“None of the films I’ve done was designed for a mass audience, except for Indiana Jones.”

George Lucas belongs to the first cadet generation of American film directors: they did not rise through the ranks like their predecessors of the classic Hollywood period but entered the profession at officer level following academic training. They were all – Lucas more than most – very conscious of their artist status and vocation. For Lucas and most of his crop of colleagues the sense of vocation did not clash with the honour of profession; for others, it sometimes did. Whatever their attitude may have been, however, these young blades grew up on a diet of European art cinema and European and American experimental film. They were taught to see their art – for that is what they were preparing to make – within the larger context of modern culture: alongside and equal to modern painting and literature, avant-garde music, experimental theatre, architecture… Experimental was the key word.

Anyone familiar with Lucas’ student work will be aware of his deep interest in exploring the abstract qualities of visuals and sound. He followed closely the work of young independent filmmakers in San Francisco and the West Coast: Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, Jordan Belson. (If you look at the still images from Belson’s Allures, you will recognise on the left, the interior of the galactic Senate, and on the right, the chute down which Luke fell when he refused Vader’s offer to join him in overthrowing the Emperor and taking over the galaxy in The Empire Strikes Back.) One could also mention Norman McLaren and Arthur Lipsett. These influences informed Lucas’ excellent, award-winning 15-minute short, Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB which later, financed by Coppola’s Zoetrope outfit, expanded into the young director’s first feature. To see the original short – and you should – please visit video.google.com and see how almost every shot in this remarkable little film has its echo in Star Wars. Listen to the sounds: you have heard them before. They are the sounds of the Empire.

"My films operate like silent movies," Lucas explains in an unused portion of an interview for a documentary on editing called Edgecodes.com. "The music and the visuals are where the story's being told. It's one of the reasons the films can be understood by such a wide range of age groups and cultural groups. I started out doing visual films - tone poems - and I move very much in that direction. I still have the actors doing their bit, and there's still dialog giving you key information. But if you don't have that information, it still works." (From Wired online)

With the above in mind, it is not unreasonable to propose that Lucas, an aware artist and, as such, mythmaker elect to the global community according to his mentor Joseph Campbell, made Star Wars as an artistic experiment on a grand scale, not because grand scales were his preference, but because immensity of scope lay in the very nature of such an experiment. Star Wars were arguably the first high concept film series. What if one decided not to limit innovation to visual, audible and narrative elements of a film, since any film amounts to so much more? Even the humblest, most obscure cinematic experiment shown under the vaults of an underground cine-club needs apparatus in order to be made (a camera of some kind – or, these days, a mobile phone); yet different apparatus (if only a laptop) in order to be edited into the desired form; people to make it; people to watch it and a space where making and watching can be done. All of the above needs money to be spent, and the means to earn the said money. Calculations must be made. The prospective audience must be informed of the film’s existence. Why not be mega-radical and experiment with all these elements in the same way as one would with the visuals or the sound? If you then decide to include the box office among the elements of a film as a work of art and extend your experimenting accordingly, you will have created high concept as a form of experimental cinema. In a word, you get Star Wars.

Conceptualism, an art movement started by Marcel Duchamp and his Fountain (1917), broached the question of what constituted a work of art: some inherent quality in the work itself, or the artist’s decision that it was one. Indeed, who but the artist could make that decision without imposing (potentially invalid) criteria of distinction upon the work? Few serious critics would challenge the now generally accepted answer that the decision is artist’s and artist’s alone, although such a conclusion does rest on the assumption that an artist is an artist by self-determination.

The crucial concept here is work in its sense of wilful and purposeful human intervention in the given natural state of affairs. Duchamp did not dispute that work of some kind was indeed required for an object to become art; he merely pointed out that the required work could, without any damage to the logic of the argument, be reduced to the artist’s decision. An artist could take a ready-made object, such as the urinal Duchamp used for his Fountain, and rightfully call it a work of art. But would Duchamp’s experiment have worked if the urinal had stayed in its original position, inside the public toilet? Would the artist’s decision to call it art have been enough? Probably, on condition that the artist drew a chalk line around it or made some other visible intervention: on condition, in other words, that he gave it boundary. By the same token, people would have had to have visited the toilet to see it, which would have transformed the toilet into an art gallery. The readymade would have expanded to include the toilet, in which case, perhaps, a visible boundary would not be necessary save for one reason only: – to prevent the readymade swallowing the entire universe! A work of art, then, is defined (but not conditioned!) by its boundary, be that boundary physical or conceptual.

Star Wars, which uses, among other things, time – our personal time – and other extra-theatrical elements as ready-mades akin to Duchamp’s urinal, do not have a boundary (the book shows exactly how this has been achieved). A work of art without a boundary, however, must include the entire universe.

Why should the above not be true for any high concept series, one may ask. The answer is simple enough: the absence of artistic decision, which is the existential condition of a work of art.

What Star Wars do do is stalk popular entertainment. In the book, in the section on Magic Traditions: Castaneda, we shall try to explain what that means.