While perusing through the table of contents of Youngblood's Expanded Cinema, the word "Mythopoeia" caught my eye. The word seemed familiar to me, but I couldn't recall its meaning. As I did a quick google search, I discovered that the term represented a modern genre of film in which the author creates a mythological fiction. J.R.R. Tolkien, a favorite author of mine, even wrote a poem entitled "Mythopoeia" to defend creative myth making, as in his famous Lord of the Rings trilogy.
But how exactly did mythopoeia come to exist? Youngbood's chapter on the subject examines the three general purposes of cinema that have generally existed: fiction, documentary, and cinéma-vérité. I will not go through and define these terms, as that would just practically be copying and pasting from the article. However, I will say that each of these purposes represent a level of reality being portrayed in a given film - cinéma-vérité being the most real, with no interaction between camera and the subject being filmed, and fiction being the most, well, made up and contrived.
Just as every other art form (music, theatre, dance, etc) has divided into genres, then subgenres, and even beyond, film makers went beyond the three above described purposes of cinema, and began to mix and match different features. Of this came mythopoeia, a fictional story, world, language, etc that references the artist's reality. As Youngblood puts it, "it is a documentary of the artist's perception."
After reading this chapter, I've been inspired to binge watch the LOTR film trilogy this upcoming weekend. Thanks...
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