I have a thousand things I want to write and no time or energy to write them properly, so I have to compromise and write some of them, improperly. This is a recurring thought I’ve had, but it keeps slipping away from me. I seem to need to perform an Inception-style multi-layered heist to rediscover it, but by the time I get there I’m usually too tired to do much with it. And the next day when I wake up, it’s gone, and I have to start all over again.
Today I want to talk about something that came up mid-conversation with a friend yesterday, a sort of nerding-out about certain elements in the history of cinema. I want to talk about things like time travel plots and multiverses, but let’s start roughly at the beginning. The earliest proto-films were single-take, single-camera sequences– mostly due to technical limitations– but still, watch The Great Train Robbery (1903). It’s a 10-minute long film, and was considered innovative for its time. I count a total of 14 shots in the whole film, some of the lasting over a minute long, with the cameras remaining mostly fixed with some slight panning. There are no closeups, though there are some variations in the ‘dimension’ of the action to keep things interesting. As I rewatch it, I find myself reminded of video games like The Prince of Persia (1989), where the ‘camera’ is locked steady and you move from one scene to the next only when you cross the frame of the screen.
Over time, films became more complex and sophisticated– and the story of how this happened is itself far more complex than I can tell, or even fully understand myself. I find myself at a crossroads, wanting to contrast the history of filmmaking with the history of storytelling, and point out how different audiences have different tolerances for different levels of sophistication. Let me switch up to talking about one of the oldest written stories we have on record, The Eloquent Peasant, composed almost 4000 years ago in Ancient Egypt. I wrote a twitter thread retelling it, and I’ll repost it here:
visakanv’s retelling of The Eloquent Peasant:
We begin with our boi Khun-Anup, a poor peasant just tryna sell his wares. To get to the market he has to pass through land that’s owned by nobles. Ultimately i believe the land is owned by the pharaoh, but it’s administrated by the high steward Rensi, who in turn lets it be run by the local goon Nemtynakht… what we have here is a ~4000yo matryoshka of bureaucracy.
So anyway. the local goon Nemtynakht is a corrupt mf and decides to rob our boi Khun-Anup. he lays out a cloth across the narrow path, which is in between a river and the goon’s private fields of barley. Khun-Anup is like, “Please sir, I can’t move, I don’t wanna trample your cloth.”
While they’re arguing about this, Khun-Anup’s donkey happily takes a chomp of Nemtyanakht’s barley. The goon Nemtyanakht immediately uses this as a pretext to seize our boi’s goods. and the donkey. Khun-Anup cries out at this injustice, and Nemtyankht retaliates by beating him.
For 10 days, Khun-Anup pleads with Nemtyanakht and receives only mockery and beatings. He decides to go up the chain-of-command to the noble Rensi, who marvels at Khun-Anup’s eloquence in telling his story. Rensi brings the story to his fellow magistrates but they’re like, “lol, this is a peasant vs landowner debate, who gives a shit? fuck him.”
Khun-Anup however has been both persistent and eloquent, and so… Rensi is persuaded to escalate the matter to the Pharaoh. Now, pharaohs are famously bored fellows, because for all that pomp and ceremony and orgies and stuff, they basically have to sit and listen to daily standups about grain and other tedious administrative legal matters. So when the pharaoh hears about an eloquent peasant, He’s like “Waow! What a great speech! What a great story! Keep him alive… but i wanna hear more, lol, so don’t resolve his case too quickly. just… keep him yapping. and write it down. so i can read these cool peasant stories.”
Our poor boy Khun-Anup yaps for like another 9 days but receives no justice. Finally he threatens suicide and insults the noble Rensi. Rensi first has him beaten for this insult, but then decides to resolve matters and return him his goods and donkey. And as a bonus… he’s also given all of Nemtyanakht’s property, effectively swapping Khun-anup and Nemtyankht’s fortunes and status in society. Justice prevails!! And so you see, kiddies, it pays to be good at yapping. And to be very, very goddamn persistent in the face of bureaucracy. The end.
</end retelling>
I like this story for a bunch of reasons. one, it’s so OLD and yet all the characters are so recognizable. We have our poor persistent wordcel protagonist. We have the corrupt goon. and the nobleman and the pharaoh are both sorta ambiguous. they dont reallyyy care lol
two, i’m amused that the goon actually setup this trap for the peasant to fall into, as opposed to robbing him in a more upfront manner. i find it kinda surprisingly complex, and it’s interesting to consider what the storytellers’ intent there might be.
three, i feel like there’s some meta-commentary embedded in the ‘keep him yapping’ aspect– it’s also similar to people telling scheherazade’s story (1001 Nights). i’m also thinking of Outkast’s “yall don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance” – the professional yapper’s lament
four, historically this is a particularly cool bc it touches on peasant life rather than just pharaohs and nobles, and it hints at the wider culture’s ideals of justice and fairness and so on. 4000 years ago there was already the idea that you could talk your way out of trouble
five- i left out khun-anup’s actual eloquent speeches, you can look them up! in a way this whole story is really a frame story for these speeches, which is really clever. i think this was basically the folk wisdom about the good morals of the time