alt Hacker NewsOne way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies. For example, I think Tokyo Story (1953) is better modeled as a four-act kishōtenketsu[0] structure than a three-act hero's journey. It's widely considered one of the best movies of all time, and one that I rate very highly, but it's very different from Western movies. That difference was essential to my appreciation of it, because it's also slow paced and lacking in action; the novelty was enough to hold my attention until I could engage with the story.
I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
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I just learned about kishōtenketsu thanks to this great video on How To with John Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs). I'm surprised that it's not as well known in the west, considering how many great directors use it.
Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
Classic Thing, Japan. There are plenty of western movies that don't follow the three-act structure (off the top of my head, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive (and probably most Lynch), Boyhood (and other Linklaters), basically any Robert Altman) and plenty of foreign films that do.
Some years back I started wading into the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die". I'm still consuming — perhaps another 3 years and I'll be done? (Can die.)
Anyway, it's been a wild ride introducing to me early silent films, surreal films, art films, Italian neorealism, French new wave, etc. There very much are different narratives and structures outside "Hollywood films". Give them a watch.
Agree on foreign films having tropes/plot beats which were locally grown, instead of borrowed from Hollywood.
Time is another dimension you can use to get to different tropes. Lots of old movies don't go quite how you would expect them to, given modern filmmaking plot beats.
Examples:
Rang de Basanti (India) features political corruption which causes the death of a man in a group of tight-knit friends. In revenge, they hatch a plot to assassinate the defense minister. And then they do it, and the second act of the movie takes place and they all die. What a ride!
Duck Soup (1933) is about as far away from a modern comedy as you can get, and it is entirely about sticking your thumb in the eye of the wealthy and powerful. Surprisingly watchable, for such an old film.
> I think loss of artistic variety as culture becomes homogenized is an underappreciated cost of globalization.
Loss of variety in terms of what's shown on traditional movie theater screens-- sure.
For everything else, technological advancement has lowered the price to create films of a base level of quality. And that has caused an explosion in artistic variety. I doubt the average American has enough leisure time to keep up with all the indie films produced in a year (nor even a sub-genre).
> One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies.
That's a great point. My recommendation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_(2019_film)
In children’s movies the antagonist/monster is often meant as a metaphor for the child’s lack of autonomy in an ambivalent world that they do not fully understand.
And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle.
While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.
But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.
I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.