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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters That certain feeling
By Mohamed El-Assyouti
Queen Amidala of the Naboo, episode I's equivalent of Princess Leia Organa of episode IV
In The Phantom Menace, George Lucas finally takes us to the beginning of the saga he started 22 years ago. The Jedi knights are back, so are R2-D2, C-3PO, Obi Wan Kenobi, Yoda, Anakin, Luke Skywalker, and Sith Master Moff Tarkin. No Princess Leia Organa, or Darth Vadar yet, but Queen Amidala of the Naboo and Darth Maul instead. The first episode (1999) is similar to the fourth (1977) in terms of events, but is visually far more stunning -- the Tunisian desert scenes and planets Tatooine and Coruscant with their Arab architecture are especially interesting -- than any of the previous films, while John Williams's music is even more captivating in digital Dolby.
Back in 1971, after seeing George Lucas's debut THX1138, film critic Stanley Kauffmann remarked: "Lucas has good eyes, if no original vision, and he knows a lot about film technique; but what he does with it all is thin. He has acquired a lot of skills but not much self." When Star Wars (1977) was released six years later, it became apparent that Lucas, if unoriginal in the modernist sense of the word, possessed a powerful visual perception.
The method employed in Star Wars counters the conventional human-camera relation by connecting a computer to the camera. The filmmaking process is thus related to a major thematic line in the series: the need to strike the balance between the human (with faculties of judgement and decision) and the technological (the capacity for information processing and preservation). Luke Skywalker, the protagonist of the nine-film series, is "the one who will bring balance to the force." As for the said scarcity of self in Lucas's works, it may just as well be considered part of his achievement.
Lucas grew up as European and Japanese modern cinema was reaching its apotheosis and the substitution of religion by art was being clinched, not least with the advent of canonical cinematic masterpieces authored by prophetic filmmakers. Meanwhile, Hollywood was witnessing the failure of the big-budget, profit-guaranteed formula and a degree of relative artistic aridity, especially in the historic-epic, Western genres.
Fortunately, the beginning of the seventies saw the ripening of several post-modern talents -- Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, Schrader, Cimino -- whose work was imbued with religious overtones (Scorsese and Schrader both considered the priesthood in their youth, while Coppola's works include The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and a spiritually-shifting Dracula). They all dedicated their attention to the grey areas in their characters, the "self", except for Lucas, who gave it much less space. They all contributed to the evolution of gangster, film noir and even horror genres, again except for Lucas who planned to revive the Western and science fiction genres. Additionally, while they all remained attached to the creative process, making one film at a time, Lucas became an executive producer of his nine-film series, accurately calculating the budgets for films years in advance.
If Lucas's work has not much "self" it is because it is much less introspective in conception compared to the work of his contemporaries. The battleground he depicts does not represent an internal dilemma between what is and what should be in the soul of a man, but of how good attracts the soul, leading many critics to characterise Lucas's work by a pre-20th century moral and intellectual logic. What makes it more difficult to distinguish Star Wars from the consumer entertainment industry in which it is produced are Lucas's own statements: "I've always loved adventure films. I came to realise that since the demise of the Western, there hasn't been much in the mythological fantasy genre available to the film audience [and] instead of making 'isn't-it-terrible-what's-happening-to-mankind' movies, which is how I began, I decided that I'd try to fill that gap. I'd make a film so rooted in imagination that the grimness of everyday life would not follow the audience into the theatre. In other words, for two hours, they could forget...so, in a way, Star Wars is a movie for the kid in all of us."
Lucas's critics sometimes lose their patience, pigeonholing him in the escapist filmmaker category. While such a labelling would not be entirely false, it risks the misrecognition that there is nothing more to Lucas's series than just imaginative entertainment. Some critics recognise a mystical element in Star Wars -- Buddhist, Jewish Kabbalist, Muslim Sufi -- and others see it as "a paean to mysticism and an attack on modern science". In all cases, it seems that through using mythical structure to elicit the audience's (especially the younger members) identification with Luke and to resolve the battle in his soul, Lucas is assuming the same religious role as his peers but leaning more towards a mystic acceptance.
Star Wars's narrative logic is a mythological pastiche derived from a variety of sources. Spencer's The Fairie Queene, Malory's La Mort d'Arthur, Dumas's Les Trois Mousquetaires, Fieldings' Tom Jones, Twain's Tom Sawyer, Dickens' The Pickwick Papers and Baum's The Wizard of Oz, have all been cited by critics as furnishing the foundations of the Star Wars plot and characterisation. Similarly, while admittedly inspired by Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress (1958), some scenes in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) quoted John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and Riefensthal's Triumph des Willen (1936), adding the genocidal racism of American settlers and Nazi ideologues to an already rich brew. As for the dialogue, it comprises a series of quotations from archetypal Westerns, science fiction and war films. Even the space battle scenes are carbon copies of actual war footage, with spaceships tracing the exact trajectories war planes had taken.
But while Star Wars has nothing original in terms of narrative ideas, it has much to offer where visual resourcefulness is concerned. While watching a Star Wars film, the viewer's surrender to the predictable narrative shifts is rewarded by numerous surprises in terms of visual detail. If the viewer mindlessly and selflessly surrenders to the "force", his entrance into the world of Star Wars will be gratified by discovering how easy it is to distinguish good from evil. Or, as Yoda puts it in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The Return of the Jedi (1983) "Clear your mind. Unlearn everything you have learned. Be calm and at peace, passive. Trust the force. Know the good side from the bad [and realise that] luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."
By achieving this, the spectator joins the protagonist Luke Skywalker -- whose name, like Lucas's, literally signifies space-traversing light -- in his adventures through a fantasy world full of wonderful shapes and forms realised by Lucas's Industrial Lights and Magic special effects workshop. Kauffmann's comment on Lucas applies all the more to the Star Wars series: they are "shut your mind, open your eyes" films by someone "with a lot of skill and not much self".
Simply, Lucas is consistent with his characters; while Lucas's declared belief is that "movies should be emotionally involving", audiences would do well to take the advice of Qui-Gon Jinn, played by Liam Neeson: "Feel. Do not think."
