Wow.

I am kinda in shock because Alfian Saat practically just dissed/derided the value of film (and film-making) as a medium for drama and performance in his blog.

People who know me well enough would know that I practically fangirl this guy as a writer because he happens to be so terribly astute in his thoughts and writing, so this is really quite a slap in the face. Fangirlish enough to feel bad reproducing his entry here since the intention would be to uh, vehemently disagree with him but its not like I have a killer readership anyway.

And thus has ended my brief flirtation with the study of cinema. Not for me film scholarship--a necrophiliac act, the love of images repeatedly shot to perfectability--in other words, an embalment. To watch a film is to partake of a thing literally done to death--the tedious retakes, the Franskenstein crypt of the editing room, the non-existence of that which flickers on the screen. There are dead people on screen, none on the stage. Cinema does not immortalise--it mummifies. The hubris of wanting to preserve corruptible celluloid. Theatre has no such illusions. It knows it is ephemeral--no two performances are ever alike. And when I watch a video recording of a play I know something has died.

I'm just incredulous.

Of course if you wanted to compare theatre against film, and a rather partisan comparison at that, you could easily make a case that one is better than another, but that would be missing a huge point - that theatre is not film, and each serves its own purposes that is valid on its own. Yes, part of the value of theatre is in its transience and this can be very well utilized to expound on our many, many levels of our existential angst, but it doesn't mean that the 'unnatural' act of recording and therefore immortalizing a moment in time negates film of the potential to accurately express existential truth. While one can say that there are too many things that are controlled and choreographed in film that makes it less 'real', it is this extensive degree of control that makes film such a powerful medium. Where theatre may be limited by its stage and the angle in which the audience views the performance, a film director has the flexibility of camera angles to create whatever perspective desired, creating as well the emotional tone of the image. A lone figure in a wide landscape versus a close-up shot of an actor's expression. You get the idea.

And the notion of non-existence in film is ridiculous. Yeah okay, metaphysically, I get your point, lalala its only a recording of a person in a moment, and not the person itself. The image is not the thing in itself, Magritte's pipe and all that jazz. But really, if you want to take that notion further, everything we perceive is an image, including what is on stage. Seeing the actor on stage is not essentially real if you think about it, its only the image that my eyes are capturing at the given moment. And the image, according to Alfian's view, is not the real thing. Besides, who's to say what is the real manifestation anyway? Would it be the actor, simulating the character under the director's instructions and mouthing the playwright's words? Or would it be the playwright's words itself? Then what would it be, the words typed on the page? But aren't those only a recording of the writer's original thoughts? In this regard, there is hardly anything real about theatre.

And if what Alfian is so fussed about is the unnatural looping or resurrection of a moment that has ceased to exist into our present time, well. Watching a film from this perspective would be the same thing as rifling through our memories because memories are but an image of what had been. To regard memories and images as zombie manifestations of our reality is just unnecessarily morbid, I think.

Besides, if what supposedly defines the real from the un-real is the state of being ephemeral, of the mortality of the moment, is there so much of a difference between the experience of a someone who watches a film once and that of someone who watches a theatre performance?