“Obscurity, generally speaking, is a serious literary offense. Simple ideas are often made needlessly difficult, and difficult ideas are often made much more difficult than they need to be. Obscurity has myriad causes, most of them rooted in imprecise thought or lack of consideration for the reader.”
– Bryan Garner Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.)
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
– William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style
I’m going to write about two pieces from the Machinima screening, Ericka Beckman’s 2016 short film Tension Building and Natalie Maximova’s 2021 short film The Edge of the World. I’ll start with Beckman.
The title of this piece is Tension Building, which is wholly inappropriate. The film is composed of individual stills, stitched together to create a moving image so shaky it looks as if the videographer was actually running up and down the stadium bleachers. The piece’s score struggles to recall anything other than cartoonish onomatopoeia.
The purpose of this piece I can only conjecture at (see Garner’s remarks), but whatever it is, Beckman vaguely gestures at the complicity of the spectator in the violence of American Football, invoking rendered images reminiscent of the Colosseum in the process.
Regardless, there is no “tension building” in this piece. There is sound and there is fury, both of which hold little significance and assail the senses for an uncharitable duration of time. Two minutes would have been plenty, eight is egregious.
Natalie Maximova’s The Edge of the World is what Machinima should be. Unlike Tension Building, it makes no claims to be other than what it is, and the subject matter is fascinating. There is nothing obscure about Maximova’s meaning. The piece is a meditation on the boundaries of constructed realities, about reaching them through considerable effort, and being awestruck by their tremendous beauty. Such work invites the viewer to contemplate their own place within worlds both real and imagined. It is profound and does not overstay its welcome.
For those that enjoyed The Edge of the World, I would recommend YouTuber AnyAustin, particularly his recent video Places in Cyberpunk 2077 You Weren’t Meant To Go (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMm4H453Km0).
