Is it just me or is claiming a film has "no plot" just about the dumbest excuse for a criticism there is?

You could say that perhaps v. experimental films, like the one that is like 7 hours of a door opening and closing, do not have a plot but if you can take the film as an interactive experience with the audience then you could coherently argue that the plot is within the audience's response to the images on screen, so I think David's right--saying a film doesn't have a plot is begging to get argued with for something a whole helluva lot more concrete to say.

And Warhol's experimental films argh, I have been made to watch like only a few hours of them thank god.

Some people think that if you throw away plot, there's nothing left. Others, like opera fans, see plot as an excuse for people to dress up and sing. Fantastic atmosphere, wonderful colour, graceful poise, rich fantasy and strangeness, music, these are the things we want from art, and some empty space we can insert our dreams into. Martin Creed once said "The whole world plus the work equals the whole world". I'd like to say "The whole film minus the plot equals the whole film".

boohoo!! ppl frequent sideshows also, eg when they are bored of the dodgems and ghost train!!

If you identify the plot as always being identical to the film itself, then you're just falling into tautology. You may as well say that a film always is a film. Gee whiz. The problem is, you'd be wrong.

I would suggest that most young artists who say they hate plots are artists who hate devising plots because it is hard work and they don't know how to do it. First, learn how to create and sustain a film with a good plot. This earns you the authority to be contemptuous of them.

Warhol, btw, was a static thinker who put soup cans in frames and called it a day. His films show this. The argument that the plot of a plotless film is the audience's reaction to it is extremely clever, but essentially it is jaw-droppingly stupid. This is also the "plot" of everything-in-the-universe and another tautology - just in a better disguise.

I'm not saying I agree with the argument mind you; I think filming a door opening and shutting for 7 hours is incredibly fucking stupid and a waste of a lot of perfectly good film!

Heh. This is what made me give up playwriting in college.

I remember when I was 16 I made my boyfriend sit through about three hours of Warhol's experimental films because I thought they were deep. I feel like a terrible person for doing this, thinking back on it now.

xpost warhol is like cage, you don't need to actually see his films to 'get the idea' (*lets self off hook*)

NRQ: The plot / story distinction is essentially what you're conflating in plot / plot as pretext.

What about the MacGuffin? How does that figure into this?

MC Kaiser droppin teh rhymatic science

-- The Ghost of Dan Perry (djperr...), March 9th, 2005.

Dan=one of the few truly sane Ilxors.

Yeah you're right. Kind of like how you can't be a movie critic unless you've tried making a film yourself.

i made a film once, of my holiday. it didn't really have a plot. it was really boring. the scene of me winning at the fruit machine was good, the expression of joy was very well done. However, the scene of being on the bus for 30 minutes was pretty bad.

I shown it to a group of film students telling them a famous filmmaker made this, and they said the film made them think.

The B7 chords brings forth another stone, a 2 by 2 square that doesn't belong anywhere, it occupies the final space on top of the stack, next to the chilling drop of the narrow chute. The next brick is the last chance, a 4x1 tube is the only saviour.

The tempo heightens, as the music becomes an even greater melancholy, as if mourning the game, soon to pass away. Then, the next brick appeared, a 4x1!! There is a saviour, afterall. Russia rejoices as the brick goes down the chute - the great plan is coming to fruition! The great foundation of the structure flashes, and disappears, the music momentarily drowned out by the crushing sound of the collapsing wall..."

to be continued

but shouldn't plot be used as one of the criteria? i mean, there are many attributes to a film (and say if we stick to the "story telling" ones - no not as in the film "storytelling"), like a game, some have a storyline some don't, there are some that don't have game play etc. but without one element, you'd really have to excel in another to make up for it for it to stand out. really.

I can agree with this to a certain extent, but then why blame the absence of the plot rather than the failure to make up for it?

I can agree with this to a certain extent, but then, given an unsuccessful plotless film, we should be blaming the film's failure to make up for its lack of plot rather than the lack of plot in and of itself.

if you think about it, the lack of plot is just a failure to make up for crap directing/acting/stage with at least a decent story.

should be this:
"Momus' point about plot being for him a pretext for the real adventures of art is interesting,"

also narrative and plot are two different things.

Cut to: Coffin, Cut to: Baby

This does not explain why they ever made an episode for Creed.

i'd say there is a place for plot in movies but i don't think its the absolute most important part. i think thats why i have no much trouble with some movie reviews, instead of explaing the texture and emotional landscape, they just give a plot overview. i think its the same with book jackets. how something is shot, how a story is told, is just as important as the actual plot. maybe this is a pot shot at my own country, but i feel like we have more trouble with this than other countries.

some of my favorite firlms arent plotless but are instead non linear in their plotlines. its more about memory and feeling than the explicit story.

I'm assuming all of the Warhol references up above are talking about Empire State Building and stuff like that because the actual Paul Morrisey / Warhol films like Dracula, Flesh For Frankenstein and Trash are totally brilliant and not at all plotless.

xpost not at all -- film adaptations of things like 'vanity fair' often fall down because they try to do the imposssible and cram it all in.

http://www.amadeusmozart.de/BesetzungJones.jpg

"Too much plot, Mozart."

Original Star Wars Trilogy vs. the fucking prequels, compare and contrast.

Terrible execution is much less forgivable than a D-grade story arc.

Right but they feel it if it's missing. And if a film is not structured in this traditional, totally formulaic way I think that leads a lot of people to say "it had no plot." Really what they mean is that the story didn't pull at their emotional strings or keep up at enough of a rollercoaster pace to push that button in their brain that says "ah, now that was a plot."

Virtually every Hitchcock: though often apparently heavily plotted, the plot is just a big Mcguffin allowing him to unleash his mojo.

Most elaborate plots suck. Especially trick-ending films - seen once, useless forever for the most part. The older I get, the less I like plots and endings - they reek of 19th century Realism, which was just melodrama with a bigger linguistic budget anyway.

xpost

my dad saw it as a kid and wz always ravin abt it

The plof of the most recent movie I saw in theaters: a German dude with extreme face makeup sings opera and rock/pop classics over New Wave arrangements and then dies.

Yay!

Was that the one with the pool boy or the door-to-door salesman?

*not really, but read "who made pistachio nuts?" anyway

(bz it wz made for big cinemas and they left space for huge amounts of laughter!!)

i think it's "slow" because of the vaudeville sensibility at work... humor is largely verbal and "gag" based, not terribly cinematic

but very funny

Hamlet is more than "a son hesitates over whether to avenge his father's murder."

It won't surprise many people here that I agree with Remy a lot here. I'd unpack the word "character" a little as it appears in your last two sentences, Remy, since most people associate that word with "funny moustache, peculiar gait, father was killed in WWI" type of thing. I think what you're driving at - and please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you - is that "character" is what you see when one of the people in the movie tries to get what they want, and how they react when they don't get it i.e. in the sense people mean when something "builds character." Is that right?

Plot = what yr friend tells you is going on, after you've skulked back from the bathroom
Story = what each character is trying to achieve
Character = the stuff what makes you like or hate the characters after they don't achieve it
Moustaches = moustaches

Almost every movie is written so that the characters in it try to get something, and fail. Sometimes it's a series of things. Sometimes it's just one thing. Thinking about the whole damn plot is like deadly nightshade if you're performing, though, because plots aren't real. All an actor can do is focus on the here-and-now, just like we do in our normal lives except that, far differently than most of us I expect, they're usually focusing pretty well cause they've had several weeks of rehearsal to identify what that goal actually is in the first place whereas you and me tend to have "texts" that scream obvious bloody murder for us to pursue a particular action and we're usually lookin at a girl or thinkin about a sandwich. Real life has a plot, too, but we're just not quite as single-minded about paying attention to it as actors are with their scripts

NB all this stuff goes double for comedies

NB I don't mean to suggest for a moment that sandwiches and girls are not valid objects of action - that's the prob with real life, we always have like 3 or 4 here-and-now actions competing for attention and another few long-arc ones.. but every actor knows that you can only play ONE action at a time well!

ACTIVITIES are the things characters do on screen. A character whose goal is to win the Olympics in Pole Vaulting first needs to get over their fear of heights. Climbing a stepladder may be the ACTIVITY but the ACTION is getting over their fear of heights.

An OBSTACLE presents a character with a bit of business - activity (and maybe action) - as a block or impedence to their goal. All movies - and especially non-plotty movies have these. Godard was famous for throwing weird obstacles in the paths of his characters: the traffic-jam scene in Weekend is a wonderful example. It's against this obstacle which our characters define themselves by activity/action. A COMPLICATION is like an obstacle except instead of deflecting the character with road-blocks, it requires a drastic ACTION or change in action. With the exception of ACTION, all of these terms are part of the plot. The plot: the nebulous, swirly, hanger from which the movie begins its bigger business. In narrative films - even something weird & untraditional, e.g. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' the plot follows a standard form: X(s) wants/needs Y(s) but are impeded by Z(s).

e.g.

Captain Picard must decide whether to cross into Klingon Space to rescue Jessica Rabbit from the clutches of Picard's half-brother Darth Vadar.

I like yr description of plot as "nebulous, swirly hanger"

my take on "there is no character" is that it's typical Mamet overstatement designed to shock/astonish actors out of uber-Method fannydangle wherein they write pages of single-spaced "backstory" about their characters, 0.000001% of which is actually useful on stage, and much of which gets in the way of their job. you would be surprised at how many acting classes teach this, i.e. "if you don't know your character's grandfather's name how can you expect to BE the character??" - this is nonsense and Mamet's right to single it out.

Mamet has an actor's POV of the word "action," Remy, that differs slightly from yrs but it's no better and no worse, just suited more for the actor's task. "getting over a fear of heights" he'd call a goal, or a want, or a desire. then it would be the actor's job to find an action that will achieve it. that particular goal is kind of a weird example because it demands nothing from anyone else in the scene (usually the goal involves other people), so maybe the desire would be better located as "show my sister that i'm not scared of heights" - leading to an action like "get a bully to back down", or "get someone to join my team" or whatnot, depending on what's happening in the scene. but no doubt both ways of defining "action" can co-exist peacefully since movies are the artistic division of labor par excellence and everyone just attend to what needs attending to

in any case my answer to the question is, i'm sure there are worse excuses. i think it's a rare rare writer who can forgo the "vast swirly hangar" (or "hanger"?) of plot and still have enough for the actors to sink their teeth into (Beckett comes to mind) so 99% of the time it's a fair cop (unless they really are just saying what Dan said way up there, that they don't particularly CARE for the plot) ("Workers Leaving a Factory")

corsspost: thank you very much Mr. Jones! i feel like a BLABBERMOUTH.

INT. JAPANESE COFFEE SHOP -- DAY
As the woman leaves the shop Philip glances the logo on the back of her knapsack and realizes - though neither his face nor his body betray it - that she works for the syndicate.

And I agree with you on the Mamet - at least per your description. But Mamet is one of those highly idiosyncratic writers who's better conceptually than in practice. If you were able to link me (or refer me) to his particular words I'd be grateful, as well.

(weirdest Mamet tidbit i've learned lately: he wrote some of the tunes on his wife rebecca pidgeon's jazz albums!!)

that's only un-actable in that that's the kind of thing you gotta show with editing--works in a script, not in a play

i thought that was just supposed to be a ridiculous example not an actual line. i hope it was an actual line tho.

i think i'm a lot more expressive than most ppl so maybe i'm projecting too much, but i wouldn't wink or anything no.

it doesn't have to be corny, it can be extremely subtle, just a slight twitch in facial structure that makes the audience realize something is not qUITE right.