Of Artistic Dead Things.
Jan. 18th, 2025 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evening_tsarAn “exquisite corpse” is a collaborative piece of art created by three artists, each in complete ignorance of what the other two have done. The Exquisite Corpse Project is ostensibly an attempt to apply this approach to film: five different writers are tasked with writing one section of a film script, without knowing what came before, or what will come next. If you’re expecting an interesting experiment in collaborative art, you will be disappointed: if you have a sense of schedenfrude, this garbage fire of combustible egos and flammable friendships may tickle your fancy.
The title is misleading: these guys aren’t working in complete ignorance – they are allowed to read the last five pages of the previous guy’s script. So they actually know quite a bit about what the last guy established and where he might have gone. It’s more like one of those creative writing projects where you have to continue someone else’s story. Either way, we never actually get to watch the titular corpse project from start to finish: it is constantly interrupted by interviews and cinema verite footage of the writers arguing with each other. We’re clearly not meant to care about the finished product, but only the dysfunctional process – this is not an experimental film, but a documentary about a failed creative endeavor.
The six guys in question (five writers and the director) once comprised the comedy team Olde English, who achieved some amount of success earlier this century, before disintegrating over creative and personal differences. It’s not hard to see why: these guys do not work well together. They don’t even seem to like each other. They’re endlessly critical of each other (and quite harsh in those criticisms), completely insensitive to each other’s concerns, and make no attempt at all to build on each other’s contributions. I’m not sure they had a kind word to say about each other. Maybe that passes for comradery amongst comedians.
The result is more a combative project than a collaborative one. Instead of working together to create something, they treat it as a kind of party game, where they try for laughs by obliterating the previous guy’s work with increasingly egregious deviations. This kind of one-upmanship might work as a party game, but sabotages any art. It might have worked as comedy if any of it were funny.
What we do manage to see is virtually unwatchable. It’s hard to know how much of this is intentional, as we’re mercifully spared more than a few minutes of it at any time. But disguising incompetence as comedy is a trick of the amateur (see Unicorn). Another is to feel the need to explain a joke, or draw attention to it in case we miss it (again, see Unicorn). Whatever the intention, it never escapes the tension of incompatible personalities struggling for dominance.
What struck me more than the failure of the project itself (understandable under the circumstances) was the unwillingness on the part of anyone to even try to make it work (one of them even boasted about being intentionally awful). I didn’t get the need of these guys to tear down their mates. Maybe it’s a personal thing: when given an unfinished piece, my first instinct is not to junk the thing in its entirety – I’d start my own piece and not bother with the original if that were the case. I would work with what I had and try to make it fit. I’d take pride in the seamless of it (if achieved), not the incongruity. But that requires a little bit of humility – something in deeply short supply here.
When I taught drama camps, the most popular activities tended to be improv games, involving the kids just going up and making up scenes off the top-of-their-heads. Our only strict rule was “you can’t say no” meaning not that you couldn’t say “no” as a line of dialogue, but you couldn’t out and out reject your partner’s contributions. You had to build off what they gave you, and they’d do the same. This lead to way more interesting scenes, to say nothing of the life lesson: cooperate with people, work well in groups, and the end result will be greater than the sum of its parts. You belong to the art, not the other way around.
These guys never learned that rule. They should have come to my camps.
The title is misleading: these guys aren’t working in complete ignorance – they are allowed to read the last five pages of the previous guy’s script. So they actually know quite a bit about what the last guy established and where he might have gone. It’s more like one of those creative writing projects where you have to continue someone else’s story. Either way, we never actually get to watch the titular corpse project from start to finish: it is constantly interrupted by interviews and cinema verite footage of the writers arguing with each other. We’re clearly not meant to care about the finished product, but only the dysfunctional process – this is not an experimental film, but a documentary about a failed creative endeavor.
The six guys in question (five writers and the director) once comprised the comedy team Olde English, who achieved some amount of success earlier this century, before disintegrating over creative and personal differences. It’s not hard to see why: these guys do not work well together. They don’t even seem to like each other. They’re endlessly critical of each other (and quite harsh in those criticisms), completely insensitive to each other’s concerns, and make no attempt at all to build on each other’s contributions. I’m not sure they had a kind word to say about each other. Maybe that passes for comradery amongst comedians.
The result is more a combative project than a collaborative one. Instead of working together to create something, they treat it as a kind of party game, where they try for laughs by obliterating the previous guy’s work with increasingly egregious deviations. This kind of one-upmanship might work as a party game, but sabotages any art. It might have worked as comedy if any of it were funny.
What we do manage to see is virtually unwatchable. It’s hard to know how much of this is intentional, as we’re mercifully spared more than a few minutes of it at any time. But disguising incompetence as comedy is a trick of the amateur (see Unicorn). Another is to feel the need to explain a joke, or draw attention to it in case we miss it (again, see Unicorn). Whatever the intention, it never escapes the tension of incompatible personalities struggling for dominance.
What struck me more than the failure of the project itself (understandable under the circumstances) was the unwillingness on the part of anyone to even try to make it work (one of them even boasted about being intentionally awful). I didn’t get the need of these guys to tear down their mates. Maybe it’s a personal thing: when given an unfinished piece, my first instinct is not to junk the thing in its entirety – I’d start my own piece and not bother with the original if that were the case. I would work with what I had and try to make it fit. I’d take pride in the seamless of it (if achieved), not the incongruity. But that requires a little bit of humility – something in deeply short supply here.
When I taught drama camps, the most popular activities tended to be improv games, involving the kids just going up and making up scenes off the top-of-their-heads. Our only strict rule was “you can’t say no” meaning not that you couldn’t say “no” as a line of dialogue, but you couldn’t out and out reject your partner’s contributions. You had to build off what they gave you, and they’d do the same. This lead to way more interesting scenes, to say nothing of the life lesson: cooperate with people, work well in groups, and the end result will be greater than the sum of its parts. You belong to the art, not the other way around.
These guys never learned that rule. They should have come to my camps.
