1
I have grown disinterested in facts, events, and happenings. I want to catch the inbetweens, the unnoticed, the unobserved. The feeling just before or after something happens is far more interesting to me then the climactic spike. And I distrust the effectiveness of words, of language to do justice to the complexity of reality. It is often the visual, the atmospheric aural, the passing of time that gets closest to the truth. More often then not, words are merely a disingenuous cover. Of course, sometimes they are the truth, but often, that’s when they are overlooked.
2
Stories are for children. But we are all children.
3
Although film looks like reality, it is not. Look outside the frame that it’s in and see that it is not. Although the two are not the same, the way we deal with both is very similar. We try to impute logical cause and effect flows on both reality and film. But significant human progress comes from mysteries, from questions we cannot answer, from breakdowns in logic. And so the highest ambition in film art must be to confound perception and thought, to reject the causual flow to whisper at unknowables. But that doesn’t give you license to confuse the watcher’s being, their sense of rhythm.
4
Characters should always be saying what they don’t mean.
5
Characters should rarely know what they are doing or why.
6
Characters should distrust themselves.
7
The narrator is the enemy.
8
Suspense comes from the the breaking or at least blurring of the causal flow. But the audience has to care first. And the audience cares for themselves. Hitchcock knew this well.
Posted 2 years ago
