Christopher Nolan's conclusion to the "Dark Knight" trilogy has been discussed quite a bit in the press. Rather than re-hashing most of the critical reviews, I want to briefly draw attention to one interesting element of The Dark Knight Rises.
I don't know what other filmmakers do this, but Christopher Nolan makes the unusual and interesting choice to mix aspect ratios in the film.
Briefly: Aspect Ratio is the ratio of the width of the image to its height. Most flat screen TVs nowadays have a 16:9 aspect ratio. Different movies have different aspect ratios, the most popular these days being 1.85:1 and 2.35:1. Typically, a movie is shot and presented in one aspect ratio, from beginning to end.
In TDKR, Nolan (with Cinematographer Wally Pfister) plays the game differently. Some scenes are presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio (a very wide image, often called "scope" for "Cinemascope", which commercialized it), while other scenes are presented in a "taller" 1.44:1 aspect ratio (which is an IMAX aspect ratio).
There's an excellent graphical depiction of the difference between aspect ratios in the film here:
http://www.nolanfans.com/2012/06/11/advanced-tickets-for-the-dark-knight-rises-on-sale/
You'll only see the full IMAX images if you see the film in an IMAX theater. Regular theaters will screen cropped prints that don't preserve the entire IMAX image, since regular screens are shorter than IMAX screens.
I am intrigued by this mixing of aspect ratios, particularly in that it doesn't seem to bother the viewer.
Generally, variation of any technical element in a film, if not done carefully, can be very distracting to the viewer. When the type of film stock changes, it's apparent, and must mean something for the viewer to accept it (see "Traffic"). Before I had heard about Nolan's use of mixed aspect ratios, I would have thought they'd be a terrible idea, distracting the viewer and drawing attention to the physical screen (something good narrative filmmakers fear!)
Now that I've seen the film on an IMAX screen, I've noted that the aspect ratio changes are not only subtle, but almost invisible unless you know to look for them, in the way that a good cut between two shots seems to go entirely unnoticed by most viewers.
In editing, a good cut is one that we don't notice. The editor needs to have a thorough understanding of how it is that we see each shot. Where are we looking? What draws our eyes? A cut takes our eyes from one part of the screen and redirects them to another without our noticing. A bad cut disorients us, and places a new image where we don't expect it to be.
I suspect that Nolan's transitions between 2.35:1 and 1.44:1 happen in moments when those transitions are visually "natural" -- when we go from a close-up to a wide shot, perhaps, or when we cut from an interior to an exterior. I'd have to see the film again (in IMAX) to test this theory.
But the real secret is more basic than that. All the aspect ratio changes are apparent at the bottom of the screen. The top of the image remains entirely consistent throughout the movie. So, when we go from 1.44:1 to 2.35:1, the bottom of the frame appears higher on the screen. When we go the other way, the expanding image pushes the bottom of the frame down towards the bottom of the screen. The "Black Bar" at the bottom of the screen grows and shrinks with the aspect ratio changes, but the top of the screen remains entirely consistent.
There's a concept in cinematography, photography and art called the "rule of thirds". It suggests that we tend to look at the top third of an image first. The framing of a shot, therefore, relies on the important stuff being in or near the top third of the frame. With so much of our attention focused on the top of the frame, it would probably be extremely distracting if aspect ratio changes were visible at the top of the image. So, instead of trimming or expanding the image equally on top and on the bottom of the frame, Nolan trims and extends the bottom, leaving the top of the frame consistent. We don't pay nearly as much attention to the bottom of the frame, so the changes go almost entirely unnoticed.
-AzS
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Friday, March 09, 2012
Musing Pictures: John Carter
Andrew Stanton's John Carter isn't as good or as bad as people say. It feels like one film that wanted to be several -- it is an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars", but it is also an adaptation of all of ERB's books about Carter, the planet Barsoom, and the characters that populate it. It falls in to the pit that many first-in-a-series films ("tentpoles" is what the industry calls them) stumble upon: It tries to cover too much, resulting in thin, expository and often insufficient narrative.
The first film in a series has a lot to accomplish: It must introduce the characters (whereas subsequent films don't feel that pressure), and in some cases such as this, it must introduce an entire world, with its politics, shifting alliances, and even laws of physics.
Laying the groundwork like that is a difficult business, which is why most first-in-a-series films tend to be a little weak (the first "Harry Potter" film comes to mind, as does the first "Lord of the Rings" film, which is wonderful, but a little cumbersome).
I look at "Star Wars" as a good example of a first-in-a-series film that introduces its characters and universe effectively. I attribute this, in part, to the fact that Lucas had no idea if there would be enough of a following to justify a continuation of the story -- he had to make the first film good enough that it would merit a second, and a third... "Harry Potter", "Lord of the Rings" and yes, even "John Carter" were all but guaranteed that their stories would have more time to unfold.
In "Star Wars", anything "alien" is cast in profoundly basic, human terms: The Force and The Dark Side are, quite simply, Good and Evil. Although there are complex politics within the Rebellion and the Empire, the first film presents them quite simply as "good guys" and "bad guys". If we want to understand the politics more, we pick up on the details over time. In the meantime, the characters and their personal journeys take precedence, which makes the film engaging, exciting, and fun.
The real secret here, of course, is that the characters themselves fit very classical, defined "types", so we don't even need to get to know them at all. We recognize the short-hand, and the story can continue on its way. "John Carter" spends too much time filling us in on details that may be interesting, but that we don't need to know. John Carter is a hero, of course, and he's reluctant to be a hero, but a lot of attention is given to his tragic past, to try to justify his reluctance, when, really, he's just that type of guy -- let the justification come out some other time, when it's really relevant, perhaps in a subsequent film!
The trouble with adapting the John Carter stories is that they don't have the usual "Good guys/bad guys" structure, which means the usual pieces of narrative shorthand are harder to use. That said, they're often quite clear within each particular moment, and as long as we can track the shifts from one scene to the next, and as long as we can track John Carter's perceptions of who's "good" and who's "bad", we should be all right.
I think that's why so many reviewers found the film "confusing". It tries too hard to explain too much, and ends up diluting the really necessary exposition. We lose the important details in the sea of background information. The next "Carter" film could be quite different, as the pressure of introduction is off, and the narrative can take center stage.
-AzS
The first film in a series has a lot to accomplish: It must introduce the characters (whereas subsequent films don't feel that pressure), and in some cases such as this, it must introduce an entire world, with its politics, shifting alliances, and even laws of physics.
Laying the groundwork like that is a difficult business, which is why most first-in-a-series films tend to be a little weak (the first "Harry Potter" film comes to mind, as does the first "Lord of the Rings" film, which is wonderful, but a little cumbersome).
I look at "Star Wars" as a good example of a first-in-a-series film that introduces its characters and universe effectively. I attribute this, in part, to the fact that Lucas had no idea if there would be enough of a following to justify a continuation of the story -- he had to make the first film good enough that it would merit a second, and a third... "Harry Potter", "Lord of the Rings" and yes, even "John Carter" were all but guaranteed that their stories would have more time to unfold.
In "Star Wars", anything "alien" is cast in profoundly basic, human terms: The Force and The Dark Side are, quite simply, Good and Evil. Although there are complex politics within the Rebellion and the Empire, the first film presents them quite simply as "good guys" and "bad guys". If we want to understand the politics more, we pick up on the details over time. In the meantime, the characters and their personal journeys take precedence, which makes the film engaging, exciting, and fun.
The real secret here, of course, is that the characters themselves fit very classical, defined "types", so we don't even need to get to know them at all. We recognize the short-hand, and the story can continue on its way. "John Carter" spends too much time filling us in on details that may be interesting, but that we don't need to know. John Carter is a hero, of course, and he's reluctant to be a hero, but a lot of attention is given to his tragic past, to try to justify his reluctance, when, really, he's just that type of guy -- let the justification come out some other time, when it's really relevant, perhaps in a subsequent film!
The trouble with adapting the John Carter stories is that they don't have the usual "Good guys/bad guys" structure, which means the usual pieces of narrative shorthand are harder to use. That said, they're often quite clear within each particular moment, and as long as we can track the shifts from one scene to the next, and as long as we can track John Carter's perceptions of who's "good" and who's "bad", we should be all right.
I think that's why so many reviewers found the film "confusing". It tries too hard to explain too much, and ends up diluting the really necessary exposition. We lose the important details in the sea of background information. The next "Carter" film could be quite different, as the pressure of introduction is off, and the narrative can take center stage.
-AzS
Friday, March 02, 2012
Musing Pictures: Footnote
I was fortunate to catch a screening of Joseph Cedar's "Footnote" with the director in attendance. During the requisite Q&A, Mr. Cedar was asked a fantastic question about his process as a director to "liberate the story".
The question, Mr. Cedar's answer, and the film itself illustrate what for many people is a mysterious link between a script and what appears on the screen.
There's often a tension between what a filmmaker reads and what a filmmaker imagines. In many cases, there's even a tension between the filmmaker's imaginings and the resulting film. This was the first time I had heard the process of directing described as a liberation of narrative, but it makes a lot of sense.
Screenplays are very tightly formatted, carefully styled documents. Like blueprints, they are there to represent the details that are necessary for the construction of a film. Details that aren't necessary are usually excised from screenplays, but movies require all of those details to be present, or the film runs the risk of feeling "fake". When a director considers a script, he has to take this rigid, often very inflexible word-diagram and extrapolate from it not just the framework of a film, but all of the details that drape over that framework. For some, this is a literal process, requiring much creativity but little deviation from the words on the page. Joseph Cedar described a different approach, one that he discovered through his work on "Footnote".
In the academic world of Talmudic Scholarship which the film inhabits, text is (to some, literally) sacred. But text is also annotated heavily, to the extent that a page of a book might contain a few lines of that book, leaving most of the page for footnotes. In these footnotes, Mr. Cedar says, there's room to relax. Scholars can loosen up a little -- after all, it's not the text, it's just a footnote! Mr. Cedar used that in his film, creating cinematic "footnotes", short narrative sections that pause the story (literally, at one point) to digress, fill in some details and subtly editorialize. Mr. Cedar describes his "footnotes" as moments that gave him the freedom to "liberate the story", to take it off the page and turn it in to something more dynamic and visual than it had been. And these "footnote" moments are the parts of the movie that elevate it from being simply a good story to being a wonderful film.
-AzS
(For a convenient list of Israeli films, visit http://eranshorr.com/israeli-movie-list/)
The question, Mr. Cedar's answer, and the film itself illustrate what for many people is a mysterious link between a script and what appears on the screen.
There's often a tension between what a filmmaker reads and what a filmmaker imagines. In many cases, there's even a tension between the filmmaker's imaginings and the resulting film. This was the first time I had heard the process of directing described as a liberation of narrative, but it makes a lot of sense.
Screenplays are very tightly formatted, carefully styled documents. Like blueprints, they are there to represent the details that are necessary for the construction of a film. Details that aren't necessary are usually excised from screenplays, but movies require all of those details to be present, or the film runs the risk of feeling "fake". When a director considers a script, he has to take this rigid, often very inflexible word-diagram and extrapolate from it not just the framework of a film, but all of the details that drape over that framework. For some, this is a literal process, requiring much creativity but little deviation from the words on the page. Joseph Cedar described a different approach, one that he discovered through his work on "Footnote".
In the academic world of Talmudic Scholarship which the film inhabits, text is (to some, literally) sacred. But text is also annotated heavily, to the extent that a page of a book might contain a few lines of that book, leaving most of the page for footnotes. In these footnotes, Mr. Cedar says, there's room to relax. Scholars can loosen up a little -- after all, it's not the text, it's just a footnote! Mr. Cedar used that in his film, creating cinematic "footnotes", short narrative sections that pause the story (literally, at one point) to digress, fill in some details and subtly editorialize. Mr. Cedar describes his "footnotes" as moments that gave him the freedom to "liberate the story", to take it off the page and turn it in to something more dynamic and visual than it had been. And these "footnote" moments are the parts of the movie that elevate it from being simply a good story to being a wonderful film.
-AzS
(For a convenient list of Israeli films, visit http://eranshorr.com/israeli-movie-list/)
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Musing Pictures: Chronicle
It's a shocking revelation when someone tells a tired story in an entirely new way. Josh Trank and Max Landis came up with a revelatory twist on the superhero origin story in "Chronicle". Before I was struck by that (the twist on the origin story doesn't make itself apparent until fairly late in the film), I was struck by their frank and straightforward approach towards telling a story about telekinesis. I happen to love the idea of telekinesis -- I think it's a fantastic visual tool, a perfect element for a magical medium like cinema, and I've been struggling for years to come up with a story to tell that could rely on telekinesis as a central device. I applaud Trank and Landis, not just for coming up with the story, but for executing it so well, and for finding ways to avoid the tired cliches without forgetting to pay them homage as well.
The aspect of the film that I most admire contains spoilers, so please see the movie first before reading further!
"Chronicle" begins with a trio of characters, three superheroes who help each other learn to refine and control their newly acquired power. They stick together, and even seem to share a psychic bond of sorts. For the first half of the film, it seems like it's an origin story for a superhero team. But the narrative shifts in subtle and startling ways, as one of the characters, the one whose perspective controls our own, the character whose camera provides us with the footage that we see, begins to spiral out of control. He grows drunk on his own power, casts aside his friends, and becomes not the superhero we expected him to become, but the supervillain! The character who seems most likely to become the sidekick dies, and the character who's most likely to become the "brains" of the operation becomes the last remaining hero. The story is structurally sound, and its reversals are shocking. I'm glad that Mr. Trink and Mr. Landis are as young as they are -- with luck, they'll have many more stories to tell us.
-AzS
The aspect of the film that I most admire contains spoilers, so please see the movie first before reading further!
"Chronicle" begins with a trio of characters, three superheroes who help each other learn to refine and control their newly acquired power. They stick together, and even seem to share a psychic bond of sorts. For the first half of the film, it seems like it's an origin story for a superhero team. But the narrative shifts in subtle and startling ways, as one of the characters, the one whose perspective controls our own, the character whose camera provides us with the footage that we see, begins to spiral out of control. He grows drunk on his own power, casts aside his friends, and becomes not the superhero we expected him to become, but the supervillain! The character who seems most likely to become the sidekick dies, and the character who's most likely to become the "brains" of the operation becomes the last remaining hero. The story is structurally sound, and its reversals are shocking. I'm glad that Mr. Trink and Mr. Landis are as young as they are -- with luck, they'll have many more stories to tell us.
-AzS
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Musing Pictures: The Artist
Watching "The Artist", I was reminded of challenges that I faced as a teacher, introducing high school students to some of history's earliest films.
To a contemporary audience, especially an audience looking to be entertained, silent films can be hard to stomach. My students, who I generally respected and admired, often found the silent films I'd show boring. Boring! I can understand if an "art film" is boring -- art films are often made to be dissected, and require a certain kind of active intellectual engagement if they are to have any meaning at all. Silent films, however, were mass entertainment, and they were very successful at entertaining the masses! How could such successful mass entertainment come across as "boring" less than a hundred years later?
At first, I chalked it up to the pacing. Scenes progressed more slowly, action unfolded more methodically in some of these older films. Perhaps my students understood the scene faster than an early 20th century audience, and were bored by all the time it took for the film to catch up to their story sense?
Maybe the stories were simpler? Without the nuance that my students had grown to expect of their media?
Maybe the lack of color and sound failed to fill my students' capacity for simultaneous information. Perhaps to them, proper entertainment provides just enough information to slightly overwhelm the brain, so that the pressing concerns of "real life" must get pushed aside and temporarily forgotten? Maybe their capacity for distraction, tuned by the frantic and explosive content of the late '90s, was such that a silent film simply couldn't distract them sufficiently from everything else they were thinking about?
Ultimately, my thinking on the matter shifted as we approached the end of the silent film section of the course. By this point, I had tortured my students with very early silent shorts, DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", some early Chaplin... and the reactions now were a little different. They didn't always like the films I showed them, but by this point, they were reacting to these films as films, not as exhibits in a history class. Here's what I think happened:
We all have to learn to consume our generation's media. We have to learn the difference between important information and "fluff". In a fast-paced action sequence, for example, we have to very quickly differentiate between the frantic cuts that are meant to simply convey pace or motion, versus the brief images that are meant to convey important narrative beats. With sound films, much of the way a scene impresses itself upon us is through sound. We've learned that not every piece of narrative information comes from the screen -- it may come from the speakers. As a result, our viewing habits allow us to look away from the screen, to zone out of what we're seeing for a while, to take visual breaks. We may not know we're doing it, but sometimes, all we really focus on are sounds.
We don't think about it, of course, because it's what we've always done. It's like learning to walk: for the most part, once you've learned to walk, you never have to think about it again.
But watching a silent film, to continue with the analogy, is like walking on the moon. You can't rely on what you're so used to doing, or you'll fly off in directions you never intended! You can't rely on sound, and you can't look away from the screen in the way that you could with a sound film -- if you do, you'll lose the narrative, you'll miss the details, and most of the film's effect will just pass you by. It's a different discipline, and it's not easy. My students had to suffer through several feature-length silent films before they began to settle in to the experience, before they figured out how to watch and absorb those films. They had to learn not to look away, and to take in more of the visual details in the scene. They had to learn that sound wouldn't draw their attention back if they let it drift elsewhere. Once they learned this, they were able to watch silent films and be entertained by them.
I wonder how "The Artist" has played to the unsuspecting public. Film critics and folks who caught it on the festival circuit have no doubt been exposed to the experience of watching silent movies. I would imagine many of them have seen quite a few silent films as part of their film education. But for those people who had never seen a silent feature, what was it like?
In some ways, "The Artist" can be especially challenging, because some of the shots have a more contemporary feel. They're the kinds of shots that you expect to come with sound. Watching a film from the '20s, for example, you never get the sense that someone behind the camera shot the picture with sound in mind, because, frankly, they didn't! But here, despite their greatest efforts, "The Artist" does have some images and sequences that feel that way. I think the mechanism at work here is basic and quite subconscious. I don't think a contemporary filmmaker can shoot silent scenes without the aesthetic pressure of eighty years of sound films pushing against him. This makes "The Artist" somewhat more challenging to watch because we see the kinds of images that we're used to seeing, but we don't get the sound that we're used to getting. It's not like watching a silent film, but it's more like watching a sound film on "mute".
These moments don't happen frequently in "The Artist" -- in fact, I think they did a fantastic job capturing much of the aesthetic of late '20s movies. But they do happen, and they can jar even a seasoned silent film viewer out of the immersive experience.
If you were a student of mine in one of those classes where we slogged through silent features, I'd love to hear from you!
-AzS
To a contemporary audience, especially an audience looking to be entertained, silent films can be hard to stomach. My students, who I generally respected and admired, often found the silent films I'd show boring. Boring! I can understand if an "art film" is boring -- art films are often made to be dissected, and require a certain kind of active intellectual engagement if they are to have any meaning at all. Silent films, however, were mass entertainment, and they were very successful at entertaining the masses! How could such successful mass entertainment come across as "boring" less than a hundred years later?
At first, I chalked it up to the pacing. Scenes progressed more slowly, action unfolded more methodically in some of these older films. Perhaps my students understood the scene faster than an early 20th century audience, and were bored by all the time it took for the film to catch up to their story sense?
Maybe the stories were simpler? Without the nuance that my students had grown to expect of their media?
Maybe the lack of color and sound failed to fill my students' capacity for simultaneous information. Perhaps to them, proper entertainment provides just enough information to slightly overwhelm the brain, so that the pressing concerns of "real life" must get pushed aside and temporarily forgotten? Maybe their capacity for distraction, tuned by the frantic and explosive content of the late '90s, was such that a silent film simply couldn't distract them sufficiently from everything else they were thinking about?
Ultimately, my thinking on the matter shifted as we approached the end of the silent film section of the course. By this point, I had tortured my students with very early silent shorts, DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", some early Chaplin... and the reactions now were a little different. They didn't always like the films I showed them, but by this point, they were reacting to these films as films, not as exhibits in a history class. Here's what I think happened:
We all have to learn to consume our generation's media. We have to learn the difference between important information and "fluff". In a fast-paced action sequence, for example, we have to very quickly differentiate between the frantic cuts that are meant to simply convey pace or motion, versus the brief images that are meant to convey important narrative beats. With sound films, much of the way a scene impresses itself upon us is through sound. We've learned that not every piece of narrative information comes from the screen -- it may come from the speakers. As a result, our viewing habits allow us to look away from the screen, to zone out of what we're seeing for a while, to take visual breaks. We may not know we're doing it, but sometimes, all we really focus on are sounds.
We don't think about it, of course, because it's what we've always done. It's like learning to walk: for the most part, once you've learned to walk, you never have to think about it again.
But watching a silent film, to continue with the analogy, is like walking on the moon. You can't rely on what you're so used to doing, or you'll fly off in directions you never intended! You can't rely on sound, and you can't look away from the screen in the way that you could with a sound film -- if you do, you'll lose the narrative, you'll miss the details, and most of the film's effect will just pass you by. It's a different discipline, and it's not easy. My students had to suffer through several feature-length silent films before they began to settle in to the experience, before they figured out how to watch and absorb those films. They had to learn not to look away, and to take in more of the visual details in the scene. They had to learn that sound wouldn't draw their attention back if they let it drift elsewhere. Once they learned this, they were able to watch silent films and be entertained by them.
I wonder how "The Artist" has played to the unsuspecting public. Film critics and folks who caught it on the festival circuit have no doubt been exposed to the experience of watching silent movies. I would imagine many of them have seen quite a few silent films as part of their film education. But for those people who had never seen a silent feature, what was it like?
In some ways, "The Artist" can be especially challenging, because some of the shots have a more contemporary feel. They're the kinds of shots that you expect to come with sound. Watching a film from the '20s, for example, you never get the sense that someone behind the camera shot the picture with sound in mind, because, frankly, they didn't! But here, despite their greatest efforts, "The Artist" does have some images and sequences that feel that way. I think the mechanism at work here is basic and quite subconscious. I don't think a contemporary filmmaker can shoot silent scenes without the aesthetic pressure of eighty years of sound films pushing against him. This makes "The Artist" somewhat more challenging to watch because we see the kinds of images that we're used to seeing, but we don't get the sound that we're used to getting. It's not like watching a silent film, but it's more like watching a sound film on "mute".
These moments don't happen frequently in "The Artist" -- in fact, I think they did a fantastic job capturing much of the aesthetic of late '20s movies. But they do happen, and they can jar even a seasoned silent film viewer out of the immersive experience.
If you were a student of mine in one of those classes where we slogged through silent features, I'd love to hear from you!
-AzS
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Musing Pictures: The Grey
I don't often like scary movies. Seeing "The Grey" last night, I came to understand my aversion a little better.
The film follows a dwindling group of air crash survivors as they battle the elements and a voracious pack of wolves in a cold, wind-swept arctic tundra. I'm usually drawn to these types of stories -- where a small group must overcome itself to survive in the face of overwhelming odds. This film was no exception: I wanted to get to know the characters, and I enjoyed following the power-structure shifts as various characters came to understand their weaknesses. But then, the wolves come, and the film falls in to familiar "jump out of the darkness" startle techniques. The wolves in the darkness are scary, and I don't mind that. But I hate being startled. Every time I'm startled, it reminds me that I'm watching a movie, and I lose that immersive feeling of being drawn in to the movie's world. In "The Grey", I noticed an additional detrimental effect: When the characters were merely talking, recalling their past, sharing their stories, instead of listening to them, I kept reminding myself not to get too drawn in, lest a wolf jump out suddenly and startle me again.
The parallel scene from a truly excellent scary movie is the scene from "Jaws" where the police chief, the scientist and the sea captain trade stories and get drunk in their boat. It's similarly structured: we learn about the characters, then the shark attacks. We've seen the shark already, and we fear the shark, but when the shark does attack, it's not a startling moment. A filmmaker's job in a scary movie is not just to scare the audience, but to shelter the audience when the audience should really be focusing on other things. Make us feel safe enough to listen, and then give us the characters and their story. If you want to undermine that sense of safety, do it with respect for what the safety is there for. If we don't feel safe ever, we won't allow the film to embrace us.
"The Grey" does borrow from "Jaws" in more successful ways. The idea of the danger being in front of us, obscured by a barrier that won't stop it, is ever-present. In "Jaws", the shark appears through the water without warning, so every time we see the water's surface, we fear the shark lurking beneath it. In "The Grey", wolves sometimes emerge from the haze of drifting snow, or from the pitch-black of an overcast night. We know that darkness is no barrier to the wolves. In "The Grey", both darkness and the fog-like snow are frightening for what might lurk just beyond. That Riddick film, "Pitch Black", works the same way.
-AzS
The film follows a dwindling group of air crash survivors as they battle the elements and a voracious pack of wolves in a cold, wind-swept arctic tundra. I'm usually drawn to these types of stories -- where a small group must overcome itself to survive in the face of overwhelming odds. This film was no exception: I wanted to get to know the characters, and I enjoyed following the power-structure shifts as various characters came to understand their weaknesses. But then, the wolves come, and the film falls in to familiar "jump out of the darkness" startle techniques. The wolves in the darkness are scary, and I don't mind that. But I hate being startled. Every time I'm startled, it reminds me that I'm watching a movie, and I lose that immersive feeling of being drawn in to the movie's world. In "The Grey", I noticed an additional detrimental effect: When the characters were merely talking, recalling their past, sharing their stories, instead of listening to them, I kept reminding myself not to get too drawn in, lest a wolf jump out suddenly and startle me again.
The parallel scene from a truly excellent scary movie is the scene from "Jaws" where the police chief, the scientist and the sea captain trade stories and get drunk in their boat. It's similarly structured: we learn about the characters, then the shark attacks. We've seen the shark already, and we fear the shark, but when the shark does attack, it's not a startling moment. A filmmaker's job in a scary movie is not just to scare the audience, but to shelter the audience when the audience should really be focusing on other things. Make us feel safe enough to listen, and then give us the characters and their story. If you want to undermine that sense of safety, do it with respect for what the safety is there for. If we don't feel safe ever, we won't allow the film to embrace us.
"The Grey" does borrow from "Jaws" in more successful ways. The idea of the danger being in front of us, obscured by a barrier that won't stop it, is ever-present. In "Jaws", the shark appears through the water without warning, so every time we see the water's surface, we fear the shark lurking beneath it. In "The Grey", wolves sometimes emerge from the haze of drifting snow, or from the pitch-black of an overcast night. We know that darkness is no barrier to the wolves. In "The Grey", both darkness and the fog-like snow are frightening for what might lurk just beyond. That Riddick film, "Pitch Black", works the same way.
-AzS
Monday, January 09, 2012
Musing Pictures: War Horse (2011)
I've seen quite a few reviews and essays on "War Horse" that label it a "classical" or "old-school" film. Some reviewers love the film for this "traditional" tone. A few detractors find it trite, and (borrowing from much of academia's view of Spielberg) think of it as derivative, un-creative, perhaps even stale.
Critiques of Spielberg, in general, follow much the same lines, and they stem from an academic distrust that dates back to his earliest successes. Here's how it happened:
It all begins in France, in the years after World War II. French cinephiles who had been prevented from seeing American films by the Nazi occupation are suddenly awash in a half-decade of American cinema. The writers of the French New Wave discuss these films in a new, unusually intellectualized way, creating for the first time an academic discipline around the study of the motion picture.
Film Studies arrives in the United States in the '60s, when folks like Spielberg and Scorsese are just getting warmed up. Although film studies began with analysis of the Hollywood system, the primary interest of the academic field is in the films and movements that break Hollywood's rules. In Europe, French and Italian nationalist cinemas rise out of this academic movement in an effort to create distinct "styles" for their own nation's films. They break Hollywood's rules, and are rewarded by the attention of the academic world. They give film theorists more to write about.
In the '70s, a wave of independent film sweeps the US. Indie filmmakers take their cameras to the streets of New York City, churning out gritty, unusual content that challenges Hollywood's basic aesthetic rules. Their films are a gold mine for academic study.
And then there's Steven Spielberg, the guy who didn't really go to film school, who never really bought in to the academic's view, who makes films that don't obviously break any of Hollywood's aesthetic rules... whose work is boring to the academic who's looking for something juicy and obvious to analyze and dissect. And in 1975, Spielberg's "Jaws" becomes the world's top grossing film. The success of "Jaws", followed by the numerous other blockbusters in Spielberg's career, is a slap in the face to academic film studies. It proved the preferences of the academic film world irrelevant. Academia got bitter, and for the next three and a half decades, would either ignore Spielberg's films, or would dismiss them as "infantile" (as a professor of mine did, almost ten years ago).
What a lot of the academic world missed, and what some today are discovering, is that Spielberg's adherence to one particular rule blinded them to almost all of his cinematic innovation.
Classical Hollywood films were always made with a primary rule in mind: the apparatus of production must never be visible to the audience! If the lighting doesn't appear "natural", or if the camera movement draws attention to itself, it's pulling the viewer out of that dream-like state of being lost in the world of the film. It's making the viewer aware of the process, the machinery, and the mechanics. It interrupts the escape.
Many independent filmmakers broke this cardinal rule. To them, part of the fun of movies was to be able to recognize the machinery, to spot the silhouette of the man behind the curtain, so they made films that invited that kind of viewing. Academics, in turn, ate it up. After all, it's always easier to dissect those films that invite their own dissection!
Spielberg's films, on the other hand, do not "demand" analysis. On the contrary, they consistently draw viewers to fall in to their narrative spell. I remember my own early attempts to perform some academic deconstruction of a Spielberg film: I tried to identify visual motifs in the desert chase sequence in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981). I had to watch the scene over and over and over again, because no matter how much I tried to pay attention to shot structure and composition, by the end of the scene, I was simply immersed in the film, watching a movie.
"War Horse" is a great film to consider in light of academia's attitudes. On the surface, it's a naiive, wide-eyed story, told in a straightforward, "traditional" way, with pretty images, plenty of Hollywood polish, and not much "art". Since it does not challenge its viewers to analyze it, academia will likely follow the usual trend and dismiss it as unworthy of a closer look.
But look closely, and it becomes an entirely different film. It is (as some critics have pointed out) a film that mourns humanity's use of violence, while at the same time celebrating humanity's potential for civility. Though it's called a "classical" film, it's a war film unlike any other -- there are no "sides" to take, no "good guys" or "bad guys" in the traditional sense at all. It is about as far from a "conventional" Hollywood narrative as you can get, but all the while, it maintains Hollywood's cardinal rule, immersing its audience in the world of the narrative, never allowing us to remember for a moment that we're in a movie theater, watching a movie.
Academia makes the claim (and it's a more complex and challenging claim than might seem at first) that cinema, at its best, is art. Though Spielberg blends his artistry with entertainment, I don't think of his work as any less artful, or of him as any less of an artist (in the cinematic sense) than Hitchcock, Ford or Keaton. In fact, I see cinema's primary goal as entertainment, much like painting's primary goal is decoration, rather than art.
Critiques of Spielberg, in general, follow much the same lines, and they stem from an academic distrust that dates back to his earliest successes. Here's how it happened:
It all begins in France, in the years after World War II. French cinephiles who had been prevented from seeing American films by the Nazi occupation are suddenly awash in a half-decade of American cinema. The writers of the French New Wave discuss these films in a new, unusually intellectualized way, creating for the first time an academic discipline around the study of the motion picture.
Film Studies arrives in the United States in the '60s, when folks like Spielberg and Scorsese are just getting warmed up. Although film studies began with analysis of the Hollywood system, the primary interest of the academic field is in the films and movements that break Hollywood's rules. In Europe, French and Italian nationalist cinemas rise out of this academic movement in an effort to create distinct "styles" for their own nation's films. They break Hollywood's rules, and are rewarded by the attention of the academic world. They give film theorists more to write about.
In the '70s, a wave of independent film sweeps the US. Indie filmmakers take their cameras to the streets of New York City, churning out gritty, unusual content that challenges Hollywood's basic aesthetic rules. Their films are a gold mine for academic study.
And then there's Steven Spielberg, the guy who didn't really go to film school, who never really bought in to the academic's view, who makes films that don't obviously break any of Hollywood's aesthetic rules... whose work is boring to the academic who's looking for something juicy and obvious to analyze and dissect. And in 1975, Spielberg's "Jaws" becomes the world's top grossing film. The success of "Jaws", followed by the numerous other blockbusters in Spielberg's career, is a slap in the face to academic film studies. It proved the preferences of the academic film world irrelevant. Academia got bitter, and for the next three and a half decades, would either ignore Spielberg's films, or would dismiss them as "infantile" (as a professor of mine did, almost ten years ago).
What a lot of the academic world missed, and what some today are discovering, is that Spielberg's adherence to one particular rule blinded them to almost all of his cinematic innovation.
Classical Hollywood films were always made with a primary rule in mind: the apparatus of production must never be visible to the audience! If the lighting doesn't appear "natural", or if the camera movement draws attention to itself, it's pulling the viewer out of that dream-like state of being lost in the world of the film. It's making the viewer aware of the process, the machinery, and the mechanics. It interrupts the escape.
Many independent filmmakers broke this cardinal rule. To them, part of the fun of movies was to be able to recognize the machinery, to spot the silhouette of the man behind the curtain, so they made films that invited that kind of viewing. Academics, in turn, ate it up. After all, it's always easier to dissect those films that invite their own dissection!
Spielberg's films, on the other hand, do not "demand" analysis. On the contrary, they consistently draw viewers to fall in to their narrative spell. I remember my own early attempts to perform some academic deconstruction of a Spielberg film: I tried to identify visual motifs in the desert chase sequence in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981). I had to watch the scene over and over and over again, because no matter how much I tried to pay attention to shot structure and composition, by the end of the scene, I was simply immersed in the film, watching a movie.
"War Horse" is a great film to consider in light of academia's attitudes. On the surface, it's a naiive, wide-eyed story, told in a straightforward, "traditional" way, with pretty images, plenty of Hollywood polish, and not much "art". Since it does not challenge its viewers to analyze it, academia will likely follow the usual trend and dismiss it as unworthy of a closer look.
But look closely, and it becomes an entirely different film. It is (as some critics have pointed out) a film that mourns humanity's use of violence, while at the same time celebrating humanity's potential for civility. Though it's called a "classical" film, it's a war film unlike any other -- there are no "sides" to take, no "good guys" or "bad guys" in the traditional sense at all. It is about as far from a "conventional" Hollywood narrative as you can get, but all the while, it maintains Hollywood's cardinal rule, immersing its audience in the world of the narrative, never allowing us to remember for a moment that we're in a movie theater, watching a movie.
Academia makes the claim (and it's a more complex and challenging claim than might seem at first) that cinema, at its best, is art. Though Spielberg blends his artistry with entertainment, I don't think of his work as any less artful, or of him as any less of an artist (in the cinematic sense) than Hitchcock, Ford or Keaton. In fact, I see cinema's primary goal as entertainment, much like painting's primary goal is decoration, rather than art.
Unfortunately, there are still too few in academia who are willing to view Spielberg and his films as anything other than the guy that keeps proving their theories of "great cinema" wrong. When that changes, I think there's a lot that film studies will gain from a thorough, honest and meaningful analysis of our era's master and his films.
-AzS
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