Musing Pictures: "Muslim Innocence"

This is not a proper "Musing Pictures" post, as I have not seen the film about which I write.  I've read enough about it to know what it is.  I feel the need to comment here in response to some of the public discourse about the "film" that recently sparked outrage and murder in the Arab world.  The issues are enormous, and far too broad for a modest filmmaker to tackle.  I don't approach politics in this blog, as a rule, and I don't intend to start now.  This goes way beyond politics.

First, the background in brief:  A "film" of mysterious origins (apparently financed by "100 Jews" and directed by an "Israeli American") is translated or subtitled in to Arabic and shared with the Arab world.  It depicts the Prophet Mohammed, which, in and of itself, offends many Muslims.  It depicts the Prophet in coarse, unflattering ways.  This really pisses some people off.  They express their frustration in protest.  Some of the protesters get very violent, killing people who have nothing to do with the film.

There are two reactions to this:

1)  People say "Yuck!  Islamic people are barbaric!"
2)  People say "Yuck!  The filmmakers are morons!"

Neither statement really approaches the depth or seriousness of what's going on.

Film is powerful.  We learned this from the Nazis.  Many of the world's more repressive governments work hard to suppress this kind of mass communication.  TV and movies are heavily censored and controlled.  Whoever made this controversial "Film" knew this and exploited it.

I get in to murky territory here, because people have been killed over this stupid "Film".  I can't address the tendency toward brutality in the Muslim world, except to say that it angers me.  If "accepting Muslim culture" means accepting Muslim violence, I reject Muslim culture.  Of course, I don't believe Muslim culture necessitates Muslim violence, but it certainly seems to embrace it in some parts of the Islamic world.

In the West, frustration is ideally expressed not by violence, but by communication.  Op-eds, essays, art.  Even strikes, marches and sit-ins are much more about communication than they are about physical violence.  I believe firmly in the virtues of expression-by-communication, and in the freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press that protect it.

I am proud to be a citizen of a country that embraces these freedoms, even if they result in trash.  And I intend to make full use of these freedoms to point out how vile a piece of trash "Muslim Innocence" is.

The catalysts for cultural change are almost always acts of communication.  Jesus spoke to his followers and changed Judaism forever.  Marx wrote his Manifesto, and world politics transformed.  Violence can appear to be a catalyst for change, but more likely, it inspires a hardening of attitudes, an entrenchment of opinion.

I think it's important to address problems in Islam, just as it is important to address problems in America, or in Judaism, or in any culture.  I think it's necessary to address these issues with communication, rather than violence.  I think there should be more brave artists willing to step up and say "hey, Islam, here's what we see when we look at you!"

If there were more protest, more communication, more depictions of Mohammed, the cheap, pointless, hateful stuff would go unnoticed.

The reason I hate "Muslim Innocence" is that it's downright dishonest.  It's dishonest in two ways.

-Its critiques of Islam are not critiques of Islam at all, but of an imaginary Islam, an Islam that was made up by people who didn't know how to express their frustrations with the real thing.  It's an Islam made up by people who don't know enough about the real Islam to criticize it properly.  Much like anti-Semitism, or any other brand of cultural bigotry, it relies on a hateful description that is, in and of itself, false.

-It hides behind other scapegoats.  This is something I first encountered in Roger Ebert's essay:  http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/09/a_statement_and_a_film.html

The claim was made (by who? I'm not sure) that the film was directed by an "Israeli American", and was financed (to the tune of $5M... I'm a filmmaker, I know what $5M looks like on screen...) by one hundred Jews.  100 Jews.  It's a typological number, not literal.  The filmmaker's name, Sam Bacile (an Israeli name?)  becomes something else when shortened to Monsieur Bacile (or, "M Bacile" -- read it out loud if you still don't get it).  A Jewish (Israeli-American) imbecile? Directing a movie funded by 100 Jews (because Jews have money, right?)  This seems like an obvious plot to use Jews as scapegoats.  Here's the intended outcome:  Jews look like money-mad bigots who spend their money on stupid projects (instead of jobs?  the economy?) to piss off Muslims who then kill Christians.  Christians get their holy war, and if it goes wrong, they can blame the Jews for inciting it.  Roger Ebert may turn out to be wrong about this.  The film might turn out to have been made by an Israeli-American, and funded by one hundred Jews.  If that turns out to be the case, you can be sure that hundreds of thousands of Jews will rise up in protest.

And that brings me back around.  How many Muslims will rise up to protest the murders in Libya?

This "Film" deserves serious protest, but not violence.  Certainly nothing even close to murder.  Not even of the people involved, let alone people who had nothing to do with its production and distribution.

The violence in Libya deserves more protest, too, and if the full force of the message requires that the Prophet be depicted, by all means, depict the Prophet!  But my plea to artists and communicators everywhere is to remember that the most effective communication is informed communication.  Understand the problem you're addressing and THEN protest the hell out of it!  And be up-front about it, too.  Don't hide behind pseudonyms.  Don't scapegoat the Jews (or anyone!)  Cowardly protest is no protest at all.

And so, for the first time on this blog, I sign with more than my initials,

-Arnon Z. Shorr

Musing Pictures: The Bourne Legacy

There's a certain confidence necessary for a truly effective action sequence.  Action sequences need room to breathe, moments of quiet that allow the viewer to get oriented, to see the danger, and to register its potential.

I thought of this a lot while watching "The Bourne Legacy".  The initial trilogy (of which I'd say this is a spin-off) included some of the best action sequences of the last half-century, so this one had a lot to live up to.  Without dissecting action sequences shot-by-shot (an interesting, albeit lengthy exercise), here's where I think the originals got it right, and where the new one gets it wrong.

Take a look at the pacing and lensing of this now-famous scene from "The Bourne Identity":


I think it's remarkable to note that many of the shots in this sequence last for more than a second.  Also, the action is very clear:  each shot conveys something about the progression of the sequence: where they're going, where they are in relation to the people chasing them, where the obstacles are, and what happens when they collide.

Also, we're kind of set-back from the action, not too far, but just enough to see most of what we're looking at.  We see most of the car, or most of a motorcycle.

There's a tendency to come in really close in a lot of "imitation" chase sequences, and to cut very quickly.  The reasoning behind this is that a chase is frantic, so, in a way, that frenetic energy needs to be conveyed to the audience.

I think "The Bourne Identity" conveys this energy well (unsteady camera, lots of movement, etc.), but it never loses track of the fact that this is, after all, a part of a narrative, and that as narrative, it must remain clear!

If we can tell what's going on at all times (even if we don't know how the hero is going to get out of the situation), we're on the edge of our seats.  Once we lose track of the action, and it becomes a jumble of quick, shaky close-ups, we lose our focus, and instead of anxiously watching the hero figure it out, we find ourselves forced to figure it out on our own.

In a nutshell, I think that's the main flaw in the "Bourne Legacy" action sequences.  They're shot too close and cut too fast, aiming for a visceral, rather than narrative experience.  See the movie, and let me know what you think.

-AzS
 

Musing Pictures: The Dark Knight Rises

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

 

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

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/)

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

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