Films about making Films...

Lately I've been exploring some films that deal with the art of filmmaking. The following is a small list of films are currently available.

1. Visions of Light - A film about cinematography that touches on the changes in the craft from the beginnings to the 1990's. Many great examples and many terrific cinematographers and their work. I would love to learn more about James Wong Howe... an immigrant Chinese photographer - a terrific artist and a wonderful story).

2. Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann - What a treasure this film is! It provides some biographical details of Herrmann's life but more importantly, it explores his indelible impact on film music. The film features interviews with the late David Raskin and Elmer Bernstein. There are great passages where Herrmann's scores are deconstructed giving the viewer a window into the composers methods.

This film also features a scene that Herrmann scored for Hitchcock's 'Torn Curtain'. They play it with and without the score...


As another part of the series, The Hollywood Sound explores the change in style from old Hollywood to the modern day and features a rerecording of Raskin's Academy Award winning score for "Laura".

3. The Cutting Edge - A film about the craft of film editing. It explores the craft of editing through many artisans including one of the greats, Walter Murch.



I have been working on film scripts with my writing students over the last few weeks and one of my biggest comments has been "write the edits". Think like the editor. Think in cuts. Think in the juxtaposition of words and images... images and images. That's how you write a film.

4. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse - Based on Eleanor Coppola's book 'Notes' and her documentary footage from the production, Hearts of Darkness is unparalleled in it's uncompromising view of the filmmaking process. Not to be missed.

5. Burden of Dreams - An account of the filming of Werner Herzog's 'Fitzcarraldo'. Herzog is one of the most engaging and talented artists working in film today. Uncompromising, daring and magnificent. I love his quote "I want viewers to be able to trust their eyes again"... He is a fearless artist.

Feel free to comment and add more to this list. I did watch 'Cinematography Style' in thinking of this post and I found it terribly ironic. It is a documentary about Cinematographers that, although beautifully shot, was just a series of quickly cut talking heads. Was there no room for a breath and an exploration of visuals? Sponsored by Kodak and Panavision, the film felt more like a public relations piece than a real exploration of the art and craft of cinema photography.

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War of the Worlds

Millsworks has a good posting today on the 70th Anniversary of Orson Welles broadcast of 'War of the Worlds'.

Rob also mentions Elia Kazan's terrific picture, 'A Face in the Crowd'. This film is one of the prophetic movies that satirized the popular media and foreshadowed the modern media's love of spectacle (Joe the Plumber). Rob also points out another prophetic film, Network and I would like to add a third (always best to have a trilogy), Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole", also known as "The Big Carnival". Wilder's film is about a Chuck Tatum, a washed up newspaperman who exploits the story of a man trapped in a cave. Instead of helping the man out quickly, Tatum manipulates the situation and turns the site into a media circus. It foreshadows such news outlets like 'Fox News' which seeks to manufacture and manipulate the news it's covering as well as people's opinions of it.

'Ace in the Hole' didn't do well in it's day - it's dark and cynical and most audiences at the time felt it was over the top. Criterion released a great print of the film on dvd.

From IMDB:
When the film was released, it got bad reviews and lost money. The studio, without Billy Wilder's permission, changed the title to "The Big Carnival" to increase the box office take of the film. It didn't work. On top of that, Billy Wilder's next picture Stalag 17 (1953) was a hit and Billy Wilder expected a share of the Stalag 17 (1953)'s profits. Paramount accountants told him that since this picture lost money, the money it lost would be subtracted from the profits of Stalag 17 (1953).

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Passchendaele

One of my favourite bloggers, Jim Henshaw, has once again lit up his flame thrower and let loose on the Canadian film industry and the critical establishment that seemingly supports it. This time he attacks our industry for it's inability to support films that might actually connect to an audience. We excuse our filmmakers and create some sort of 'artistic' rationale that allows failed writers and directors to make new films that don't represent the actual experiences/feelings of Canadians. And despite what our cultural institutions tell us, our experience isn't much different to the rest of the world. In some sort of bizarre cheer leading, the 'critics' are often pulling their punches and judging our home grown talent with kid gloves.

Jim's article is a frank critical look at Paul Gross's new film Passchendaele. I decided to avoid the film as I gave four hours of my life to the CBC mini-series 'The Trojan Horse', written and directed by Gross. This series, despite some good ideas, fell flat on cliches, absurd situations and lazy story telling. Jim was more adventurous and his article can be read here...

I've often complained that we export most of our great talent. It is exploited in Hollywood as our home grown filmmakers have contributed wonderful films to the canon of great movies. We need to get past the idea that 'entertaining = bad'. 'Citizen Kane' is entertaining. 'The Godfather' is wildly entertaining. We need to change the equation and realize that 'art' and 'entertainment' are not at odds.

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New Tools for the Indie Filmmaker

October 19, 2008 from angus giorgi on Vimeo.

Rob Mills sent me a link to the new Canon Digital SLR (EOS 5D Mark II) that is capable of 1080p video at 30 frames per second. What is amazing about this camera is that it uses a 21 megapixel sensor and it gives a filmmaker access to the entire lineup of Canon compatible lenses. The camera isn't perfect and there are complaints that the video runs at 30 fps instead of 24 and it writes the video with H.264 compression (it isn't uncompressed or Raw like the actual photographs). This may be so but many people don't understand the importance of the lens. If you have a cheap lens you'll get a cheap picture. Garbage in, garbage out.

Despite these 'flaws', this new leap forward in image gathering means that more independent filmmakers will have access to high end tools that will put them near equal footing with high end productions. This camera is being sold for $2700 dollars (body only)! Compare this to the 'affordable' Red One camera that sells for $17,500 for the body of the camera. All in on the Red camera, you're looking upwards of $25,000. Red is going to announce a new camera that will retail in the neighbourhood of the Canon price tag. Red One did something brilliant in their design. They decided to ignore the standard formats of video (HD, Ntsc, Pal) and brought out a camera that could capture the video raw and then allow the user to encode the video the way they want. This set them apart from the Hd and HDV cameras as well as the new Canon which does bring it's images in on that wonderfully big 21 megapixel sensor but has to write the video to a standard hd format.

Beyond all this geek talk, 2009 seems to be a year of change for the independent filmmaking community. I've met people that lament this as they like the elitist elements of making movies. What these folks don't really consider is story. No matter how wonderful the tool, the artist needs to have an idea. The pencil has been the most accessible tool for writing but few people are creating great novels or poetry. Still, it helps that the filmmakers have access to a tool that will allow them to create images that will be equal to their creative ideas.

Kudos to Cinematographer Alan Doyle and Editor Angus Giorgi for sharing their footage.

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Apparently I'm Speechless...

Lately I've been guilty of excessive amounts of work. I've also been entertained, watching the world swing by.

The show's been good.

The biggest thing on my mind today has been what will happen to American satirical television if Obama wins? These satirists have gorged themselves on the presidency of George W. Bush. And just when you think you couldn't do any better for political humour, along comes Sarah Pailin! Ironically, it's in Jon Stewart's best interest for a McCain/Pailin presidency. As Kenny Banya would say - "it's gold Jerry, gold". Those pinko American liberals should think twice before casting their vote next month as they might be creating an undesirable void in American humour for the next four years...

Consider your vote carefully.

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Wall Street

Has there been a more appropriate time to bring up Oliver Stone's 1987 film 'Wall Street'? I've wanted to write about this film for a few months now. More specifically, I wanted to write about the ironic impact the film had on the the financial centre of the United States.

"Wall Street" is the story of Bud Fox, a young broker who has grand ambitions of becoming a big time financial player. He ends up hooking a big time client, Gordon Gekko, a major market speculator and corporate "raider". Bud's father is a blue collar worker at a small airline company and inadvertently gives Bud some inside information regarding an upcoming court settlement. Desperate to bag Gekko, Bud gives him the inside information and kick starts his rise through the ranks. Bud's biggest problem is his lack of experience and the information he gets legitimately is weak and not worthy of Gekko's time. Gekko knows this and urges Bud to get the inside information that Gekko uses to make the big deals. As the story progresses, Bud is corrupted and begins to make himself in the image of the shrewd and successful Gekko.

"Wall Street" is both flawed and terrific. It features some great performances, great dialogue and strong characters. The major flaws come from a fairly contrived and earnest ending. I personally dislike the Stuart Copeland electronic score. Like most synthesizer scores of the 80's, I find the soundtrack rather empty and insipid. Daryl Hannah is an exception to the performances as many of her dialogue scenes were very obviously overdubbed (adr) and sound forced.

What I found to be even more interesting than the film itself is the 20th anniversary documentary on the dvd. What you discover in this footage is that Gekko, the films corrupt villain, has been worshipped by many in the Wall Street community. There are scores of interviews with brokers who talk about how Gekko inspired them. Most of these men criticized the end of the film as Gekko got his comeuppance. How wonderfully ironic this is in a fairly earnest film that attempts to expose the corruption of the financial system but ends up inspiring the real-life Gekko's who recite lines from the film like "greed is good", "lunch is for wimps" and "what's worth doing is worth doing for money". To take the irony a little further, Stone contends that Richard Nixon decided to invade Cambodia after watching Frank Shaffner's "Patton". If that film had a negative effect on the Vietnam war, certainly you could argue that Stone's "Wall Street" has had a negative effect on the current Wall Street. Greed is good and greed has borne much fruit in the current economic crisis in America.

As fun as it is to assert Stone's roll in the current economy, I don't actually put much stock in the idea. It is ironic but I wouldn't think of the world so simplistically. What "Wall Street" underlines is that colourful villains in films can upstage the heroes. Bud Fox has great character development but he is overshadowed by the rich and successful Gekko. Gekko is the in the exciting business of corporate warfare and, like Patton, there is much to admire about the way he slays his foes with such ingenuity, force and precision. Truffaut is famously quoted "there is no such thing as an antiwar film", war is exhilarating and exciting with the extreme drama of life and death. Gekko, in his metaphoric trench, is much more exciting to watch than young Bud fumbling his way through the story (I wonder if Stone named him Bud in a homage to that other great ladder climber CC "Bud" Baxter from Billy Wilder's "The Apartment"). Whether you agree with Truffaut or not is irrelevant, the idea is solid. "Raise the stakes" is one of the mantra's of feature filmmaking and some of the audience connected with Gekko and his obsession to win the battle by any means necessary.

In the end of "Wall Street" Gekko does get what is coming to him. There are consequences to devastating peoples lives for the sake of a buck. Yet, twenty years later, the mantra "greed is good" is as strong as ever. The price of gas is much higher than the worth of a barrel and most economists say it's because of the speculators, those Gekko types who love to put us all over the barrel so they can take as much as they can.

And do these wealthy men give anything back? In nature they call them parasites...

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Dekalog

Having rented the Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog a few years ago I decided to pick up a copy and revisit them. If you don't know the series, Kieslowski and his writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz created a ten part television mini-series inspired by each of the ten commandments. What is astounding about the series is how it subtly explores the difficulties and complexities of human behaviour and morality. As simple as the commandments seem on paper, Kieslowski and Piesiewicz manage to delve into the grey areas and challenge our ideology of absolute morality. Life is difficult and the answers aren't always clear cut in simple rules.

Stanley Kubrick is said to have stated that the "Dekalog" was the only film masterpiece that he'd seen in his lifetime. After showing "Red", "White" and "Blue", one of my astute students suggested that Kubrick was heavily influenced by Kieslowski for his final film "Eyes Wide Shut" (an interesting proposition that I would love to see explored).

I highly recommend this series to all but particularly to film writers. Kieslowski's work is firmly planted in strong themes and ideas. I'll leave you with Stanley Kubrick's forward to the published screenplays of 'The Dekalog':

I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieslowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.

Stanley Kubrick
January 1991

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