Go slower, go faster Lucas

Rating: 10/10 (20 November 2019)

In the cinematic universe Star Wars is for the many the big bang. It all starts from that singular event and in the expanding space created from the explosion, form super hero franchises, paradoxical Terminator sequels, curling matrix matrixes and all that is understandable about modern cinema. Before Star Wars there was almost nothing. A universe where the point of view would remain steady and unedited, a universe that could be square and in black and white, where things would move so slowly that minutes, possibly even hours would pass while people just stood and just talked to each other with their pants held high and almost all of it happened on Earth.
And here I would have to agree with the many, because Star Wars has over its forty years shaped cinema into its own form. Its success has begat other shape shifting films and those have begat others, until almost all films seem to drive and chase the same audience expectation. To create other Star Wars like films, you needed a rapidly expanding effects industry. To make effects the central aspect of your film they have to be increasingly special and there for increasingly expensive to produce. So expensive that no national market will yield sufficient profit, so they are globally marketed to each individual nation whose need for your product and opportunity to experience it, is carefully managed into a mirror image of your own.
Only Jaws can claim to be the first real summer blockbuster and the first film to be distributed at the same time across the county rather than rolling slowly across the individual states, but it was the success of the Star Wars' economic model that cemented our present relationship with cinema. We live in a Star Wars universe you and I.
But that was all in the future and in a different county, it's 1977 and I am just about to because a British teenager. I can remember seeing the trailer for the film. An avid reader of science fiction I sniffed at the production, all those people running around dressed in plastic, it looked cheap and childish. I decided at age 12 that I was above all this. When the film arrived in London, what it did to me was the same as so many children of my age, we were blitzed, mesmerized, poll axed and smitten.
It would be very hard now to describe now, how and why this happened to any present day 13 year old or for that matter any present day father of a 13 year old. They have grown up surrounded by instantaneous gratification from numerous technological mediums, we only had television and the record player and the record player belonged to and was controlled by our parents or to our older brothers or sisters. Most cinemas across the country had closed down. A medium sized town had about one fleapit running the same filmed advertisement for the local curry house. The industry seemed to have abandoned us for adult entertainment and I am no fan of the children's film foundation or The Railway Children (May the God of cinema rot every one of them. Oh why were they all not hit by a train?). A visit to the cinema might be a three times yearly event. There was television, and the television was always on, but it was never television on demand. You had to wait though endless repetitions of nationwide and the generation game to get at what you wanted and it was never enough.
A good example of this, is a scene I can remember from Blake's Seven a BBC science fiction programme from 1978. Vila the group's thieving locksmith is using an ultrasonic stimulator on a complicated electronic locking system to gain access to a vast military/scientific complex on some distant planet for some reason or another. The ultrasonic stimulator was a plastic pen with small light in it; the complicated lock was three Christmas lights the inside a Tupperware box, which had just been placed on the rusting gate of a dilapidated rusting gas plant somewhere in the home counties and not in a galaxy far... far... away. It wasn't the cheapness of the production that felt like a slap in the face, it was the poverty of the imagination. I actually felt ashamed to be sitting in front of the television. To young minds the imagination of Star Wars seemed to ride the wind and it was the brain child of one guy, so who was this George Lucas?
Well like we all are, Lucas was a product of his age but he was also part of the new rising generation of American film makers, who deeply idealised European cinema, were influenced by Italian realism and the French new wave, but they were not disciplined intellectuals or isolated philosophers. Film makers like Francis, Ford Coppolla wanted to film the American experience from the past and in the present, but seen with a new honesty and freedom unavailable to previous generations. Others like Lucas and Spielberg returned to their own childhood imagination, reliving the cheap and cheerful cinematic pulp fictions from their childhood, but this time with a razor sharp eye on composition, editing, framing and many of the dazzling possibilities thrown up by increasing budgets and developing technologies. They wanted to make the kind of films where imagination has no limits because they are the ones that normally only ever run through your head.
Lucas has been open about his influences and they are almost all from Hollywood's golden past; the Adventures of Robin Hood, Zorro, The searchers, as well as Japanese samurai films and one British production The Dam Busters which inspired the final run down death star's trench. CP30 and RT-D2 are mechanical versions of Laurel and Hardy in fact I think CP3O is the maschinenmensch from Metropolis with the personality of Edward Everett Horton, (If you don't know who he is, look him up, you're on the right website). The symbolism and mysticism of the basic plot are borrowed from Joseph Campbell's work on the art of ancient story telling. An element which seems to have been slowly lost to the franchise from the first moment of the prequels, when Lucas starts taking about intergalactic trade deals and up to the present day, where the stories are in a bland nether-land between a compelling mythos and political and social realities.
There was also John Williams at a career high after making the music for Jaws. If you want to know why symphonic composition for cinema is now so weak you only have to remember that Williams, who is in his eighties, is now is the end of a long line of composers who really knew their classical forefathers; Mahler, Shostakovich, Bartok, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, (who produced some first class film music himself), they are all there in the notes, but never slavishly imitated, always a source of inspiration. I have the two, thirty three and one third r.p.m long playing records from the original black coloured album, purchased at the time. Listening to it now, I realise how much of the movie is all there; the fear, joy and excitement is all choreographed in those musical staves.
The oddest impact the movie has had, is on its own creator. From the start Lucas's own talent as was very much on the technical side he was not good with actors, often only able to tell them to make their dialog go faster or go slower. Older more experienced performers and those with considerable star power survived; if you were young and inexperienced then you were in trouble. Over time Lucas's relationship with his own material warped He reissued all the Star war films in the cinema with new added computer effects and refused to exhibit the originals in any reasonable quality saying that were beyond repair. He even added computer effects to his dystopian 70s sci-fi THX 1138 the one thing it didn't need. The prequels had their dazzling moments, but seemed to enlarge upon his most tiresome traits; if you had looked back at the simple working beauty of American Graffiti, you may have wondered where it had all gone wrong. The rights to merchandise from the Star Wars movies and the profits from the prequels have made Lucas one of the richest in the industry. Finally he sold the rights to produce more films for billions to the disney Corporation (has the empire won after all). But fear not dear citizen, there will be another Stars Wars film arriving in you cinema for you every year for all eternity. How this all ended, well George is on record as saying that one day he would like to be able to make small personal films.
I still get a thrill from that big bang the London Symphony orchestra makes as the main title hurtles away from you but this is a memory of an emotion, I am very aware of the part that nostalgia plays.
A Star Wars fan once told me that as an adult he was sitting in the cinema watching trailers for forth coming films, when the screen went expectedly quiet and dark, blackening the theatre, a moment pasted and then the auditorium filled with a sound of a heavy breath and Darth Vader spoke; it was a trailer for the mid-nineties theatrical rerelease of Star Wars. Taken by surprise he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise, an instinctive and very primal reaction to fear. Somehow perhaps because he had started watching Star Wars from a very young age, Darth Vader had managed to crawl right down deep into the darkness of the mind, deeper then reason and reality, he had hidden until now only to materialise at a cinema in Stevenage, or so said the part of the brain we cannot control. Star Wars has most of us in that fix; we were engulfed before we could take any of it apart and reason with it
Perhaps Star Wars greatest quality is what we the viewer's brought to the cinema, a potent mixture of our inexperience, innocence, expectation and our youth. But that was in a galaxy far... far... away.