Category: artmaking

laconic

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The screenplay for the film Lost in Translation (2003) was only 75 pages.

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Lost in Translation is one of my favorite films. Typically, feature length screenplays are 90 to 120 pages.

Many of my favorite directors use few words in their films: R. Bresson, A. Tarkovsky, E. Rohmer, T. Malick.

I love great dialogue, but sometimes I prefer films with little or no talking. Many of my favorite scenes are ones that are purely visual, relying on the moving image to tell the story. Relying on dialogue to tell the story is sometimes just laziness.

The screenplay I’m currently working on is 92 pages and will probably increase to around 95 pages. I was worried I didn’t write enough, but now I think it’s fine, even a bit long.

Elliptical Editing in Vagabond

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Back in 2008 I wrote a little post on Agnes Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985), or Vagabond. Recently David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson put together a video short on Elliptical Editing, and they used Varda’s film as the example. Bordwell and Thomspon have been important in my own thinking about film.

Elliptical editing is one relatively common characteristic of what we might call “art films” that distinguish them from more traditional or “classical” films. I find it’s often a matter of taste; some love this kind of storytelling and some are annoyed by it. I love it. But one can also find elliptical editing in any genre; it just depends on the needs of the filmmaker.

>SX-70 (1972)

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One of the greatest inventions of the 20th century in a promotional film by two of the most important designers.
Directed by
Charles Eames
Ray Eames
Writing credits
Charles Eames
Ray Eames
Produced by
Charles Eames
Ray Eames
Original Music by
Elmer Bernstein

>Tuesday 3:00 PM Jean-Luc Godard…

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From 1968 to 1973, [Jean-Luc Godard] stated repeatedly that he was working collectively. He was never tied to a party or a Maoist group, although the politics evidenced in his films seem loosely “Maoist.” For about three years he drastically reduced the technical complexity and expense of his filming, lab work, compositions, and sound mix. Partly he wanted to demonstrate that anyone could and should make films. He did not concern himself with creating a parallel distribution circuit. He said most political films were badly made, so the contemporary political filmmakers had a twofold task. They had to find new connections, new relations between sound and image. And they should use film as a blackboard on which to write analyses of socio-economic situations. Godard rejected films, especially political ones, based on feeling. People, he said, had to be led to analyze their place in history.

1968: Godard films some events…
(Photo by Serge Hambourg, Hood Museum of Art)

1972: Jean-Luc speaks on intellectuals making films for the oppressed…

Are not these questions still relevant today? Possibly today there are more alternative voices being committed to various media because the means of production (e.g. ultra-lightweight HD cameras and laptop editing) and the means of distribution (e.g. the Internet) make it possible to do so. However, the questions facing media producers have not significantly changed. As Godard states, making a film “in the name of…” comes with a host of issues that, though intentions are good, may sabotage from within and without the film and its message. In the U.S. we are less likely to call filmmakers “intellectuals.” Certainly, U.S. filmmakers may not be intellectuals to the same degree (or as obviously so) as those in France once were. On the other hand, anyone who actively seeks to understand the world beyond the given and controlled ideological constructs we all inherit should be called an intellectual. Many social documentary filmmakers, it could be argued, fall into that category.

There is a trap, however, for contemporary would-be revolutionaries (filmmakers or otherwise) to borrow from the past what should be left in the past. The struggles of the 1960s (the period from 1956 to 1974) are inspiring and worth studying, but today’s struggles must be dealt with directly and not through a process of memory and hagiography. Today’s issues require their own terms. On the other hand, it is worth noting that (probably) all revolutions/reformations start from a re-examination and re-interpretation of the past – in particular the primary documents of the past.

In 1972 Godard had just completed Tout va bien. The interview above was made in relation to the film. Here is the “supermarket scene” from the film:

On a side note, doesn’t Godard (in the interview clip above) look like a slightly crazed hipster? I mean it’s apparent he just had a double cappuccino before the interview and afterward will ride away on his fixed gear. Also, is that a red bathrobe he is wearing? Marxist morning dress? Leftist lounge wear?

*From Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 51-58 copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1983, 200. This is a great article on Godard’s movement from his Nouvelle Vague and more popular period of 1960-1968 to his more overtly political and less popular (but maybe more interesting) period of 1968-1973. Note: Julia Lesage was my thesis committee chair for my MA.

Chinatown and the Rule of Thirds

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Many films are beautifully shot. Few, though, are as consistently well composed as Chinatown (1974)*. Shot in Panavision (anamorphic) format with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio the somewhat extreme rectangular image would seem to offer significant challenges to effective image composition. As I was pondering this challenge I was struck by how much I loved the images in Chinatown, which I just watched again the other day. That’s when I went back to basics and considered that even with widescreen images there are still fundamentals of composition at play. In this case I figured I would grab a few images from the film and apply the Rule of Thirds to each image.

The Rule of Thirds is simply as follows:

Divide the image into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, then put the focus of the image either one third across (from either side) or one third up or down the screen. Those lines, and the points at which they intersect, are the strongest invisible forces in an image.

In Chinatown the images are constructed around those lines and intersecting points. By doing this the aspect ratio becomes a relatively mute point as the human brain automatically takes in the whole image, mentally divides the image into thirds, and finds pleasure as key visual elements are constructed around those thirds. Of course, deviation from the power of the thirds creates visual tension, which is an additional tool in the filmmaker’s toolbox.

Chinatown was shot by John A. Alonzo. Here are the images from film (I, of course, added the white lines):

This is a simple process of analysis. More involving would be to examine how the rule applies to changing composition withing shots as they are re-framed or the actors move about. One thing I noticed was that all the extreme close-ups put the object of focus directly in the center of the middle square. Placing visual elements along the “third lines” was reserved for medium shots and long shots. Finally, the rule of thirds does not guarantee that an image will be good, or work well for a particular scene. However, fundamentals are fundamentals. Without them one will not only have difficulty maintaining a consistent quality, but one cannot truly “break the rules.” The irony is that fundamentals are what allow filmmakers to innovate and stay fresh.

* This is my opinion, of course, but there is a quality in the film’s imagery that is truly wonderful and yet difficult to pin down.