Monthly Archives: April 2016

Lectorials, Media 1

In Seth Keen’s Lectorial presentation this week he mentioned that narrative films are generally governed by temporal relations, but in non-narrative film the governing force is often spatial. That is, rather than following a cause-and-effect procession, the various elements of an experimental film can work together to create a “space” in the audience’s mind.

A couple of years ago I read a reddit AMA with some of the crew that work on David Attenborough’s nature documentaries. Attenborough’s films aren’t strictly non-narrative, because they have such prominent narration and they’re generally constructed as a narrative film with characters, settings, etc., but the material they shoot could easily be compiled into an observational documentary in the style of Frederick Wiseman if they so choose.

Anyway, I’m a huge Attenborough fan so I read the entire AMA with glee, but one thing in particular stuck out to me: I discovered that in Attenborough’s films (and most nature documentaries) the sound is recorded entirely separately from the video. So when you see amazing video of a bird imitating human noises, chances are it’s actually a bit of a cheat and they’ve just layered audio of one bird over footage of a different bird.

I’d never really given this a conscious thought before but it makes sense in hindsight, because unless you have an incredibly sensitive directional microphone attached to each camera there’s no way you can record the sound of, say, a lion from 300m away and have it sound as crystal clear as it does in the finished product. I guess you could consider it a kind of foley, in a way… where the foley artist is an animal.

Anyway, the point of all this is that the result is a spatial relationship between all the pieces of material (audio and video), which is put together into a whole by the audience in their minds. This is another example of closure, which was discussed early in the semester.

One of the main things I’m learning in Media 1 so far is that so much of the work in making a text coherent is actually done by the audience. Very strange.

Cheating spatial relations

Aside
Media 1, Workshops

(Not) noticing

I can safely say that noticing isn’t one of my strong suits. Unless I make a deliberate effort, I tend to get caught up in my own thoughts and can often let the world completely pass me by. I like to think it’s just that my brain is extremely efficient at deciding whether information is useful or irrelevant from moment to moment, so I only concentrate on whatever cognitive task is currently most important to me. This is fantastic in some contexts (on the train, for example), but it did lead to a slight fail situation in this week’s Workshop.

Louise ran a quick exercise where she asked everyone to turn around and write down what we thought she was wearing, from memory. Some people were bang on, but I could not remember a single thing. I wasn’t trying to be funny, I literally couldn’t remember a single thing about her clothes.

So that definitely wasn’t the best vote of confidence for my awareness skills. But it was useful to know that about myself, so I can work on it in future.

The funny thing is, when I’m watching a movie or television show I can notice the most seemingly insignificant details and recall them long after watching. The difference is that when I’m watching something I’m in a noticing frame of mind, so I make a conscious effort to take note of things and can commit them to memory easily.

So this week I’m going to give myself a little exercise to start noticing more. Any time I walk into a room I’m going to try to notice how many lights are on, what the temperature is, and how many people are on their phones.

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Assessments, Media 1

PB3: Eraserhead

Behold, my finished video for Project Brief 3.

I decided to call it Eraserhead, both as a reference to collector culture and as an ironic nod to one of the most disturbing films of all time — and possibly the film least like mine in all of cinema history.

The film is an interview with my brother, Gavin, who has held on to his small, crappy collection of erasers for 30 years despite their total lack of usefulness. I’m really interested in the idea of nostalgia as one of the biggest mediators of human experience/behaviour, and my brother’s collection is a direct manifestation of his attachment to childhood objects.

Aesthetically, I decided to place Gavin against a plain white background and shoot him with high contrast lighting and exposure. I hoped that this would visually separate him from “real life”, to reinforce the idea that his collection is a bit weird and abnormal, and also to give the interview a slightly clinical feeling. I first saw this visual style in the films of Errol Morris, my favourite documentarian, and I tried to replicate his aesthetic as best I could using a home-made lighting rig against a wall in my living room. I was pleasantly surprised at how close to my vision it ended up being. In a studio environment with a professional lighting set-up it would be quite easy to improve it even further.

Another aspect of my film that I’m happy with is the audio, and specifically how it is constructed. I made heavy use of J-cuts after first learning about them in our week three Workshops, and they really help to tie everything together into a cohesive whole. Each sentence flows into the next and it feels like a single piece of dialogue even though there are dozens of cuts in the audio track.

It was a real struggle to find footage online that I could incorporate into my project. Even when I could think of suitable types of footage that I could use to illustrate what Gavin was saying, I would search online and more often than not I would come back empty handed. I had a very specific idea of the kind of footage I wanted to incorporate (vintage black and white educational films) because it would tie into my theme of nostalgia, but it was actually impossible to find such footage in most circumstances, particularly the shot of a child crying. I ended up having to “grunge-ify” some recent footage so that it would fit the rest of the piece. Next time I’m planning a video project that will incorporate found footage, I think I’ll try to source it before I finalise my vision for the project, because it really was the hardest part of the whole exercise.

But I think the biggest weakness of the film is that it was difficult to shape Gavin’s interview answers into a narrative that adequately gets the film’s point across. I think audiences will likely watch my film and then afterwards think, “so what?”. I am really interested in making documentary portraits, and this was a useful experiment for my first time, but in the future I think it will be valuable to ensure my subject has an interesting story to tell that doesn’t need to be shaped too much (or at all).

On the other hand, I really like films where the “point” is either ambiguous or subjective, and it’s up to the audience to do the work to understand it, so that could be true of Eraserhead too. I guess I’ll find out when it’s presented to my classmates.

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Narrative and story in a poetic short film with no dialogue

The presence of Michael Dudok de Wit in the 2016 Cannes film festival announcement prompted me to re-watch his 2000 film Father and Daughter, which won an Oscar in 2001 for Best Animated Short Film. You should definitely watch it if you have a spare 10 minutes:

It’s a beautiful film. The amount of story and feeling Dudok de Wit is able to express without dialogue, just through movement, music and sound effects, is really incredible.

It got me thinking about this week’s readings, and I realised that Father and Daughter has all the major elements that a cohesive film should have. There’s a three-act structure, a protagonist and an antagonist, and the success of the film relies on its ability to evoke empathy in its audience (which is does very well, at least in my case).

The protagonist is the daughter, as the whole story is told from her point of view narratively and emotionally. She undergoes the most change/development, as she grows from a little girl to an old woman, and has a conscious desire (for her father to return).

The antagonist is the father. This is interesting because the father is actually barely in the film at all, and he’s not an enemy in the traditional sense, but his character’s desires/behaviour lie in opposition to the daughter.

Act I sets up the characters (father, daughter) and the setting. Depending on how you read the film the inciting incident could be the birth of the daughter, or it could be the start of a war. There is a first-act turning point when the father gets into a boat and rows away, never to return. The film leaves it intentionally ambiguous, but this could be read literally (he abandoned the daughter) or metaphorically (rowing away could be a symbol for death, or for going off to war, or various other potential explanations).

In Act II we watch as the daughter goes through her life, growing older little by little, revisiting the many places she and her father visited on their bikes when she was younger. We see her go through her entire life, wondering about her father and the loss in her life.

Finally, in Act III we see the daughter, now an elderly woman herself, literally follow in her father’s footsteps as she steps out from the beach and finds his abandoned, decaying rowboat. Again, depending on your reading of the film the climax and resolution could actually mean different things, but they’re certainly present at the end of the film.

So it goes to show that even a poetic animated film with no dialogue can be read according to the principles of narrative and story laid out by McKee and Rabiger.

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Media 1, Thoughts

Cannes program highlights

The official line-up for the Cannes Film Festival was announced a few days ago, and as expected it’s a hell of a collection of films.

Every year the Cannes announcement is exciting for two reasons: one, as the world’s most high-profile festival, many filmmakers premiere their work at Cannes and it’s fun to get a look at what some of my favourite directors are up to; and two, the Melbourne International Film Festival draws a lot of its program directly from Cannes, so in some ways it’s a very early MIFF pre-announcement.

I’ve been to MIFF every year since around 2009 (seeing between 30 and 50 films across the three weeks of the festival), and I plan to continue that for as long as I live in Melbourne, so these are (hopefully) some of the films I’ll be watching in August:

  • It’s Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan, Canada) – Dolan is a 27-year-old Canadian director who can only be described as a wunderkind. He’s made six films prior to this (the first when he was just 20), and at least two of them are modern masterpieces. It’s Only the End of the World sees him working with two of my favourite French actors, Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel.
  • The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, South Korea) – Park’s first feature film since he made the jump to Hollywood with Stoker (2013). He returned to his home country to make this period film set in South Korea and Japan of the 1930s, which seems like it might be a little out of his usual wheelhouse.
  • After the Storm (Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan) – I’ve been on a huge Koreeda kick for the past few weeks. He makes amazing small-scale family dramas that aren’t flashy on the surface, but underneath are just endless caves of emotion and humanity. They don’t call him the reincarnation of Ozu for nothing.
  • Baccalaureat (Cristian Mungiu, Romania) – Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is probably in my top 20 films of the 21st century so far, and his follow up Beyond the Hills is also incredible. The only synopsis I’ve found for Baccalaureat so far is quite vague (“a family drama about parenting set in a small Romanian town where everybody knows everybody”), but the beauty of Mungiu’s films are that they’re not usually about what you think they’re about.
  • The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit, Netherlands) – Dudok de Wit won an Oscar in 2001 for his short film Father and Daughter, in my opinion one of the most soulful and beautiful animated shorts of all time. The Red Turtle is his first feature film, a dialogue-free story about a man trying to escape a desert island. If that doesn’t sound like it could sustain a feature-length film’s running time, you haven’t seen what Dudok de Wit can do without dialogue.

Those are my most anticipated picks – if these five films make it to MIFF in August I’ll be a very happy camper.

 

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Cinema Studies

Editing and Enemy of the State

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

If mise-en-scène concerns what’s in the shot, and cinematography is how the shot is captured, editing dictates the relationship between shots. By editing, a director joins two shots together to steer the audience’s perception and experience in a particular way. There are a number of ways a director or editor can join shots together: a simple cut (instantaneous change from one shot to another); a fade in to or out of black; a dissolve (briefly superimposing the end of one shot to the beginning of another); or a wipe (one shot replaces another by means of a boundary line moving across the screen). By deploying these techniques, a director controls the relationship between the two shots in terms of time, space, rhythm and graphic qualities.

In Enemy of the State, Tony Scott uses editing in a number of precisely controlled and kinetic ways to evoke mood, drive the narrative and create contrasts between characters and settings. As just one example, the rhythm of cutting is often ramped up to heighten the sense of tension and paranoia felt by characters during chase or fight sequences, and the same techniques are used to depict the high-tech surveillance equipment used by the CIA (the capability of the CIA to quickly locate Robert Dean is integral to the plot of the film).

Cross-cutting is often used to show the simultaneous action of characters being surveilled (usually Robert Dean) alongside the people doing the surveilling. This cross-cutting invites comparison of the two sets of characters, and emphasises the power relationship between the two — the CIA knows much more about Dean than he knows about them.

One particular example of this is a scene in which Dean and his wife are driving through a tunnel, unaware that at that moment CIA agents are ransacking and vandalising his house to cover the installation of recording equipment. The shots of Dean and his wife are mostly medium shots of the two conversing in their car, well-lit by overhead street lighting, with few cuts to different angles/perspectives other than the occasional close up to one of the characters while they talk. When it cross-cuts to the CIA agents ransacking Dean’s house, the editing changes drastically to emphasise graphic contrasts (the setting in Dean’s home is much darker and shot with higher contrast, low-key lighting), rhythmic contrasts (shot length becomes much shorter as the agents violently trash the environment), temporal contrasts (the scene condenses time by jumping forward through actions), and spatial contrasts (depth is shortened by extensive use of close ups and camera movement).

These techniques (governed by an approach to editing known as continuity editing) are working constantly through the film to affect form and create meaning.

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Experiments, Media 1

Experiments with slo-mo

Over the Easter weekend I stayed in Mt Beauty with a group of friends, and on the trip there I decided to play around with my iPhone’s slow-motion video function, which I’ve never really used before.

The result is pretty interesting; even with simple composition and no accompanying music the videos seem to take on an epic quality, which seems to be an inherent attribute of slow-motion footage (no doubt culturally conditioned from watching so many films that use this technique).

I’m not sure if I’ll ever use this technique in my course work (it does look a touch contrived), but it’s fun to experiment with.

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Media 1, Thoughts, Workshops

Life casting

In our Workshop this week the subject of David Boltanski came up; specifically, the agreement he made with David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art to broadcast his entire life into the gallery until his death.

It’s an amazing story, and has just made it even more clear to me that I need to find my way to MONA sooner rather than later, but it also reminded me of a weird relic of 90s culture that has always fascinated me: life casting.

Back before people streamed their every thought to YouTube, back even before reliable internet video really existed at all, there was a small, strange subculture of people who recorded every detail of their lives and placed it online for the world to see. The most prominent practitioner of life casting was JenniCam (Jennifer Ringley), an American who began broadcasting her life in 1996, at the age of 19, by placing cameras throughout her college dorm room. She continued the practice for almost a decade.

The compulsion to live your entire life in public is something I just cannot understand, no matter how much I try. I didn’t even appear in my own “creative self-portrait” video for Project Brief 2, that’s how little I want to be on camera. But there are others who are so secure and comfortable with themselves and what they’re doing that they give strangers unmediated, unrestricted access to it via internet video. It’s crazy to me, but it’ll probably continue to grow and become normalised over the next decade or so and I’ll be even less in the mainstream.

If you’re interested in the topic, JenniCam and Jennifer Ringley was the subject of an episode of the Reply All podcast – it’s a great episode and definitely recommended.

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Assessments, Media 1, Workshops

Narrative structure in PB3

  1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ (Robert McKee) of your portrait?
    Nostalgic attachment to objects has an influence on our lives far greater than its practical use. People will go to ridiculous lengths to keep and maintain connections to their childhood/former self even if to other people the value may not be immediately apparent. My subject has a small, crappy collection of erasers that he’s kept for over 30 years (through marriages, divorce, moving house multiple times, having children, etc.) and will keep for the rest of his life, purely because of his nostalgic connection to them.
  2. How is your portrait film structured?
    My portrait is structured around an interview with the subject, using voiceover narration to allow the subject to speak about his collection, what it means to him and why he still has it in his possession. While the audio of the interview continues for the entire duration of the video, the subject’s words are supported and reinforced by cut-away shots to B-roll and found footage.
  3. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee?
    I hope the audience perceives the interviewee as a bit weird or strange to begin with, but as the video continues I hope to spark a feeling of empathy as the audience recognises the same nostalgia in their own lives.
  4. How is your portrait being narrated?
    The only voice heard in my video is the subject’s interview answers as he reflects on his experience. I chose to do this to give the video the feeling of an uninterrupted series of thoughts from the subject, as if he is reflecting on his own history and what it means to him. Because the audio from the interview needs to be cut and pasted together to form coherent thoughts, the structure of the video necessitates cut-away shots to mask edits in the audio.
  5. What role will ‘found footage’ play in your portrait?
    Found footage will be used as reinforcement at certain key points, to illustrate what the subject is speaking about or to create associative connections. I’ve chosen to use vintage footage wherever possible to reinforce the theme of nostalgia.
  6. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point?
    Not in the traditional narrative sense, but I hope that the audience’s realisation of empathy for the subject will be an emotional turning point.
  7. When does this turning point occur in your portrait and why?
    I hope the (gradual) turning point will occur towards the end of the video when my interviewee is explicitly talking about nostalgia and how there is inherent value in still having something you’ve kept for a long time. I’ve structured it this way to allow the audience to come to realise this idea naturally first, and then the subject will emphasis the point in his own words.
  8. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum?
    Through chronological storytelling, by diving straight into the story and evoking curiosity, and then further explaining and building context.
  9. Where will your portrait’s dramatic tension come from?
    Dramatic tension will be built upon the strangeness/uselessness of my subject’s hobby – the audience will wonder why he has such a collection, why he’s kept it so long and, most importantly, why I’ve made a film about it.
  10. Does the portrait have a climax and/or resolution?
    There is a small resolution to the film when my subject accepts and defends the uselessness of his hobby – which is, ultimately, what my film is about.
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