From my February newsletter

My two books for the fiimmaker

Every so often I like to stand back and reiterate what I offer in filmmaking education, how I believe it differs from much of what else is out there and why it yields benefits to directors and other filmmakers from around the world, whatever their sensibility, approach, or genre leanings.

Here is some of what I make every effort to provide:

• Human interaction. Online sessions are LIVE—but recorded so you can watch later as well. 

• One-on-one consultations, thoroughly prepped.

• Questions, exploration, discovery.

• Support in finding your filmmaking self. No one-size-fits-all instruction. “THERE IS NO MANUAL.” (Martin Scorsese).

• Exploring the nature of story, storytelling, the language of the screen.

• No conflation of creative filmmaking with careers advice, industry talk, production procedures.

• No AI.

• Specific examples, forensically analyzed, to illustrate concepts vital to the filmmaker.

• Topics not covered elsewhere.

• References to the arts and philosophy but…

• Emphasis on the filmmaker’s imperative of practicality.

• Centrality of: Mischief. Magic. Mystery.

• Centrality of: Intuition. Instinct.

• Belief in, passion for, devotion to Cinema. 

Above all, I am receptive to your questions, comments, thoughts, and contributing insights.

Please email me if you’d like further clarification.

Peter Markham

February 2025

Is there a difference?

From “In the Mood for Love” (2000) | Writer-Director-Producer Wong Kar-wai. Cinematography Christopher Doyle, Ping Bin Lee.

Awhile back, I attended a memorial for a dear colleague, a writer and educator with a decades long record of achievement in film and TV. No one could have been more generous or encouraging to their students or collaborative with other teachers than this exemplary educator.

One of this sadly lost man’s friends, apparently among his closest, in giving his eulogy, came out with something to the effect that when the writer has written the screenplay and the director goes on to f… it up…

If the roar of applause from the assembled scribes immediately drowned out any possibility for reflection on what had just been said, the import was clear enough without it — film is all about screenplay. The job of the director is to ensure that the screenplay plays out on the screen. Faithfully. Obediently. Rigidly…

In this blunt view, the director is little more than a copyist. Dutiful, loyal, unquestioning as they point the camera at whatever the writer describes. They’re not even some kind of translator, taking language on the page and translating it into the language of the screen, since in the assumed process of the eulogist that evening, the language of the screen, were it ever so much as acknowledged, can play no part.

The screen, we were to believe, is merely a subservient vehicle for the story’s telling, which to all intents and purposes has already been done on the page.

The art of cinema for the director, if we are to believe this, is thus comprised of two elements: casting and the directing of the actors. Otherwise, there are only the processes of production, logistical, professional, while production design, cinematography, costume design, editing, sound design, and score/source music serve only as slaves to the screenplay.

Extremist stuff from just one person of course, although judging from the reaction that evening, it appears not only widely accepted among many screenwriters but passionately endorsed.

Before going further, I want to make it clear that I see screenwriting as an intensely challenging form of writing—maybe the most difficult of any since it involves writing in one medium for another. Screenwriters, meanwhile, are casually and habitually disrespected. And some directors, it has to be said, do indeed damage the writer’s work…

Perhaps they fail to grasp the complex connective tissue the writer has built into their script, proclaiming they are “making the film their own.” (A film surely should be made the film’s own, not the director’s, nor the writer’s.)

They might be utilizing shots and angles striking in themselves but unrelated to the narrative — a purely pictorial approach lacking dramaturgical authenticity. A director might employ a tone contrary to the writer’s intended attitude to their material, leading to confusing results. A director might, to the detriment of the movie, ignore the sense of rhythm and energy the best screenwriters can convey on the page. A director might not have even read a screenplay with sufficient diligence and so fall short in their efforts.

Yes, there is plenty that can go wrong on the director’s side.

Next consideration though — say two directors could each direct the same screenplay and with the same cast, team, sets and locations, would this result in two identical movies? Of course not. Performance, shot selection, angle, framing, sound, editing, rhythm and its manifestation, tonal modulation, articulation of narrative POV — there’s a wealth of factors that depend on a director’s creative decisions. Screenplay alone cannot determine all of these aspects.

There again, could a director ever make a good movie from a mediocre screenplay? Perhaps not, but could they make a good movie with noscreenplay? Yes, they could and they have.

Wang Kar Wei did this with In the Mood for Love, a classic of the new millennium. Mike Leigh’s movies used to involve weeks of improvisation that resulted in his story and characters coming to fruition. Co-Writer-Director of the animated Flow Gints Zilbalodis has commented on social media that once it had been completed, he never again looked at the film’s screenplay when he went on to make his movie.

Surely, a screenplay is a blueprint rather than a hard and fast template? Even Writer-Directors consistently discover this as the concept and articulation of the film they have set down in screenplay form evolves through the practical and developmental aspects of its making, through the collaboration of the creative team, and as the film itself speaks to its filmmaker with increasing clarity of what it needs and what it is.

We might say that the director should be faithful not to the script on a surface level but to its depth and spirit, those products of the writer’s creative subconscious, not to mention the interweaving of its narrative and thematic threads.

The director’s voice is then not a betrayal of the writer’s screenplay but the vehicle for the realization that transforms it into cinematic life.

The seed is not the bloom. The bloom is the bloom.

Peter Markham

February 2025

Which is the true language of film?

Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) | Images: Wikipedia, Philosophical Film Festival.

Pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein asserted that cinema works through the cut:

Eisenstein felt the “collision” of shots could be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience and create film metaphors. He believed that an idea should be derived from the juxtaposition of two independent shots, bringing an element of collage into film.

Another Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, in his monumental book Sculpting in Time, later maintained that film’s essence lies not in the cut but in the passage of time within the shot. Here, a camera holds the shot as events, the world, or simply time itself, pass before our eyes.

Robert Bresson, it would seem, disagreed with Tarkovsky. Like Eisenstein, he proposed that the essence of cinema lies in the cut. Unlike his counterpart though, he was not for any collision of shots but — in accordance with his aesthetic of the uninflected image — stated that the poetry is in the joins and not to be found within each of what he thought should at best be neutrally presented frames.

I’ve heard it posited that the long take reflects our perception of the world.We look one way, look another, at one thing then something else but we don’t cut in between. Instead, we experience an uninterrupted flow. A notable actor once told me that estimable filmmaker Gus Van Sant, with whom he’d just worked, incorporates this insight in his approach to shooting.

Does the contention bear scrutiny through? I’m an enthusiastic admirer of much of Van Sant’s movies and am fortunate to have met the man when he generously visited one of my classes but I seem to recall that editing master Walter Murch, in his book In the Blink of an Eye thinks quite the opposite. That when we look one way, then another, we reflexively blink as our eyes pan.

The cut, he suggests, is intrinsic to human perception.

Perhaps it’s true at deeper levels also, true of our inner “seeing” even? I’m sure I dream in cuts. (Although there’s one camera move I conjure in my sleep that dollies around some dark corner and leads me — with no cut I’m aware of along the way — to encounter whatever terror might be concealed, in menacing wait for me.)

Talking of the subconscious, in the days after major surgery several years ago, while awash in oceans of painkillers, I was jump-cutting from my inner world to the outer, from an interior, weird, self-concocted version of Chinatown to my attending surgeon, nurses, and hospital staff.

Polar opposites: noir on the inside, healthcare on the outside.

Perhaps those jarring transitions from imagination to the witnessing of what was actually happening around me constituted an extreme manifestation of our constant daily switching from thought to vision, from imagined image to perceived event, on and on, on and on? Perhaps, I find myself wondering, the cut is fundamental to consciousness itself?

Even if this were to be the case though— and perhaps it’s a fanciful notion on my part — need the language of film be restricted to the mimesis of our mind’s processes? Shouldn’t the filmmaker be free instead to form and utilize a cinematic language most appropriate to their movie and their sensibility? To expand consciousness rather than merely adhere to it. Why shouldn’t filmmakers invent, innovate, explore, and subvert?

If a visual language functions, if it communicates, creates wonder in us, horror, astonishment, and above all emotion, if the poetry of its imagery shines (or shadows), if it simply tells a story, surely its validity is authentic?

Entire movies may consist of a single shot — or what appears to be one. From Hitchcock’s Rope, to Russian Ark, to Irréversible, to the more recent Birdmanand 1917 (nothing there in the list by Tarkovsky, oddly) the canon continues to expand along with the capabilities of the editing technology that enables this aesthetic. It’s become easier to move the camera too. To begin with, Steadicam appeared, then cameras themselves became much more portable so that individual takes can be achieved with an ease denied to directors of previous eras, saddled as they were with weighty 35 mm Mitchell’s, Arriflexes, and Panavisions.

Yet, montage remains as potent as ever.

Let’s take a look at two scenes from masters of film that illustrate the contrast between the opposing maxims:

Firstly, some opening moments from Bresson’s 1959 Pickpocket:

From Bresson’s Pickpocket, Cinematography Léonce-Henri Burel

Starting with the arrival of protagonist Michel at the racetrack, where he stands behind the woman he’s about to rob… (Not a word of dialogue is spoken throughout.)

1 — Over Michel’s shoulder as he arrives behind the woman. She turns, looks at him.

CUT

2 — 3-shot. Woman. Michel. Man. Woman turns from Michel to the front. Michel looks from her to the front. (Hold shot.) Man looking through binoculars. Michel glances down (to woman’s purse), up, then down again.

CUT

3 — Purse. Michel’s fingers edge toward, feel and loosen catch, edge back.

CUT

4 — Repeat 3-shot, Michel looking to the front. Hold shot.

CUT

5 — Repeat purse shot. Michel’s fingers pop catch of purse open.

CUT

6 — Repeat 3-shot. Michel blinks, looks to the front, glances down then up, looks to the front, again glances down then up.

CUT

7 — Repeat purse shot. Michel’s fingers enter purse.

CUT

8 — Repeat 3-shot, Michel looking to the front. Everyone’s looks from frame right to frame left as they follow the horse race. Man lowers binoculars.

CUT

9 — Repeat purse shot. Michel’s fingers take out a bundle of bills from purse, transferring them to his jacket pocket.

CUT

10 — The scene moves on, everyone heading for the exit.

You could write this in a paragraph as a series of sentences, each describing new steps in the action. Bresson stated:

To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks.

See my article “Cinema’s Currency of Looks.”

For Robert Bresson, the cut consummates the binding, not as Eisenstein’s clash but as connective tissue. Michel, the woman, her purse form an integral triangulated drama. Hard to see how any fluid camera could capture this as well. Even moving rapidly, it couldn’t arrive at each image in time.

In addition, this sequence of shots forms a purely cinematic universe. The physical world here is an impossibility. The relationship between hand and purse is designed for those individual frames. From where Michel stands, the movement of his hand in those shots would not be possible. The actions could not be shot in single take because they couldn’t exist in the real world in the precise configuration shown.

Another virtue of montage then: cinematic precision.

(The use of sound is also vital. Listen to the thunder of the horses’ hooves and where this comes in the scene.)

Next, an example of the converse: the long opening take from Max Ophuls 1953 Earrings of Madame de…

From Ophuls’ Earrings of Madame de… Cinematography Christian Matras.

Here, the extended take could be thought of as the equivalent of onesentence, although the shot is far more elegant than any lines on the page might be. Watch the clip to see how immeasurably superior the shot is to my attempt to describe it in a single sentence (here taken from my first book):

The shot begins with the image of jewels in an open drawer as a woman’s gloved hand points at, and hovers over a pair of earrings before opening an adjacent case of jewelry and effects, again hovering, then reaching to open a closet opposite — in the mirror of which the audience does not see the woman herself — to reveal more drawers, closed but with an extrusion of ostrich feathers, after which — the camera pulling back to show the woman’s shadow — she moves on to open a second mirrored door that like the first fails to reveal her reflection, disclosing a row of dresses and a top shelf of bric-a-brac before she continues to a third mirrored door that once again permits the audience no view of her, inside of which are fur coats on hangers, one of which she takes down, fondles, then replaces before returning to the previous closet — the audience catching a fleeting glimpse of her partial profile now, and also of her other, ungloved hand — to reach for a hat on the top shelf, knocking over in the process a bible, which she retrieves (as again the audience catches sight of her profile) before taking the hat and returning to the dressing table — evidently where she was first situated — and in looking at herself in an ornately bedecked mirror provides the audience with its first view of her face, tries on the hat, lowers its veil, takes up and poses with a jeweled necklace, which she rejects in favor of a crucifix that in turn she discards for the earrings she originally hesitated over, tries them on, slips them into a pouch, rises, and pushing shut one of the closet doors she passes, heads for a bed from which she picks up a handkerchief before crossing to the door of the room and exiting.

End of shot!

How effortless is Ophuls’ mise-en-scène and camera and what they create on the screen compared to my cumbersome prose? (We experience the shot but read the sentence.) Despite shooting the scene with a heavy 35 mm camera, or perhaps because of it, there is a precision in this work that in its own way parallels that of Bresson.

(And I haven’t mentioned the complex use of sound and how that informs image…)

Here’s what this single take achieves: 1. The introduction of the earrings of the film’s title 2. The introduction of Madame de, searching… 3. The camera has the audience follow and accompany her in that search. 4. The audience wants Madame de to achieve her goal even before it knows what this is. 5. The revelation, through her belongings and wardrobe, of her tastes and lifestyle. 6. The misdirection of the audience, who will later come to understand she is far from affluent and has financial problems. 7. The teasing of the audience by the withholding of the character’s face. 8. The introduction of the notion of moral transgression, implied when she knocks the bible from the shelf. 9. The revelation of her sensuality as she strokes the fur of a coat. 10. The eventual introduction of the protagonist as she looks at herself in the mirror, a moment when the audience shares and invests in herbecause it’s been made to wait to see her face. This brings the audience into her Narrative POV. 11. The showing of the environment of her bedroom and its decor — further insight into her world. 12. By not cutting but “editing” with a fluid camera and so utilizing real time, the director places the audience in Madame de’s temporal experience and compels it to follow her.

A couple of consummate examples of each approach then: montage and long take.

Some consideration of rhythm, whether fast or slow, is also central to any discussion of the two cinematic philosophies. With cuts, rhythm can be readily modulated. With a long take, the filmmaker has to be sure they have it right on the day. If they haven’t, they’re going to need to insert cuts anyway. So an inordinate amount of shooting time might well have been take up to achieve an ambitious shot that never makes the movie in its unbroken form.

The notion of rhythm itself deserves exploration. Are we talking about the rhythm of the screen or the rhythm of life? The cinema of Eisenstein and perhaps Bresson, or that of Tarkovsky? Are the two equally valid? Are they mutually exclusive? Is the rhythm of a Tarkovsky slow, long take somehow more “authentic” than the screen tempo of an Eisenstein montage? Why would that be? Because there’s no manipulation of the passage of time, as there will often be in a montage? And so on and so forth… So much to think about.

I’ve also tended to skate over the use of fluid and static cameras, although either can be used for both approaches. With a long take, a fluid camera generally facilitates editing in camera whereas with static camera in such a take, it is the unfolding of the action itself which must offer increments of information.

With montages meanwhile, cuts on the move, particularly when planned, offer a versatility of orientation and energy flow harder to execute in a long take.

In conclusion, I’m not personally prepared to forgo either the Eisenstein/Bresson or the Tarkovsky concept and enthusiastically settle for both. Indeed, most filmmakers adopt whichever method a scene requires, although they may have chosen one particular aesthetic over another in their formulation of the style of their film. There are those, meanwhile, who will go for the long take solely to show off prowess or make innovative use of new technology purely for the sake of it — opportunism which can easily undermine the authority of a film’s visual language. That doesn’t however undermine those examples of the method’s best articulation.

The purists and the visionaries, for that was what the three filmmakers earlier quoted were, reveal to us fundamentals and essence of cinema. The collision or the poetry in the cut. The passing of time in the shot.

Perhaps though, it is in the irreconcilable contradiction of these concepts that the ultimately inexpressible genius of cinema lies…

Peter Markham

November 2024

Three movies day and night

The Electric Cinema, Portobello Road, Notting Hill, London. Est. 1911. (In better nick than during my days there) | Photo by Ewan Munro on Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I wasn’t born into a home with a TV. I saw a film on the big screen before I ever watched one on its smaller counterpart. And what a film it was!

Not long ago, in an interview about his relationship with his father, Robert Downey Jr. looked down at fathers who took their sons to Fantasia as their first film, his own dad having taken him to an X-rated movie as his starter flick. Well, it was Fantasia that my own father, whom I loved, took me to as my first film, so this dismissive comment hurt quite a bit.

I’ve since reflected though, that given Downey Jr.’s barely disguised anger as he spoke, the subtext of his throwaway comment could have been that he secretly wished he’d have been taken to something less odd for a kid than porn — such as Fantasia perhaps.

Dad had left school at 14, was an autodidact, an unsophisticated twenty-five year old, and from a very different, culturally more modest world, than writer Downey Sr. Seeing that film with him when I was three years of age in a cinema in Battersea, South London, and sitting mesmerized in the front row of the balcony, the dark abyss of the stalls below, couldn’t have been more terrifying, more overwhelming, or more consequential…

That was the afternoon I was born. Everything before had been a pre-existence. When Thor threw down his thunderbolts when the brooms danced to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, my wonder, terror, astonishment exploded.

London was blitzed still, bombed out and grey, its architecture stained with black grime — the taint of its black deeds the world over. The whining of Nazi V1 drones and the screams of the V2 scud missiles echoed on, long after the demise of the Reich.

The gas mask in the coal cellar stared through cobwebbed dust with hollow menace. Shadows lurked in every recess of the family flat’s dank hallway, waiting to pounce… and do what? I dreaded to think. The bathrobe hanging on the back of the bedroom door awaited its sudden moment. Fridge-less milk soured in the kitchen sink, place of ablution for dishes, and the three generations of us resident there. Candles sputtered without conviction in the outside loo…

I’m a boomer? There was no boom in fifties’ London. Families, smaller than those of previous generations, knew only ration books, tasteless meat and two veg, blanketing cloud, glottal-stopped cheer, monochrome dreariness. The single car in the street, a sit-up-and-beg, never moved.

No boom was discernible until Thor rained down those fiery projectiles.

Then, for me, cinema arrived… and Cinderella and Gulliver’s Travels soon followed.

England transitioned into the brighter sixties and there came visits to the Odeons, the Granadas to see Tom Thumb, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Jason and the Argonauts, HMS Defiant.

Next, Lawrence of Arabia twice, the first week of release — terror, moral confusion, spellbinding wonder for this ten-year old. (Dad and O’Toole the spitting image.) White savior-ism before the term, although not of course before the phenomenon.

From London to Hampshire’s New Forest for grammar school. TV brought the next steps. Wilder’s Double Indemnity. (Could this be the Fred MacMurray of The Absent-Minded Professor?) Mum’s love of 40’s Hollywood and her naming of every actor in the shot.

Friday nights, BBC 2 and Polanski’s Repulsion. Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Hammer Horror on ITV. Peter Watkins traumatizing with Culloden. Psycho practically mummifying this terrified youth. Quatermass and the Pit at the local “picture house”. Nightmare upon nightmare — we English don’t dream. Dreaming is for optimists. Easy Rider in seaside Bournemouth, universes away from Fonda’s redneck USA.

The seventies. Drama degree at University up in Hull. Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. Lang’s You Only Live Once. Franju’s The Blood of Beasts. A Clockwork Orange in Leicester Square, twice in its first week on a class trip to London. Pretty much left to one’s own devices to assess and understand. Still assessing, understanding, feeling…

Back to London post degree. British Film Institute mail room. Watching from the projection box. Bresson. Cassavetes. Boorman. Borowczyk. Pontecorvo. Wenders’ Alice in the Cities. Salo at the London Film Festival. Writing b-movie reviews for the Monthly Film Bulletin.

Onwards and three screenings a day when not set PA-ing at BBC TV, White City. The Gate Cinema (double bills starting 10 pm). The Coronet next door. The Academy in Oxford Street. That place off Tottenham Court Road near Charlotte Street (forget the name). The National Film Theatre on the South Bank. The ICA on The Mall. The Electric Cinema, Portobello Road (see above) — fleapit of Mum’s North Kensington childhood now screening silents accompanied by arbitrary Beethoven, Chopin piano round and round, round and round. Random score — try it!

Racing, breathless, between venues. On foot, bus, tube — Central Line, Piccadilly, Bakerloo, Northern Lines. Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, The Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff, The Crucified Lovers, Last Tales of the Taira Clan, Capra, Sirk, Fassbinder, Peckinpah, Altman, Chabrol, Siegel, Rosi at the Gate. Von Stroheim, Renoir, Bellochio, Lang at the Electric. Rivette, Dreyer at the NFT. Ophul’s Reckless Moment at that place off Tottenham Court Road (forget the name), plus Oshima’s Ceremony, The Boy, Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge. Angelopoulos, Bertolucci at The Academy. Tarkovsky, Ferreri at The ICA.

New releases. One year alone, 1976: Taxi Driver, The Tenant, All the President’s Men, The Missouri Breaks, 1900, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Illustrious Corpses, In the Realm of the Senses. All this after Barry Lyndon in ’75.

1976 marked the beginning of VHS. Then followed DVD, BluRay and on to streaming. The Criterion Channel. More and more accessible content. More cinema in amongst it.

But could I ever learn as much as I did from those years of dedicated filmgoing around London? From barely catching a breath between one glory and another?

With so much amazing new work, I think I can. The pace of discovery may be less frenetic these days but cinema never ceases to reveal its possibilities. There for each new generation, it’s the gift that keeps on giving — for as long as we have it.

Returning to Robert Downey Jr., I saw Oppenheimer three times after seeing that interview, and there he was, commanding the screen, scene after scene, working with cast, camera, and director and revealing the depths and dimensions of a distinctly reprehensible but all too human character with his unflinching craft...

We may disagree or not on fathers and Fantasia, I reflected, on one movie or another, we may come from very different social and cultural backgrounds, privileged or not, from different countries even, but what film can teach us, whatever our taste and sensibility, is our commonality.

All of which is to say that my self-education in cinema hasn’t only taught me about cinema, it’s taught me about us.

Peter Markham

October 2024

A character rendered the conduit into story

From Three Colors Blue. 1993. Director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Screenwriters Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Krzysztof Kieślowski. Cinematography Sławomir Idziak.

On the page, the writer may adopt a first person narrative POV, a subjective I, who as narrator takes us through the story in their perception. We are ‘with’ them whether we care for them or not. Perhaps we empathize, perhaps we don’t. Love or loathe them, since there is only one I we are, for better or worse, stuck with them.

Characters, on the other hand, might be written as an objective he, she, or they. If so, as everyone knows, the author is writing in the third person.

When we follow several such characters but are kept at a distance, unaware of too much of what they are perceiving, feeling, or thinking—as if we were merely witnessing or observing them—it can be said that the writer is utilizing a third person objective point of view. Less intense, usually, than the subjective mode (depending on the stakes of the story, perhaps).

If, on the other hand, we do know what these characters are perceiving, thinking, and feeling—while at the same time they lack such godlike insight into the minds and hearts of each other—then the writer has chosen a third person omniscient point of view. 

When we see through the eyes of a single character, hear their thoughts, know what they know and no more, when they in effect constitute our conduit into the story, its events, and its world, yet they are not an I but a he, she, or they, the writer has adopted a third person limited or intimate point of view.

I prefer intimate to limited because it seems to me that the boundaries set by this approach do not so much impose limitation as intensify the reader’s engagement with the specific character and their journey. It is as though an I is being disguised as a he, she, or they.

How might we compare Narrative POV on the screen to its articulation on the page? Can the screen do what the page can? Can it utilize this variety of approaches. Or does the audience simply sit back and watch events play out—somewhere in the third person objective/omniscient spectrum?

Most of us with a working knowledge of film are aware of the term POV Shot. The camera lens, placed where a character’s eyes are, offers the subjective view of that character. When they turn, the camera pans. When they look up or down, the camera tilts. When they rise or fall, the camera booms up or down. When they walk forward or move laterally, the camera dollies accordingly. For most of us, this amounts to the sum of our understanding of POV in film. It certainly used to for me.

But Narrative POV in film (as with fiction on the page) is a concept and practice, not a particular type of shot—although this device might well constitute an element of the onscreen modulation of POV.

Hitchcock, with his customary perspicacity, said:

Subjective treatment, putting the audience in the mind of the character, is, to me, the purest form of the cinema. I suppose Rear Window is the best example of it. Close-up of a man; what he sees; his reaction to it. And that can’t be done in any other medium—can’t be done in the theater, can’t be done in a novel. You put the audience in the mind of a particular character.

I think it can be done in a novel. At least, it can be described. What my fellow Londoner/Angeleno Hitchcock is pointing to though is the experiential nature of our engagement with with some characters in movies.

With the master’s method, the screen offers, through the experience of a character,  a mimesis of our universal perception, questioning, and grasp of the world before us and what lies in it.

Here is what we might see on the screen:

1.     A character changes from not noticing to noticing and looking at something.

2.     Cut to the something they see.

3.     Cut back to their change of expression as they react. (We must see this change. No good simply seeing a smile or grimace already in place. Then, if only for an instant, we’d have been severed from the journey of the character’s thoughts and emotions.)

4.     A further moment as they question or reflect. (A look down, or to the side.)

5.     A change of their expression as they take a decision. (A blink, a look up.)

6.     (Possibly) They move, about to act…

7.     Cut! Perhaps to a wider shot or to the next scene…

During this sequence, shots showing the something the character sees may be repeated one or more times, intercut with repeated shots of the character, the sizes of both tightening as the beholder’s interest grows.

The contrast of proximity to distance comes into play too. We might find ourselves closer to the character and further away from what they are looking at.

Here’s the paradox: we see not only what the character sees but we see the character seeing it—so how can we be in the character’s ‘point of view’?

We are. We are in their Narrative Point of View, and that NPOV is the screen’s equivalent of the page’s third person intimate. They are not an I (the single POV shot) but a he, she, or they. Even so, we experience a substantially subjective sense of their story of perception.

This third person intimate mode renders a character the viewer’s conduit into the story, and this character also prompts the means of it telling in terms of camera and editing… (On the page, meanwhile a character might prompt idiom, rhythm, sentence construction, tone.)

Such a character’s looks and actions might motivate angles, shot sizes, and cuts. They can also motivate camera placement. Say our fictional being points to something or calls out to someone, there might be a cut to their subjective view, yes, but there might equally be a cut to a shot in which the camera is placed opposite them so that we see them past the object of their attention—which is situated in mid- or foreground while they are placed in the background.

So instead of a POV shot, we see both beholder and what they behold in the same frame. We grasp their inner process and their understanding of their outer world. An example of third person intimate within a single frame.

The articulation of NPOV can also work in a simple scene of dialogue between two characters, whether static or mobile. Each might be shot on matching sizes and angles. When it comes to the edit though, one character will be given prominence over the other. They’ll be given more screentime, especially in relation to listening and reaction shots, plus tighter sizes and longer lenses with narrower focal planes—in contrast to the presentation of their interlocutor, with whom the viewer is not so connected.

There’s another factor. The character in whose NPOV we find ourselves may motivate both the sizes of shot used for the other person in the scene as well as the timing of the cuts from one character to the other.

In this way we experience the scene as our character experiences it. We are ‘with’ them in mind and heart. Their subjective perception is our perception. Our thoughts and emotions are taken from theirs.

In a scene where characters are mobile, one character might motivate not only shot size and cut (perhaps to keep them in the frame as they move) but camera movement too. A dolly, a counter-dolly, a boom up or down might take its energy and direction from those of the character in question (but not from those of other characters).

(At the end of Fellini’s I Vitelloni, a protagonist’s gaze from a moving train even motivates a camera to dolly over vignettes that occur in his imagination—or if they’re ‘real’, they have to be happening in rooms far from anything he’s able to witness.)

With this technique, the looks, movements, and actions of other characters will not motivate anything apart from reaction shots of our central character that keep us in their perception of, and with their reactions to what is going on. This contrast serves to emphasize the filmmaker’s chosen Narrative Point of View.

Sound and score can be integral also. A sound of significance to a character in one way or another might be emphasized in the mix, a reflection of their subjective auditory perception. It might even prompt an image in their mind that we share on the interior ‘screen’ of ours.

A melody, musical motif, a sting, notes from a particular instrument meanwhile, might serve to draw us into a character’s experience, might bring us into the memory of some moment when we last heard it.  

While I’m on the seminal topic of soundscape, a voice-over can take us directly into the mind of a character, their emotions, denials, disturbances, world view, secret thoughts. It may contradict what we see of them, what we’ve understood of them, or may reveal how they imagine themselves to be.  

How does it feel though when, after rigorously following the NPOV of a character for any length of time, we find a sudden switch to those of others? How might this come across if the director has deliberately designed the shift?

I’m indebted to Martin Scorsese and a conversation I was lucky enough to have with him when I was putting together a class on Narrative POV in film. The great director suggested I watch Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man…

Early in the movie, protagonist Manny Balestrero visits an insurance office to make a claim on a policy. The point of view moves to the teller when she begins to think she recognizes Manny as the robber who recently held up the office at gunpoint.

As the POV spreads from her to one colleague after another—none of whom we yet know—we ourselves experience the contagious paranoia in an unsettling manner that seeds our own misgivings that Hitchcock’s unsuspecting protagonist could indeed have been the culprit. (Even if the title of the movie is The Wrong Man!)

These are no rules however. Although third person intimate is to me an intrinsically cinematic approach, great films can lack any subjective POV, be largely objective, or (rarely) may to the contrary be shot entirely on a POV shot or shots.

Narrative POV might be opportunistic, changing from moment to moment, perhaps to communicate suspense, or a gag in a comedy.

Hyper POV is a term I use to describe a violent event, for example in an action movie, covered from many angles, each offering the most dynamic impact, second by second, frame by frame. Third person objective barely measures up to such visceral presentation of mayhem.

The complications of dramatic irony, of unreliable narrators might also be brought to bear. We shouldn’t forget, meanwhile, that we may feel closer to a character and want to go along with them simply because we like them! Or identify with them. Or wish we could be them. Or the star playing them has a compelling charisma. Or a performance draws us in.

Let’s end with a look at that screenshot from the top of this article:

The moment occurs in Kieślowski’s Three Colors Blue, in the seconds before Juliette Binoche’s Julie—in whose eye we see the reflection of a physician—asks him about the condition of her daughter after the family’s car crash. No moment could be more dramatic; the only character we’ve seem thus far is the child…

As Julie asks that question, and receives its answer,  the film gives us our first view of her—and it’s in a close-up.

Here, the narrative point of view of the character is introduced in the very same moments as the character herself—a devastating display of the director’s mastery of this powerful concept.

Peter Markham

In no particular order…

Photo by Joe Roberts, Unsplash

1. Learn not what to know, learn how to think.

2. Don’t conform, dissent.

3. Magic. Mystery. Mischief.

4. Feel. Consider. Challenge.

5. American dramatic narrative = adversarial individualism.

6. Reject the club, seek loneliness.

7. Ambition is is the death of thought. (Wittgenstein)

8. Film is not theatre on camera.

9. Watch films to make films.

10. Make a movie to save your soul.

11. Know it never will.

12. No need to save your soul? No need to make the movie.

13. Read! Read! Read! (Werner Herzog)

14. Story. Screen. Audience.

15. Image. Sound. Film.

16. Dance to the pain.

17. When I’m making a film, I’m the audience. (Martin Scorsese)

18. Emotion.

19. Tone.

20. Language of film.

21. Style comes from the soul.

22. Your vulnerability forms your strength.

23. Not preparation but formulation.

24. Screenplay. Casting. Editing. (From Kieslowski)

25. Connective tissue, the path to simplicity.

26. Image. Shot. Camera.

27. Think passage of time.

28. Montage. (Eisenstein). Time. (Tarkovsky).

29. The agency of emptiness.

30. The potency of silence.

31. Contrast.

32. Dissonance.

33. Interfunctionality of filmmaking crafts.

34. Never “unpack” unless it’s a delivery.

35. Suspect current idiom.

36. Forget careers guidance.

37. Filmmaking an artistic process. Production an industrial.

38. Flow of images, not coverage.

39. Flow of energy.

40. Territory—the primal human currency.

41. Dialogue as multifunctional resource.

42. Looks as wordless dialogue.

43. Image as subtext.

44. Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. (Nabokov).

45. Elegance as eloquence, not embellishment.

46. Rhythm not pace.

47. Let characters not rise above circumstance.

48. Listen to yourself.

49. Listen to the film.

50. Conflict. Friction. Tension. Vibe.

Peter Markham

Disclaimer, I’ve done one.

Photo by wuz on Unsplash

In following a number of BluRay commentaries recently, I’ve realized why, for quite a while, I hadn’t bothered to pay them much attention. The experience of revisiting these “extras” prompted me to ask what we might expect from them, what we might reasonably hope for, and what, in general, we get.

I’ll start with that last thought by applauding the erudition of the best contributors. Film history, background of the movie in question, other movies by the same filmmaker, facts about the director — there are some highly informed scholars and commentators out there whose enlightening discourse might serve to carry us along as the movie plays. (I’m coming to the problem this invariably leads to.) There are other folk of more moderate resources. Over this inconsistent spectrum, some can be engaging, some indifferent, some downright boring.

But most — of whatever calibre — rarely seem to mention is what is actually happening on the screen.

If they do, this will be largely a reference to actors, not so much in terms of performance, for example in relation to camera, but more a matter of which stars might have been considered for the part or any previously attached. There are notable occasions however when an actor’s preparation is discussed, especially when this has been of a singular nature, and this can be intriguing.

Often what we find are details of a film’s industry background — not so much the behind the scenes production circumstances that can be of interest but more the meetings, hesitations, maneuvering and machinations of the corporate high-ups. The perfect way to ruin one’s engagement with the screen.

Contributors seem to want to display familiarity with the business, their vicarious way of saying “I belong”. They seem to want to cleave to orthodoxy, to groupthink as though that reveals their authority. They are insiders, they imply, never outsiders.

The screen might be portraying traumatic mayhem or sublime wonder while the commentary drones on about which bigwig had lunch with which bigwig, as though the speaker is paying no attention to the events we are witnessing or the emotions they are conveying — perhaps because they’re not looking at the film or perhaps because, if they are, they don’t experience cinema in the manner most of us experience it.

But even if the commentary is related more to the movie itself, shouldn’t the commentator refer — at lease from time to time — to what we are seeing? Fundamentally, mightn’t they offer insights into the filmmaker’s cinematic language? Shots, camera, framing, angle, movement, editing, imagery, soundscape, score? Wouldn’t it be an idea to talk about emotion, information, story and storytelling? Then there are those moments that can’t be explained or reduced in any meaningful way yet come across to the viewer with profound effect. Let’s hear them noted, celebrated, marveled at.

There’s complex, inventive narrative and visual connective tissue in a good film. The revisiting of shots, compositions, angles, stagings — let’s have the architectural glue of these memes revealed.

And passage of time — how does the filmmaker modulate this? Through editing. Through transitions. Through ellipses. Even within a single shot — what changes out of frame before a moving camera returns to show the same space (see the end of The Taste of Things).

And how is sound used? For subliminal effect, for tonal dissonance, to heighten emotion, to orchestrate eye trace, as an element in the articulation of narrative point of view, to heighten suspense, to narrow or broaden the “focus”of a scene. A commentary might reveal specific examples of these aspects .

Commentaries that fail to relate to the progression of images on the screen are surely more easily digested, and indeed enjoyed as audio essays elsewhere in the “extras” rather than as a talk that arbitrarily accompanies a movie Watching image, action, drama while listening to largely unrelated narration tends to result in cognitive overload — at least if a film means anything to the viewer.

The image and text correlation I find so helpful and so natural is, it has to be admitted, rare in book form also. Indeed, production of my latest book was agony as I struggled to get the production company to mesh screenshots with sentences and paragraphs in the precise configuration set out in the copyedited manuscript. (One or two instances excepted, we finally got there).

I’m by no means arguing for dry, dispassionate analysis. Commentaries can be dry and dispassionate even without the analysis. I’m asking for the excitement of informed appreciation, nothing too technical or esoteric but an articulate, tonally welcoming, clearly communicative exploration of the filmmaker’s navigation of their medium throughout a movie that might appeal to fellow filmmakers, to film scholars, and to film lovers also — most of whom probably never having set foot anywhere near a film set.

A film is not a novel, not a play, not a poem (although it might be the latter visually), it’s a film — and just as novels and plays and poems can most usefully be appreciated as novels and plays and poems, so films can surely best be appreciated as films.

Those who offer commentaries (and critics too) — please don’t take the film as a film for granted, as if it’s no different from any other narrative form.

Why not discuss it as a film?

Peter Markham

August 2024

A screen of power or a screen of the soul?

From The Teacher’s Lounge. Writer-Director Ilker Çatak. Cinematography Judith Kaufmann. (Image Sony Pictures Classics)

The cinema of vulnerability? What do I mean? Don’t there have to be stakes in any dramatic narrative? Threats, peril, casualties — whether physical or emotional, mortal or psychological? Isn’t all of cinema an arena for vulnerability in one way or another?

I think it was Ari Aster who I heard in an interview say that if he’s to engage fully with a movie, he needs a sense of the filmmaker’s vulnerability. This was a revelation. Not because it was unfamiliar—I realized it’s the case for me too. I’d just never accepted I had the same requirement. Why? Because it made me feel vulnerable? Unable to tough out the action movies, the cold noirs, the macho thrillers?

Or perhaps it’s more that I’m not so interested in watching a movie when I might as well be staring at insects fighting it out in a jar. Being a voyeur gazing at conflict for adrenalin kicks, for ‘the ride’ is not only something that to me seems vacuous, it tends to leave me somewhat nauseous. I can’t help but feel the pain inflicted on characters, whatever their position in any spectrum of good to bad.

Instead, I generally need the filmmaker to bring me into the emotions, visceral and neural sensations, and the cognitive activity of at least one character. If that character isn’t vulnerable in some way, what’s more, I’m unlikely to be able to empathize, not merely sympathize, and certainly not identify with them. (Note: empathy = in the feeling; sympathy = with the feeling; identification = being the character.)

Even Tom Ripley, at least in his novel and movie manifestations — Purple Noon, Ripley’s Game, Talented Mr Ripley has his moments of paranoia verging on panic. Even a Joker, in Joaquin Phoenix’s versatile hands at least, has his complex PTSD, poor murderous guy, and so I go with him.

So that’s one way a filmmaker’s vulnerability might come across — not only in the nature of their characters but in the ways they have the viewer connect with them. (With Whiplash the audience around me in the movie theater were howling with laughter at the suffering of the victims of bullying — something the filmmaker himself, apparently incapable of modulating his film’s tone, seemed to me to be encouraging. No vulnerability there.)

How else might vulnerability in a filmmaker be manifested?

In a sense of fragility perhaps. In the characters, as discussed, but also in their world, their customs and culture. In Ilker Çatak’s 2023 The Teacher’s Lounge the faculty world of protagonist Carla Nowak is stricken with conflicting obligations, loyalties, and resentments. At the same time the teacher-pupil relationship at the center of the story reverberates with an ambiguity of power dynamic familiar to those of us who have worked in such an environment. The authority of the educator vs. the tyranny of the student. The delinquent student as victim, the teacher as bully — although who might be the true bully?

Guilt meanwhile, is transferred so seismically from one to the other that even Hitchcock at his best might feel left behind. The Wrong Man, I Confess, and North By Northwest by the master of vulnerability barely match the interchangeable culpability of perpetrator and perpetrated upon in Teacher’s Lounge. In such a morally shifting cosmos, the tissue of meaning appears fragile. There’s no center that holds and Carla’s world, and our sense of it, falls apart — triumph, defeat, hurt, defiance are rendered the contradictory vibes of the movie’s scintillating, perplexing, paradoxical ending.

Which brings me to uncertainty, as companion of fragility a similarly fertile domain for vulnerability. Moral uncertainty. Cognitive uncertainty. Narrative uncertainty. Uncertain uncertainty.

When we don’t know where we are with a movie, where we’re going with it, whether a character might choose the right path or the wrong, the safe or the perilous, when we are unsure of what our protagonist knows and what they don’t, when a story seems to be going in one direction but we find it going in the opposite or suspect it might, or when we sense traces of a hidden story that might rise up to eclipse the ostensible one, we become uncertain of the film we are watching and how of how we are to relate to it — and with that uncertainty comes a sense of vulnerability, both in the film and in ourselves.

Another approach to understanding this cinema of vulnerability might be to look at its opposite: the cinema of power.

There’s precious little vulnerability in what might be thought of as cinemachismo. In this category we might include the predilection for torture in the movies of Villeneuve from Incendie to Prisoners and on, or the beloved festive screen mayhem of Miller, or a Bond industrial slaughter, or Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty in which the filmmaker invites the viewer to smile with the torturer — or in the filmically consummate soullessness of a Fincher.

This is far from suggesting though that violent movies and thrillers necessarily fit into the cinema of power. If Wenders’ Perfect Days, Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves, the new Cottontail by writer-director Patrick Dickinson, eschewing screen ‘action’ as they do, are quintessential exemplars of vulnerability, then so are Haneke’s brutal films — Funny Gamesamong them — critiques as they are of our love of festive cruelty, of what the filmmaker refers to as America’s ‘barrel-down cinema’ — an alternative term for the cinema of power perhaps? Scorsese’s canon overflows with vulnerability, from the final lonely damnation of Goodfellas’ Henry Hill to the epochal precarity of Kundun’s Dalai Lama. Kubrick’s characters are forever at the mercy of the contradictions and confusions of the human and the mechanical. The criminally underrated master Agnieszka Holland’s most recent film Green Border is awash with brutality melted out to migrants but like much of her body of work aches with vulnerability. The shocking Titanefrom Julie Ducornau descends into terrifying visceral violence yet at its end to sings from the heart in what is surely one of the strangest, most unlikely yet fiercely emotional denouements the screen has ever offered.

These movies, however savage, don’t desensitize us. We aren’t invited to embrace their violence. To the contrary — they tear us apart. Indeed, it isn’t violence or its absence that gets in the way of or gives us a film of vulnerability. It’s where the filmmaker places us in relation to the characters and their story. Yes, violence, cruelty, combat are the stuff of myth, of drama, of story, of spectacle — all potent elements in great cinema. How we engage with all of this is however what determines how this fiction comes to life in us. Does it hurt or does it titillate? Reveal human truth or divert us from it? Do we feel the pain of others or enjoy witnessing it?

Of course, I’m dismissing some highly accomplished directors here while I can so often get things badly wrong. For example, I used to think Steve McQueen couldn’t convey empathy. A brilliant filmmaker but Hunger I found icy, while in Twelve Years a Slave his racking of focus at one point from emotional to physical pain struck me as revealing an instinct for sadism rather than empathy. But when I saw his Small Axe series of films, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. These movies could be compared with Kieslowski’s Decalogue for their luminous humanity. Then there came this versatile filmmaker’s documentary Occupied City! Four-and-a-half-hours of emotion obliquely but painfully conveyed, the soul that seemed almost comprehensively extinguished somehow surviving the hell it has been put through…

It’s the concept though, a cinema of vulnerability that to me resonates. If I’ve left it nebulous at times, I’d argue that the screen of the soul and the movie-audience connection it prompts could never be reduced to easy conclusions…

Peter Markham
June 2024

Movie events vs. non-movie events

From Perfect Days directed by Wim Wenders, Screenplay Takuma Takasaki, Cinematography Franz Lustig (Picture from Free Stone Productions Co.)

A lot of people now equate drama with sensational incident, such as someone getting killed. But that’s not drama; it’s a freak occurrence… Instead I think drama is something without sensational incident, something you can’t easily put into words, with the characters saying everyday things like ‘Is that right?’ ‘Yes, it is,’ ‘So that’s what happened.’

Yasujirō Ozu.

I was recently taking part in a dinner conversation, perfectly congenial, agreeable, indeed enjoyable, in which someone around the table said they’d just seen the worst movie ever. They couldn’t believe how bad it was. Terrible! A disaster!

Somehow, some sixth sense alerted me. Uh-oh! I thought. This is sure to a film I love!

What was it? I asked, fearing the worst.

Then it came. As I feared: the worst.

Perfect Days, they said.

What? I thought. Why? I said.

Nothing happens! they replied.

But everything happens, I replied, finding the conversation had moved on while I was gathering my thoughts — as is invariably the case. But I need time to think, I reflected, wondering, as ever, why others don’t.

When, in life, something out of the ordinary occurs, something extreme, sudden, traumatic — a dangerous accident say, an act of violence, a crime in broad daylight, when moments we witness seem go go into a cinematic slo-mo — people often comment that it was like something out of a movie! In other words, things that happen in films aren’t generally things that happen in daily life. The former have to be ‘action-packed’, involve injury, death, or worse.

And things that happen in daily life don’t happen in movies because that would supposedly make for a boring film.

And this, I think, is what my friend meant… there’s nothing in that film, were it to happen in our everyday existence, that might prompt the like something out of a movie comment. The cleaning of public toilets as a daily routine, protagonist Hirayama’s job, is hardly likely to feature in the next Fast and Furious (even if Dan Casey, screenwriter of the last F&F is, as I can attest, as acutely aware of the nuances of humdrum human drama, of quiet subtext as anyone… or he was with his peers in our classroom).

Is this all a matter of genre, perhaps? In genre, in the sense of the term that suggests heightened drama in which the narrative observes particular conventions and tropes — whether merely regurgitating, or preferably subverting, reinventing them, or perhaps commenting on them obliquely or ironically — in genre we expect to find those somethings that happen in movies. (Okay — maybe not in all such genre, romcoms, for example.) 

Such events become matters of life and death, literally. The stakes couldn’t be higher, the action — usually a euphemism for violence — more physically dynamic, more explosive. But this is the stuff of dreams and nightmares too, of our primal instincts, fears and desires, of myth throughout history the world over. So it doesn’t mean that such fare denotes vacuous sensationalism. (In my eyes, I admit, it too often does.) Of course, to our shame, we often enjoy seeing others suffer pain, as the culture of badass reveals. There can be no festival without cruelty, Nietzsche reminds us. Indeed, we don’t have public executions in the US (yet) but we don’t need them while we have movies and TV to feast on.

But back to the dramatic register of a film, like my friend’s disliked Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, like Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, like the cinema of Ozu, or much of that of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh.

The register of the drama may be less pronounced but the emotions can be as intense, more intense even than those of the escapist mayhem of the action movie. The life and death stakes may be figurative rather than literal. There may crisis of a character’s sense of meaning rather than a threat to their mortality — but what is life without meaning?

And there may of course be cruelty — psychological, emotional, unthinking, deliberate. There may be extreme events too, although these more usually occur offscreen, be reported, at the most out of shot and only heard. Even if they are profoundly painful, life-changing, there is little melodrama about them. They are what they are. They feel the way they feel. Grief, longing, rejection, betrayal, love — no need for bombast to convey the deepest aspects of being alive.

In Perfect Days there’s a theft (of a cassette tape), nightly dreams, an unexpected guest, a father (unseen) with developing dementia, a coming death, and daily public toilet cleaning. There’s getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night.

All of this amounts to perfect cinema. Yet there’s nothing here like something in a movie.

And it’s a film I love.

Peter Markham
June 2024

What critics, what many of us ignore.

From Vertigo (1958). Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay: Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor. Cinematography: Robert Burks.

I’m sure that the painter is not a bit interested in the apples for themselves alone, but in the technique of his work which stimulates the emotion of the viewer of his picture. After all, all art is experience. People look at an abstract and say, ‘I hate it!’ but the mere fact that they use the word ‘hate’ means that they are going through an experience… therefore if you apply these principles to film, as I see it, it is not the pure manner of the content, in other words it is not just the story but what you do with it.

Alfred Hitchcock, 1964, interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

So much of what critics write about films might just as well be written about novels, short stories, plays, or simply a story they’ve heard. Critics invariably offer a synopsis, thoughts on story and characters, and on what works and what doesn’t in the narrative. There might be comparisons with other current movies, references to the filmmaker’s past works and, rarely, some sense of cultural context.

But in general it’s the synoptic take that dominates.

What seems rare is any measure of analysis — at least in all but the most cursory detail — of a film’s cinematic language and how that might be understood as an integral part of what the movie is and of the effect it has on us, emotionally, cognitively, neurally, viscerally. How, indeed, the film could not exist without it. (Or if it does, how such visual indifference diminishes the movie.)

If Marshal McLuhan once said The medium is the message, many critics seem to be saying the medium is irrelevant or the medium as a tool for communication is interchangeable with any other medium for communication, be it the stage, the page, even human speech.

Surely this is to deny the distinctive nature of the screen and its multifunctional richness — just as it ignores the specific resources of those other forms of communication.

Another aspect of how film is discussed — often by filmmakers themselves — is the conflation of the elements of the screen with those of the page. For example, I recently came across Francis Ford Coppola postulating that the screen’s equivalent of the sentence is the shot. (For the moment accepting his observation, how about turning on its head? Why not say that the prose equivalent of the shot is the sentence? Why give the page primacy over the screen? Why should the screen be seen as subservient, the junior to the adult.)

But allow me to question his insight. How do the individual clauses of a sentence correlate with what comprises a shot? With its static frames, its moving frames, with its shifting angles, one after the other? With what does the punctuation within a sentence correlate on the screen? What do its words correlate with? Or the letters of those words? The sentence’s tense? Its idiom?

And how about what happens when two shots are cut together? Is this the same as when one sentence follows another? Martin Scorsese, Coppola contemporary and fellow luminary in the pantheon of American masters, says that when two shots come together, a “phantom image” is created. Not one up there on the screen, but some fleeting, indefinable picture on what I like to call the screen of the mind.

Does that happen with two sentences on the page? Maybe sometimes:

A man crossed the road through the speeding traffic. The ambulance wasn’t long in arriving.

But here we have an ellipsis. The conjoined shots don’t necessarily need an ellipsis. They may elide time and space but also may extend them.

So I’m not seeing too many convincing parallels. Rhythm yes. Length, yes. Simple to complex, ok. Function, maybe. But this brings me to my next point.

What both shot and sentence do have in common is that they are each what I choose to refer to as a narrative unit. (Perhaps, broadly speaking, I’m agreeing with Coppola after all?) A paragraph is also such a unit, as is a chapter, a “book” or “part” within a book. A scene, sequence, an act in a film or as I prefer to say a movement, a vignette, also a sequence of parallel action — all of these might be regarded as narrative units.

Forgive me for questioning the words of a filmmaker whose The Godfathertops so many lists of the greatest masterpieces, whose Apocalypse Nowreaches such dazzling, visionary heights and plumbs such terrifying, epic depths, and whose The Conversation conjures maybe the most chilling paranoia in the history of the movies. I’ve experienced some of the most powerful cinema I know at the hands of this master. But his sentence-shot equivalence doesn’t actually seem to tell us too much, which is perhaps why he doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t follow up with any implications.

Another prose-screen claimed equivalence is the notion of film grammar. But just as writing a novel is not a question of writing decorous grammar, so making a film is not about good “grammatical” behavior. In both cases, it is language not grammar that matters. It is through language that a story is told, language that may be indecorous, innovative, individual and an element of a movie’s distinctive subculture.

Above all, the language of a story may be heretical… A million miles from “grammar” with its intimations of prescribed form, correctness, and good behavior.

For much of my time working in production, as a first AD, then initially as a director, I’d be thinking of establishing shots, matching sizes, matching angles such as profile to follow profile for example — a template of “coverage” into which to force the shooting, the results of which could be assembled in the cutting room, establishing shot first, going tighter through the scene perhaps with a new wide at some point to give breath and punctuation, and a new angle on the action.

No.

The filmmaker’s task is not to behave grammatically but to capture fictional events by the most effective means, means by which they may be conveyed to the viewer, prompting engagement, emotion, realization,. Ari Aster — once my student, as I ever remain his — one day mentioned to me Nabokov’s term ecstatic prose. Okay, here I’m doing is exactly what I was criticizing Francis Ford Coppola for: I’m correlating prose with film’s discourse. But forgive me for arguing that the notion of a corresponding ecstatic screenseems bolder, less dry, more illuminating as a comparison.

It gives a sense of style and language, of ebullient energy. The heady opening sequence of Romain Gavras’ Athena achieves exactly that ecstasy. Terrifying, yes, but exhilarating instant upon hyper dynamic instant.

The screen can by contrast also be uninflected, unassuming, of course. It can be tightly controlled, deliberate. It can proclaim its design (Terence Davies, Paul Schrader), celebrate it (Martin Scorsese), conceal it (Andrea Arnold), exemplify it (Charlotte Wells).

No, it’s not grammar that matters, that makes for the language of the screen, it’s aesthetics — and not as a veneer of either elegance or grittiness but as a practical resource of the visual utterances that form its discourse. Composition, framing, angle, line, space, proportion, light and tone, color, depth, movement, mise-en-scène, flow of energy or visual rhythm — the screen elements I like to call ikones, from the Greek word for an image, ikona (εικόνα).

No correlation to the sentence here.

Look at the ikones in that screenshot from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The left to right, up to down, broad to pointed, oppressive, even threatening diagonal of the Golden Gate Bridge. The dark slash it forms, its vector, its energy,. The sensuous deep red of the stanchions. The silhouetted female figure to lower and less stable screen right, helpless at the mercy of that menacing dark diagonal. The slim, horizontal, tenebrous sliver of the quayside in foreground on which she stands. The broad, horizontal space afforded by the stretch of open water. The distant hills that together with the sweep of the bridge form a thrusting shape traveling behind the figure and across to the far right of the frame. The low horizon and the space it creates for bridge and cloud-laden, blue sky, its contrasting patches of brightness and shadow perhaps threatening some imminent storm.

How different the sentence or sentences describing this frame would be. How differently the reader would process the words of the writer from the way they process the filmmaker’s image. And how different the effect. Seeing the frame, the impact is almost immediate, reading the lines, more cumulative, the prose would have to be more considered, while the picture works on the viewer more primally.

That’s one aspect of a movie’s address of course. There’s sound too. There’s music. There are the connections between one shot and another, one image and another, not necessarily following on but later in a film too, the echoes, the contrasts. There’s dramatic context (as there might equally be on the page.) There’s camera and its stasis or movement, its placement, angle, its lensing. There’s what is shown and what isn’t, what’s in the frame or out.

Vertigo is my favorite film. When I think of it, I think not only of its story, its myth of obsession with some delusional, fixed, cold, lifeless ideal. I feel not only its foreboding melancholy, a resonance of the human psyche (for me at least) but I recall its hallucinatory images and the visual texture or Robert Burks’ elegant, effulgent cinematography. I see it playing out up on the screen. And on the screen of my mind, which is where we remember movies. I see its language, its life, its cinema.

I don’t see it as a novel or a play. I see it as a movie, as a film.

I cannot see its story without its storytelling.

Peter Markham

June 2024