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Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

The earnest faith of a storyteller

Ang Lee, the two-time Academy Award-winning director, has noted that we should never underestimate the power of storytelling. Indeed, as a storyteller, Lee has shown through his films the potential of stories to connect people, to heal wounds, to drive change, and to reveal more about ourselves and the world. In particular, Lee has harnessed new technology for storytelling in movies such as Life of Pi (2012) and his upcoming feature film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (to be released on 11 November, 2016). It is therefore not surprising that Lee received the International Honor for Excellence Award—the highest honor given by the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC)—during the IBC Awards ceremony in Amsterdam this September. According to IBC CEO Michael Crimp, the award “goes to an individual who has made a significant and valuable contribution to the movie industry, combining technology with creativity to achieve remarkable ends.” Previous winners of this honor include James Cameron, who directed Avatar, and Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings series and The Hobbit films.

Lee’s 3-D, high-frame rate (HFR) film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk premiered at the 2016 New York Film Festival and will be released by Sony in November. The film, adapted from Ben Fountain’s novel, is about an American war hero who embarks on a victory tour with his squad that includes a halftime show at a Thanksgiving Day football game. In this film, Lee and cinematographer John Toll used a 120-frame rate in an attempt to capture the soldier’s memories of his wartime experiences. The standard frame rate for movies is 24-frame rate per second or “FPS,” but directors sometimes depart from the standard for special purposes. However, this practice will change the nature of the image. For example, Peter Jackson previously experimented with a 48-frame rate, a technique known as “high frame rate,” in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012).

Nevertheless, critics such as Richard Corliss (Time magazine) and Scott Foundas (Village Voice) complained that the look of The Hobbit resembled that of video games or high-definition television. This dissatisfaction is mostly due to the fact that the sterile hyperrealism and deadly coldness of HFR’s high definition image disrupts the diegetic realism of normal cinematography. Although ultra-realism has aroused criticism among The Hobbit’s fans and critics, in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ang Lee appears to have delved deep into this technology in order to show the intensity of war and its emotional impact on his characters. As New York Film Festival Director, Kent Jones, said in a statement that, “Ang Lee has always gone deep into the nuances of the emotions between his characters, and that’s exactly what drove him to push cinema technology to new levels. It’s all about the faces, the smallest emotional shifts.”

The suspension of disbelief is often considered as an essential part of storytelling.

In this regard, one cannot help thinking of Lee’s earlier war film, Ride With The Devil (1999). By going beyond the dualisms associated with the American South, the film was an exception to the Civil War genre. This time, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk can be considered as another exception to customary procedure, as Lee uses digital technology to experiment and play with “suspension of disbelief” of his viewers. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk will allow us to see whether Lee is able to successfully engage his audiences in the “suspension of disbelief” with this new technology. The suspension of disbelief is often considered as an essential part of storytelling. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and literary critic, described the implicit contract in storytelling and aesthetic illusion as “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

Like any creative endeavor, film is only successful to the extent that the audience offers this willing suspension. It is part of an unspoken agreement between a filmmaker and his/her viewers. Over the course of time, however, the adoption of digital technology has somewhat destabilized the “indexical” faith that spectators invested in the credibility of the image in relation to an imagined referent.

By presenting in ultra-realistic ways the realities of war and peace through a war hero’s eyes, Lee has put the issue of “faith,” the implicit contract between filmmaker and viewers, into question. Lee is likely to continue to use technological developments to push the limits of viewers’ deep-rooted knowledge about photographic image as well as cinematic language for larger purposes. Will Lee use this ultra-realistic technology to endorse or question the type of nationalist belief and storytelling that a drama of courage and heroism generally entails?

The film will give us a unique platform to understand and evaluate Lee’s earnest faith in creativity and storytelling.

Featured image credit: Screenshot of a scene from Ang Lee’s ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’. Fair Use via Sony/Tristar.

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