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.

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.