Perhaps I'm just wrapped up in the idea of expressionism lately, but the last episode of Battlestar Galactica really got me thinking. We know that Ron Moore has a bit of a taste for non-narrative filmic techniques; the season opened with a very non-linear montage sequence that he reportedly had to fight for in the production meetings. He insisted that their audience is mature enough for it, and his comrades in arms thought they should start in more of a solidly narrative place (Hollywood continuity editing), and then work their way into montage. Thank gods he won that argument because the opening sequence of season three was spectacular. The seemingly non-narrative montage slowly builds into several different narrative threads that all cast light on each other. The sequence communicates an incredible amount of plot detail in an astoundingly beautiful way.
Given the kinds of serious cinema jollies I got from that sequence, you can imagine how joyous I was to watch the Basestar sequences of episode 5, "Torn." Half of the episode takes place on-board on a Cylon Basestar and is edited in a distinctly different style. The scenes are, first, subject to rapid dissolves that leave the plot hanging in time, as it were. Though events happen and time passes, there's no indication of how much time passes between them, and very little sense of how much time they take to occur. The story is focalised through Baltar, as he tries to figure out the Cylon world, so his confusion is our point of view.
In the episode commentary, Moore said that this was kind of a trick, that he couldn't think of a way to dress up the Basestars in such a way that was within budget and would satisfy the audience's curiosity. There's nothing he could have done that would be as fun as the mystery, he said (in so many words), so instead, he made fairly standard, TV-science fiction sets: a room and a couple of hallways. To maintain the mystery, however, he edited it in the style I mentioned already, and he had music made specifically to support the effect. The music is just some classical piano, a sound-alike version of Mozart, but it's notable because it has no sense of rising and falling action, no discernable beginning, middle, and end, no sense that the music could guide you through the story being told. It's amazing how powerful an effect music has on a scene.
But the last piece of the puzzle was a bold-faced exposition from Six, who specifically says that Cylons "project" most of the time. That they can simultaneously work within the fairly mundane confines of their world and project whatever imagined environment they want. To illustrate the point, we briefly see Six's world, a green forest instead of sterile hallways. This leads to a panicked discussion between Baltar and 'Head Six' about whether he's a Cylon, too, since he seems to be able to project into fantasies with her (this dialogue occurs while Baltar and a red-bikini-clad Head Six lounge around on a sun-drenched beach).
But the real point that I'm trying to get to is that the Cylons are expressionist creatures. Their world is somewhat expressionist in cinematic terms; it's a projection (there's that word again!) of their colours and moods into the sets. They're supposedly machines, so the walls are steel-coloured. They're associated with the glowing red eye, so that eye motif is on the walls, too. They're mysterious, so their environment is hard to understand. It's pretty basic set dressing, really, not particularly expressionist, as science fiction goes, but that device is used a lot in sci-fi in general, so it's not unfair to say it's present here, too. The real crux of it, though, is that they specifically do "project" their mental states, their chosen mental state, into the way they see the prefer to see the world. It's realistic only in so far as they see the world in a way that reflects how they "really" feel.
Posted by orion at November 10, 2006 2:00 PM