Monday, November 5, 2007

A Call to Collaborative Storytelling

I just recently saw a special screening of the movie Juno with my wife. The movie was incredible--real, hilarious, touching, everything I could want.
This morning I was thinking about what goes into creating a movie, and it occurred to me that movies are a form of advanced, collaborative storytelling.
There are so many people telling the same story, creating layers upon layers that congeal into one final work made of many moving parts. There are writers who spell out the story, but then you have directors and others who determine how to tell the written story through the lens. Moreover, you have actors who each have one piece of the story to tell and yet to look deeply into their part is to find an entire subtext to be explored. In the end, all these people come together and impact the world, even if it's just in the way that the masses come willing to shell out nine bucks to the box office, but more often the audience is impacted because they enter in and become one with the story.
This collaborative storytelling made of many moving parts that form a unified whole, which ultimately impacts the world by drawing it into the very story itself--isn't that the true work of the Christian community?

1 comment:

Servant to the Gospel said...

Chris your blogs are always brilliant I finally got a real blog and have posted a bunch of my past work and that essay check it out