Film Friday: George Lucas and the Canadian Force

When the National Film Board of Canada released an iPhone application last week, I naturally thought of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Yoda. For some people, trolling through the NFB’s video archives will undoubtedly bring to mind those three famous Canadians.

Or— let me back up.

When young film student George Lucas came across the work of a guy named Arthur Lipsett in the 1960s, he was so energized that he ran the films repeatedly to figure out how they were put together. Lipsett was a young guy himself, working for the NFB with a budget so small that his movies were assembled almost entirely from archival photos, leftover footage, and recorded audio scraps. They’re short—under ten minutes—and they have no story or traditional structure. They just show average Canadians sitting on park benches, walking down sidewalks, waiting for buses, and living their daily lives.

It sounds simple, and yet Lipsett’s editing rhythm and his use of candid audio against those images seem to capture something about modern city life that’s hard to pinpoint. They’re also hypnotic; watching them is like watching a campfire or cracking open a time capsule. His widely studied seven-minute film “Very Nice, Very Nice,” made up mostly of still photos, is humorous at times, but the repeated phrase, “very nice, very nice,” seemingly spoken by a radio announcer, is placed with a hint of irony, blanketing the film with a sense of melancholy. Life is complicated like that.

STILL FROM VERY NICE, VERY NICE

The George Lucas who was inspired by Lipsett’s work went on to make experimental student shorts and the feature film THX-1138. The lines of inspiration aren’t hard to draw. You can see them in American Graffiti, too, not just in the rhythms but in the focus of the story, the fascination with routine.

The Star Wars films, on the other hand, are so different, made by a filmmaker so seemingly disinterested in visual patterns and the textures of (North) American life, that you’d think the spark had left him. But there’s evidence that it remained. In Star Wars, Lucas makes several references to Lipsett’s film 21-87 . (Princess Leia is held in cell 2187, for example.) Although Lucas likely cobbled together the idea of The Force from multiple sources, the word itself is spoken in the middle of 21-87, in the audio clip of a man trying to put into words the indescribable energy that animates humans differently from robots. That force is arguably the same one that Lipsett tried to capture with his films, and the same one that ignited Lucas’ imagination when he saw Lipsett’s work.

Nobody can call George Lucas a failure. The billionaire whose films have affected the world (and its toy industry) in countless ways has cemented his place in the history books far better than if he’d gone the route of an obscure avant-garde filmmaker. In 1997, looking back at his career, Lucas told John Seabrook that he considered Star Wars an artistic statement, too, but he also wondered aloud if he could have made a movie like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, or if he could have shot Apocalypse Now in a documentary style with 16mm film, which was the original plan. “I could have made Koyaanisqatsi, but not Taxi Driver,” he says, weighing his own capabilities.

It’s one thing to look back, to second-guess a blockbuster, but I wonder what Lucas, like many of his cohorts from the ‘70, could do now if he coupled the same creative spark of his youth with his present-day clout and financial security. Wouldn’t it be great if Martin Scorsese stopped trying to win Oscars and went back to making movies like The King of Comedy and Life Lessons (the striking short he made for New York Stories)? Or if Francis Ford Coppola would get the fire back that produced The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather, Part II, and Apocalypse Now back-to-back?

Actually, Coppola, who was a mentor to Lucas all those years ago, may be doing just that. His filmmaking seems reinvigorated. He’s currently driving around Europe with a tiny crew making small movies that he funds himself. The first two, Youth Without Youth and Tetro, are no masterpieces, but they show a welcome scrappiness, an energetic flair for making art, and an older man’s wisdom. Youth Without Youth is so dense with beautiful images and weird ideas that I’ve returned to it several times since I first saw it, and I can’t say the same for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, even though the stories are somewhat similar. One of them has aging on it surface; the other has aging in its bones.

I still hold out hope that Lucas, too, will break free from the shackles that Star Wars has put on him and find similar inspiration, whether it’s spurred on by age, the willingness to dip into a personal fortune, the example of Clint Eastwood—cranking out movies every 18 months or so—or a newfound energy like that of his former mentor. I mostly want to see what kind of movies he’d make, and I want to leave his films—as I haven’t in quite some time—nodding my head and saying, “Very nice, very nice.”