Two thoughts. One: Sculpture, painting, poetry, composing, playwriting, dance are all usually called "arts". Nevertheless they differ in many ways. The last three are sometimes termed "temporal arts". The argument for this is that they intrinsically entail change and therefore time to "experience". (Granted: A reasonable argument could be made that the first three also take time to experience.)
Robbins was involved in a temporal art. I sometimes think of such arts as comparable to a series of paintings. My son is a movie director. I've watched him on the set as he prepared each new scene, and it seemed not unlike much of the work of a painter -- choosing where to put the cameras, who would be in the picture, what the background is, what lens to use, where the border of the frame should be. (Robbins at least didn't have to choose where the camera should be when directing a stage production, but he did not escape the necessity to choose the lighting, etc.) My point is this: Robbins could, in making the film of WEST SIDE STORY, consume immense amounts of time in rehearsal and set up because he was in a sense creating a hundred paintings. Plus the paintings moved. I've often been awed by the multiplex of detail in a Breughel-vast panoramic visual work. For all that, the details stayed fixed, they didn't have to move. Though narrative, temporal, "arts" demand many gifts similar to those of a painter, it seems to me they also demand some gifts that are intrinsically different from those required in a non-temporal artist. I'm ready to maintain they require a command of more detail, detail in sequence, details changing, moving. (Within literature we see a remote analog in the difference between, say, a New-Yorker-type short story, and a novel. Some storywriters specialize in presenting a portrait of a "situation", of a character in his milieu, where nothing much changes and the point of the story is a sudden "insight". These writers are quite "painterly".) Two: A second inherent difference (always to a degree) between Robbins's task and a that of a non-temporal artist may be what Chris refers to as Robbins's slavery to the audience. One can imagine a sculptor, painter or poet saying, "To hell with its impact on any contemplators, this is the way IT (the work) ought to be." That artist's criterion, his measure of the "success" of his work, is almost always what most of us would call "aesthetic" (various though the notions behind that word may be). Robbins and other directors -- and playwrights, screenwriters, et al -- are aiming for, and measure their success by, their effect on an audience. Such directors and writers almost never summon up the word 'esthetic'. If they don't win over the audience they feel they have failed. (Granted: audiences vary. The stand-up comic is not always rationalizing when he blames his "dying" on a dull audience that night. But if NO audience EVER laughs, it is hard for him to continue believe his routine is any "good". Grieve for the novelist or playwright whose work fails before the audiences of that time, because he is "before his time". There aren't many such, but there are a few, the Van Gogh's and Kafkas and Melvilles.) Of course, a critic might say of certain movies or plays that prosper in their time that they did so because they are "aesthetically right". But if he sat down with the director or writer, the latter would talk only of specific causes and effects, without ever resorting to the allegedly justifying general abstractions the critic, aesthete, or academic might wield. ************** You can't always choose whom you love, but you can choose how to find them. Start with AOL Personals. (http://personals.aol.com/?ncid=emlcntuslove00000002)
