Certainty or Clarity — Which Best Serves the Filmmaker’s Process?

Or how cinematic wisdom lies in uncertainty.

(Screen capture from Aftersun, Writer-Director Charlotte Wells, Cinematography Gregory Oke. A24 Films.)

Seeing a particular new filmmaker’s fresh visual discourse and adept delivery of emotion has prompted thoughts on one of my favorite topics.Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun eschews the observance of rote filmic rhetoric for the true cinematic language her movie discovers. How might filmmakers in general similarly avoid the reductionism of conventions and assumptions so often taught and so readily accepted?

Students tend to prefer the teacher who delivers certainty. ‘This is how it’s done. How it works. It all boils down to this,’ they claim. Whether born of common supposition, precedent, wisdom handed down, experience, or little but dogma, the all-knowing maxim pithily delivered prompts pre-determined approaches from its adherents while the question formulated but non-judgmental, or the paradox defiant in its contradiction, or the fundamental challenge realized but unresolved yield only further uncertainty and continuing exploration.

Filmmaking students are no exception. Many gravitate to educators who nail down their art and craft to the certainties of the “industry professional”so that they may follow in the paths these cognoscenti have laid out as they make their own movies, the first and those subsequent. They become filmmakers with go-to approaches and solutions, the practitioners of film grammar, for instance, rather than film language. They make films that look like everyone else’s. There’s little joy in in the discovery of how a scene might be staged, shot, and cut because there is no discovery, just a regurgitation of every staged, shot, and cut scene that’s previously fitted the mold.

That way lies a cinema of the locked mindset, devoid of the nourishment of doubt, of heresy, of mischief, of the subversive imagination — a cinema of boundaries impermeable to danger, to innovation, to the influences of other arts, philosophy, thought, form, and above all to the unfathomable mystery of the human soul and the true emotion to which it gives voice. A mechanistic cinema intended never to fail, oven-ready for the safety-net filmmaker. “Product”, “content” — the pabulum of the “creatives”. (Language as an instrument of dissimulation.)

These words, from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, not a filmmaker of course — although I once read he loved westerns that he would watch from the front row — might in this respect bear consideration:

Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

Philosophy, the Austrian-Cantabrigian sage tells us, is not about a collection of established certainties, a body of doctrinebut is an activity — the never-ending task of investigation through the logical clarification of thoughts.

Could something similar be said of filmmaking? Is it a body of doctrine? Are its tenets set in stone or do they evolve? Are they there to be taken from some tablet of conventions or might they prove to be ever elusive but nevertheless worth seeking out? Might what works in one context, one movie, one sequence, not work in others or might something different work better? Might there be different ways of making something work? Might there be different contexts and connections to be considered before one is chosen and even then… there will be doubts remaining.

Philosophy, of course, doesn’t require a budget! (Although philosophy academics generally require a salary.) Filmmaking, on the other hand, can be tough without one… Yet just as story can reveal in so many ways the contradictions of the human condition with a breathtaking clarity more compelling than a philosophical treatise so the task of cinematic storytelling itself can invite contradictory, novel, unexpected strategies in its process that reveal an art perennially triumphant in escaping the confines of certainty.

Director John Ford of The Searchers and other great movies who taught/teaches us so much, commented that Directing is a job of work. Some job! Some work! In his demystification of his own brilliance the master was perhaps alluding to the formidable practicality demanded of the film director who must plan rigorously yet still be able to think on their feet once on set. The director, in other words, needs a flexible mindset — and certainty is the enemy of flexibility.

Director John Patton Ford of Emily the Criminal whom I taught and who always teaches me so much in return, said in his AFI Conservatory Commencement speech that although it may not seem like it when you’re in its throes, the period of not knowing is the best time of all, the most fruitful time in a filmmaker’s process — an opportunity for open exploration, for questions and their clarification — the clarification of thoughts.

It is this activity that the filmmaker does well to continue throughout the making of their film. What do we have here? What am I dealing with? What’s the story? How am I going to tell it? How might this connect with the visual strategy of the sequence, the act, the movie as whole? What are the counter-thoughts and the doubts I am pushing to one side? Too scared of addressing. What am I missing? What’s so in front of my eyes that I’m not seeing it? But then you arrive on set… Even a director as adept as Steve McQueen has talked of how, although he formulates so much of his approach so thoroughly, he always has to ask himself: Now how am I going to do this? Now how can I make this scene work? (Watch his Small Axe sequence of films to see how he does make his scenes work, over and over.)

So… find your questions and make them clear. Don’t let certainties get in the way!

All of this said, a director owes it to their team, to their self, to their movie to make production decisions by the necessary deadlines. The production designer, costume designer, cinematographer and others such as the special effects designer can’t afford to leave everything until the last minute or they won’t be ready for the shoot.

Easy to deal with that and be decisive when you are certain. But does this entail that clarity without certainty need stand in the way of decision-making? Maybe it does — at least in the case of making the wrong decisions. Less chance of that. Certainty without clarity can be the consequence of confusion, a means of denying it, and can often lead to confused decision-making. Clarity, by contrast, is the realization of questions and challenges with no easy answers, the acknowledgment and indeed embrace, then the working with what is uncertain but understood as such.

It is through that unflinching clarity that a filmmaker may come to know their film. Such clarity comes not from filmmaking as a body of doctrine, in the words of Wittgenstein but, in his words too as an activity.

Final thought and contradiction (?): the filmmaker who does not immerse their self in the body of cinema history (which is not doctrine but compendium of practice) and does not learn from the masters misses a fundamental resource in their search for clarity.

Peter Markham April 2023