[Thor Joachim Haga]

Good posts!

For me, it isn’t so much the story in AVATAR that’s important. That isn’t original at all, it’s basically just a riff on Pocahontas. Rather, story is just a mechanism through which we can enter a world to explore. Or as Nick put it above:”[Cameron is] selling immersion, not narrative”. The AVATAR films are closer to an amusement park attraction that way, it’s about being engrossed. To achieve this, Cameron constantly oscillates between ‘pulse down’ (action pauses to let you take in the surroundings) and ‘pulse up’ (tightly edited action sequences with lots of kinetic energy). These are very bodily films, to put it that way.

I’ve always been interested in films that communicate more through visuals and sound than narrative (although both obviously exist at the same time). As such, there is actually a link between “arthouse” auteurs like Antonioni or Tarkovsky and Cameron. Like Antonioni’s exploration of SPACE as a character/entity, or Tarkovsky’s exploration of visceral tempo. Although the films are widely different, there are some similar basic ideas that have to do with what film can do as a medium beyond mere storytelling.