THX1138

Put my name down a year or more back to be notified by Amazon when/if the dvd of THX1138 came out. Meanwhile I put up with the videotape, but the film’s visual aesthetics are best appreciated on a hi-quality screen. Despite being the first film by the instigator of the Star Wars franchise, it’s relatively little known. A father of one of Amy’s friends who’s an avid Star Wars fan said he’d be interested to see it, but was told by somebody else sniffily that it was very slow and boring. This latter person had a Phd in Fine Art, but that evidently don’t mean nothing. Lord, lord. The plot is pretty minimal, but THX1138 is a stunning sonic/visual tone poem, the likes of which I’ve only really seen in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky (at least in terms of narrative film). Necessity really was the mother of invention in this case – much was made of a relatively limited budget. What a crying shame that George Lucas went on to Star Wars, etc. Perhaps now he’s completed the prequel trilogy he’ll have the courage to return to this sort of filmmaking as he states in a recent Wired article. This DVD is the director’s cut which means he’s added a number of scenes which are clearly not of the original film. These amount to superfluous meddling, but don’t thankfully spoil the film.

Addendum 1: The 2nd DVD is, as usual, not really worth watching except for the overly keen, but it does include Lucas’s first film, a one minute short made for film school and it’s absolutely blinding.

Addendum 2: I referred above to the lack of plot and had the thought that this very paucity allows the film’s aesthetics to become effectively freefloating. Narrative development becomes almost superfluous in a way comparable perhaps to Minimalism or Techno’s jettisoning of melody.