have to buy the premise that part of what is essential about theater is that it is live. Therefore, a recorded theater performance is unsatisfactory as a play (it may work as a TV special or film, but it has lost its essential theatricality, it has been stripped of something). Theater, however, can incorporate actual film by projecting it onto stage and having the play interact with it. This (rather than stripping film of something) augments the process of watching film by adding into it the elements of the theatrical listed above.
This is only a partial list, but it's where I would start from. Again, film can try to do all of these things (except probably #7), but (IMHO) theater does them better. This is not to say that theater is better than film but simply that they are two different experiences, to be evaluated differently. What theater does not do better, for example, is naturalism, which is one of the reasons why I think we should try to get out of the naturalism game.
AC Douglas wants to evaluate theater via the rules of film, and if you do that theater will of course fail every time. This would be as ridiculous as my saying that film is bad simply because it isn't live, or in three dimensions &c. There are (to me anyway) no objective, aesthetic contants in art. I make my way in theater because of its particularities, not because of its superiorities.
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