Avatar and James Cameron...a comment-Ron Price, Australia
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AVATAR
Part 1:
The film Avatar has been out for more than 6 years(12/09 to 1/15) after being in development since 1994. I have read many reviews, listened to many comments and discussed it’s style and content with many both in cyberspace and in our wide-wide-world. This prose-poem tries to encapsulate some of my initial thoughts on this blockbuster, its initial reception and some of its meaning drawing as I do on several sources of comment during these last six years.
James Cameron, who wrote, produced and directed the film, stated in an interview that an avatar is an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods who takes on flesh-form. In this film, though, avatar has more to do with human technology in the future being capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body. "It's not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace,” said Cameron; “it's actually a physical body." The great student of myth, Joseph Campbell(1), should have been at the film’s premier in London on 10 December 2009. I wonder what he would have said.
Part 2:
Composer James Horner scored the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic. A field guide of 224 pages for the film's fictional setting of the planet of Pandora was released by Harper Entertainment in late November 2009. The guide was entitled Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora. With an estimated $310 million to produce the film and $150 million for marketing, the film has generated a myriad positive reviews from film critics as well as its share of criticism especially over what many reviewers refer to as the film’s simplistic content.
Roger Ebert, one of the more prestigious of film critics, wrote: “An extraordinary film: Avatar is not simply sensational entertainment, although it is that. It's a technical breakthrough." Avatar has had overwhelming success as a work of cinematic-art. Its enormous visual power, its thrilling imaginative originality, its excitingly effective use of the 3-D technology seems bound to change permanently the nature of cinematic experience henceforth.--Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 5 April 2010.
Part 3:
Like viewing Star Wars back in ’77
some said/an obvious script with an
earnestness & corniness/part of what
makes it absorbing/said another/Gives
you a world, a place/worth visiting/eh?
Alive with action and a soundtrack that
pops with robust sci-fi shoot-'em-ups...
A mild critique of American militarism
and industrialism.....yes the military are
pure evil........the Pandoran tribespeople
are nature-loving, eco-harmonious, wise
Braveheart smurf warriors…….Received
nominations for the Critics' Choice Awards
of the Broadcast Film Critics Association &
on and on go the recommendations for the
best this and that and everything else. What
do you think of all this Joseph Campbell???
You said we all have to work our own myth(1)
in our pentapolar, multicultural-dimensional
world with endless phantoms of our wrongly
informed imagination, with our tangled fears,
our pundits of error, ill-equipped to interpret
the social commotion tearing our world apart
and at play on planetizing-globalizing Earth.(2)
Part 4:
(1) If readers google Joseph Campbell they can find some contemporary insights in his many volumes of analysis and his comments on the individualized myth that Campbell says we all have to work out in our postmodern world.
(2)The Prophet-Founder of the Bahá'í Faith, Bahá'u'lláh, has been presented as an avatar in India beginning, arguably, in the 1960s. There were only 1000 Baha’is in India in 1960 and now 2 million(circa). Baha’u’llah has been associated in the Bahá'í teaching initiatives with the Kalki avatar who, according to a major Hindu holy text, will appear at the end of the kali yuga, one of the four main stages of history, for the purpose of reestablishing an era of righteousness.
There are many examples of what one might call a cross-cultural messianism at the core of the Bahá'í teachings. This applies in India and in/to many other countries and religious communities. This approach has included: (a) emphasizing the figures of Buddha and Krishna as past Manifestations of God or avatars; ( making references to Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita, © the substitution of Sanskrit-based terminology for Arabic and Persian terms where possible; for example, Bhagavan Baha for Bahá'u'lláh, (d) the incorporation in both Bahá'í song and literature of Hindu holy spots, hero-figures and poetic images and (e) using heavily Sanskritized-Hindi translations of Baha'i scriptures and prayers.
Part 5:
Footnote: For an excellent analysis of James Cameron’s films and especially Avatar go to the following link and my quotes below:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/25/the-wizard/
Cameron’s real attraction, as a writer and a director, has always been for the technologies that turn humans into super-humans. However “primitive” they have seemed to some critics, the Na’vi—with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself—are the ultimate expression of his career-long striving to make flesh mechanical.
The problem here is not a patronizingly clichéd representation of an ostensibly primitive people; the problem is the movie’s intellectually incoherent portrayal of its fictional heroes as both admirably pre-civilized and admirably hyper-civilized, as a-technological and highly technologized. Avatar ‘s desire to have its anthropological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply un-self-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself.
Cameron’s films depend for their effects—none more than Avatar—on the most sophisticated technologies available. Cameron tells himself that the technology that is the sine qua non of his technique isn’t as important as people think. In fact what makes Avatar special is the “human interest” story particularly the love story. But there is a large flaw in Avatar—one that’s connected to Cameron’s ambivalence about the relationship between technology and humanity.
The message of what is now James Cameron’s most popular movie thus far, and the biggest-grossing movie in history—like the message of so much else in mass culture just now—is, by contrast, that “reality” is dispensable altogether; or, at the very least, whatever you care to make of it, provided you have the right gadgets. In this fantasy of a lusciously colourful trip over the rainbow, you don’t have to wake up. There’s no need to go back home to the grey world. If you are really lucky you can stay immersed in the wonders of modern technology with the end of effort and the triumph of sensation. Whatever its futuristic setting, and whatever its debt to the past, Avatar is very much a movie for our time.
Ron Price
5/4/'10 to 24/1/'15.