Beyond the Frame

My trouble is that I try to cover a part entirely. When you do...

Tue, 29 May 2012 16:30:47 -0400

My trouble is that I try to cover a part entirely. When you do there’s the danger that the patron will leave the theatre feeling that you are so perfectly suited to the character he has just seen that he can’t imagine you in any other part. (…) Mothers with children ran from me in the street. Terrible letters came to me. Letters came from strange people; people who I never believed lived in the world; depraved and disturbed minds, thinking they saw in me the perfect companion, a fellow psychopathic. A success can be too great, I tell you.

~ Peter Lorre modestly discussing his role in Fritz Lang’s M (1931)

(via shrbr)

The Key to Success in Filmmaking

Tue, 29 May 2012 13:55:16 -0400

While this article in Forbes on Why Immigrants Make Better Entrepreneurs is a bit of pulp, it’s a topic that generates a lot of casual speculation on why some people get a “big break” and others don’t. The article describes an immigrant, Christian Gheorghe, that was willing to take any job - hauling plywood, driving limos - while simultaneously improving on his craft and chatting up everyone that crossed his path. His life essentially changed the day that Andrew Saxe entered Gheorghe’s limo. Saxe needed help programming and Gheorghe had the skill set and the time to oblige. Saxe Marketing was ultimately sold for $30 million to another firm in 1997. Gheorghe went on to use his cash windfall to achieve even greater success in Silicon Valley.

The key point here (and one that the article overlooks) is that success is never achieved on your own. Even if you’re an immigrant. It’s always a combination of opportunity and preparedness. Assuming equal parts hard work and diligence, the division between those that achieve and those who do not is drawn along the line of opportunity. People in filmmaking who have not achieved their goals in spite of their hard work often see the absence of a Christian Gheorghe-like serendipitous encounter. Reasonably so, almost everything in this industry happens because of who you know; we can’t put our resumé on LinkedIn, list 10 years of experience, and get a job directing, producing, or editing feature films. If you meet the right person or you’re born into the right family, you have a chance. Anything short of that, you don’t. Not even Charlie Chaplin, who came from a dirt-poor family in London, made movies on his own.

The maddening randomness is almost embittering. But the honest-to-God truth is that none of this matters. If you keep putting yourself out there, if you keep pushing your limits, if you keep working for/with people you like, and if you keep improving your craft, you improve the odds of getting that Christian Gheorghe break. If you never get it? Who cares. At least you’re doing something you love and you’re living a full life. The only real drag is that if you never get a break, you’ll have to quit someday - either by force of nature or fact of finance. But we’re all in this for the ride, not the result; we all know how this story ultimately ends and it ends the same way for everyone. Let go, enjoy it, and make movies while you still can.

~ü

An actual comment card from a test screening of David...

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:42:35 -0400

An actual comment card from a test screening of David Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME.

~ criterioncollection

(One of my favorite films. ~ü)

"Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:06:41 -0400

“Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they’re not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow. The building is a thin-walled set, the sunlight is a Xenon, and the traffic noise is supplied by the sound designers. It’s all illusion, but the prize goes to those who make the fantasy the most real, the most visceral, the most involving. This sensation of truthfulness is vastly enhanced by the stereoscopic illusion.”

- ~ James Cameron in 2008

Editing, Producing, and Directing:

Mon, 07 May 2012 15:43:19 -0400

In response to my post Editing With Intention, Rob at York University wrote:

I just returned from a masterclass with Joe Walker editor of SteveMcQueen’s Hunger + Shame. His points matched closely with what you say. He explained how McQueen shoots very little (and in fact hates the word) coverage forcing him as an editor to hold on shots. Ultimately this is good because it allows you to pinpoint what is really important in the scene + question what the audience has to see, ie. do we REALLY need to see character A when he talks? Directing can force pace.

The rest of Rob’s experience, which is posted here, is an interesting recap on how much impact the director’s decisions in production have on what is possible in post-production. This might seem obvious, but in the case of a director/editor relationship like Steven Spielberg and Verna Fields, Verna exerted quite a bit of power and influence on a film like Jaws because Spielberg was able to shoot so much footage.

There is, of course, not right way of doing things, but shooting more footage (and spending more money in turn) will give you much more flexibility in post-production. Now that we’re talking time and money, the producer will inevitably weigh in with their thoughts on how the film should be made. In the end, people often associate a movie and the term ‘filmmaker’ with a director. Depending on the flick, this may or may not be the case.

~ü

"Identify your own obsessions, then figure out how to make them interesting to other people."

Sat, 05 May 2012 12:59:00 -0400

“Identify your own obsessions, then figure out how to make them interesting to other people.”

- ~ ScreenwritingTips

"Dear Hitch, In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the..."

Fri, 04 May 2012 17:02:36 -0400

“

Dear Hitch,

In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train and your failure to make any comment on it, and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay — for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity — in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script. I could understand your finding fault with my script in this or that way, thinking that such and such a scene was too long or such and such a mechanism was too awkward. I could understand you changing you mind about the things you specifically wanted, because some of such changes might have been imposed on you from without. What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write — the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera. Of course you must have had your reasons but, to use a phrase once coined by Max Beerbohm, it would take a ‘far less brilliant mind than mine’ to guess what they were.

Regardless of whether or not my name appears on the screen among the credits, I’m not afraid that anybody will think I wrote this stuff. They’ll know damn well I didn’t. I shouldn’t have minded in the least if you had produced a better script — believe me, I shouldn’t. But if you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me in the first place? What a waste of money! What a waste of time! It’s no answer to say that I was well paid. Nobody can be adequately paid for wasting his time.

Raymond Chandler

”

- ~ Raymond Chandler to Alfred Hitchcock, Dec. 6, 1950. Published on Letters of Note, brought to my attention by caioamnesiac.

Editing With Intention: After assembling the footage for one of...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:38:21 -0400

Editing With Intention:

After assembling the footage for one of our forthcoming narrative films (currently titled Without. Within.), I was considering ways to approach the actual edit itself. The assembly is an encouraging start. The film flows quickly, nicely. So what am I hoping to get out of the first serious pass? I defer to Walter Murch who effortlessly describes the quality of a good edit:

The underlying principle: Always try to do the most with the least - with the emphasis on try. […] Why? Because you want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience - suggestion is always more effective than exposition. Past a certain point, the more effect you put into wealth of detail, the more you encourage the audience to become spectators rather than participants. The same principle applies to all the various crafts of filmmaking: acting, art direction, photography, music, costume, etc…

So in an attempt to distill this film’s essence I consider what I’m attempting to do in each scene:

Scene 1: I want to show my character’s anxiety based on his loss - a focus on his own, singular pain.
Scene 2: Perspective: my character’s inner-state reflected in the cold outer world.
Scene 3: Anger and harshness that ultimately gives way to the acceptance of impermanence and the beauty of a cherished memory.

My initial thought on how to reflect the first scene’s anxiety is though the use of jump cuts. After trying it, I immediately realized that it wasn’t quite right. Aggressive jump cutting in a film filled with winter solitude felt wrong. I was absolutely not doing the most with the least. I was forcing the issue on a scene where the anxiety is already apparent.

I come back to asking myself how I can do more with less; how can I ask the audience to become a participant rather than a spectator? I immediately realize that I linger on some shots too long. At times I allow the actor to complete an action in a single shot when it’s more powerful to cut to a different shot and allow the audience to fill in the space between. It’s a win-win - I strengthen the pacing while making some cuts more unsettling than others.

~ü

[Image: Schmüdde Without. Within. (2011)]

"It’s not like I have an aversion to my own films, but at a certain point the last thing I want to do..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:09:56 -0400

“It’s not like I have an aversion to my own films, but at a certain point the last thing I want to do is watch my own movies. I just like to put things out there and then walk away. I don’t have my own posters in my house. I don’t even own my own dvds or books that I’ve written. I don’t have anything. You would walk in my house and you wouldn’t see anything that reminds you of me except pictures of myself and my family. I never understood going to director friends’ offices and it’s just covered with their works. It’s like living in your own asshole. I feel like you can get really caught up in some kind of history, or living in the past. I know I put myself into those movies, my ideas, and they exist almost like your children, a child would exist. But there’s something nice about putting them out there, leaving them to their own devices, and just going out there and making up something else new.”

- Harmony Korine

Is It Time To Let Moviegoers Send Texts During A Film? IMAX’s...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 12:14:05 -0400

Is It Time To Let Moviegoers Send Texts During A Film?

IMAX’s Greg Foster seemed to like the idea of relaxing the absolute ban on phone use in theaters. His 17-year-old son “constantly has his phone with him,” he says. “We want them to pay $12 to $14 to come into an auditorium and watch a movie. But they’ve become accustomed to controlling their own existence.” Banning cell phone use may make them “feel a little handcuffed.”

I can’t say that I’m thrilled that we’re at this juncture in filmgoing, but it’s a discussion that needs to be had. First of all, if Greg Foster’s son compulsively checks his phone, it means that his son has little sense of agency - the phone is controlling his existence. That’s the larger issue at play. I don’t think it is a teenage thing either. I have gone to films with fellow filmmakers in their late 20s and have seen them respond to non-urgent texts during a film.

Classical music venues have been facing issues such as these for decades. As the audience ages, they wonder how to bring younger people to listen to pieces by Bach, Mozart, Ligeti, and Glass. They discuss amplification, allowing or encouraging audience participation, and relaxing the dress code.

I suppose I’m not concerned about these issues. The etiquette will work itself out. I know what I like, however. I like to focus on beautiful pieces of music. I love to dive into a great film. I want to engage a piece of art and not concern myself about what I have to do later, who I should be texting etc… In other words, I enjoy handing myself over to something else. I honestly feel bad for those people that can’t relax and go a few hours without checking their phone.

In the end, it’s simply a matter of education and experience. Telling people NOT to do something only encourages it. Showing them the joys of contemplation, focus, and engagement will do more to combat the compulsions of the Distracted Generation more than any rule possibly could.

It reminds me of this book by Eric Siblin, a pop and rock music critic that discovered Bach later in life. Like so many others that are not raised knowing the joy of Bach’s work, once he was formally introduced and really understood how to listen to the music, he was enchanted. So much so that he switched gears entirely and wrote a beautiful biography of this experience called The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece.

This is incredibly common. People ignore Bach because they don’t understand it. People text because it is habitual. If you want people not to text in a theater, simply show them how liberating it can be to free yourself from this compulsion. Rules are made to be broken. Habits are too.

~ü

[Image: The Invisible Cinema designed by Peter Kubelka]

[Quote: David Lieberman, Is It Time To Let Moviegoers Send Texts During A Film?: CinemaCon]

What all of these examples show—other than how the unique...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:36:29 -0400

What all of these examples show—other than how the unique styles of experimental cinema have become embedded in certain filmmakers’ techniques—is how vital it is to challenge the norms or ideas behind “traditional” moviemaking. If it weren’t for the risks of a select group of filmmakers, most directors would still be thumbing through Hollywood’s Rolodex of remake-ready titles.

Friend and fellow Chicago filmmaker Nelson Carvajal bridges the gap between experimental and mainstream in his video essay celebrating Maya Deren. The accompanying text also discusses one of my favorite films, Chris Marker’s La Jetée.

~ü

[Video: Nelson Carvajal Where Experiment Meets the Mainstream]

The person who runs the @popcornflix Twitter account suggested...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:37:00 -0400

The person who runs the @popcornflix Twitter account suggested an alternative, and I believe superior, form of the Indie Triangle.

Pick Two:

Fast + Cheap = Not Good
Fast + Good = Not Cheap
Cheap + Good = Not Fast

~ü

I recently worked on a project with a client that got ahead of...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:06:14 -0400

I recently worked on a project with a client that got ahead of themselves. We spent some money in places that we really shouldn’t have in an effort to get the product out the door faster. When they saw the result, we immediately slowed down in an effort to ensure that we won’t be making any more hasty decisions. In order to explain this, I sent them over the “indie triangle.” The “indie triangle” dictates that you can only pick two.

If you want Quality you either need Time or Money. If you don’t have Time, then Money must solve the problems that you’ll enviably encounter in production. If you don’t have Money, then Time must be the way you solve problems.
If you don’t have Time or Money, you’ll likely not get Quality.

Independent film producers never have to worry about having abundant Time and Money. With rare exception, this does create problems in Hollywood productions. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is the product of actually having too much Time and Money where Quality suffered as a result.

~ü

"There is no honest discussion that can be had about this Hobbit footage without emphasizing the..."

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:44:14 -0400

“

There is no honest discussion that can be had about this Hobbit footage without emphasizing the 48fps presentation. The film was shot this way and will be digitally projected this way, as well as presented in 3D. So what does 48fps movie footage look like as opposed to your usual 24fps theatrical movie experience? In this reporter’s opinion, it looks like live television or hi-def video. And it didn’t look particularly good. Yes, this is shocking, but I was actually let down by the Hobbit footage, as were a number of the other journalists that I spoke with afterward.

It looked like an old Doctor Who episode, or a videotaped BBC TV production. It was as shocking as when The Twilight Zone made the boneheaded decision to switch from film to tape one season, and where perfectly good stories were ruined by that aesthetic. Here, there were incredibly sharp, realistic images where colors seem more vivid and brighter than on film, but the darker scenes were especially murky (and the 3D only dims that image even more). Frankly, it was jarring to see Gandalf, Bilbo or the dwarves in action against CG-created characters or even to move quickly down a rocky passage. The whipping of a camera pan or the blur of movement was unsettling.

”

- ~ Jim Vejvoda after watching 10 minutes of The Hobbit presented at its native 48 fps (rather than the normal 24 fps)

I like making films more than watching them. Who’s with me? ~ü

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:29:25 -0400

I like making films more than watching them. Who’s with me?

~ü

Throughout the mid to late 1970s and upwards, Hiroshi Sugimoto...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:53:21 -0400

Throughout the mid to late 1970s and upwards, Hiroshi Sugimoto packed up a folding 4x5 camera & tripod, surreptitiously entered matinees (and, one can only presume, evening film events) and documented the interior of movie theaters across the United States - invoking a classic procedure borrowed from Conceptual Art. He would open the shutter just before the ‘first light’ hit the screen and close it after the credits finished rolling and before the house lights came on. Using this method he was able to invert the subject/object relationship of the movie theatre and use the film itself to illuminate the proscenium and interior. However - it’s MORE than that, isn’t it? There is also a social and political critique implicit to the gesture. The rendering of a ‘blank’ movie screen carries with it a whole series of alternate implications that are highly relevant to a culture of consumption. The unavoidable allusions of mass social programming and lack of content are implicit in the act. This content, largely unaddressed critically, is what lends the images their incredible power - along with the natural fascination of being made privy to the photography’s divine birthright - allowing us to see the normally invisible - to experience a finite collapse of time.

[Images: Hiroshi Sugimoto]

Hilarious. By the way, there are only two ways to make it in...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:50:00 -0400

Hilarious. By the way, there are only two ways to make it in showbiz:

Be born in it.
Ignore it.

If you ignore it and stick to your convictions, you have a chance of standing out just enough to break in. That is, if the timing is just right.

Striving to be the next Michael Bay isn’t good enough. Michael Bay is already a better Michael Bay than you are.

~ü

(via Check The Gate)

The Newest New Wave

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:59:00 -0400

The Newest New Wave:

Peter Webber opines on the discrepancy between talent and available technology in his latest post:

Film maker Aaron Stewart-Ahn who tweets as @somebadideas (and is a must-follow) touched on this when he tweeted (and I paraphrase) that the average 24-year-old has better tech than Jean Luc Godard and his cameraman Raoul Coutard, but that we don’t see films as brave, funny, entertaining, ambitious or unashamedly intellectual as the ones they made together. The technological advances of that era such as lightweight cameras also liberated the imagination of these film makers and led to the French New Wave. Nowadays there seems to be an overall diminution of ambition, an unfortunate limiting of horizons.

Peter laments the lack of virtuosos on YouTube while ignoring the fact that these are two different audiences. Even in the 1960s, people that went to see Goddard films were engaged and active. YouTube audiences are largely passive. A stronger video community, Vimeo, still has trouble delivering long-form content because of how audiences engage the small screen. However, yielding to what has become idiosyncratic to the medium, there is amazing short form work to be found. Just to help him out, here are my Vimeo Likes. They aren’t all approaching Bresson or Kurosawa but there is some good stuff in here.

To be fair to Peter’s point, we filmmakers are in the shadows of giants. Today’s musicians and artists defer to their mentors too often. Regressive, referential work is pervasive. The plague of the familiar haunts our remixes and our genres. As long as creative-types serve the meme, the sort of pedestrian art will remain the norm.

~ü

Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film. But the Consequences of Going Digital Are Vast, and Troubling

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:18:30 -0400

Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film. But the Consequences of Going Digital Are Vast, and Troubling:

This is the most complete analysis of the issue of going 100% digital from Production to Distribution to Exhibition. Christopher Nolan sums up my issue as a filmmaker:

“The danger comes from filmmakers not asserting their right to choose that format,” Nolan says. “If they stop exercising that choice, it will go away. I tell people, ‘Look, digital isn’t going away.’”

As a filmmaker, I love digital. I just want a choice. Film is a very different practice.

The issue of costly upgrades forced on exhibitors sums up my issue as a film-goer. DCP, the format, is simply not robust enough to last even ten years. Even if an exhibitor can afford to upgrade now, they will have to upgrade again in less than a decade. This is after a little under a century of stable projection costs. We’re going to see independent exhibitors go out of business faster than what happened between 1927 and 1930 (the adoption of talkies).

~ü

Life is but an Oneiric

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:25:46 -0400

Life is but a dream; it’s what you make it

Always try to give; don’t ever take it

~ The Temptations

I like living, breathing, better than working… My art [is] that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it’s sort of constant euphoria.

~ Marcel Duchamp

Row, row, row your boat; Gently down the stream.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily; Life is but a dream.

Part of my disillusion with conventional cinema is how ubiquitous the dull blade of logic is seeded within the narrative. Everything must have a reason. Everything must be explained. Even in something as unique as The Artist, the dream sequence is rationalized, not as a tangible event, but as a pandering metaphor known as an oneiric.

Life is not linear. Life is not rational. The most exciting parts of life consist of not knowing. An artist like Marcel Duchamp or a director like Ingmar Bergman isn’t afraid to approach that within life which is intangible. This is what makes them great - a sense that within their work there is something more.

~ü