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Private Detective, Investigator, Movie Consultant

Movie Consultant - Private Detective (Scene) Choreographer

 

Jeff Friedberg, Expert In All Things, Speaks: Movies

 

An essay                                                          

The movie audience is alienated, stagnated, bored, impotent, cynical, and angry. It has no universal values, and nothing spiritual in it's life, and movies offer no general mitigation.

The audience believes more in UFO's and ghosts than it does in Spirituality or the inner core of itself.

This inner core of people is a part of creation, whatever actually powers the universe, and people's little lives. The audience senses this part of itself, but can't find it. Nevertheless, the audience instinctively desires to express it's own creative potentialities, its inborn courage, it's humanity, and to connect with the unseen forces which shape its Life. In the past, movies helped or aimed people along these lines.

The audience's desire is instinctively strong for instruction in a method that will enable them to sense or experience that indefinable power or principle that informs the universe and enables their lives. They are aware that they crave a vocabulary of actions, not words from some unreality. They don't want sterile symbols or blind ritual, but it stops there, because they don't know what to do next. Movies formerly attempted to provide guidance through this wilderness.

Today's audience can only spectate the hero on the screen, rather than engage in self-actualizing acts by emulation. They can't find the way, the courage, or even an inner reflection of that energy of creation, and so they are not inspired to let loose on a personal quest. This debilitates them.

Today's mostly specious scripts substitute exhibitionism for import, dishonesty for integrity, preaching for fun. Movies become more spectacle than symbolic, more annoying than inspiring. American acting is so full of silly, stock mannerisms and slogans that is is completely inauthentic, without any spiritual resonance, no truly universal cues to prompt the unconscious in beneficial directions.

How many times can we listen to, a vacuous, "Hey. Are you OK?" How many times can we watch an actor roll a cold glass across his (apparently) feverish brow? How many more times can we watch an actor fill their own dead air with "The Sniff Of Snot," that somehow happens, or watch them scratch, or do bizarre finger/hand "acting," where they hold the gun sideways, or with just two fingers, while the rest of the hand "acts."

If I see one more actor pretend to be chewing food, instead of just biting the fucking sandwich, I may myself vomit.

Scenes become more and more just plain stupid or vulgar. Who wants to watch two people trying to eat each other's lips off? It's wacky. Who cares? Get a room.

Without the brilliance of a sincere, positive, and grand, iconic mythology, culture perverts itself and collapses.

Movies offer possibilities: a clear-cut morality with spiritual values, via the actions of the hero; a vocabulary of action, which the audience can grasp, and lessons they can take with them, steps onto the path toward self-realization of their own relationship to the universe and the power that informs it. This is what consciousness intuitively craves.

Movies can be modern prophecy. This, as opposed to offering a mere spectation of sterile ritual or petrified symbols.

We consciously or unconsciously seek a way of reconciling being alive in time and space. However, in this era, there is no black and white morality myth to guide us, as in past epochs, only a gray blanket smothering the way. Science replaces religion for some.

In the 1950's, we saw what we feared: Earth VS The Flying Saucers.

Next, George Lucas showed us what we thought probably was: Star Wars, and Stephen Spielberg, what we hoped for: E.T.

Then, Mel Gibson showed us his hero's way: The Passion.

These movies were smash hits because the audience sensed the mythic mythic universality of their messages.

The next step is to show a way of action, a path relative to our complex era. This is what Star Wars came close to doing, why people still talk about The Force, and The Dark Side.

These are quasi-religious effects, pondering the nature of the universe, the eternal, where does the energy of space and eternity originate? What was There before here daddy?

Where is our Guide through this sea of darkness and Unknown? Where is our blueprint, our priest, our Way into the experience itself, not the talking shadow of it.

Words are sterile symbols of what is, but cannot express it. Poetry traverses the gap. The artist speaking with immediacy, or painting on a cave wall beneath the earth, or in light on the silver screen cuts past passive words, to action.

Movie making can tap the brain-wired pathways of myth, dreams, and fairy tales buried deep in the whale-black contours of the unconscious. It is here where we reconcile the prods and demands of flesh, where we are maybe when we are asleep, or dead, or not born yet.

Art, poetry, picture-making--they are the tools of the Shaman. He uses them to experience his eternity, and to pass on to his people, pitching them out physically into the experience itself.

The Shaman is a way of action. His job is to give people the experience itself, not to just talk about it. This is the destiny of the movie-maker.

Shaman...

                         jeff friedberg, NM, 2005

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The Book - 2012- The Novel

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