30 years ago, The Empire Strikes Back premiered and audiences saw what may be the best Star Wars film anyone will ever see. The original Star Wars and the franchise it created changed the business of filmmaking and the experience of moviegoing forever. But did Star Wars subvert the aesthetics of cinema? Did it actually show us something we’d never seen before or just give us an updated hero’s journey tale set in a Wilder West that we were used to? Here’s what Stan Brakhage said about bringing new eyes to cinema…
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.”
Now here’s Star Wars Wars: All 6 Films At Once, reducing George Lucas’s vision to pure sound, color, movement and iconography…
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