There tends to be a fierce snobbery in artistic circles against epic films. Many artists who have little else in common would unite to deny that a blockbuster film can be true art, because it is essentially co-operative; and true art, they would maintain, is the singular expression of a single artistic imagination.
If that's so, the Cistine Chapel is not "art"; nor, indeed, are many of the great sculptures down the ages, on which apprentices toiled under the eye of the master. And of course, cathedrals and great palaces are definitely excluded, because they are not merely co-operative enterprises, but they are also cumulative, the work of many generations of people with no single all-embracing idea.
But "the single, all-embracing" interpretation of art turns it into a purist political tract, a word-perfect manifesto. That's a very egotistical and limiting definition of art. A more useful one is that art is something that is made by human beings, which speaks - as intended - through the senses to the imagination, and continues to do so far beyond the time in which it was created.
Only in this final sense does the film trilogy The Lord of the Rings not (yet) qualify as a work of art. But in time, I believe it will come to be regarded as a very great work of art; actually, I regard it as of the greatest ever triumphs of the human imagination, and though it sounds absurd, I would seriously maintain that the only artistic works with which to compare it are the greatest masterpieces in the world - Chartres, Beethoven's Ninth, Mozart's Requiem, Hamlet, the Brandenberg concertos.
To be sure, unlike these examples (with the exception of Chartres) it is a finished product and not just the text; and moreover, comparing a film with any other art form is like comparing a colour with a sound, a poem with a painting. But there are benchmarks which all creative works must meet before they can be called art, and the primary ones are these: Does it ravish the soul? Does it cause you to ask hitherto unpondered questions? Does it take you into another realm, far beyond the creative powers of your own imagination? By these definitions, the director Peter Jackson has created a true work of art; and in the final part of the trilogy, The Return of the King, he has made an almost perfect filmic masterpiece. I would go so far as say it is one of the greatest ever triumphs of the human imagination.
In part this is because it has woven so many genres seamlessly together. Computer-generated special effects, which were born in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and acquired genre status with Star Wars, have here been harnessed to liberate more classic narrative forms from the limitations of resource, manpower and geography. In a word, these different narrative traditions - the western, the road-movie, the love story, the sagas, the tales of the Arthurian round table, of good versus evil - are otherwise known as "myths".
Tolkein was a conscious legendiser. He drew on myth, and added to it; moreover, he also wrote parables. The enchanting precursor to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, was written in 1937, as the shadows fell. His far darker trilogy appeared in the mid-1950s, after the shadows had fallen. The world now knew about evil. It had journeyed to Mordor; and nothing in the artistic imagination had foreseen the abyss to which the second World War was to take the human species.
Mordor remains real. Mordor is Cambodia in the 1970s, Iraq in the 1980s, Bosnia in the 1990s. The allegories which Tolkein used within his mythic tales precisely half-a-century ago told us of what happens when evil is not opposed. The world was warned, but of course, as always, paid no attention.
Tolkein was a very fine artist, as the enduring popularity of his books testifies. But he was not as fine an artist as Peter Jackson is. The films are mightier by far than the books: indeed, they stand as the greatest achievement in the entire history of cinema. In their moral complexity, in their narrative lucidity, in the breadth of their vision and ambition, in the majesty and detail of their execution, in the strength of their characterisation and in their technical mastery, they have set unprecedented standards, ones which might never be emulated. If there is any justice at the Oscars - and there usually isn't - The Return of the King should sweep the board. But it seems a very European, indeed English film, even though it isn't - it was made in New Zealand - and Hollywood tends to be miserly when it comes to rewarding apparently "foreign" movies (though Harvey Weinstein is a co-producer). That the two male leads, Elijah Wood and Sir Ian McKellen, have not even been nominated for Oscars is quite scandalous. The former is an American who really can speak English English and he is quite stunning as Frodo: subtle, complex, beguiling, and also impossibly beautiful. And Sir Ian is utterly majestic and magisterial in every scene in which he appears.
But there's hardly a category for which the film doesn't merit an Oscar. Certainly, if Peter Jackson doesn't get an Oscar for best director, and his wife Frances Walsh get one for her screenplay, then I'm changing sides over the war in Iraq.
A final word. Do not - DO NOT wait to see this film in video or DVD. This is a cinematic masterpiece, the greatest of all time. PLEASE. See it in a cinema.