Short Film Take 2: The Trouble With Mr. Goldman April 29, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Artfully Deranged, Short Film , add a commentThis article is written in conjunction with several others and is best read in conjunction with them. Click the below titles to read/navigate between each individual article:
1. Short Film: A brief critical history
2. Short Film In The UK: Screen Yorkshire and the Independents
3. Short Film In The UK: Film Festivals and Competitions
4. Short Film In The UK: Technology and the Tiny Screen
5. Short Film In The UK: Availability, Audience, and the Future
6. ‘Okay, we’re done’: The story of my first short film
7. Short Film Take II: The Trouble With Mr. Goldman
8. Short Film In The UK: Recommended Links
You learn from your mistakes. Last year I learnt the art of bad sound recording. This year I learnt several of the things I should have learnt in 2005, namely, rehearsals, script editing, production design, and preparation. On my second narrative-based short film, Trouble With Mr. Goldman, we were basically rushing from start to finish, and it unfortunately shows.
Yet, I can’t fault my actors (who themselves would quickly admit their best skills lay in other film and television production departments). They gave it their best shot, learning their lines minutes before each take, producing some idiosyncratic and against-type performances. But the problems of essentially filming a three day shoot over two half days really hits hard when you simply didn’t prepare enough. And that was my fault. The script needed editing and cutting down (we changed a major plot point during a take on the second day) and more needed to be done to make the two main characters more interesting. I attempted to rectify one problem by cutting down the film in editing (the original cut came in at just over 12 minutes; this new version is just over 10) but that’s when I realised I needed a couple of re-shoots (best example - during a scene when Mr. Goldman first arrives, I should have filmed this entirely from one character’s perspective, but I never got the shot).
There were two things I prepared for that worked to some degree. Firstly, the scene where Mr. Goldman tells the two character’s separately, what he has to offer. I wanted to cut the two scenes together so that the conversation would only take place once, but identically to both characters. This way the audience would know they are both being offered the very same thing, whilst keeping the pace of the film moving quickly. The other thing I prepared for was to shoot in widescreen. I wanted to give the film a more cinematic look even if the production values were very low. This involved working with a 1.85:1 blanked out view finder/monitor, and adding a 16:9 mask in post-production. I also added a contrast effect to give the film a more expensive look, and to add to the dreamy sense of the story.
Talking of the story, Mr. Goldman is supposed to be a comedy (I let other people be the judge of that). It concerns this crazy idea that laziness is punished in some way - in this case, by a mad man who thinks he’s Alex from A Clockwork Orange, and calls himself Mr. Goldman. When two slackers get a visit from him one day, they believe they are in the money when he offers them riches beyond their imagination. Yet, secretly he plays them off against each other, evidentally trying to prove or disprove whether they deserve to be punished for their sins.
You Tube channel featuring some of my short film work
Short Film in the UK: Technology and the Tiny Screen April 27, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Artfully Deranged, Short Film , 7 commentsThis article is written in conjunction with several others and is best read in conjunction with them. Click the below titles to read/navigate between each individual article:
1. Short Film: A brief critical history
2. Short Film In The UK: Screen Yorkshire and the Independents
3. Short Film In The UK: Film Festivals and Competitions
4. Short Film In The UK: Technology and the Tiny Screen
5. Short Film In The UK: Availability, Audience, and the Future
6. ‘Okay, we’re done’: The story of my first short film
7. Short Film Take II: The Trouble With Mr. Goldman
8. Short Film In The UK: Recommended Links
The Technology
Light Blue Optics Ltd. is currently developing a mini projector that would be capable of transferring images from devices such as Ipod’s and mobile phones, and projecting them on to screens in much the same way a theatre projector works. According to Clint Deboer, what is known as PVPro technology ‘overcomes the size limitation of conventional projection techniques, allowing projectors to be smaller than ever before.’ This certainly intrigues Lisa Roberts of Blink Media in Huddersfield who is watching such technological advancements with enthusiasm. Roberts, who pioneered Pocket Shorts’ initiative to create a vending machine for downloading short films to mobile phones, says ‘I am following the developments in miniaturization of projection technologies closely. There is a projector by Light Blue Optics that is the size of a matchbox that they hope to shrink further to be another mobile phone feature within a few years.’
Roberts, along with Andrew Wilson, created the Blue Tooth Vendor. This acts like a conventional vending machine. As Wilson says, it’s a ‘wall-mounted unit which allows people to download films to their mobile phones.’ Through their Pocket Shorts scheme, they hope to attract filmmakers to this new way of viewing films, and they believe the short film is the way forward. ‘A lot of people download short films to their mobile phones now but these come from large commercial media companies.’ Wilson continues, ‘Pocket Shorts is about getting new filmmakers to create independent mobile phone films [that are a] bit more innovative than you would get from downloading clips from Big Brother.’
Andrew Quinn of Slack Video was one of the first to receive a commission for a Pocket Short film. ‘I found it really interesting to work with, personally. The whole idea of being short, sharp and straight to the point was really emphasised with these 4 x 15 second long films, or 1 x 1 minute films. I think as a whole it worked very well, it was certainly a challenge.’ Quinn believes you only have to consider the number of mobile phones that are being sold to see the concept has great potential. ‘If you look at the popularity for ring tones and video ring tones, you can see there’s probably going to be a demand for small media works on these kinds of portable devices.’
They’re certainly not alone in their belief that mobile phone technology is the way forward for short filmmaking. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has already created a mobile phone entertainment store. Named Mobizzo, it’s ‘a production studio to focus exclusively on developing cell phone entertainment in much the same way that 20th Century Fox creates movies and television.’ According to Holson, the reasons companies are rushing to support such media on mobile phones is because ‘analysts predict that the number of global mobile phone customers will double to four billion in five years.’
Through its global possibilities, Olga Kharif believes it can break down the barriers of national cinema such as Hollywood in America and Bollywood in India, to produce a worldwide cinema that has more cultural influences than ever before. ‘That virtual land is full of possibilities. With 2 billion subscribers worldwide, mobile phones represent a much greater market for film than movie theaters or PCs. No wonder studios, distributors, and independent animators and filmmakers are streaming into this virtual film genre.’ Quinn concurs, ‘by using this new technology there’s definitely an opportunity to get these kinds of works seen by a mass audience who would otherwise never experience them.’
Mobile People with Mobile Phones
However, if indeed mobile phone films become mainstream commodities, will this belittle the medium with its easy access production tools being used by amateurs? Roberts is adamant this will not happen: ‘I’ve heard a lot of this - how can having more creative product around be a bad thing? Yes, it might take more time to sift through but so what?’ Kharif sees the low-cost nature of mobile phone filmmaking as a risk worth taking. ‘These aren’t big-budget productions. Where a Hollywood production can cost millions, a cell-phone movie can be created for a few hundred dollars and with an investment of, perhaps, only 40 hours of time.
Yet others are not so sure, as Neil Hunt says: ‘To me, it seems that if you’re going to invest your time into enjoying a movie, you might as well watch it on a large screen.’ Even Andrew Quinn who produced a short mobile phone film says, ‘I still think short films look better on television or projection than compressed into a 1″ screen.’ Kharif is cautious, ‘Cell-phones are obviously nowhere near their big-screen cousins in sophistication and popularity. It’s not even clear that wireless subscribers will pay for flicks.’
In a sense there’s a contradiction. In bringing short films into the mainstream, the filmmaker has to take liberties if producing primarily for mobile phone exhibition, such as Pocket Shorts maximum run-time for films of one minute. As Kharif says, ‘Granted, today’s cell-phone flicks are no Casablanca. Take The Life Of A Ringtone, an entry from Louiza Vick, who took first place among student works [at the Zoie Cellular Film Festival]. The movie’s artfully arranged photos and video clips take viewers through a ring tone’s creation. But the flick is more akin to a slide show.’ Is it true then that mobile phone films should not be judged by their lack of quality, but just taken as they are, in the sense that they will never be as good as Casablanca? Zoie Cellular Festival creator Victoria Weston says that mobile films are ‘fast entertainment. You’re not going to be dealing with heavy plot lines.’
So effectively they differ from ‘normal’ short filmmaking. However, Andrew Quinn believes ‘people are very likely to show videos they like to their friends, which again can only be beneficial in terms of ‘getting things seen’, and therefore generating interest in short film as a whole’. Yet he stands by large screen projected exhibitions when he says ‘short film works still obviously need to be shown in festivals and screenings’ Therefore, he implies that short film as whole could be damaged by mobile films having an adverse effect on traditional filmmaking methods. For example, if mobile phone films are primarily between fifteen seconds and one minute, will this mean the end for the ten and twenty minute short? Additionally, if mobile phone films disregard heavy plot lines, will this mean an end for traditional narrative forms?
It is interesting to note that the commercial short film of the 1910s helped form the bigger and longer feature film which ultimately forced it into non-existence. Now a new possibility for commercial short film is getting smaller in size and shorter in length, breaking down the barriers of the non-mainstream modern short film. Fundamentally, it shows how important commercial value is to an art form.
However, with mobile phone-only short film competitions such as Nokia Shorts 2005 and the Pocket Film Festival beginning to come into action, the bad can be seen being filtered from the good. Additionally, with award-winning British film director Shane Meadows becoming the first filmmaker to create a short mobile phone film using a phone’s video capabilities, it would seem the format has the support of the established talent. As well as opening up more possibilities for short films to be made. ‘Meadows praised the technology and raved about the potentials of filming with mobile phones, in particular that ‘they let you get shots which might not be possible using larger camera equipment’’. ‘There’s already great creativity in mobile phone film-making’ says Pocket Film director Laurence Herzberg. As Rory Mulholland says, the Pocket Film festival came about ‘as mobile network operators in many countries are thrusting third-generation (3G) phones equipped with video cameras and internet capability on their customers in the hope of recouping some of the huge investments they made in the sector.’
Therefore, this suggests that the short film has become a marketable, commercial product once again, through this new media form. Given its commercial importance in early cinema, it’s only logical to think this could have far reaching effects on the film industry as a whole. Roberts says, ‘until recently I would say short film was viewed only as a calling card for filmmakers wanting to move onto features. However, thanks to technology and TV programming/commissioning trends over the last 5 years there has been a revolution in all things small and short.’
Theoretically, given the mobility of mobile phones and the fact they can be used and accessed wherever and whenever, the implications on the films themselves could be of vital importance.
This is important since the short film offers one fundamental advantage over the feature film – its length. If short films became mainstream phone accessories, and as Wilson claims, they are used whenever and in whatever circumstances occur, then their shortened length would appear more appealing to mobile people with mobile phones.
Citation:
Deboer, C (2006)Laser Projectors Coming to Cell Phones and PDAs [online] available from http://www.audioholics.com/news/editorials/laserprojectorscellphones.php (accesed 7 March 2006)
Herzberg, L (2005) Festival celebrates mobile phone movies [online] available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4314894.stm (accessed 8 March 2006)
Holson, L (2006) News Corporation to Tap Not Just Its Film Vaults, but Art From the Street [online] available from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/technology/27mobile.html?ex=1142053200&en=bbc788cdada4e5e2&ei=5070 (accessed 8 March 2006)
Hunt, N (2005) The Movie Theatre In Your Pocket [online] available from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2005/tc20050622_9670_tc_212.htm (accessed 8 March 2006)
Kharif, O (2005) The Movie Theatre In Your Pocket [online] available from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2005/tc20050622_9670_tc_212.htm (accessed 8 March 2006)
Mobile Films.net (2005) Mobile Filmmaking – A Birth of a new genre [online] available from http://www.mobifilms.net/scene_heard.html (accessed 8 March 2006)
Mulholland, R (2006) Festival celebrates mobile phone movies [online] available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4314894.stm (accessed 8 March 2006)
Quinn, A (2006) Interview conducted by Daniel Stephens with Andrew Quinn at Slack Video Hull
Roberts, Lisa (2006) Interview conducted by Daniel Stephens Huddersfield
Weston, V (2005) The Movie Theatre In Your Pocket [online] available from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2005/tc20050622_9670_tc_212.htm (accessed 8 March 2006)
Wilson, A (2005) A Film In Your Pocket [online] available from http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2005/11/24/pocket_shorts_huddersfield_feature.shtml (accessed 8 March 2006)
‘Okay, we’re done’: Story of my first short film April 23, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Artfully Deranged, Short Film , add a commentThis article is written in conjunction with several others and is best read in conjunction with them. Click the below titles to read/navigate between each individual article:
1. Short Film: A brief critical history
2. Short Film In The UK: Screen Yorkshire and the Independents
3. Short Film In The UK: Film Festivals and Competitions
4. Short Film In The UK: Technology and the Tiny Screen
5. Short Film In The UK: Availability, Audience, and the Future
6. ‘Okay, we’re done’: The story of my first short film
7. Short Film Take II: The Trouble With Mr. Goldman
8. Short Film In The UK: Recommended Links
Before Texas-born film director Robert Rodriguez rose to fame with his tale of a vengeful vigilante, slithering around sun-smoked Mexico with a guitar case full of guns, he sat in a Medical Research Hospital whilst they took chunks of skin out of his arms, giving him $2000 for his troubles. Here was a young 20-year-old who didn’t just dream of filmmaking – he bled for it. Checking himself into the clinic to undergo testing for a quick healing drug, he was intentionally wounded and then patched up with the medication, left walking around the hospital for seven days to see how it worked. After the pain was over and two scars were forever left on his arms, he took his money and made the award-winning short film ‘Bedhead’. The rest as they say, is history…
I certainly wasn’t going to go to such extreme measures. Perhaps that means I’ll never make a $45 million movie, get Salma Hayek to dance half-naked on table tops whilst Quentin Tarantino licks her toes, or live in a house that has its own editing room, sound mixing stage, and cinema. At least, though, I can say I had a good time making my first short film, and that the results were fulfilling if a little underwhelming. There was certainly a moment when freezing my butt off at a reservoir we were shooting at in Barnsley, I began to wonder why we were bothering. Then I remembered what had inspired me in the first place – Rodriguez’s maniacal passion for the art. ‘Get your a**e out there and make a movie because I’m telling you,’ he says in his book Rebel Without A Crew. ‘There are so many creative people out there itching to make something, but they’re too negative in thinking they’ll never get anywhere or it’ll never happen.’ It suddenly became clear – freeze myself to near death today, but tomorrow reap the benefits of unrelenting riches, a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, a black Ferrari, and a sex scandal on ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’. Hang on, back track - you’re still freezing your butt off, you’re losing light and your actors still don’t know their lines.
Kevin Smith, director of the critically acclaimed ‘Clerks’ thinks it’s quite amusing when people tell him his low-budget film made them want to make movies. “I know what that means,” he says, “your movie looks so terrible, if you can do it then I can!” I prefer Rodriguez’s take that if you think you’re a filmmaker then you are one, and you should go make yourself a business card. It’s better than maxing out ten credit cards like Smith did on ‘Clerks’. To make our short, however, we didn’t need any unsubstantiated promises from the likes of Mr American Express. In all, we must have spent less than £50 using a borrowed camera, microphone and editing equipment. The only things we paid for were petrol and some garden lights from the local DIY superstore. I guess that’s why my actors – friends Tony Avino and Nick Tinker – didn’t learn their lines until about ten seconds to ‘ACTION’. What can I say? I wasn’t paying them but they might become famous, and when they did, they could stick this film on one of their DVDs as a special feature. Of course, it helps if both friends have some acting experience. Tony had just finished a stage play in Bolton, and Nick’s claim to fame was a walk-on part in ‘There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble’. It also helps if your girlfriend is willing to give up her car to drive you to locations (in return for a Production Manager credit, or so I told her) and your lead actor can play both guitar and piano, and can wriggle his way into the Music Department at the University to record the soundtrack.
One of the things that bugged us early in pre-production was what we were going to do with it after it was completed. We knew we were making it because we loved movies, wanted to break into the business and wanted to get some experience of low-cost filmmaking, but would anyone see it? Luckily, my home town of Huddersfield (like many others around the U.K.) has its very own outlet for local filmmakers in the form of ‘Short Circuits’, which was created in 1999 by Andrew Wilson and Lisa Roberts, whose main aim was to provide a platform for enthusiastic and talented film producers to showcase their work in the town and throughout the region. Andrew says: “We wanted to give filmmakers the chance to screen their films, gauge audience reaction, learn from their peers and be jealous of them, and have a drink at the same time to calm their nerves.” Andrew thinks new filmmakers should take themselves more seriously. “There are a lot of media courses, and students on them need to make films, watch other people’s films and take the time to submit their work.” He says: “Hit it and hope, then fail better next time. If you stick at it and be brave, you’ll get there in the end.”
In the Yorkshire region it is comforting to note there our people who are willing to help and exhibit creative work like Short Circuits. There are plenty of film festivals including those in Bradford, Leeds, and Hull, as well as the Sheffield Documentary Festival and other smaller events. Short Circuits distributes films through their partners Slack Video, Interruption and Monitor, as well as providing screenings throughout the year at various locations around Yorkshire. Andrew told me about Screen Yorkshire’s four schemes which include a £2000 grant; Caught Short Focus which is an intensive week long production, and Digital Awards which includes a £10,000 production fund, or a £20,000 production budget for serious and more experienced filmmakers. The great thing is, schemes like these are set-up around the country, you just have to look for them. Check your local arts funding body or council website for more details.
We filmed over a two month period, neglecting our study in many ways to concentrate on the script and getting the most out of our limited technical capabilities. The story which I had been chopping and changing for some time eventually became two different films stuck together. Originally I had wanted to make something about what one experiences when losing a very close relative – a mother or father. I wanted to see this person on the lowest ebb of their psyche, contemplating suicide. I wanted to sneak a peak at how someone can become so low they decide to end their life and have the same fate as their loved one. But then, I got all caught up in the ethical and religious debates that would surround such an act, so I moved on. I had seen a film called ‘Near Dark’ which was basically a vampire movie that lost all its gothic roots and ran like a hot-blooded Western, set in the dry, sandy pastures of America’s south. I liked the idea of making a horror movie that wasn’t really a horror movie – it’s only fantasy based on the viewer’s own experiences of the macabre. What I decided upon were two friends who hadn’t seen each other for a few months, meeting at a crossroads in their lives. One, the character from my previous idea, had just lost his mother and couldn’t see any reason to live. The other claimed he had been bitten by a vampire and that he could now live forever. He could taste the fruits of the world for eternity. The dynamic I tried to instill in the story was that one friend thought this life was too hard, he wanted to give up, and the other was just beginning an adventure of lifelong eternal youth. What you didn’t know was whether the vampire bite was a figment of his imagination, a by-product of his over-indulgence with alcohol and drugs. Likewise, it never became clear who was the sane one of the two, who was the grounded one – both were as unhappy as each other, and while they thought they knew the answer to their dilemma, neither was right.
I directed the film, Nick produced it, and we edited it together. We shot on-location in Barnsley, just on the border where Derbyshire and Yorkshire meet. The first time we went location scouting we knew we wanted to film there because it was such a beautiful location with its panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. Partly because of the brilliant location, and partly due to the problem of lighting, we decided to film there during the day and not at night, as was originally scripted. The night shoot would occur back at Nick’s house on Leeds Road in Huddersfield. Here we would film the interior and exterior shots – the back of the house, shot in the right way, was made to look like a location 100 yards from the reservoir, but was actually over 30 miles away.
Our only major problem was with lighting the exterior night shots. We didn’t have the silent generator needed to power the lights because we couldn’t afford one, so the only thing we could do was get the longest power cable possible, attach it to the security lights, and hook it up to the power outlets in the kitchen. That way, we could light an exterior scene, as long as it was within 25 yards of the back door of the house. Luckily, the downtrodden posterior of Leeds Road’s student residencies look as bedraggled and neglected as the script called for.
We devised a cunning way to make rain for added ambience in the exterior scenes by using a broken water pipe from the house which ran every time you used the water tap in the bathroom. We simply ran the water, stuck a board under the dripping pipe, and aimed it where we wanted. It was actually very realistic but if there had been a water shortage, I don’t think the Water Board would have been too happy. Of course, we then had to prevent the power leads from getting wet and electrocuting everyone which was quite a task.
We were guerilla filmmaking at its most basic, that’s for sure. We created what was to look like vampire bites on Nick’s neck using a mixture of flour and water, coupled with mascara and red pen. Believe it or not, it actually looked quite authentic but I only shot it using a wide angled lens. We fashioned reflectors for the lights to create shadow and provide more depth to the cinematography using turkey-foil wrapped around a 6×4 board we found in the garage. We did everything as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Certainly there were some liberties taken in script development to account for this, but I didn’t feel we lost any of the impact from the story. It would have been great to shoot at night on-location but it wasn’t feasible at the time. We’re just thankful that a six figure budget is not what is required to break into the industry. “The quality of equipment has nothing to do with it,” says Andrew at Short Circuits, “We just look for films that show hard work, thoughtfulness, and a willingness to learn. It’s important for new filmmakers to feel part of the scene, where their hard work and talent will be recognised.”
My You Tube channel featuring some of my short film work.
Short Film in the UK: Film Festivals and Competitions April 22, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Artfully Deranged, Short Film , add a commentThis article is written in conjunction with several others and is best read in conjunction with them. Click the below titles to read/navigate between each individual article:
1. Short Film: A brief critical history
2. Short Film In The UK: Screen Yorkshire and the Independents
3. Short Film In The UK: Film Festivals and Competitions
4. Short Film In The UK: Technology and the Tiny Screen
5. Short Film In The UK: Availability, Audience, and the Future
6. ‘Okay, we’re done’: The story of my first short film
7. Short Film Take II: The Trouble With Mr. Goldman
8. Short Film In The UK: Recommended Links
Finding Neverland on the Independent Circuit
In 2001, Washington-based producer Mark Ruppert devised the 48 Hour Film Project, where teams of filmmakers had to write, shoot and edit a short film in two days, culminating in a competition to pick the best film. Utilising the ease of use and cost of digital editing and camera equipment, they provide each team with the basic items they require, such as a simple tripod, lights and a Mini-DV camcorder. As the competition’s mission statement says, the project is to help ‘advance filmmaking and promote filmmakers.’ Through the festival and the competitions ‘the Project encourages filmmakers and would-be filmmakers to get out there and make movies.’ In 2004, the ‘Project’ came to Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
To differentiate the competition from venue to venue (the 48 Hour Film Project has toured many countries including Ruppert’s native USA, Britain and France), teams picked genres and themes at random. Phil Parkin, who took part says, ‘The weekend was a resounding success for all the team members, I would recommend others to take part in the future. It was tremendously good as a team morale builder and as a practical and theoretical experience.’
The ‘Project’ aims to get new filmmakers exhibited and through a ‘Best-of’ DVD at the end of each year, can continue to showcase the work they have achieved. Yet, as Parkin says, the competition holds a lot more value than that. Because of the competition’s time constraints it forced his team into making tough decisions which were ‘very worthwhile’ and an example of the ‘harsh reality of the industry.’
Like Charlie Chaplin using short film to forward his career, and George Lucas using it to learn his craft, competitions such as the 48 Hour Film Project are enabling filmmakers the same opportunities. In Yorkshire, Bradford Film Festival has the ‘Shine Award’ which focuses exclusively on the short film, honouring ‘the best short by an emerging director’ that shows ‘innovation and originality.’ Elsewhere, the Hull International Short Film Festival is ‘dedicated to the exhibition and creation of short film as a crucial art form in its own right.
Yet, as Matt Lloyd, film programmer at Edinburgh Film Festival says, it’s not just the competition itself that is important to short films and their makers. ‘Shorts are always popular at festivals because it’s one of the few outlets for people to see them.’ Perhaps the most important aspect of short film competitions and festivals is the exposure they provide. ‘You also get industry interest as people are always keen to see what the latest talent is and what’s up-and-coming.’ As Chris Patmore says, ‘festivals and competitions probably provide the best opportunity to gain some recognition for all your hard work.’
‘Too Rich For My Blood’: The Problem with Elite Competition
The elite film competitions don’t assure success either for short film itself or its filmmakers. Many who use festival competitions to their advantage, do so with feature films. Joel and Ethan Coen won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1985 with their first film, a feature named Blood Simple. This led to thirteen more feature film credits to date, including their most famous films The Big Lebowski and Fargo in the mid-nineties. Also, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez won the ‘Award of the Youth’ at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999, leading to widespread publicity for their first film, a feature named The Blair Witch Project. Compare this to Amanda Forbis’ When The Day Breaks which was 1999’s short film winner at Cannes. In the seven years since, Forbis has not directed another film, feature or short.
Given that the most prestigious prizes such as those awarded by the Academy of Motion Pictures in America (Oscar’s) and the British Academy of Film and Television (Bafta’s) will not accept lower quality digital video for their short film competition (Bafta’s rules, for example, state only ‘films finished on 35mm film or Digital-beta will be accepted’, it appears that the low cost nature of short filmmaking and it’s usefulness in getting recognition is a fallacy. If the major competitions such as the Oscars, Bafta’s, Cannes and Sundance, only want large-screen projection-ready prints for competing short films then the cost immediately rises. And, with most success stories coming from filmmakers who won the competitions for ‘features’, it does suggest the short film is a means to another end. As well as being an undervalued type of cinema at both the commercial, mainstream level and at the top of cinema’s most prestigious, recognised awards. Ultimately, this suggests the short film at its grassroots, low-budget level (such as the 48 Hour Film Project) is a means to more expensive filmmaking - namely feature films.
The fact the elite competitions only accept ‘first-quality’ short films, that being they are available to be viewed on 35mm film or high-definition digital tape creates an interesting conundrum. This would suggest the short is the ‘final product’ of a filmmaker’s vision and not something to explicitly progress his or her career. Given the higher budget needed to make films for the Oscar’s or Bafta’s, there is no room for amateurish experimentation, requiring strong financial backing that wouldn’t support filmmakers learning their craft. This would be an example of the type of filmmakers who ‘spend their whole career making short films because they enjoy the format and find it the best medium in which to express their ideas.’ Essentially, this is short film being credited with strong artistic merit, an art form that deserves to be awarded, not as a learning tool but as a finished product. However, if the award is based primarily on the ‘art’ and not on marketability for example, why should the quality of equipment and money on screen have anything to do with who gains acceptance? In the 2006 Oscar’s, the winning short cost £125,000 to make, whilst the 48 Hour Film Project produced twenty films in Sheffield for £50 each in two days. Perhaps there is a major improvement in creative quality and artistic performance when more money is involved, but since the Oscar’s and the Bafta’s won’t even look at the £50 shorts, the world will never know.
The Trouble between King and Pauper
It is interesting how the difference between Screen Yorkshire and the independent exhibitors mirrors that between the highest accolades in film competition and their low-budget equivalents. Effectively, because the freedoms of low and no-cost filmmaking are stifled by the major competitions who won’t accept them, filmmakers either need financial backing or a better established independent exhibition circuit. Therefore, those that do not gain financial support can still exhibit their work, if funds are made available to maintain short film exhibition.
The important idea to note is that which Matt Lloyd of Edinburgh Film festival pointed out, that shorts are always popular at festivals because people rarely get a chance to see them anywhere else. It is therefore important to maintain a good exhibition circuit so that talented filmmakers can learn and interact with their peers. After all, as Andrew Wilson says: ‘Short Circuits started in October 1999 to give new filmmakers the chance to screen their films, gauge the audience reaction, [and] learn from their peers.’ If a good exhibition arena is established then that will mean more short films are being seen. Theoretically, if more short films are being watched, then the need for product will grow and more people will be interested in participating. Therefore there will be more ambitious talent, and greater numbers for the likes of Screen Yorkshire to meet their targets.
Citation:
Bradford Film Festival (2006) The Shine 2006 Short Film Award [online] available from http://www.nmpft.org.uk/bff/2006/filmdetail.asp?ida=6172 (accessed 9 March 2006)
Imdb.com (2006) International Movie Database [online] available from www.imdb.com (accessed 10 March 2006)
Lloyd, M (2005) Edinburgh is a festival of discovery [online] available from http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/festivals/edinburgh/short_film_programming.shtml (accessed 9 March 2006)
Parkin, P (2004) The South Yorkshire Filmmaker’s Network [online] available from http://www.syfn.org.uk/completedprojects/ (accessed 9 March 2006)
Patmore, C (2005) Get Started In Short Filmmaking London: Quarto
Ruppert, M (2001) The 48 Hour Film Project Mission Statement [online] available from http://www.48hourfilm.com/about/history.php (accessed 9 March 2006)
Wilson, A (2005) A Film In Your Pocket [online] available from http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2005/11/24/pocket_shorts_huddersfield_feature.shtml (accessed 8 March 2006)
Short Film in the UK: Screen Yorkshire and the Independents April 20, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Artfully Deranged, Short Film , add a commentThis article is written in conjunction with several others and is best read in conjunction with them. Click the below titles to read/navigate between each individual article:
1. Short Film: A brief critical history
2. Short Film In The UK: Screen Yorkshire and the Independents
3. Short Film In The UK: Film Festivals and Competitions
4. Short Film In The UK: Technology and the Tiny Screen
5. Short Film In The UK: Availability, Audience, and the Future
6. ‘Okay, we’re done’: The story of my first short film
7. Short Film Take II: The Trouble With Mr. Goldman
8. Short Film In The UK: Recommended Links
The article features my own personal interviews conducted with Sally Joynson (Head of Industry Development and acting Chief Executive) at arts funding agency Screen Yorkshire based in Leeds, and Andrew Quinn (Creator of Slack Video in Hull) who runs a screening night for new and established short filmmakers.
Short Film the Screen Yorkshire Way
Sally Joynson’s statement that short film is simply not ‘commercial’, that the film industry is ‘all about business’, sheds the most light on the argument that short film is primarily a means to further develop a filmmakers career. The BBC’s Film Network guide to making short films states that only one out of six reasons for even considering making the film has anything to do with money and even this is ‘very rare as [they] don’t usually pay financial dividends.’ Joynson says ‘people make shorts to go somewhere, to lead their career somewhere. It’s all about talent development.’ Given this, it would suggest that short film is viewed as a means to develop skills, and the government’s schemes through the regional arts partners such as Screen Yorkshire would support this.
Screen Yorkshire has a number of initiatives geared towards finding and nurturing new talent based on the idea of a ‘sustainable, robust, skilled industry, with an infrastructure that creates new opportunities and initiatives, and builds partnerships.’ Screen Yorkshire cite short film as a major way of achieving this and through a certain amount of funds each year they prove this belief. Their literature states ‘through our lottery scheme, we will support up to 12 short films per year with a maximum length of 10 minutes and with a financial contribution from Screen Yorkshire of no more than £2000.’ This then progresses for more experienced filmmakers with the Caught Short digital awards scheme of up to £10,000 and Screen Yorkshire will finance one short film a year with up to £20,000.
However, Joynson stresses that while these schemes are in place to find new talent, it is primarily a business decision to increase the skilled workforce. She says, ‘the focus is to increase production to increase jobs and opportunities.’ This is perhaps why Andrew Quinn of Slack Video felt that Screen Yorkshire supported only the business benefits of talent development, and that their focus on this might be ‘missing out on a lot of potentially brilliant work being produced by ‘some guy who just had a great idea one day’. When asked whether Screen Yorkshire supported the development of short film as an art form or for big business and making money, Quinn replied: ‘Directly, they seem to be supporting the latter’, clarifying that ‘Screen Yorkshire (and the Film Council in general) are very much of [the] thinking [that] shorts are primarily a way for new filmmakers to break into the industry.’ Quinn sees their ‘talent development’ as a way to make money. This isn’t necessarily detrimental to the industry on a business level. Yet, since Quinn sees short film as an important art form, he doesn’t believe Screen Yorkshire provide much consideration for this aspect.
Quinn is adamant that short film is not treated as a ‘stop-gap’ between other career ventures. He believes that the ‘cinematic art’ that he exhibits at Slack Video screenings is not a ‘test version for bigger plans’ and says ‘I think very few people in this area of work are interested in a feature film career.’ Theoretically, since short film isn’t commercial, Screen Yorkshire would not invest money in these sorts of filmmakers, since they don’t have aspirations to go on to anything else – namely, a type of cinema that would make money. This creates the question of what type of filmmakers are Screen Yorkshire investing in? Thus, suggesting that the short films that are made with such funding are indeed ‘test versions for bigger plans’ that would ultimately make money and create jobs.
It is interesting that any work that doesn’t fit the Screen Yorkshire criteria of what a short film should be is branded as ‘self-indulgent’. Joynson asks, ‘what aspirations do filmmakers have?’ She says, ‘there’s a danger that short film can become self-indulgent with filmmakers making such films primarily for themselves.’ It would appear that her comments are anchored by the necessities required by the agencies that fund Screen Yorkshire. Skillset and Yorkshire Forward are two of the three funding agencies and Joynson tells me that Skillset’s objectives are for ‘skills development’ and Yorkshire Forward’s objectives are purely ‘economical’. This provides a reason why Screen Yorkshire view short film in the way they do. Skillset’s primary motivation is to ‘ensure that the UK audio/visual industries have continued access to the skills and talent they require’, whilst Yorkshire Forward are ‘the Regional Development Agency behind the economic regeneration of the Yorkshire and Humber region.’ Therefore, it is unsurprising that Joynson cites short film as a way of finding the people who want to work in the industry, and separating the talented and motivated, from the rest. In a sense, their low-budget awards become bait in order for them to meet their targets and continue to get funded.
Short Film and the Independent Circuit
Creating job opportunities and building a skilled workforce are noble ideals but is it at the expense of the ‘art’ itself, as Quinn suggests? If filmmakers want to self-indulgently improve their art and experiment with the medium, as Spielberg and Lucas did without monetary gain, Screen Yorkshire and their affiliated funding agencies seem uninterested.
Andrew Quinn has run Slack Video in Hull since 2003, with the aim of promoting new short filmmaker’s work and to give people the opportunity to see films they would otherwise not be able to. However, he has run this exhibition outlet without any funding from the major agencies. As they exhibit ‘art’ films and ‘narrative’ films, he says this causes a problem as ‘the film council essentially say they won’t fund art film, and the arts council say they won’t fund narrative film.’ This causes an obvious dilemma as both agencies have their own agendas behind why they release funding. Quinn goes on to say that he applied for funds from the Hull City Arts Council but it was rejected because they don’t fund film, and interestingly, ‘The city arts unit covers art, theatre, dance and music but they don’t [cover] film.’
This displays two flaws in the system. The first is that, if the funding agencies are going to fund films, why is the support not there for the exhibitors? The second is, in funding films in the way they do, it could be argued that it stifles creativity because the freedom of the art form is compromised for new, young filmmakers who might have been given a £2000 grant from Screen Yorkshire. Any filmmaker given such a grant would have to be a first or second time filmmaker (according to Screen Yorkshire rules), and therefore very inexperienced. When put under the constraints of working under such hierarchical pressures, it would certainly put strain on the people involved. Quinn attests to this idea:
‘I’ve noticed there seems to be a bit of fear in applying to such things. I’m not sure if it’s the paperwork, the responsibility of managing a proper budget or maybe the pressure of having to produce something great because it’s your only chance. There must be something intimidating about it I guess. There are quite a few exceptionally talented animators and filmmakers who have given up at the last minute and not put a proposal in for some minor fear or another.’
Quinn believes that under such pressures, talent can be stifled, and creativity and originality can suffer. Andrew Wilson, who runs Short Circuits (a similar venue for the exhibition of short films in Huddersfield) says, ‘We just look for films that show hard work, thoughtfulness, and willingness to learn’ and it is this mentality that frees some of the burden on the creative process that funded filmmakers might have. Instead of the objective being to find more skilled workers and therefore increase productions to increase jobs, for Slack Video and Short Circuits, it is to find new filmmakers, showcase their work, and promote and push short film forward.
Monetary value is of little concern, since the only money Slack Video make is a percentage of that taken at the bar on the night of each exhibition. However, if more money could be placed into exhibitors like Slack Video, Quinn would want to do several things including setting up a video label for short films and artist’s videos, set-up a local community film training scheme, and a local production company. Yet, he believes more should be done before money even comes into the equation. He states, an ‘easily accessible advice or support network would help a lot more people. There appear to be a lot of lost graduates, not sure quite what to do with themselves. I think there are a lot of talented people being lost this way.’
‘Knitting A Love Song’: The Importance of Screen Yorkshire
Any reservations regarding Screen Yorkshire’s motives being detrimental to the freedom of short film as an art form, can be easily dispelled with the fact that for the second year running, one of their funded films received a ‘BAFTA’ award nomination. The film’s producer, Debbie Ballin said:
‘We are really excited about receiving a BAFTA nomination. Screen Yorkshire has really helped make this all happen. Their New and Emerging Talent Manager, Tony Dixon has given us a huge amount of support. As well as providing funding, Screen Yorkshire has helped during the post-production and promotional stages. They’ve been with us every step of the way.’
Clearly if Screen Yorkshire-funded productions are receiving such recognition, they are doing the right things for the industry. Additionally, since they are also given high praise from the filmmakers themselves, it does suggest that not only their funds, but also their support is of vital importance to the nature of film production.
However, as Joynson states, if short film is to succeed it has to lead somewhere, and in effect, it has to be guided towards assisting the industry to support itself. If the medium isn’t commercial, it has to be used in a way that makes it viable on an economic level, and that means creating a skilled workforce in the media industry and increasing jobs. Ballin’s film Knitting A Love Song did just that. ‘The film provided employment opportunities for thirteen regional freelances from the region.’ Joynson says, ‘we insist on getting as many locally based crew on the production as possible which helps in building skills, creating more jobs, building CV’s and means we can make more productions.’ She clarifies: ‘money that comes from productions is very important because it helps different kinds of business. If a big film crew comes to Yorkshire, they need a place to stay, they need food to eat, and that money is put back into Yorkshire based businesses.’ Head of production, Hugo Heppell concludes, the ‘BAFTA nomination for Knitting A Love Song is a great result for Screen Yorkshire and testimony to the work we are doing in developing a wealth of filmmaking talent in the region.’ However, even though Knitting A Love Song won prestigious awards and was nominated for the highest accolade in British film, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is something people want to see.
Effectively, Screen Yorkshire’s use of the short film is more practical than the independent exhibitors, but since they cannot fund every single application they receive, their output is severely limited. Therefore, they require each other to sustain the industry because their collective endevours are supporting different aspects of the film community. The independent exhibitor’s support the experimentation, creativity and freedom of low and no-budget independent filmmaking, whilst Screen Yorkshire assist those more ambitious, to prosper on an economic and society-based level. This is why it is vital that Screen Yorkshire support exhibition, because it is the only way to gain spectatorship and new audiences for short film. They have channelled their funding support of 12 short films through independent exhibitor Short Circuits, who then filter through the possible candidates, but more needs to be done to create a solid basis for short filmmaking to be exhibited regularly. As of March 2006, Short Circuits has only around eight screenings a year in Yorkshire, while Slack Video still has to work from the organiser’s own funds.
In conclusion, short film is seen in two very different lights but both ultimately agree on one thing – that it is a way of finding new talent. Screen Yorkshire from an economic and commercial aspect, see it as a way of meeting their targets (building a skilled work force and helping the region succeed on an economic level). The independent exhibitors see it as a way of finding new work from new filmmakers, who want to establish short film as something worth seeing. Essentially, under the commercial ideals of Screen Yorkshire, the short film has to be a means to something else. However, under the non-commercial ideals of independent exhibitor’s like Andrew Quinn, there’s the idea of just celebrating it for it is, without ulterior motives.
Citation:
Ballin, D (2004) Screen Yorkshire Gets Bafta Nomination For Second Year [online] available from http://www.digitalyorkshire.org.uk/news_1374.htm (accessed 10 March 2006)
BBC Film Network (2006) Why Make A Short Film [online] available from http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/filmmakersguidewhy (accessed 10 March 2006)
Heppell, H (2004) Screen Yorkshire Gets Bafta Nomination For Second Year [online] available from http://www.digitalyorkshire.org.uk/news_1374.htm (accessed 10 March 2006)
Joynson, S (2006) Interview conducted by Daniel Stephens with Sally Joynson Leeds
Quinn, A (2006) Interview conducted by Daniel Stephens with Andrew Quinn at Slack Video Hull
Screen Yorkshire (2006) Screen Yorkshire [online] available from http://screenyorkshire.co.uk/ (accessed 10 March 2006)
Skillset (2006) Skillset Strategy [online] available from http://www.skillset.org/strategy/ (accessed 10 March 2006)
Yorkshire Forward (2006) Yorkshire Forward [online] available from http://www.yorkshire-forward.com/www/index.asp (accessed 10 March 2006)
Not just another dead soldier: Subjectivity in Saving Private Ryan April 19, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Artfully Deranged, Audience , add a commentSaving Private Ryan is a very subjective film that paints a glorious view of heroic American soldiers sent to save the world from evil. Whether this is a problem or not is for the audience to decide but it has continually split critics over the merits of the film. However, to examine how the film uses its subjectivity within the narrative, it is possible to look at its focalisation, narrative point of view, and the careful construction and control of spectatorial knowledge.
In Saving Private Ryan, ‘focalisation’ forms a major part of the narrative as it ‘shapes our perception of the fabula [story]’[1]. The way in which it does this is by omitting story information in the plot to create a focal point for the narrative. As we are introduced to Captain Miller, the main character of the film, we are immediately focused on his part of the overall story. This is only a minor part of the focalisation that the narrative creates, because through the suppression of gaps we are quickly told who is on the side of the ‘bad’, and who is on the side of the ‘good’. In the initial battle sequence we know German soldiers must be dying. We see them shooting, yet this is all we see. This suppression of gaps helps focalise the story on Miller and the Americans while delineating a divide between what the plot believes are the good and bad. The gap however is temporary, as we see dead German bodies being searched and/or moved. We fill in the gap that other German soldiers must have died in the firefight previous. Although the gap is suppressed, ‘surprise’ is not its goal which is usually a major use of the suppressed gap. In this case, the gap (which we can imagine would be German soldiers screaming in pain, and dying in much the same way as the Americans) localises our attention on the American soldier’s deaths. It creates a causal relationship in that the ‘barbaric’ German bullets kill the ‘helpless but heroic’ Americans. Therefore when, in this case, we fill in the gap, through the subjective view presented to us, the dead German soldiers are mere trophies of the ‘heroic’ American’s who have survived this long. Because of this set-up, when American soldiers later kill surrendering Germans there is less a sense of reversed-barbarism more an awful feeling of payback. The cause and effect of the events presented in the first battle work on the audiences generic expectations of a war movie, and reinforce the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ divides. As mentioned, it is very subjective as we are told who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’.
‘Retardation’, as David Bordwell describes as a factor of the ‘gap’ in story information, occurs when the plot postpones revealing certain items of fibula information. In this respect, we arrive at the ‘point of view’ of the narrative in Saving Private Ryan. The constant throughout the film is a clear delineation between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and this is reinforced through retardation. For example, in the initial first battle scene we are given key expositional details. Firstly, the shots of the American flag followed by an old man visiting graves. This is then followed by shots of an empty beach covered in debris, before centering on Miller in the boat. He is wearing U.S army uniform sporting a clearly defined U.S flag. This visual clue alone ties the soldiers in with the opening shot of an old man visiting graves via the flags prominence. Finally, the non-diegetic title of ‘Normandy, 1944 – D-Day’ delineates not only a flashback, but uses audience ideology and their prior expectations to set the scene of America going to war. Our initial belief is that Miller is the old man in the first scene, but as I will discuss later, this is not the case. However, that is a minor detail in that whoever the soldier is, he represents the U.S and quickly it is established that the narrative point of view is on the side of the Americans.
As mentioned earlier when discussing the narrative focalisation through distributed exposition, the audience is continually presented with the ‘heroic Americans’ and ‘barbaric Germans’. Examples include the eventual introduction of the Nazi soldiers as they stare down the barrels of their guns killing U.S soldiers. Additionally, in a later scene Miller and his men decide to secure a Nazi outpost. We are given the information that they go to fight but we only hear the gun battle, we don’t see it. Then the guns stop firing, and we are introduced to a German soldier held at gun point, with one U.S soldier shouting at him, ‘Why did you kill him’, referring to a U.S comrade who had just been shot dead. If we take this as the ‘initial’ scene (the audience hearing the bullets being fired as prior plot events), we are presented with the question of why are we, through Miller and his men, in remorse over the death of one U.S soldier, while two dead German soldiers lie dead in the background? The fact is we don’t ask the question because we are not allowed to – if the narrative hadn’t taken its point of view with Miller, and from the U.S perspective, then such remorse wouldn’t have been so easily centralised with the U.S soldier. A prime example of the point of view being reversed is in Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot, where our remorse if firmly centered on German navy soldiers.
Retardation also affects the film’s point of view in a more conventional sense. Before it highlighted the plight of good versus evil - the Americans versus the German’s - the film opens with the old man viewing gravestones, then we are established in flashback and our attention is brought to Captain Miller, a much younger man. This suggests, in story terms, that Miller is the old man, and he is recalling the events of the time he took part in D-Day where many of his friends and countrymen were to die. Therefore, the ‘initial’ scene or as drama theorists call it, the ‘point of attack’ is set up, and our immediate belief is that the following information simply confirms our belief the old man is Miller. Unlike the way in which the Germans are interweaved in the story via distributed exposition, the narrative utilises what the audience believes in order to create a shock or surprise by the end, much like a mystery film. This concentrated exposition is delayed until the end in order to maintain the highest possible level of surprise. As Miller dies we wonder how he can be by the graves, but through a dissolve from the young Private Ryan’s face (a character we meet much later in the story) to the old man’s – (they both have the same forlorn facial expression) – confirms that our understanding of the old man was wrong. Sternberg calls this ‘the rise and fall of first impressions’[2] Bordwell claims that ‘concentrated exposition supplies a strong primacy effect, solid grounds for confident hypotheses’[3], so in using this narrative technique at the end, it could be argued that it attempts to leave the audience with a solidified view on the events portrayed, and that you take away the subjective view expressed throughout. For instance, this could be a technique of not allowing the audience to ask too many questions about a point of view that is excessively subjective and essentially biased. It could be seen as taking the audience’s attention off such elements as the German’s portrayal, as you think about how the plot fooled you into thinking the two characters were one and the same. The narrative acts much like a magician: he/she has you looking at one hand, while he/she hides the playing card in the other. A much more extreme example would be The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer 1995), yet Saving Private Ryan still uses the technique. In holding back information, then releasing it at the end, the filmmakers have the ability to cause shock and surprise. Not only this, when re-watching the film a now knowledgeable audience would look at it in a different way providing a differing insight, and via the suppression of gaps already discussed, and the ‘surprise’ exposition at the end, the film manages to almost pull the wool over our eyes and centre us on its point of view.
Additionally, like most narratives, the plot repeats to ‘reinforce assumptions, inferences, and hypotheses about story information’.[4] A simple example of this in terms of Saving Private Ryan is the non-diegetic title of ‘Normandy’ telling us where we are. After the main battle, one of Miller’s men puts soil into a small tin marked ‘France’. He places it in his bag next to other similar tins with country names written on in the same handwriting, and with the same blue pen. This suggests he takes soil from each country he visits as a souvenir, and with him taking soil and putting it in a tin marked ‘France’, this infers he is now in Normandy, France. It could also help the audience know that Normandy is in France, for those who did not know. Whereas this sort of repetition reinforces story information, we can relate the repetition of plot information to the narrative point of view. The subjective view of the German’s is repeated because according to Bordwell, by ‘repeating its own commentary’ it adheres ‘to a consistent point of view’.[5] For example, the shot of a German soldier constantly shooting an automatic rifle is shown several times. Later we are presented with the ‘barbaric’ Nazi soldier who swears he did not shoot Miller’s medic. Remorse is shown for the one dead American soldier while two dead German’s lie as mere objects in the background. The ‘heroic’ American’s allow the ‘barbaric’ German to go, however, his ‘barbarism’ is reinforced when he returns in the final battle seen shooting American soldiers dead. Eventually, a ‘heroic’ American soldier kills the ‘barbaric’ German. While we continually see the American’s discussing the morality of war throughout the film, no attention of the plot is given to the story of that particular soldier when he is not interacting with Miller and his men. The soldier could just have easily been discussing the same subjects: why he didn’t want to fight, or whether he actually agreed with the Nazis motives, or whether he was so scared of being killed if he didn’t fight, he just had to do as he was ordered. Therefore, the plot not only repeats information to make it easy to follow the story, but it repeats information to maintain its own point of view.
Finally, in terms of the control of spectatorial knowledge, you have to look for the optical and aditory clues. As already mentioned, we are presented with a very subjective view on the allies involvement during World War II, and our range of knowledge is restricted to the character of Miller (or Private Ryan, if he is recalling what Miller tells him before he dies). In the initial battle scene, we follow Miller’s movements – when he stops, we stop; when he hides, we hide with him. It is our interpretation of what he sees and hears that forms our own judgement. The use of muffled/distorted sound centralises on him, in that we can imagine that is what he is hearing either because his ears have been injured, hence the distorted sound, or an inference to his psychological state in that he is trying to block out the noise. This gives the audience a direct indication that our knowledge of the story is based on and around him.
In terms of the narrative’s communicativeness, Miller may see German soldiers scream out in pain, get blown up, die etc., yet we only see his countrymen get hurt. This subjective view allows us to centralise our attention on him, with the story information of German soldiers dying, being restricted in the plot. This restriction of knowledge forces the audience to stay loyal to the character of Miller. He’s fighting the ‘enemy’ (clearly delineated in the ‘focalisation’ of the narrative), we fight the enemy; he hates to see his countrymen die, but doesn’t care about German deaths – so do we, and so on…
The film however, ‘deviates from its internal norm of communicativeness which becomes a mark of suppressiveness’[6] by showing German soldiers from behind staring down the barrel of a gun, firing continuously looking through the gun’s viewfinder. This, for a slight moment on several occasions, takes us out of Miller’s subjective view and into an objective, yet restricted view of the German soldier. This works on two levels, the first being the objective view which shows us American soldiers getting killed, but it also gives us an obvious reason for their deaths - the German sniper’s bullet. Typical ideology and conventional moral value suggests that killing/murder is wrong so this objective view only reinforces the subjective view of Miller. Secondly, it is still restricted in that all we see is a German killing machine; there are no German deaths, so this again reinforces the main character’s subjective view.
The film uses uncommunicativeness to create tension much like a mystery film hides/chooses not to divulge story information in the plot, in order to create tension when enigmas are revealed. For example, in the final stages of the film, as we have throughout the film, we follow Miller’s men on their mission. The initial quest is complete, however, after a new conflict arises for the protagonist, Miller and his men have to defend a bridge from German attack. The concealment of story information comes in the form of not knowing where the German’s are. We know from character discourse that they are close; we also know they will come close to the bridge. The plot provides us with auditory clues in that we hear German soldier’s talking, and a German general on a loud speaker commanding troops. We are also given optical clues in that we see dust from German vehicles being created near by, and one American soldier looking from a clock tower sees German soldiers mobilising. By not showing us what the German’s are doing exactly, and not allowing us to understand the German’s discourse (for a non-German speaking audience), tension is built – will they find the Americans, will there be a battle, who will survive? This again delineates the narrative’s point of view, because the only reason the tension is not reversed (for example, we feel tension for the Germans), is because we know everything, in terms of the story, that we need to know about the Americans - we know where they are, we know who they are; we know their motives etc.
Bibliography:
David Bordwell - Narration In The Fiction Film
[1] Narration In The Fiction Film – David Bordwell – University of Wisconsin Press 1985. Pg. 54-61
[2] Narration In The Fiction Film – David Bordwell – University of Wisconsin Press 1985. Pg. 54-61
[3] Narration In The Fiction Film – David Bordwell – University of Wisconsin Press 1985. Pg. 54-61
[4] Narration In The Fiction Film – David Bordwell – University of Wisconsin Press 1985. Pg. 54-61
[5] Narration In The Fiction Film – David Bordwell – University of Wisconsin Press 1985. Pg. 54-61
[6] Narration In The Fiction Film – David Bordwell – University of Wisconsin Press 1985. Pg. 54-61
Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994, UK) April 17, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : 1990s, Drama, Film reviews, Thriller/Suspense, Crime , add a commentDir. Danny Boyle; screenplay by John Hodge; starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Ecclestone, Kerry Fox, Ken Stott, Keith Allen
Shallow Grave, British director Danny Boyle’s debut feature film, is about the disintegration of friendship under the strain of greed. It’s also a bleak social study of three bright but blinded intellectuals who’ve allowed callous opportunism defeat any moral grounding. It’s certainly a daring, hard-edged low-budget thriller that paints a dark, almost dangerous view, of the young, middle-class characters it portrays. But it’s also a very astute investigation of the primal forces that drive human beings. Indeed, the three main characters display the primitive form of Freud’s theory of personality development when they allow their moral judgment to be governed by the pleasure of having lots and lots of money.
Shallow Grave concerns the lives of three friends who live in the same flat, David (Christopher Ecclestone), Kelly (Juliet Miller), and Alex (Ewan McGregor). When they advertise for a new flatmate, the mysterious Hugo arrives and shuts himself in his room. When they try to tempt Hugo out of his slumber they find him lying on his bed dead. Instead of calling the police they search his belongings finding a large suitcase full of money. Putting all decency aside, they chop up the body, mash up his teeth, bury him in a secluded wood, and throw his car over a cliff. Of course, nothing is easy. David, whose job it was to do the chopping of limbs and smashing of jaws, begins to succumb to the madness of the situation as the reality of what he did takes its toll. Meanwhile, Hugo obviously didn’t come by the money through any sort of legitimate way, and some of his old ‘friends’ are closing in on the loot.
You can see where the buoyancy of youth and lack of big-budget constraints helped director Boyle create this very tightly-paced thriller. He shows some lovely directorial flourishes, whether it’s in the way he moves his camera around the flat, or how he lights the burial scenes, you know you are watching a man who is so passionate about his film. That passion is definitely something that comes off the screen, with Boyle having the smug-confidence to show off the film’s concluding twist, not with words, but with a sweeping track beneath the floorboards. You’ve also got to give him credit for presenting us with such obnoxious characters; it’s a definite trait of a director either free of studio shackles or with the determination to demand he do it his own way. He doesn’t take the obvious route in presenting us with people we must care about to feel any emotion in their story, he simply shows us a decision they make which questions any decent fundamental moral standing. In doing this, the audience is drawn into the film through how their own ideals reflect the situation. In other words, it leads back to that age-old tale of finding a twenty pound note and asking yourself: do you keep it, or hand it into the police. In this case the stakes are intensified but the underlying issue remains the same. The beauty of the film is its ability to question the audience’s values by suggesting that everyone, for at least a second, thinks they would take the money and find some way to dispose of the body.
It works so well because as the characters pretensions begin to collapse they become, dare I even say it, endearing. It’s obviously a very dark appeal they possess but as the disdain for their peers starts to crack, and the friendship becomes detracted, there’s a very realistically identifiable paranoia that is easy to relate to given the circumstances. As Alex starts to write his ‘facts that should be known in case of my untimely death’, Kelly’s probable escape to Rio, and David’s continuing internal destruction, we see a fabulous dynamic between these people that were at the beginning of the film, over-critical, over-indulgent, and most certainly over-confident. It’s a rather cynical appreciation of the film as the audience feeds off these undesirable’s murky fall from grace, as they get what they deserve. In effect, it’s like watching the school bully get stoned by all the little kids who’ve had their dinner money stolen from them. By presenting us with characters that were difficult to like at the beginning of the film, we find a more powerful resonance from their disintegration as things begin to go wrong.
The film isn’t perfect however (Boyle would go on to make a better film with Trainspotting two years later), largely because some liberties are taken to keep the pace up. Kelly, Alex, and David make the decision to chop up the body too quickly (Charles Manson might make the decision so quickly but not these intelligent, professional people with everything to lose) which is certainly an indication of Boyle’s intention to get to the second part of the story more quickly. It works in the sense that the tension can be cranked up ten minutes earlier, but perhaps a greater deal of development in this area would have helped. Yet, you can’t take much away from Boyle, his cast, or his production crew (who create a great main location in the flat), as it’s a very mature debut film with excellent central performances. Certainly, you can look at Shallow Grave and Trainspotting - Danny Boyle’s first two feature films – as his greatest achievements.
Rating: 4 out of 5
The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006, USA) April 16, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : 2000s, Drama, Film reviews, Crime , 1 comment so farDir. Martin Scorsese; screenplay by William Monahan; starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farminga, Anthony Anderson, Alec Baldwin
I looked at the running time before beginning to watch Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime-drama and thought it might be too long. My girlfriend certainly thought so – she was asleep after half an hour and woke up with about forty minutes left. As I tried to bring her up to speed with what had happened, I found myself breathlessly retelling events without a pit-stop for oxygen or chance for her to really take it all in. When I finally said, ‘so that’s it, I’ll just pause it and go for a wee,’ I realised I was on the edge of my seat (an exceptionally comfortable sofa) and had been for the past hour and a half. As I relieved myself of half a bottle of wine I knew, as I reminisced about the film, I was experiencing Scorsese’s most polished and entertaining film since Goodfellas.
The Departed concerns the stories of two recently graduated cops – DiCaprio and Damon – who end up battling, unknowingly, against each other in a world of crime, deceit, and corruption. Damon is Colin Sullivan, a ‘rat’ in the police force who works for crime lord Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). DiCaprio is Billy Costigan, a wild new police officer given the assignment to infiltrate Costello’s gang. When Costigan gets on the inside, he learns of Costello’s ‘inside man’ but can’t identify him. Likewise, Sullivan knows a cop is in Costello’s gang but hasn’t the access to find out who it is. It all plays nicely into Scorsese’s hands as he’s able to investigate once again his favourite human dynamics.
There has been talk Scorsese won the Oscar for best director because he was somehow owed it, or had earned it based on his body of work rather than the film itself. It’s easy to look at Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The King Of Comedy, as better works of cinema than The Departed, which eventually won him the Oscar. Yet, he is such a convincing storyteller that I believe The Departed deserves the gold-gong on its own merit. The Departed flies along like an unstoppable bullet train, leaving you breathless. He works both sides of the complex story to perfection, while presenting thoroughly convincing characters and never once allowing them to become lost in the scenery. Other less experienced directors wouldn’t be able to cope with the material and that’s where Scorsese’s genius comes out most. He has to juggle the lives of two major characters with at least five others who have almost equal importance and you never get the sense that one is under-developed or lost in an over-complicated plot. Indeed, the plot is complex, but under another’s direction could easily be convoluted. Here however, Scorsese is so in control of all facets of the story, it has to be the most polished film he’s ever produced.
Scorsese’s passion for cinema is obvious in The Departed. The film is almost a nostalgia trip for the director. He keeps his camera restrained throughout, allowing the dialogue, story and performances to maintain audience attention, but the assuredness he shows in switching from Costigan’s story to Sullivan’s is one of a man perfectly in tune with his art. He has fun with the story and doesn’t allow the usual big-budget Hollywood conventions to constrain him. Without doubt, the director is having as much fun making the film as the audience is watching it.
With a director like Martin Scorsese, who has a body of work unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries, you do find yourself comparing subsequent films with those of his past. For me, The Departed is undoubtedly his best work of recent times, fixing the flaws that – only slightly – marred his work since Casino. Instead of the brooding, bleak cynicism of Bringing Out The Dead, the indulgent, sentimentalism of Gangs Of New York, or the obvious Hollywood sensibilities of The Aviator, The Departed offers the director at his unadulterated best, let loose on everything he loves about cinema. But unlike Gangs Of New York, a rather self-indulgent film, The Departed is made for an audience that loves genre films and high-octane, cinematic theatre.
Rating: 5 out of 5
The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, UK) April 9, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : 2000s, Drama, Film reviews , 3 commentsDir. Stephen Frears; screenplay by Peter Morgan; starring Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell
I can’t say ‘The Queen’ particularly inspired me in any sort of way. It was a well-made drama with some nicely-placed humour, but it was also a lot like watching a very average soap-opera. It comes as little surprise it was nominated for Oscar’s – it steers clear of genre sensibilities, deals with the upper-crust, and has a leading performance from someone imitating a famous historical figure. In effect, Oscar gold.
Not that I can fault Helen Mirren who deserves her Academy Award for best performance. Her portrayal of the Queen is mannered and at times amusing. Yet, putting the royal family into a drama about tragedy and loss is both over-sentimentalising a relic that doesn’t deserve such attention, and caricaturing famed figures whose lives are already constructs of media derision and, at times, fascination. It’s most telling that Alistair Campbell’s scorn and egocentric asides are the most truthful and believable attributes of a film that first asks its audience to suspend their disbelief, and then asks us to suspend our disbelief for the over-privileged, out-of-date, out-of-touch royal family. When it comes to the second part, it becomes increasingly difficult and awfully easy to find ‘oneself’ shouting words like ‘robots’ and ‘who are ya’ at the screen.
I did enjoy Frears cynical approach however. Tony Blair having to blackmail the Queen to come out of hiding (I’m paraphrasing but it was something like: ‘Hey, Liz, the public hate you, they want you to show your fake smile on TV pretending to care. Can you do it please, so that at least I look good?’). The idea that both the tabloid press and public attitude is fickle and indeterminate is particularly well-handled. However, he doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know – sensationalism, conflict, death, and division, sells papers and fuels public attention. Most of all, when the bandwagon starts rolling, we’re all ready to jump on, push, or chase frantically behind.
I’ve heard some commentators praise the film for not resorting to caricature but this seems blinded by the fact no one, at least anyone beyond the Queen herself and the closest family members, know exactly what she’s like or what went on. Her persona is based on public performance and tradition. What we know of her is nothing more than the construct built by her public relations advisors. The film is nothing more than a fictional tale weaved around a high-concept, high-impact premise. Therefore, what we get is a sort of Chinese whisper of royal family etiquette. Writer Peter Morgan weaves the characters to his own whim, flirting with parody and taking obvious liberties to tell the story. The script is largely uninspired, resorting to obvious narrative characterisations to provide the film with much needed drama. Prince Charles is the wimp who thinks he’s going to get shot, he doesn’t know what to do but sides with Blair’s idea of putting a brave public face on proceedings, something the Queen is decidedly against. Prince Philip cannot grasp the public outcry, nor does he show any compassion or emotion, while Blair is only tentative at first, in trying to tempt the Queen to his way of thinking. It’s all quite tidy for a dramatic narrative but when you see the Queen mother with her daughter, Philip, and Charles, having a mid-afternoon conversation about the underlings (read: public), you are left with two things in mind. One, is that it doesn’t seem possible that this ever happens, although who is really to know. And two, these ‘important’ bastions of the monarchy and British tradition are really being used by an over-zealous writer who couldn’t think of a more restrained way of depicting the story. Essentially, it’s a soap opera with a reality of the Queen as fake as her real life public image.
In many ways, you’ve got to take ‘The Queen’ for what it is. A middle-of-the-road drama that takes no chances, depicting a British public in transition and a monarchy dealing with an unusual problem there seems no precedence of. As filmmaking goes, it ticks many of the right boxes, interspersing real life footage of Princess Diana’s final months with re-enactments of the car crash that killed her, and the media’s response afterward. We see Tony Blair’s first meetings with the Queen (in what turns out to be one of the film’s finer moments: a nervous Tony Blair is introduced to ‘Her Majesty’ and, having being told not to turn their backs on her, Blair and wife Cherie back out the room like lemmings sent to slaughter), and the family’s retreat to Balmoral. Again, Frears is rather cynical, even sadistic, as he reasons the royal family’s hiding as a way to protect Diana’s young sons from media intrusion and public gaze – a media and public they couldn’t give two hoots about when it doesn’t suit their needs. Later, in the face of public outrage, the royal’s put on their glum faces, take the stage, and play us like the fools they think we are.
However, Mirren’s performance is, in many ways, the reason the film is worth watching in the first place. She commands the screen with little fuss, seemingly infusing the effect the real Queen appears to have on people when she meets them. Mirren has an elegant grace that demands authority and a sense of prestige. The make-up, costume, and production design are all superb, making for a very identifiable, and lasting, image.
Yet the cosy style of the film is only a ‘bells and whistles’ detraction from the shallowness it encapsulates. The warmest thing about ‘The Queen’ is the Paparazzi’s flash bulbs, everything else is damn cold.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Bob Clark (1941 – 2007) April 6, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, 1970s, Film reviews, Thriller/Suspense, Biographies , add a comment
On the 5th of April 2007, writer/director Bob Clark was tragically killed when an unlicensed, drunk driver, smashed head first into his car. Sadly, his 22 year old son, who was travelling with him, also died.
The director was most famous for the irreverent Porky’s films which saw, amongst other things, a group of horny, under-sexed teenagers spying on the girl’s shower rooms. The sudden appearance of a penis through a hole in the wall is what most people remember about the movie.
The director also brought us the holiday classic A Christmas Story, and worked with Dan Aykoryd and Gene Hackman on the action-comedy Loose Cannons. Certainly, Clark came under fire from critics who saw a lack of consistency within his work, and it is saddening he never found the form to surpass his horror masterpiece Black Christmas.
His later career was dominated by children and family entertainment both for television and film. Unfortunately, his new horror film Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things had production pushed back from its start date in 2006 to Spring 2007, and will therefore be left incomplete.
Below is my review of Bob Clark’s best film. This was first published by DVD Times in March 2003.
Canada, 1974 – director Bob Clark, unbeknownst to him at the time, waters the seeds planted by Hitchcock’s Psycho, and to a certain degree Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, to which would fruit to bare a new sub-genre in horror cinema. Four years before the supposed fire starter, and most famous film to grace the genre Halloween, Black Christmas began the refining of conventions in laying the groundwork for Carpenter’s film to bloom. True, Halloween was the catalyst to a whole heap of movies which followed in the very late seventies and eighties, but it was Clark’s film that shone at the roots in terms of the generic aesthetics which became so prevalent.
Soon after Carpenter’s student years, he and Bob Clark would have a conversation, that ultimately spawned 1978’s Halloween, in which Carpenter told Clark how much he enjoyed his earlier horror film. According to Clark, Carpenter asked him if he would be willing to make a sequel to Black Christmas, to which Clark replied with an unequivocal ‘no’. However, Clark did divulge to Carpenter how he thought a sequel to Black Christmas would go, plot wise. If it were made, he told him, it would be titled Halloween, and would be based on a serial killer who was caught but then escaped from a mental institution to stalk victims on Halloween night. Clearly, Carpenter took this food for thought on board and with the help of Debra Hill, turned the idea into reality. So in essence, Black Christmas could very well be thought of as the unofficial prequel to Halloween.
The story is quite simple. At a sorority house, the girls are getting ready to go home for Christmas but begin receiving phone calls from a strange caller who won’t give his name. The next day, many girls leave, but one who should have met her father doesn’t turn up, which causes great concern for her safety. When another girl goes missing, the police begin searching the area and find a body nearby. Meanwhile, with only three students left in the sorority house, the phone calls continue, getting more and more menacing each time, but unknown to the remaining members of the house, the caller, and perhaps the killer, is closer to them than their nightmares could ever imagine.
Bob Clark’s career needed a boost, and as he showed with his later comedy Porky’s, he wasn’t someone who would shy away from breaking norms and subverting audience expectation – who would have expected the events of the shower scene, and that hole in the wall that overlooked the girls shower room!? Violent, shocking, and horrific stories were becoming regular pieces of American cinema, and Clark sensing this, grasped the opportunity to direct his first horror picture. Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in 1971, Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left in 1972, and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in 1973 were proof that the obscure, dangerous films put your name on the map, for better and for worse. His film hardly made the splashes the three prior films made for themselves, but it put his foot in the water, and it was in his small, but significant ripples that would elevate his film beyond just cult status.
Clark begins his film looking through the eyes of the killer, as he examines the house from the outside, and scales the wall to find a way in. The subjective, voyeuristic nature of the point-of-view camerawork beautifully places the audience inside the killer’s mind, as we stalk the house and become the voyeurs too. Clark mixes objective and subjective aesthetics to create scenes of intensity and suspense, not seen on film before, and rarely matched since. Unlike Tobe Hooper’s documentary style voyeurism in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the audience is dared to keep their eyes on the screen, Clark throws the audience no room for a breath of oxygen as he cuts from an objective shot into a point-of-view shot of what the killer sees, as if we are forced to partake in the action of killing itself, and not just in the selfish act of watching someone else’s life being taken. Clark compounds this with brilliant use of sound, deafening the listener with ear haunting rasps and screeches, as if he wants to hurt your senses.
Indeed, the director wants to unsettle the audience rather than give individual viewers incessant shocks, only for viewers to forget about them once they’ve left the theatre, or once they’ve turned off the television. What violence occurs in Black Christmas is largely implied, rather than explicit, and adds to the overall sense of physical emotion in the audience, because the ‘horror’ unsettles you on a personal level with your imagination creating the ‘terror’ implied. One wonderfully created scene has one of the girls being killed juxtaposed with carol singers singing at the door. The Christmas song plays over the violent, loud, blood bath, with images of happy children singing their hearts out combined with jerky, dark glimpses of a knife entering flesh, and a blood soaked hand becoming more and more lifeless with every blow.
Clark uses the phone as an extension of the killer, an extension of the evil, to great effect. Mixing different voices with jagged, undecipherable language, the director is able to create a monster, existing above human capacity through alienating the solid form of a human being into the detached, multi-faceted voice of grotesque, unseen evil. Elsewhere, he owes a debt of gratitude to Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu, and Fritz Lang’s brilliantly unnerving, sombre tale M from 1931. The killer moves within the shadows, his/her form largely subliminal, and what we do see of him/her is that of disembodied evil – hands holding a weapon, or an erratic eye, peering through a crack in the door. It also becomes apparent that the film doesn’t just share the voyeuristic nature of the photography with its counterpart The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, incidentally released the same year, it also shares similar themes regarding the real life serial murderer Ed Gein. In Clark’s film, like Hooper’s, the killer has a penchant for ornamental corpses, and here, he/she likes to leave them in the attic in ‘hello death’ posers, culminating in a viscerally, haunting final image that ends the film.
It wouldn’t be surprising if this film were cited as playing a major part in so-called feminist horror films made afterward, like Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave, but of course Zarchi’s film could be looked at in a completely opposing way. Nevertheless, unlike the genre’s films to come where the clean, young virgins survive, and the dirty, man-eater’s meet horrible deaths, Black Christmas’ main female cast are largely the only ones for which we have any sympathy. Barb, played superbly by Margot Kidder, rises above any authority put before her. She doesn’t allow, at least visually, the caller to frighten her and in fact tells him/her where to go, and later when talking to the police she plays a little game when asked what her phone number is, telling the inept male cop that the number is Fellatio 20880, to which the cop unknowingly writes down. She has a rather unfeminine personality, she drinks too much, and swears in most of her sentences yet we get the feeling there’s some inner turmoil perhaps down to jealousy of some of the other younger girls and the beautiful, quiet but authoritative Jess, played by Olivia Hussey. Hussey caries the film with her quiet, pondering and wistful looks, grounding the almost unreal events, in real life reality, and in her character Jess, rebels against her boyfriend after she tells him she’s getting an abortion of which he is adamantly against, but she sticks to her guns. And the father of one of the girls who goes missing expresses dismay at the fact she might have been experimenting with drugs, drink and sex saying, ‘I didn’t send my daughter here to be drinking…and picking up boys’. The women in the film rebel against the constraints put upon them, and for the most part these restraints are embodied in the male characters, most of which are either inept or out of touch with present day reality.
As for the rest of the performances, well, for the most part they are very good. Keir Dullea, as the insecure, neurotic boyfriend broods around breaking things, shouting and acting like he has the credentials to be the killer, while John Saxon, as usual, is the ultimate professional giving his chief lieutenant a strong backbone, and Doug McGrath offers some comic relief as the inept cop.
Black Christmas is a fantastically, effective horror film, easing its way under your skin and it stands as a major contributor in the creation of a new sub-genre in horror culture. Halloween has a more refined characteristic and is arguably the better film, but Black Christmas inspired it in so many ways you have to give the plaudits to Clark’s film.