Film Making Groundbreaking or Just Perfect Fits

Tree of Life: New Age Seminal Film

Well into the second century of the fictionalized, narrative films, groundbreaking ideas materialized in seminal masterpieces of the film genre are not easy to come by. A list of these usually ends up with 2009, when Avatar was released. "The Tree of Life" is an out of the ordinary film that exceeds the category of "pretentious" artsy, intellectual films that nobody understand, but many are willing to watch only to brag about having seen. The film cannot be qualified as "seminal" because it does not necessarily bring new techniques or ways to express in this art form on the table, but it is definitely representative of the film in this day and age.

During the last decade, more and more artistic films from the big budget realm have been noted to take more and more serious note, even those hat announce themselves "comedies." The film industry seemed to have started to be dominated by the drama of a good portion of the developed world: loosing faith and never being able to replace it with something valid. Anyone who will take a critical look at the film industry in the second decade of the twenty-first century will easily notice that even Hollywood blockbusters kneeled to the more and more taunting drama of the postmodern human being: the impossibility to answer the question "why." "

There is hardly a blockbuster or art film made during the last ten years that does not deal at some point in its plot with the struggle of the post-modern human to find its place in this universe or to make sense of it. This is in terms of the content. In terms of technical development, the achievements in the film realm during the last decade or so far and wide reaching that there seems to be harder and harder to come up with something truly "new." As Brad Pitt, the actor playing the father figure was saying in an interview: in technical terms one could say that the film makers were actually looking for what is usually considered a mistake in the film industry in order to "perfect" it. The "perfection of mistakes" as Pitt calls it is not necessarily entirely new, since Woody Allen already successfully dealt with this type of approach in his numerous films, but it is an innovative way of introducing it into a narrative film. Thus, the viewer is many times tempted to wonder if there is a fictional film or a documentary presented on the screen. The fact that images related to the origins of the universe, the earth and life on earth are introduced into it, ads to the innovative form of approach. Dialogues are sparse, but the director is brilliant in "perfecting" the mistakes of the acting. Nothing seems too be left untouched, even the smallest detail: a small child who is clearly incapable of "acting" is surprised at the perfect moment: his gaze is saying exactly what the scene is about.