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| ISBN-13: | 9781843447474 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oldcastle Books |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 746 KB |
About the Author
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Introduction to Film
A Director's Perspective
By Alex Cox
Oldcastle Books
Copyright © 2016 Alex CoxAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84344-748-1
CHAPTER 1
CONTEXT, MISE EN SCÈNE, AUTEUR THEORY AND THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY TIMELINE
* We watch the title sequence of The Wild Bunch (USA, 1969) ...
... because it's an exemplary title sequence, because it sets up the film's conflict (outlaws versus railroad bounty hunters, all of whom are living on borrowed time), because the uniformed hero-villains who are about to provoke a massacre aren't just a cinematic invention but a reference to the film's context – the ongoing massacre in Vietnam – and because the sequence's heroic conclusion ('If they move, kill 'em!'/freeze-frame on the hero's face/title: Directed by Sam Peckinpah') is about as clear a celebration of the auteur director as you could ever get.
What's an auteur? You probably have an idea, but let's ask some even more basic questions first. What do we mean when we say 'a film'? A sequence of moving images that tells a story? Why is it called a film? Once, all movies were shot on film. Now many of them are shot, and screened, on digital video. Yet we still call them films. And if they last around 80 minutes, or longer, we call them feature films. (What is the difference between a film and a movie? This was explained to me by the Hollywood director Michael Mann. Tod Davies and I had met him to propose an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian. Mann listened to our proposal, and turned it down. 'What you're talking about is a film,' he said. 'I make movies.' It had not occurred to me, till then, that there was any difference. I asked what the difference between a film and a movie was. 'About 60 million dollars,' Mann replied.)
What kind of film is a film? Is it a drama? Most features are. Is it a documentary? Is it a feature-length commercial for a product (think Slumdog Millionaire or Top Gun)? Is it experimental?
What are its technical aspects? Is it sound or silent? Mono or stereo? 5.1 or 7.1? Colour or black and white? Why? (This is an interesting consideration. When sound came in in 1929, that was it. Henceforth films/movies had sound. But when colour arrived a few years later, black and white remained a popular medium – not only for financial reasons, but as an aesthetically preferable choice.) What is its aspect ratio – the shape of the image projected on the screen – and who decides this? Is it 2D or 3D (one hopes 2D)? What is the frame rate (one hopes for 24 frames per second)?
This is a mixture of technical and aesthetic questions, and it brings us to my questions: questions a filmmaker might ask, after seeing a film.
Whose idea was it? Where did the idea come from? Who pays for it? Who creates it? How does it deal with censorship and other barriers? Who sees it? Who – if anyone – profits from it?
That last question may seem redundant, but not all films make money. Some films aren't expected to make money, but are made for other reasons entirely, as we shall see.
Film studies and film critics tend to concentrate on only one of those questions: the first, creative one. Who is responsible for a film? Is it the director? The producer? The writer? The principal actor? There's a tendency among critics and academics to assume the director is responsible for everything – what the French call the auteur, or author. As a director, I can assure you this is not so. Scouting locations, working on the script, casting the actors, directing the actors, and deciding where the vehicles must be parked is more than enough work for any one person. Even directors who operate the camera from time to time, or write their own music, rely on an entire camera department, or arrangers and musicians, to get the job done.
I'm the writer/director of Repo Man, but I'm not responsible for everything you see in that film. Robby Muller, Bob Richardson, Greg Gardiner, J Rae Fox and Linda Burbank are all responsible for its particular visual aspect. Robby was the cinematographer; Bob shot inserts and additional sequences. Greg was in charge of lighting. J Rae and Linda were the production designers. So the visual aspect of the film is a group effort. Perhaps to encompass this complexity the French came up with another concept – mise en scène – to describe the creative process by which a film, or play, is formed. Translated, it means, simply, 'put in scene' – and though it's sometimes used as a synonym for the director's work, it really implies a lot more: the location, the props and costumes, the lighting, and the lens the DP (Director of Photography) chooses to capture the shot, or scene.
Clearly the French were thinking about these things before the rest of us, as they found the language to describe film's new concepts and processes. They even came up with words to describe the cinema itself: le Septième Art – the Seventh Art (the previous six being literature, painting, sculpture, music, theatre and comic books). It is a good term, because it describes the original art form of the twentieth century. Film existed in the nineteenth century, and it exists today, but it came to fruition with the marriage of sound and moving pictures, and inevitably most of the films we consider will be twentieth-century films.
And because context is everything (why were those bandits dressed in US Army uniforms?), to comprehend any film you need to know when and where the film was made, and what else was happening at that time. Films either address the issues of the day, or attempt to ignore them. In either case, the result isinteresting. So in order to understand the films of the twentieth century we need a timeline of the twentieth century.
You can make your own. In fact, you must. My own timeline, unfortunately, concentrates on wars, invasions, economic collapses, and political assassinations, plus the occasional revolution. Your timeline will vary, depending on your interests. But a historical timeline of your own is vital, if you're to understand the context in which these films were made.
* The first film we watch as a whole is The Wizard of Oz (USA, 1939). It's a film most people are familiar with, and it addresses the auteur theory in an interesting way.
The Wizard of Oz was made because the head of MGM studios, Louis B Mayer, wanted a big fantasy picture to compete with Walt Disney's Snow White (USA, 1938). It was the pet project of its producer, Mervyn LeRoy, who wanted to direct it, but Mayer told him no. Mayer saw it as a 'prestige project' – that is, it didn't need to make money, only to prove that MGM was a match for Disney in the fantasy game. A huge budget was approved: two million dollars, which had swelled to almost three by the time the picture was done. The film didn't break even until, decades later, it was licensed to television.
Who directed it? Victor Fleming received the credit, and directed most of the picture. But the first director was Richard Thorpe, who shot for two weeks with Judy Garland wearing a blonde wig. Thorpe was replaced by George Cukor, who lasted three days and took the wig off. Before the film was finished, Victor Fleming was passed on to another film: Clark Gable wanted him to direct Gone with the Wind (USA, 1939). The film was finished by King Vidor, who shot the black-and-white scenes. Another director, Norman Taurog, is also said to have worked on the film.
In these circumstances, who is the auteur? Fleming? Mervyn LeRoy, who supervised the whole show? Or the studio that wanted the picture made? And whose is the mise en scène? Wizard features a fluid, constantly moving camera – something rare in those days. Was this the choice of the cinematographer, Harold Rosson? What of the film's extraordinary look? One art director – Cedric Gibbons – and one costumer – Adrian – were credited, but clearly many more talents were involved.
The examples of The Wizard of Oz and The Wild Bunch suggest there is more than one type of director. There is the director-for-hire (Fleming, the Scott brothers, say). The accomplished British director Stephen Frears told me he happily fits into this category, not initiating his own projects, but waiting for his agent to bring him work. There is the auteur director, who may commission the screenplay and raise money for the film (think Kurosawa, Arturo Ripstein, the Coppolas). And there is the hybrid, who does both (Oliver Stone, Alejandro Iñárritu and others).
The more money at stake, the more tightly controlled directors are likely to be. And, conversely, the further away from the studio, and the lower the budget, the more freedom they may enjoy. The Wizard of Oz was made on sound stages in Culver City. The Wild Bunch was made on location in Parras, Coahuila, Mexico, a long way from LA.
Even an auteur director faces limitations: what is affordable, what is available, what can be safely done without endangering cast and crew. These are serious considerations.
Directors and writers usually face an impossible task when the subject matter of their film is disapproved of. Most often the film cannot be made because financiers won't support it (it took me 30 years to get Bill, the Galactic Hero off the ground – as a non-commercial, student-made-and-acted, crowdfunded feature). If a controversial film is completed, it may well fall foul of censorship. In most countries, the censorship body is government-appointed. In the United States, censorship was in the hands of cities and municipalities – till, in 1930, the studios published a 'Production Code', drawn up under the supervision of Will Hays, president of the studio's lobbying group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (later renamed the MPAA – the Motion Picture Association of America).
Supposedly voluntary, the Hays Code was strictly enforced by the Studio Relations Committee. It prohibited depictions of illicit sex and disrespectful portrayals of authority figures, stating 'the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin'.
In 1934 the studios established the Production Code Administration, which required all films released on or after 1 July 1934 to receive a certificate of approval. Failure to receive a certificate meant a film could not be released in the US. What a coup for the studios! They now had a lock on what films could and could not be distributed. Independent producers could apply for a certificate, but they were obliged to abide by the studios' content rules. This situation lasted into the 1960s, when independent filmmakers like Roger Corman and Dennis Hopper broke the mould with lively, controversial subjects and forced the studios to compete with them.
Even today, 80 years on, the MPAA rating system still exists, and the studios are able to marginalise independent and foreign films in the US by giving them the dreaded 'NC-17' rating.
Some directors' careers were wrecked by coming into conflict with the censorship regime. In 2010 the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was subjected to house arrest and banned from making films for 20 years. In 1965 Peter Watkins, one of the most talented young British directors, saw his film The War Game banned by the BBC, the broadcaster that commissioned it. Suppressed in England, The War Game won an Oscar for 'best documentary' – and it wasn't a documentary. We'll return to that film later in the book.
Let's conclude this chapter by viewing an extraordinary film by a director who is an undisputed auteur, and a highly original and successful one: Federico Fellini. Fellini's films include La Dolce Vita (Italy, 1960) and 8½ (Italy, 1963).
Toby Dammit is part of an Edgar Allan Poe 'portmanteau' film called Histoires Extraordinaires/Spirits of the Dead (France/Italy, 1968). Context being everything, an Edgar Allan Poe movie didn't just appear by chance. This French/Italian co-production followed a series of seven successful Poe-based horror movies produced by an independent American company, AIP. The series included Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and Masque of the Red Death (1964) – all directed by Roger Corman.
Fellini's film is based on Poe's Never Bet the Devil Your Head (published in 1841 – another reason the Poe stories were popular with producers is because they had passed out of copyright, and were in the public domain). The film has the same skeleton as the short story, but it's also about the movie business, and worth your attention for its take on that, too, as a decadent actor played by Terence Stamp shows up in Rome to attend a film festival and star in a Vatican-financed Western, in return for a Ferrari.
Toby Dammit is the work of a director who has thought about the project, worked on the screenplay, chosen the cast, cinematographer and designer, and spent time in the editing room. In other words, an auteur.
* We watch Toby Dammit.
CHAPTER 2CINEMATOGRAPHY, THE FRAME, UNDERSTANDING CREW ROLES
In Toby Dammit, as our hero is driven from the airport into Rome, one of his priest-producers describes the Western he's come to make: 'It's Carl Dreyer meets Pasolini with a touch of John Ford!'
Who are they? Film directors all. Carl Dreyer was the Danish director of Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1928). Pier Paolo Pasolini was the Italian director of Gospel According to Matthew (Italy, 1964). And John Ford was the most famous American director of Westerns. Both Passion and Gospel are highly regarded films – Pasolini was gay, an atheist and a Marxist, yet he responded to Pope John XXIII's call for dialogue with non-Christian artists, and dedicated his film to the Pope. As your film education continues, you should see both these films, and several films by Ford!
So the priest-producers have very good taste in directors – perhaps the only example of 'good taste' in this excessive, bizarre, exemplary film. Toby Dammit is outstanding in its design, its costumes, its acting, its weird authenticity, giving the feeling of arriving in a strange city, being interviewed by people who don't like you, meeting unknown celebrities at strange events, never knowing where you are ... If you become a film person, and attend film festivals, you will have experiences like those depicted here, though with luck they won't end quite as they do for Toby.
As the film's cinematographer, Fellini chose Giuseppe Rotunno: a man of his generation. Rotunno has shot some 80 films: eight with Fellini, and also American studio pictures like Popeye (USA, 1980) and All That Jazz (USA, 1979).
What does the cinematographer – also known as the Director of Photography (DP or DOP) – do? Do they hold the camera? In traditional studio cinema, they did not: DP and camera operator were considered different jobs. With the independent cinema of the sixties, however, the two roles were increasingly combined. This was partially due to lower budgets, but also to the arrival of a smaller, lighter 35mm camera – the Arriflex BL – which made location shooting, and hand-held shooting, easier.
The DP, in consultation with the director, will decide how to shoot, or 'cover' the scene. The DP usually makes decisions as to composition – the exact relationship of objects in the frame – so as to create a pleasing image (perhaps by observing classical painting's rule of thirds) or a disturbing one (for example, by using a disorienting angle, or negative space). The camera crew will position the camera, and most likely move it around, so as to get a variety of angles: a wide establisher, medium shots, two-shots, close-ups, 'over the shoulders'.
What is the camera? You know, I bet, that it's based on the camera obscura – a room or box in which light enters through a tiny hole, creating an upside-down image of the scene outside. Such things were described millennia ago, and modern cameras follow this ancient concept. A camera is a box where light enters and is focused on a recording medium – film (which records the image in its emulsion) or a sensor (which converts the image to an electrical signal). But instead of a pinhole, the light enters through something more sophisticated: a lens.
Usually the DP has one camera, and multiple lenses. Many lenses, three choices: normal, wide, and telephoto.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Introduction to Film by Alex Cox. Copyright © 2016 Alex Cox. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
INTRO TO INTRO,1. CONTEXT, MISE EN SCÈNE, AUTEUR THEORY AND THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY TIMELINE,
2. CINEMATOGRAPHY, THE FRAME, UNDERSTANDING CREW ROLES,
3. THE EDITING ROOM,
4. SOUND: RECORDING, DESIGN AND SCORE,
5. PRODUCTION DESIGN,
6. SCREENPLAYS AND SOURCE MATERIAL,
7. COPYRIGHT AND FAIR USE,
8. HOLLYWOOD, KANE AND WELLES,
9. HOLLYWOOD: SELF-CENSORSHIP AND PRODUCT PLACEMENT,
10. PIRATES AHOY! THE RISE OF THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA,
11. GENRE,
12. VISUAL EFFECTS,
13. ALTERNATE NARRATIVES: DOCUMENTARY AND EXPERIMENTAL FILM,
14. EUROPEAN FILM,
15. LATIN AMERICAN FILM,
16. THE FUTURE OF FILM,
INDEX,