Current Cinema
One little rule about shooting is that you're not supposed to cross the line between two characters. You shoot on one side of the line - you can't just pop to the other side of the line, because what a camera seems to be doing is just mimicking a person in the room. It becomes a person in the room, an observer.
And so, I was always interested in this one little question, which was, How do you cross the line? And then watching Bela Tarr's film Satantango I thought, Oh, I see, the way to cross the line is to not have a line, of course. Satantango is like an eight-hour film set in post-communist Hungary. It rains and rains and villagers trudge through mud, all in very long, real-time takes. Not a lot happens, but it is a very beautiful film. He was thinking outside the box. There is no line. The camera doesn't cut back and forth. And I thought, Ah, it's so brilliant, because why should you create a line? Why should you have cutting back and forth? That's not like an observer. Eyes do dart back and forth, as if we're cutting. Our eyes flit from one shot to another - cutting is mimicking that - but ultimately it's not really a cut, it's a really fast whip pan.
What interests me is... which not be absorbed by the popular culture or observer for some time... is long takes. First off, long takes are in conflict with the method of traditional cinema. Going to L.A. and working in the system, you'll always have this thing in your head - that modern cinema is a code, and it was already created somewhere along the line. The standards that you're learning, and I guess this is true with other mediums, are created, absorbed and re-created.
What is obvious is that modern cinema has been using film to present something that really was from another media, like literature or stage plays. It wasn't actually its own thing. It was subverted in some ways by the invention of the close-up and medium shot in the mid-teens, 1910-1920. They were stylistic innovations, but they became the popular idiom.
And it's also the way you tell the story - it's coming from previous media. The new medium will borrow from the old medium until it becomes its own. Writing will be used just to copy down words until it actually arrives at its own thought process and becomes the novel, which isn't just copying down an orator's words, it eventually works like psychological storytelling. So film is borrowing from previous media until it can arrive at whatever it is supposed to arrive at. Watching Satantango, I was thinking, Wow, this is the guy who's beat the system.
What motivates me stylistically is innovative film that relies on long takes, and inverts the literary medium model. Instead of editing & drafting scenes from long passages of text, a film should create a personal world inside the viewer - - where one's inferences and interpretations are paramount. Films should adopt a far slower pace, one that would unfold like a novel. A massive reduction of cuts would be necessary. And here's where I opine, I don't think long cuts take away from the action. Honestly I get upset with a lot of films because if you're interested in character, there is no way you can really see them - they're always cutting away from them, even if it's Brad Pitt or Meryl Streep. They're doing really intense work and if you really want to see what they're doing, you've only got three seconds, then it's off, and then you're back, and then you're off again. Sentimental, conventional films depend on preexisting emotional conditioning in us. There is not enough exploration of silence, of inevitable digression, of what is odd. They don't show us anything new, they just show us a pattern that triggers a patterned response. In this new approach, a Werner Herzog like approach, space is held out. Because of the spaces, a lot of time would go by. If a young man goes walking down a hallway for three minutes, it is novelistic in the sense that a writer might describe somebody walking down a hallway for three pages. They might take a number of pages just to describe a very simple thing. I mean, there's a short story by David Foster Wallace where he describes a man on a chaise lounge in the backyard. It takes ten pages or something like that, and you're very riveted. You're really following it.
In the time long takes give us, we kind of work, and fill in the details. We see small things, the color of the walls, a shrug, the texture of the floor, the other kids looking over their shoulders, their different expressions.
(I tell you, it's these little podcasts: panels from "Stories from the Near Future" presented by The New Yorker that's got me in this frame of thought.)
Generally, I see films attempting to head in this direction, which lies somewhat outside the model. A medium less about dialogue and overt narrative cues, something more concerned with semiotics and the peculiar neuroses of visual symbols.
Something else must happen before film can achieve its own language though. Something like a three dimensional environment will happen first. Maybe, more practically, a three screen theater that wraps around the audience, stretching our capacity to perceive the peripheral. Every take would incorporate three cameras rolling simultaneously, pointed in different directions, though from the same vantage point. Take a murder mystery film. One viewer may look to his far left & discover a vital clue. At the same time another might notice something less crucial to plot on the right, but find it unusual and hilarious in context. Film in the future theater will be about negotiating a visual terrain equivalent to ours, plus a chameleon's. Our reflexive stimuli will inform meaning, and affect what colors and sounds imbue the story we come away with, if any at all. The face of cinema is undergoing a change. It'll be like cinema, but it won't be flat on the wall.
One little rule about shooting is that you're not supposed to cross the line between two characters. You shoot on one side of the line - you can't just pop to the other side of the line, because what a camera seems to be doing is just mimicking a person in the room. It becomes a person in the room, an observer.
And so, I was always interested in this one little question, which was, How do you cross the line? And then watching Bela Tarr's film Satantango I thought, Oh, I see, the way to cross the line is to not have a line, of course. Satantango is like an eight-hour film set in post-communist Hungary. It rains and rains and villagers trudge through mud, all in very long, real-time takes. Not a lot happens, but it is a very beautiful film. He was thinking outside the box. There is no line. The camera doesn't cut back and forth. And I thought, Ah, it's so brilliant, because why should you create a line? Why should you have cutting back and forth? That's not like an observer. Eyes do dart back and forth, as if we're cutting. Our eyes flit from one shot to another - cutting is mimicking that - but ultimately it's not really a cut, it's a really fast whip pan.
What interests me is... which not be absorbed by the popular culture or observer for some time... is long takes. First off, long takes are in conflict with the method of traditional cinema. Going to L.A. and working in the system, you'll always have this thing in your head - that modern cinema is a code, and it was already created somewhere along the line. The standards that you're learning, and I guess this is true with other mediums, are created, absorbed and re-created.
What is obvious is that modern cinema has been using film to present something that really was from another media, like literature or stage plays. It wasn't actually its own thing. It was subverted in some ways by the invention of the close-up and medium shot in the mid-teens, 1910-1920. They were stylistic innovations, but they became the popular idiom.
And it's also the way you tell the story - it's coming from previous media. The new medium will borrow from the old medium until it becomes its own. Writing will be used just to copy down words until it actually arrives at its own thought process and becomes the novel, which isn't just copying down an orator's words, it eventually works like psychological storytelling. So film is borrowing from previous media until it can arrive at whatever it is supposed to arrive at. Watching Satantango, I was thinking, Wow, this is the guy who's beat the system.
What motivates me stylistically is innovative film that relies on long takes, and inverts the literary medium model. Instead of editing & drafting scenes from long passages of text, a film should create a personal world inside the viewer - - where one's inferences and interpretations are paramount. Films should adopt a far slower pace, one that would unfold like a novel. A massive reduction of cuts would be necessary. And here's where I opine, I don't think long cuts take away from the action. Honestly I get upset with a lot of films because if you're interested in character, there is no way you can really see them - they're always cutting away from them, even if it's Brad Pitt or Meryl Streep. They're doing really intense work and if you really want to see what they're doing, you've only got three seconds, then it's off, and then you're back, and then you're off again. Sentimental, conventional films depend on preexisting emotional conditioning in us. There is not enough exploration of silence, of inevitable digression, of what is odd. They don't show us anything new, they just show us a pattern that triggers a patterned response. In this new approach, a Werner Herzog like approach, space is held out. Because of the spaces, a lot of time would go by. If a young man goes walking down a hallway for three minutes, it is novelistic in the sense that a writer might describe somebody walking down a hallway for three pages. They might take a number of pages just to describe a very simple thing. I mean, there's a short story by David Foster Wallace where he describes a man on a chaise lounge in the backyard. It takes ten pages or something like that, and you're very riveted. You're really following it.
In the time long takes give us, we kind of work, and fill in the details. We see small things, the color of the walls, a shrug, the texture of the floor, the other kids looking over their shoulders, their different expressions.
(I tell you, it's these little podcasts: panels from "Stories from the Near Future" presented by The New Yorker that's got me in this frame of thought.)
Generally, I see films attempting to head in this direction, which lies somewhat outside the model. A medium less about dialogue and overt narrative cues, something more concerned with semiotics and the peculiar neuroses of visual symbols.
Something else must happen before film can achieve its own language though. Something like a three dimensional environment will happen first. Maybe, more practically, a three screen theater that wraps around the audience, stretching our capacity to perceive the peripheral. Every take would incorporate three cameras rolling simultaneously, pointed in different directions, though from the same vantage point. Take a murder mystery film. One viewer may look to his far left & discover a vital clue. At the same time another might notice something less crucial to plot on the right, but find it unusual and hilarious in context. Film in the future theater will be about negotiating a visual terrain equivalent to ours, plus a chameleon's. Our reflexive stimuli will inform meaning, and affect what colors and sounds imbue the story we come away with, if any at all. The face of cinema is undergoing a change. It'll be like cinema, but it won't be flat on the wall.