Infinite Variations

Jim Jarmusch’s new film Limits of Control has just been released to DVD. It is a wonderfully abstract film with sensational cinematography by Chris Doyle. As an added bonus, there is a nifty documentary included on the DVD that includes scenes of Jarmusch and Doyle during the production of the film. (I may post a clip to YouTube in the next few days). It is in this bonus material that Jarmusch states the following:

“Nothing is original. All human expression is really just endless variations. There are only a limited number of stories you can tell. But there’s an unlimited number of ways to tell the same story”

What Jarmusch says here is interesting and consequential for young would-be screenwriters and filmmakers. It is the how that is essential (how you tell the story), much more so than the what (what is it about). And yet, most screenwriting manuals and filmmaking manuals tell you the reverse: they tell you that the how has been solved for you in advance; the mold into which your story will be poured into is preset, has been fabricated in advance. Your job as a screenwriter or filmmaker – according to these guides – is to focus on the what and to make this what go “pop” (especially for the producer who sees $$ flash before his mind’s eye). This is one of the reasons why there are so few interesting films being written or shot today. The what is pure gimmick and the how is pure formulae. Worse, this focus on what means that most aspiring young filmmakers pay little attention to the medium they are working in, when in fact the opposite should be the case: to focus on the how – how you tell the story – would mean that one thinks specifically about the medium they are using, to think about the modes of expression made possible by or through this medium that distinguishes it from other kinds of storytelling. Films tell stories with images drawn from the everyday world; images in movement and time; images placed in relation with other images and transformed through their contact with sound. What the consequences of this are for the stories we tell in cinema, and how we tell them, should be one of the central concerns of young screenwriters and filmmakers.

So, far from being discouraged by Jarmusch’s statement, we should use this as the starting point for our investigations/research into the medium. Indeed, what he is pointing to – if we think about it – is profoundly complex and mysterious: how is it that the same story can produce endless variations? How is it that the same story never exhausts itself but has the potential to reveal, through its repetition, a hidden reserve of meaning, an unexpected depth of feeling? And what role can cinema play in revitalizing the limited repertoire of stories through which we come to know ourselves, through which we come to know the world?

S I-G

Form Is Content

All great works of art give lie to the distinction between form and content. Form and content are not separate entities but two expressions of the same thing. This inextricable link, this indissociable bond, is most easily illustrated in painting. When we look at, for example, Van Gogh’s The Sower or Starry Night no one makes the argument that what is great about these paintings is the “content.” Or, if they do, they don’t mean by content “a sower at dusk” or “a star-filled night.” What is miraculous about these works is the painter’s dazzling use of color, as well as the way he manages to impress upon us his individual perspective on the world – the way he communicates the sensation of color and light. The “content” of these works is color, light, perspective, which is also what we would discuss if we were considering its “form.”

This seems straightforward enough, does it not? The same argument can be made about literature. The use of long-winding sentences in Proust, some of which extend for more than a page, is not a gratuitous addition to the “content” of In Search of Lost Time but an essential component through which the novelist communicates ideas and emotions. (If a no-nonsense translator decided to “simplify” Proust and correct the novelist’s tendency to embed subclauses within subclauses, you would any up with a book that had little to do with Proust. You’d write In Search of Lost Time without Proust.) This is why the adaptation of a great work of literature into a film is a perilous task. As Truffaut once said to Hitchcock, a great work of art is one that has already found its perfect form, and for this reason it cannot be “translated” into another medium without extraordinary difficulty. (On the other hand, a second- or third-rate novel might be ideal material to adapt to the screen, precisely because it has yet to be fully realized. It remains in chrysalis form, awaiting perfection.)

When we talk of cinema too often people assume that the “content” is the story or the plot (i.e., what is in the script), and form is merely a way of embellishing content through the use of a number of stylistic flourishes: a 360º pan, a crane shot which descends from the clouds, a fancy Steadicam shot, etc. It is a common belief, and it results in nothing but mediocre works. In a great film, form is content: the form in which the filmmaker tells a story and through which the viewer experiences the film is what makes it memorable; indeed, it is what makes it unique, one of a kind. A director’s job is to discover, in the translation of a script into a film, the correct way to give life – to embody – the ideas and emotions that remain only half-realized (chrysalis-like) on the written page. (As Godard once said, if you write a script that is so good that readers laugh and cry when reading it, then you should just bind the script and sell it in a store. Your work is complete. A script does not need to do all these things because this is not its purpose.) So a film is not its script, and the form through which a film comes into being is not extrinsic to its content – it is its content.

S I-G

Thoughts On Making An "Outside" Short (Part One)

Hello, blog readers, current and former students of Media Practice: Film Form. I'm writing about the experiences I had shooting a non-assignment short film using the New School's equipment this fall. In other words, a short film that I wasn't assigned but rather one I just felt like doing. I think that we're given so many resources as students here we need to take advantage of them as much as possible and constantly be creating projects big and small. So, what i'd like to do is write about my experience shooting this film and go over things that workd and some that didn't in the hope that some of this may help someone out there.

I wasn't initially planning to make anything outside of class this semester, but when taking a look at the syllabus for Cinematography I realized that there weren't going to be as many opportunities to make films as there were in MP: Film Form.

Working from an idea I had developed over the summer (in which a recently unemployed man receives a mysterious handwritten letter and discovers he can move through time) I set out in September to figure out what I had to do to make the film. I knew a few things from the start: I wouldn't have much money beyond small expenses; with my day-job schedule it would be difficult to have more than 2 days at a time to shoot; I wanted a smallish crew, as in, just me or me and one other person. Had I been able to shoot in one or two days, a larger crew with more tasks delegated might have been feasible, but given the somewhat larger number of locations or a film this length and with virtually no budget, not having too many people involved seemed like the best way to keep things uncomplicated. I also kept the cast to a minimum, casting my good friend John as the lead, and my friends Ryan (fellow New School filmmaker) and Robyn (roommate and a producer) in bit parts. John is not a trained actor, but as a writer and trained improv comic I knew that he could bring just as much to the production as a conventional actor could and that he would be perhaps more understanding of the filmmaking process than a stage actor.

This proved true, but with complications, which I'll explain next time.

Matt Simon

Production Photos: Maximum Stache

Above are some photographs from Ryan Garretson's film shoot. Ryan took Media Practice: Film Form in SP09. He plans to shoot two or three shorts prior to Production Studio in FA10.

"The title of this film (shot on HD) is Maximum Stache: To Protect and Serve and it was more or less inspired by two very talented actor friends of mine who I noticed could grow good facial hair. I guess it was also partly inspired by Magnum P.I., although the end result of this project will likely bare little resemblance to Magnum, with the exception of the mustaches. More or less, the skeletal plot of this film is built upon the premise of two plain clothes police detectives sitting in a car, waiting for a nameless, faceless criminal to make his move, and having screwbally, pseudo-gritty conversations along the way.

The inane nature of the setup notwithstanding, this project has allowed me to experiment with a variety of filmmaking techniques, such as one-shot cutaway scenes expanding on a narrative world, occasional in-camera editing, dream sequences facilitating a carte blanche approach to sound design and post-production, and the utilization of the point of view of a one-eyed cat. My crew consisted of four fellow graduate New School students, three of whom are also in the Film Form sequence, a few friends, and my girlfriend. We shot roughly 40 setups divided by two cameras over the course of one long day spent on the street outside a renovated industrial building in Bushwick. We learned a lot that day - a lot about filmmaking, a lot about ourselves, and, especially, a lot about mustaches."

Ryan Garretson

Claire Denis at the NYFF

Claire Denis with two actors (Isaach de Bankolé, William Nadylam) from her new film The White Material during the Q&A at the NYFF on Saturday, October 10. It is the third film that Denis has shot in Africa, following Chocolat (1988) and Beau Travail (1999), each made a decade apart. It's as though Denis, who spent her childhood in various regions of Africa, was periodically drawn back to the country she first considered her home. (Born in Paris in 1948, Denis – whose father was a civil servant – spent most of her childhood moving from one part of Africa to another. She only returned to France as a teenager. Not surprisingly, her interests as a filmmaker have often been focused on displaced individuals living on foreign soil – which was her own experience both growing up in Africa and returning to France as a young woman.) This is not to say that these films should be understood as autobiographical or sentimental. Indeed, Denis is one of the least sentimental directors working today. She has also developed, over the years, an impressionistic, rhythmic style of filmmaking that should be seen by all who are interested in rethinking the nature of "narrative" as it applies to the medium of film. (The best place to start? See I Can't Sleep and Beau Travail. And see The White Material, if/when it finally picks up a US distributor.)

S I-G

Michael Haneke at NYFF

Here is a photo I took of Haneke (sitting on the far left-hand side) during the Q&A that followed the October 7 screening of his new film The White Ribbon. Some of Haneke's responses surprised me, including his claim that a filmmaker should not impose a predetermined plan or schema on their work. It's hard for me to understand what this could mean coming from someone who, in the past, has made such formally rigorous works as 71 Fragments for a Chronology of Chance (which, as the title suggests, consists of 71 scenes, most in long takes) and Code Unknown (a series of precisely controlled sequence shots). The audience responded with great enthusiasm to his latest film – winner of the Palme d'or at Cannes in May – and this was not a big surprise considering that The White Ribbon is easily the most polished and classically structured (narratively-speaking) of all his films. Personally, I wouldn't have minded a bit more provocation.

Interesting technical aside: The White Ribbon was shot with color film stock and then developed in black-and-white. The result, according to Haneke, was not always to his liking, so they did some digital tinkering (with silhouettes, for example) in postproduction. (The effect of this, at times, is to make the film look – unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned – as though it were shot with a digital camera.)

S I-G

Cinephile Alert

If you haven't come across it yet, I recommend that everyone check out the website entitled "The Auteurs" (www.theauteurs.com). What makes it particularly nice is that along with articles about new films and filmmakers, and a discussion forum for members of the site (with endless top ten lists), they also stream films, some for a small fee and some for FREE (including the films restored by the Scorsese sponsored non-profit organization, World Cinema Foundation). The emphasis throughout is on alternatives to mainstream film and, because it is an internationally run webpage, it allows the student of film to discover a number of works that previously may have escaped his or her attention. This month the free steaming films includes a number of remarkable debut feature films: Agnès Varda's La Pointe Courte (1956), sometimes referred to as the origin of the French New Wave; Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water (1962); Jane Campion's Sweetie (1989); and Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher (1999). It's a great website for current and future cinephiles. Join today!