This scene, in all its unadorned simplicity and almost preternatural wonder, attests to that instantly graspable but maddeningly intangible project that the Dardennes have been honing to its keenest edge since La Promesse: a Bazinian revelation of the real achieved via the most fundamentally illusionistic properties of the narrative cinema. When coupled with the painstaking precision—of events and revelations, of looks and gestures—with which they construct their narrative architecture, the breathtakingly simple device of that insistently pursuing camera scores an ontological coup, enlarging the world precisely by narrowing the frame through which we are allowed to view it, indeed, most often making that frame commensurate with the body and movements of a single character. If The Son is the first among equals in the Dardennes’ remarkable body of work, it is because its dramatic crux most perfectly articulates the suggestively epic power ingrained in their determinedly and deceptively small-scale workings. Rigorously adhering to the circumscribed life, milieu, and field of vision afforded Olivier, eschewing any hint of allegorical or symbolic inflation, The Son moves organically into one of the richest evocations of worldly existence and experience achieved in cinema.
Perhaps the best looking movie made in Bangladesh that I’ve ever seen. The directorial restraint for most of the film is exemplary. Really exciting to see that Bangladesh can look so beautiful through a lens. See the whole film (in 11 parts) on youtube. Directed by Tareque Masud.
He is very eloquent on working with non actors, on improvisation, on being inside, on restraint and much else. Here are some especially powerful parts:
Q: Is economy a different problem when you’re working in colour instead of black and white? A: The problem of unity is the same. You touch people’s emotions with unity of effect. You must start from the blank screen and start from the silence. I like silence very much. When I read this little sentence—”Silence was pleas’d”—in Milton’s Paradise Lost, I liked the idea of silence being pleased. Another thing I was aware of was that nearly all gestures, all of our ways of talking, are mechanical. It’s true. You put your hand like this. Look. There are two pages in Montaigne about the way our hands go where we don’t want them to go. He’s a writer who isn’t really difficult. You can always read a page or two and find something. Theatre consists of well controlled gestures and words. Cinema must be something different—not controlled. It must be the equivalent of life, like any art, but certainly not copied or simulated. There must be little elements of life, of reality, captured separately, little by little with the extraordinary machine which is the camera. Then when you put them together in a certain way, a sudden life comes out of it—cinematic life, which is not at all like everyday life. Nor is it like the life of the theatre. The life of the theatre is like life only because actors are alive. In the cinema, when you photograph somebody, you kill him on film. It’s dead images. Projecting a film is projecting people killed. But there is a certain way of doing it so that the images are transformed by their contact together. Then life comes into it, like flowers reviving in water.
Q: What do you think of Tolstoy? A: In comparison I find him very dry. He works much more from the outside than from the inside. With Dostoevsky you feel “I’m sure you don’t make mistakes about human beings.” That’s what I’m looking for—to remain on the inside.
Click on the link in the title for the full interview.
I was very taken by Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) when I saw it the other day. I loved its formal grandness, its glacial, seasonal pacing, its protestant restraint in nearly everything. Here are some quotes from an interview with him:
Q: Except for a brief and vague remark at the beginning, the narrator does not reflect on anything beyond this one story and these local characters. And his last words are: “I never saw any of them ever again.” The paradoxical effect, of course, is that we immediately start to think of where and when we might have encountered them in other shapes—throughout history or in our own lives. This is a good example of your double strategy to leave some things open but also leave enough traces for substantial interpretation. A: I always look for the places in a story where leaving things open can become really productive for the viewer. I often compare filmmaking with building a ski jump; the actual jumping should be done by the audience. For the filmmaker, this is pretty hard—it’s much easier to do the jump yourself, to do it for the viewer. Because there’s always the fear of frustrating them. What do I have to indicate? What do I leave out? How much can I not spell out when constructing a film and still not frustrate the audience? Such strategies have become widely accepted in modern literature, but much less so in cinema. That’s a bit sad.
On there being nuanced, rich characters in the film: “To me there are no completely positive or negative characters in the film. The pastor is not evil either, he’s really convinced of what he does. He really loves his children. That’s the horror of it. It was normal to beat one’s kids. When he tells them, “I won’t sleep tonight, because tomorrow I will have to hurt you,” it sounds cynical to our ears, but I think it’s better to believe him. It’s not very interesting to see him as a sadist or as a grotesque mental case. If these people had just been perverts, this kind of behavior wouldn’t have had such broad effects. And I’m not sure if any other system of education is inherently better. It’s always about the individual pedagogical impulse: do you do something just to exert your authority, or to help the other person find his or her way in society—as shitty as society may be. Each educational system is only as good as the person who acts in it. “
On the role of a director: “I had a fantastic crew—Christoph Kanter, my art director who I’ve been working with for ages, Moidele Bickel, the costume designer, whom I hired because she had done the costumes for Queen Margot—the best I’ve seen in cinema. She’s a master in creating the necessary patina, clothes that look truly worn. I don’t think a director needs to be proficient in all these crafts, cinematography, set design, etc., but he needs the ability to quickly perceive all details and proportions and see if something is wrong.”
A very different method to the messier, impromptu methods of Wong Kar Wai, and Antonioni: Q: Are your films still storyboarded throughout? I wonder if certain strong images—like the crucified bird—are already present in the script rather than “found” while making the film. A: In general, I draw the storyboards after I’ve decided on the locations. But images like the one with the bird are always in the script. I don’t believe in fortuitous events on the set, except in relation to the actors’ work. I never trust “symbolic” things that happen by chance while shooting. They sometimes appear like sudden “proposals,” but usually I cannot judge in that exact moment what it would mean for the whole film if I were to include them. I did that twice in my career, and in the end I cut them out. You may find it great that very second, but it’s usually wrong in some other way. I pretty much follow the script 100 percent.
Goethe: “I have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed.”
Q: … Can you describe why genre traditions hold very little appeal for you, even though, as in the case of Funny Games or Caché, the points of contact are sometimes obvious? A: Points of contact is the correct expression, because I do use genre—both films you mention are thrillers in a certain way. But generally, what bores me in genre cinema is the sort of abstraction or de-realization of reality that takes place there. It bores me as a viewer, not as a filmmaker. It’s like in the theater, in cases such as Ionesco or Gombrowicz: when the world is reduced to a model, I lose interest after five minutes, because I know right away what it will boil down to. I also try to build models in my films, but ones that are “filled with the world,” where the effect is not just metaphorical but steeped in a verifiable reality. And most film genres—apart from the thriller—don’t do that for me. They offer prototypical modes of behavior that only interest me if I can reflect them as a filmmaker.
Q: I came upon something from Pascal, who is one of your gurus. It’s from the Pensées: “We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine.” I had to think of Cannes, where you’ve been a regular, and of your recent Palme d’Or—the whole glamour and fame aspect of cinema. It’s not something you seem made for, but maybe even you desire to live this “imaginary life in the mind of others.” A: Look, this is a truly happy moment in my life. We are all social beings, and we strive for some appreciation by others. If your work is the center of your existence, it’s great to be recognized for it. You don’t do all this for yourself, you want to communicate. First and foremost, you may actually do it for your own pleasure, because you like to do it, but this energy will stall if you find no response or success. What makes me happy about the Palme d’Or is definitely not the glamour that goes with it but that it’s the optimal form of recognition in my métier. The work should shine—it’s what I go public with. As a person, I’d rather have my peace and quiet.
I was hired (payment terms still to be confirmed) to shoot a band interview and some live performances at the Vanguard that would go up on their website. It was something different and I was very interested to see how the camera (and I) would go in a live situation like that.
Interview Planning
I didn’t know too much about the shoot before-hand. It wouldn’t have made a huge difference to how I would have gone about things in this case. I had the equipment that I had. I did ask whether there were some lights available and I should have known that even when the answer is yes, the answer really is no. It is never the right kind, or enough. Wesley lent me a key light but it was missing a diffuser. He also gave me some good tips in terms of really concentrating on the sound as the key to interviews. Although I had the sense to bring a pair of headphones with me, I didn’t have enough sense to make those closed, sound-cancelling cans, which is what you actually need.
Interview Setup
I arrived an hour and a half early, and that was a good thing because it took that long to get things looking right. The band room was a bit of a mess of stuff but there was a very interesting gold plated wall and a nice deep red on the other wall in that corner.
I tested the light that I had bought and it was nice and bright (too bright without the diffusor) and a nice tungsten colour. Good, at least everything could be seen. I set up the camera to point at the corner and set up the audio recorder.
Then we got down to moving a big piano out of the corner and thinking about what could be used as seats. Originally I was thinking about the couch but it was way too large and a hideous green. There was a shabby looking bench covered in a zebra print and a straight wood back which would work well with two people on it and then we needed something for the interview. In another room I found another of the same bench but also an inflatable yellow horse. Yup, we went with that.
The floor was vacuumed and things positioned and it was looking good. There was another light there that I tried to use as a hair light but it was too strong and it looked daylight balanced and made things look very funny. Decided to go with one light.
Next I tried out focusing, positioning a model in all the positions and the DOF covered everyone well. The zoom function at 10x magnification worked very well for getting focus
The problem was composition. There wasn’t much room to move back and still have a clean frame (doorways and other junk gatecrashed) so I was fairly close, the problem was that I had to cut off the legs to get the headroom in. In the end I lowered the sticks and managed to get everything in. The performers bought in their own guiters and really filled out the frame which I wasn’t even thinking about. It looked good.
I recorded some test video and transferred it to the notebook to have a look. It looked good. Especially the colours.
Next I tested the sound and very quickly realised the hopelessness of trying to monitor with open cans. Really need closed, even sound-cancelling headphones with the volume turned up higher to monitor independent of the real sound in the room compared to the monitor output. This is a crucial purchase.
Ok, everything was now ready and we were short of time as the performers had to do sound checks and the interviewer had to leave at a certain time.
We got going.
Interview Recording
Everything functioned pretty well at the beginning except sound monitoring and consequently the sound was a little low especially for one of the artists who was a little quieter than the others.
The light really did look harsh I thought. But that’s better than too little light.
The big problem occurred because of the heat in the room created by the big light and lack of ventilation etc. etc. The camera started overheating at around 7 minutes but kept on working. At around 10 minutes I asked the interviewer and performers to stop and that we’d need a minute. The moment passed pretty quickly but it wasn’t the most professional bit. One of the performers mentioned the continuity issues that would result from him drinking the wine. I realised this was actually a problem and how I was going to edit things together now with the break and not make it look cheesy and amateur.
The interview lasted just over 20 minutes and I didn’t have to shut things down. It visuals took up about 7 gigs. My battery was down to two bars (I didn’t start from full) I really need two batteries to do this kind of work.
Doing visuals and separate sound is a hard task for one person.
Concert Footage
An hour later I moved downstairs to film from the mezzanine levels the actual performances. I started late because I was talking to an old friend I hand’t seen for awhile.
The light levels were very low and I had to push up to 3200 ISO. which wasn’t actually that much of a problem. The other thing I unfortunately had to do was go down to a shutter speed of 60 when I was shooting 1280x720 50p. I should have been at 100. It resulted in some seriously unnatural movement. I’m not sure why the camera let me go down only to that. I also had to shoot at 2.8 and it resulted a pretty narrow DOF even at the 20m distance I was from the stage. Focus wasn’t a big problem though.
The big problem was the battery running out over such a long period. Deciding what songs I actually wanted to shoot and running out of space on the two 16GB cards for the 3 hour set from three performers. Sound monitoring was also an issue.
Can’t use exposure compensation when on M and shooting video.
I was able to get a CD from the sound guy which should be far better quality that then the very hollow stuff that the recorder got.
Matching up all the disparate video and audio (sometimes I’d shut down video and leave audio on) is going to be a pain but not impossible. Better synchronicity between the two would be better for next time.
Pack up was efficient and I didn’t leave anything behind.
All in all, the work is pretty boring and doesn’t need much creativity at all. Will see if there is any payment involved. It was of course, excellent to try it. Not really the direction I want to go in. Main limitations were overheating, sound monitoring, battery, and card space.
I will be editing over the next couple of days and will write up that experience separately.
Making film is a slow, laborious process. Watching a film is a smooth, undemanding breeze. The contrast between these two aspects have always fascinated and frightened me. One has to work especially hard in film as it is so close to reality—there is a moving image, sound, real people etc. It is easier to hide what is really going on in a still image and present a transformed view of that than it is in film.
These difficulties usually mean that it is harder to get up and actually make films. You have to think of the idea, write it, plan it, find locations, find people to help, shoot it in its intricate detail with multiple angles and takes for the shortest of sequences, get good sound, move all the data around, edit it, colour grade it, provide music and sound. It’s easier (well, in theory) to just try and write something. But Wesley, an ok friend of mine, tired of my whining and told me to think of the simplest shortest film that I could and just go and shoot it. I did and it is a very useful process. Here’s a rundown of how I made the 25 second film Shot.
Planning
There was none. There wasn’t much light left in the afternoon and my plan to go shoot in an abandoned Marrickville factory started to look too ambitious. So I walked to the wild non-park at the end of my street with no idea what I was going to shoot. I had a walk around and the initial idea was to just shoot myself walking through the long grass and get a number of angles so that I could practice cutting together.
Shooting
I set up the sticks for a wide shot and as usual couldn’t tell focus for shit on that small screen with so much sunlight around. I try to set up the camera for a 10 second delay before starting the shot but that didn’t work. I started walking across the frame and the ground looked soft so I had the idea of just falling down. The ground was not soft, there were giant, sharp edged rocks exactly where I was diving. Acting is hard!
When I came back to have a look at the footage it looked a lot like I was getting shot so I decided to go with that.
I filmed another closer wide shot from the side. And then one from a front 45 degree angle looking down on the walker. The camera was getting a lot of front sun and it really washed out the image for this shot but there wasn’t really much I could do. I realised later that It would have been better to have the walker walking into the sun rather than away from it.
Around this time I started doing some multiple takes for the same shot. All in all I must have thrown myself onto the ground perhaps 12 to 15 times throughout the shoot.
I gradually got closer and closer to the subjects fall. The colour in the image although I was working a super desaturated, unsharp, decontrasted picture style varied a lot from shot to shot and I was unsuccessful in colour grading later. Don’t know what to do about this really.
Put the camera on the ground for the final fall shot pretty close to the walker. Realised that a nice dead face close up would have been nice.0)
I had a decent idea of exposure (esp using the ND filter) but it’s nowhere near being good. A monitor is crucial for shoots on this thing. You really need to be able to tell what you are looking at.
I then did some general walking scenes. I don’t know if it is the lens of the bad focus or bad exposure but the images are nowhere as sharp in the wide angles as I’d like them to be. A monitor again may help.
Audio
I took the Zoom along to record pristine audio but it was very difficult to manage shooting, acting and then worrying about audio as well. Most of the time I forgot to turn the recorder on for the shot. The 6 clips that I did get were really unusable because most of it was silence either from not being near the action (I had to leave it near where I was going to fall) or from it not being really turned on. I have to practice a lot more with the recorder.
In the end I just went with the Audio from the camera which surprisingly wasn’t that bad. Everybody talks about how horrible the sound is, and maybe I’m just really ignorant about good sound but it worked ok.
I got the hilarious gunshot from the first place I could find on the web. Sound is strangely forgiving but that doesn’t mean that you can neglect it.
Editing
I converted the 3.6GB of data to ProRes LT and imported into Final Cut Pro. To show you the level of my expertise, I spent 10 minutes trying to find how to split the single long clip in the timeline (a result of MPEG streamclip) into multiples.
Once I had found the razor tool I was left with the jigsaw puzzle that seems to be what editing actually is. I played around with in out points and went through the clip frame by frame making sure I synched up where the walker was in the process of the fall. I had a pretty good range of angles to choose from and had a good feel for the shot.
I choose the actual shooting to happen in an unexpected place where the walker is actually coming into frame. As it was a sudden, intense action I cut the clips very short for the shot and had longer more contemplative shots around it. I think it is a pretty standard edit and I was definitely happy with it in the end although it is very immature in terms of crafting.
I used the text tool to make the titles which is super unintuitive (you can’t move the text box around with the mouse but have to define it’s coordinates for example) but the titles are one of those nice touches that makes the thing look smooth.
What I couldn’t figure out was how to colour the piece well. The tools aren’t very intuitive in FCP itself and I wasn’t confident to go into Color. This is something I definitely want to put more effort into and maybe download a trial of Magic Bullet looks. But even with that getting consistency of light and so on across clips seems to be a difficuly task. Important though. In the end I was left with a washed out look which isn’t really what I wanted.
I think the piece works without music as there is a blank tension just in the really everyday sounds of traffic and grass being trodden etc.
I had fun doing the edit. There’s a long way to go.
One of the main problems which I don’t know how to avoid is that I can’t use multiple filters like Fade In/Out and Desaturation together on a clip because my notebook isn’t powerful enough to render the two. This sucks and I need to read up on a way around it. May be good justification for getting one of the newer macbooks with a decent graphics card and handing this off to one of my siblings.
Timing of the shot was critical but pretty easy. I kept on playing it back and put it just a little earlier than the visual clue of the shot having been fired. I think it works well. The body is strongly propelled forward by the edit and then it slumps.
The fade in/outs really add to the feel of the clip.
Distribution
Exporting the movie into 1280x720 for uploading to youtube took like 15 minutes. The actual upload of 72MB of data to youtube took half an hour! That sucks. The quality when it’s up there is fairly good and the UI around the whole upload thing isn’t the most intuitive but it’s decent. I then posted it to Facebook.
This clip did take a while (about 5 hours of work) but it was fun doing it. It would be far easier with another person I guess but wasn’t impossible with just one. I need to do a lot more of these. I’ll try doing 2 a week.
I come from a photographic background. I have always looked down at ‘staged’ photography as being a lower form of the art, as it evades the central challenge of the medium: to make intuitive, spontaneous sense of the symbolic chaos of visual life and to realise new knowledge out of this which can’t be grasped at by other mediums like writing. But now as I’m foraging in the unfamiliar forest of film-making I’m struck by how pre-determined you have to be about the image in film. With the inclusion of time, and the movement that is possible only in time, the task of visual configuration has to become infinitely more determined, but as I’m finding out, it is no less authentic.
I’m having to learn now how to stage, how to ‘say’ instead of ‘find’. It’s funny because I had to try so hard to learn to find (actually, I never really got there). But perhaps this belief that film is to be staged is a limitation of my imaturity. Some of the film-makers that I really like eventually made films in a far more plastic, unmodelled way. They would turn up with minimal scripts, scenes written the day before or in the drunken haze of the morning and play around with the actors and the set when shooting. Antonioni, Wong Kar Wai, Coppola all did so.
This feels like a very esoteric, premature discussion though. It can’t be denied that drama films are more staged. That the process of the capturing the image is slower, that the time slice is longer. Of course great beauty can come from that. It isn’t quite Winogrand’s project of ‘discovering’ new knowledge about the world through instinctive photography but something more designed. In fact, this is why I wanted to try film in the first place, here I have more room to ‘say’. Whether or not it’s what fits me is hard to say, the good thing is that I’m giving it a go.
Cormac McCarthy sounds like a cantankerous sense maker. I imagine most people make sense and also cantankerous. Some good tidbits about filmmaking in here as well:
The Wall Street Journal: When you sell the rights to your books, do the contracts give you some oversight over the screenplay, or is it out of your hands?
Mr. McCarthy: No, you sell it and you go home and go to bed. You don’t embroil yourself in somebody else’s project.
WSJ: When you first went to the film set, how did it compare with how you saw “The Road” in your head?
CM: I guess my notion of what was going on in “The Road” did not include 60 to 80 people and a bunch of cameras. [Director] Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago and I thought, “This is just hell. Who would do this?” Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.
WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?
CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.
…
WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?
CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?
CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
WSJ: The last five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?
CM: I don’t think there’s any rich period or fallow period. That’s just a perception you get from what’s published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote, and she said, “Because I was good at it.” And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.” And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.
…
WSJ: You were born in Rhode Island and grew up in Tennessee. Why did you end up in the Southwest?
CM: I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.
…
JH: Be glad you didn’t have to sit through the assembly cut, which was four hours. Look, I’ve never made a film anywhere near two hours. I admire the films, back in the day, when they were 90 minutes.
CM: One school of thought says that directors shouldn’t be allowed to edit their own films. But the truth is they should be. And they should be really brutal. Really brutal.
JH: Viewers are being hardwired differently. In film, it’s harder and harder to use wide shots now. And the bigger the budget, the more closeups there are and the faster they change. It’s a whole different approach. What’s going to happen is there will be the two extremes: the franchise films that are now getting onto brands like Barbie, and Battleship and Ronald McDonald; then there are these incredible, very low-budget digital films. But that middle area, they just can’t sustain and make it work in the current model. Maybe the model will change and hopefully readjust.
CM: Well, I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.
JH: No, you’re absolutely right. Just as an example, the Toronto Film Festival is one of the biggest in film festivals. They have made it, for the first time ever, much more difficult to submit a film. They charge an entry fee and they still had 4,000 submissions just this year and they boiled that down to 300.
…
WSJ: Do you feel like you’re trying to address the same big questions in all your work, but just in different ways?
CM: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way. Things I’ve written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there’s something about writing about it that flattens them. You’ve used them up. I tell people I’ve never read one of my books, and that’s true. They think I’m pulling their leg.
I didn’t know the director of The Road was Australian, but he is.
Some very interesting discussion in the middle of the clip where he describes beautifully how good editing can make something less obvious and more visual and ultimately more moving.
He also mentions Nicholas Roeg whose Walkabout is a very interestingly edited and shot film.
This is really making me think that writing for film is such a different job to writing novels or short stories. Whereas in the novels the quality of the words and sentences are what’s important, in film the best writers deal with visual sophistication.
