On Mon, 2008-02-11 at 14:40 +0100, Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
Alex Hudson home@alexhudson.com wrote:
Look, I've seen street performers do very entertaining things in the street for change, from poetry to plays. That's not a serious alternative to theatre, though.
Why? A lot of "street performances" are very spontaneous and not thoughtful, but I see no reason for generalising this.
It's not about thoughtfulness or preparation; it's simply that it's a different art form in the same medium. I would say the same thing about theatre and film: they're superficially similar, but theatre is not a serious alternative to film (and vice versa).
There's nothing wrong with street performance, but it's only good for certain things: short performances, simple stories. Performing a three-hour play in the street is really the wrong setting; for one thing, people need to sit down, and most people won't spontaneously take three hours out of their plans.
It's the same with film. Short, low-budget films are fine. But film also includes long, complex films like "Ben Hur", "10000 Years BC", "Dr Strangelove", etc., and none of those could be sensibly made on a small budget. Even a "low budget" film like "Crash" (Haggis, not Cronenberg) cost $6.5 million, and even then money was so tight that the director filmed parts of it in his own house and using his own car, and borrowed part of its set from a TV show.
Saying that low budget versions of a similar art form are enough that we don't need the big budget versions is a very sad sentiment indeed. I wouldn't want to lose any of those films I mentioned, or any of the hundreds of other excellent big-budget films that get made every year.
Cheers,
Alex.