Gang Fang's Blog

“1000 men have 1000 interpretations of the Hamlet.”

1000 viewing of a great piece of art yield 1000 interpretations.

The Great beauty, directed by Paolo Sorrentino and starred by Toni Servillo, is one of the great art. I first fell for its exquisite cinematography and found myself discovering new details every time I watched it.

And now with the growth in my artistry I am deriving a whole new level of meaning: this is a movie ultimately about the struggle between “original nature”, coined by Stephen Nachmanovitch in his book “Free Play”, and “learned nature”. I created the second term to describe a state of ourselves so adopted to the convention of family, society and culture that the set of learned expectations and behaviors becomes our second nature, replacing our “original nature”. For most, this replacement is a given progression of life because societies need it to function (i.e., everyone being in their place and performing at their role for the whole societal machine to work). But for the artists and thinkers, this easy progression is the greatest danger because it is a black hole sucking everything into emptiness, including originality, without which the true creators can’t create.

The monologue of Jep Gambardella at the end of the movie confirmed my interpretation that was gradually developed throughout my current viewing: “there is death, but there is first life. They are both buried in all the mundane blah blah blah, until the sensitive ones realize it is nothing but a trick. Let the story begin.”

If you write, let the story begins. If you sing, let the song begins and if you dance, let the dance begins.

While my interpretation and appreciation of the film evolve, there has been one constant: I feel reassured, when Jep realized after his 65th birthday that he could no longer waste time on things he didn’t want to do, that I still have time in my creative journey, and I am already rejecting a lot of the blah blah blah that I don’t want. Plus, my study of art and the practice of it have entered into a new phase, where I am realizing the importance of creativity, developing a deeper understanding of it and ultimately using it more effectively in my life, my art and science. Now everywhere I look at, the people that stand out the most are those the most creative. I find it baffling that I haven’t realized the importance of creativity until now, given my very open personality, but that also proves that cultural norms are such a gravitational force that a curious and creative person has to fight long and hard to get to a point of self-revelation.

Back to the review of the movie and a final thought: the “original nature” vs. “learned nature” duality and all the other duality are everywhere in our life. I first read about duality in Shunryū Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind when I started graduate study in LA and was completely puzzled by its meaning. But since then I have observed many more that I regard that as an inductive bias of our cognition: just like causality, we use duality to make sense of the world. Even Niels Bohr saw complementarity as a grounding principle in Quantum Mechanics. So it is not only in the macro world but the micro world. I believe the awareness of this is an effective tool in our creative pursuits, since it demands us to seek balances by fusing opposite forces or qualities in our work, which is the most challenging.

At the end, I invite you to watch the trailer of the movie.

I have showed this movie to 3 people that I am close to, they all failed at finishing the 2 hours and 21 minutes. I understand, they are no artists. But if you find this movie enjoyable, that might be a sign of your sensitivity and your ability to see beyond the education given to you.