Have you ever listened to a piece of music that just held you completely captive? Kept you suspended is a state of... rapture might be too strong of a word, but maybe not. And when the music ends, there's no cerebral dissection of the experience. No breaking down of the music into its constituent components. The experience of listening is the meaning.
I'm for filmmaking, for visual storytelling, that communicates in this way.
I watched Upstream Color for the first time a few days ago. The promise of smart science-fiction, produced and distributed entirely outside of the Hollywood mass-market movie extruder had me more-than-excited to see this film. And it delivered on a lot of that promise.
But it also reignited an internal debate I've grappled with for a while, that revolves around this idea of "film as riddle."
Both Upstream Color and writer/director (and actor, editor, and music composer... hell yeah!) Shane Carruth's first feature Primer come with a built-in assumption that they require figuring-out. That for the film's meaning to be imparted, it must be further unraveled and examined (so much so, that Primer has inspired several fan-produced diagrams - see below).
While it's undeniably empowering for an audience to receive a film as a puzzle to be solved, I can't help but feel this comes at the expense of true and meaningful exchange.
This doesn't preclude a film from speaking in abstraction, however. Quite the opposite. But there's a distinction to be made between films that do so and accept analysis, and those that are beholden to them. One is open, the other impenetrable. I'm thinking of the difference between David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and Christopher Nolan's Inception. Both films explore dream states and layers of reality, but whereas Mulholland Drive is held together by an abstract emotional logic, Inception is a deliberately crafted (and exquisitely so) jigsaw puzzle of narrative wizardry. Mullholland Drive invites you to make sense of its meaning. Inception demands it.
Films are at their best when they engage us as full body experiences, when they speak to both our brains and our guts. It's then that we can disappear into that magical, spellbound state where the experience of watching the film is the meaning itself.