Sometimes I wish it would stay. Sometimes I wish it would go away. (Paul McCartney: McCartney III)

Sakuro Ando as Nobuyo Shibata in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters. (Cinematography by Kondo Ryuto.)

On the screen, in the hearts of the audience, in the course of a story, at its denouement, emotion is Cinema’s most precious gift. In tandem with existential vision (Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland), orchestrated by trenchant intellect (Michael Haneke’s Amour), unleashed through the stealth of patient narrative (Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire), conveyed achingly in each and every frame (Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu), emotion is both the punishment and the reward we take from the films that count.

Why do I say punishment? Because emotion can hurt. It can hold us in its ruthless grip. Can render us desperate for release. Can keep us awake during the night long after a film has finished. Can return to us unannounced. Why do I say reward? Because the word suggests a recompense for a task carried out, for work that’s been completed, a pleasurable bounty but also perhaps one more problematic—the just desserts maybe, for our complicity in a journey of dubious moral complexion (Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here). Emotion is the deepest experience of the characters we watch, and of ourselves as we watch them. They may perceive, they may think, they may know, they may act, but it’s when they feel that the screen delivers its coup de cinema, us at its receiving end.

And when a character suppresses or hides an emotion too painful for them to bear, when they hold back a tear so that it is we who shed it for them, that blow is intensified. When, as Krzysztof Kieślowski commented, a director also partly conceals emotional pain, perhaps shooting a character from behind or in conjunction with the cinematographer, cloaking them in shadow, the resonance somehow hits harder—not Show, don’t tell! but Obscure, don’t show! There will be times too, when a character is unaware of the danger they are in, or they fail to make a connection we have made so we fear for them, or we anticipate their joy on the discovery we understand they are themself soon to make. Here the emotion arises from situation and storytelling, the interplay of world within the film and world within the audience.

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible, Alfred Hitchcock, my fellow Londoner—true to the city’s perennially roguish spirit—observed. And this he did, yet audiences loved his movies, still do, many of them—while even some of those falling short upon their release proved later to be masterpieces. Hitchcock knew that the more he made an audience suffer, the more grateful it would grow. The Safdie Brothers could have been bearing this in mind as they made Uncut Gems—look at how many of us thrill to that film. He knew that we come to a movie as we come to a novel or a short story, in order to suffer. But why? Usually we go out of our way to avoid pain. Why then should we spend time and money to experience it?

Author Anaïs Nin wrote …nothing that we do not discover emotionally will have the power to alter our vision.

When locked into a mindset, maybe bounded by a story, a myth, a culture, and the sense of identity and belonging they foster, or when we have succumbed to common thinking and someone comes along to argue the contrary, we are unlikely to shift our position. We tend to strengthen our views in fact. Driven to defend ourselves, we grow even more convinced of our perspective.

How different that outcome is from when we follow the journey of a protagonist in a novel or film—eventually, at least in the best of cases, finding the character has some moment of realization we come to share. We adhere to a voyage of rage for example, a path to righteous justice, only to discover our protagonist becoming much the same manner of violator as the perpetrator they and we wish to see punished. (The Limey.) Or after the protagonist has become deaf and like him we long to find a cure, we both learn that it is silence that perhaps offers the most profound sense of being alive. (The Sound of Metal.) Reading those sentences, we might understand their point intellectually, but watching those films and following their narratives, we grasp their truths through the voyage of emotion, especially that we feel as the movies arrive at their end.

Is this what Aristotle, polymath among the ancients, was describing, when he talked of catharsis? Usually this concept is thought of as the “purging” of emotions, as though emotions were—in and of themselves—toxic. Emotions can throw us off balance, yes. They can lead us to act unwisely and commit actions we later come to regret. They can make us feel ill, deliriously happy, desperately needy, confused, compassionate, hostile—the litany never ends. One way or another, they can disturb some supposed equilibrium. Is that the complete picture though?

I like to keep in mind another meaning of the word katharsis contemporary to Aristotle—namely understanding. Bear with me, because I don’t believe that emotions need to be swept away at all. It seems to me that true revelation comes with and through emotion. Indeed, it cannot come without it. At the end of Chung Mong-hong’s A Sun, for example, I feel intense emotion, and this remains with me in the wake of the movie—in the ensuing minutes, in the night after, the next day, and even during the following weeks. The emotions the characters have experienced have been deeply unsettling. Those the viewer has endured, have been similarly rough—the instances of dark comedy complicating and contradicting this relationship—even if our actual emotions are of course generally less traumatic than the characters’ fictional feelings. (These latter exist only in a world of make-believe, remember, although they may have been conjured by the actors on the set—take a look, for example, at Sakuro Ando in her scene towards the end of Shoplifters, when her flow of emotion possesses the frame—or they may not, story and storytelling alone the originators.) Have our feelings been expelled when A Sun is over? The main characters are in a better place while I am deeply moved—to tears, if I’m honest. So what has been purged?

This final rush of emotion follows from realization, what I believe Aristotle called the anagnorisis, on a character’s part and on our own. Surely this represents an acceptance of all we have felt, which we can now see through a fresh perspective—the understanding that only a journey of emotion can bring. Emotion regarded in this way is not merely a bio-chemical drug, an imbalance of the metabolism, even a disturbance, but a form of profound intelligence, a cognition, a resonance that continues once the plot, and the story it supported, is over.

There are films throughout which we can remain very profoundly engaged emotionally, that deliver this final gift, perhaps in accord with their journey thus far, perhaps through some unexpected twist. There are films that render us listless, even bored, but then take us by surprise, leaving us shaking with feeling as the credits roll, as if we’ve been ambushed by the filmmakers. There are films that by contrast peek our emotions throughout, often through the layering of conflict, through performance, lighting, cutting, and score, but at their end fall short—consumerist confections of feeling that calculate themselves into emptiness. How robbed we feel at the end of those latter follies! How empty! It’s the sense of fulness, the fulness of our human selves, our souls, that true Cinema gives, the transmuting of our emotions from burdens and manipulators into the entities that make us what in total we are, which draws us to film.

This is the reward, the awareness of ourselves, for better or worse, that we seek. It can awaken us. It can trouble us. It can surprise. It can affirm. Whichever, it leaves us feeling alive—and accepting of our being in the world, for all the fathomless uncertainty of our predicament.

New filmmakers take note! Take care not to protect your audience—or yourselves—from the emotions inherent in your story. Embrace the pain! Drown in the joy! Feel it! Write it! Shoot it! Put it up on the screen, whether obliquely or directly but make sure it’s there. We need it…

It’s the essence.

Peter Markham March 2021

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

My experience as a teacher in graduate film school.

Sadie Palmer: Photo by Nick Palmer

My grandfather used to advise, gruff and guttural in his Paddington patois, “Yer go’’uh ge’ uhn edificayeeshun!” How though (always assuming Grandad had a point), does the aspiring filmmaker get their “edificayeeshun”—sorry…education. From teachers? What kind of teachers? From classes? What kind of classes? Do they consult filmmaking friends? Head for social media? Books? “Masterclasses?” Workshops? Do they learn by watching—movie upon movie? Do they watch and simply allow the chops of the filmmakers to seep lazily in or do they attempt to put themselves in their heads, mining the riches of process beneath the contours of the finished movie? Or do they simply step out, and jumping in at the deep end pray for flotation and go ahead and just do it? The school of hard knocks, so to speak, some concussive perhaps. Or does ability have to be there from the get-go, undeniable, irrepressible, nothing to be added? Talent—you either have it or you don't. It can't be taught, can't be learned. 

I never went to film school so I can't speak from the student’s perspective. I can from my own though, from the teacher’s side of the equation, so that's what I'm going to attempt here, hoping to cast light without, in the process, justifying too much my own position. 

I've stood on location directing stuntmen dropping on parachutes, explosions blasting one after the other in the deep background. I’ve directed tanks, planes, I've directed a three-year old child, capricious even at their most accommodating, worked with a dog or two, with a bird, jabbing of beak, independent of (bird) brain. I've directed above water and I've directed under water, on land and in the sky. There's little more terrifying to my mind though than facing a class of hungry, brilliant young filmmakers. Like the dream you wish you weren't having that offers no escape. To see their looks as they anticipate pearls of wisdom from their teacher, and to consider the responsibility one has for their development—all too aware of one's shortcomings and the dearth of the sage omniscience they expect—is petrifying. What if I can't come up with the goods? What if what I have to say is wrong? What if it’s banal? What if they already know it? Can I even think of anything? How to begin? How to continue? What’s the destination of this session and does it amount to anything worthwhile? The doubts would creep insidiously in. Do my colleagues feel like this, I’d wonder? Do they doubt what they know or are they certain of it? I’d once read that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations pillars of 20th century thought, would barf generously before each of the classes he taught because he felt he didn't know anything. I would remind myself of this, the notion being that I was in good company. On the other hand, I’d reflect, if Ludwig felt so challenged, what hope was there for Peter? 

It took a while to understand that this was not a problem at all. To the contrary, it was a gift. No matter how conscientiously I’d prepared—and prepare I did, meticulously—I found that insecurity and doubt could give me something: the foundation no less, for a path of exploration shared with my students. Not that I was planning a free for all. No, it wasn't as though I was resorting to chaos but to a Socratic approach, founded in questions, in searching for the ones to ask while inviting others from the students, ones I myself hadn't considered or had papered over as being too simplistic, too inconvenient and consequently too demanding... I realized that teaching is no mere matter of doling out answers or rules. I shouldn't be presenting tablets of wisdom, which anyway I'd left behind long ago, if I’d ever had them, but offering a mutual process of exploration and discovery. This could be dangerous—it entails an embrace of uncertainty because often the questions would lead to answers that might prove contradictory, might reveal a paradox—and why should any student pay good money for that?  

I wasn't dealing—at least on the whole—with the processes of pre-production, physical production, set procedure, the functions and structure of the crew, with the stages of post-production, with “workflow”, with the hardware, the software, with business, financing, or distribution, and I wasn’t providing career advice. There are tablets of certainty that come in handy on these fronts, which at some point it becomes necessary to be familiar with, but that is what I call “the conveyor belt”. It’s not “the candy”, and it’s the candy that has always interested me, the arena that excites. For me it’s story and storytelling, the domains of dramatic narrative—character, conflict, tension, stakes, structure, theme, tone, emotion—and staging, camera, editing, the language of the moving image and its auditory companion—that motivate, compel, and captivate me. In short, it’s the art. 

“You can't teach creativity,” I recently saw stated in social media, in comments on the question as to whether film school is worth the cost. The artist not so much enfant terrible as enfant savant. Not auto-didact so much as no didact at all. Scorsese didn’t need to watch every film he could feast his eyes on then? PT Anderson didn’t benefit from having Turner Classic Movies playing in every room in his home. Ari Aster didn’t thrive on being the most film literate student of the 450 or so I taught (read: worked with) at AFI Conservatory? Creativity cannot be taught perhaps, but it has to be developed. The tabula rasa of the mewling babe is rasa, blank, and not a screen replete with images and stories. The mind of the growing child, youth, young adult can, however, be assisted, facilitated, encouraged, enabled in its striving for cinematic prowess. 

Where then to do the enabling? At film school?

There are notable filmmakers who went to film school just as there are those who didn't. These institutions of varying pedagogies and merits didn't exist until 1929, when the program at USC was initiated, and it wasn't until 1947 that UCLA’s School of Film and Television opened. NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts opened in 1965, AFI’s program a few years after that, although with few students (I’m lucky to have known Gil Dennis and Tom Rickman, contemporaries of Lynch, Schrader, and Malick in an early intake). By the time of the inception of USC’s program, the history of cinema was already sated with masterpieces, with many good films, together with a whole host of the indifferent, the mediocre, the execrable (as ever). So, with no filmmaking pedagogues how did early directors learn their craft? How did they garner their skills when the first moving image hadn’t been captured until 1888 (the Roundhay Garden Scene)? Did they, in the years around the turn of the century, simply block the scene, set up the camera and shoot—pretty much what the neophyte armed with no more than an iPhone might do today? Maybe they did and maybe the next short involved much the same simple course of action, the next also—but at some point before too long perhaps, they would do something differently, more effectively, that new approach subsequently incorporated into later shoots. Expertise evolved so that before long there came about a language. Put untrained directors on sets today indeed, and over the months, the years, some will learn proficiency by doing, by trial and error. Art is not about doing whatever we fancy, it’s about doing what works. Stick with that, jettison the rest, and—soul and voice thrown into the mix (see my previous article)—the newly enlightened filmmaker is on their way…

No need for film school then? No need for the teacher? If the pioneers could work it out for themselves, why not Generation Z? Sure—if it’s content to go back to ground zero and spend the years it takes to get up to speed. But that couldn’t happen anyway—today's new filmmakers have grown up watching movies, consuming TV, following YouTube etc. so couldn't possibly start from square one. They’re pre-educated. (While some of the presumptions picked up along the way will have to be challenged and ditched—the beginning filmmaker often needs to be de-educated.) The question becomes one not of how education starts but how it continues and develops. It’s here that the pitfalls become evident. It doesn't help to have a teacher who wants to make the student into a simulacrum of themselves. It doesn't help to have a teacher insisting on hard and fast rules. Doesn't help to have one enslaved to common thinking. Doesn't help to have those who instill in the student the notion they’re unlikely to succeed because few do—a self-fulfilling prophecy. No. The teacher—more precisely the mentor—must permit the student their autonomy, seeing themself as the guide to the student’s agency, not the preacher of their own. The good mentor learns from the student so that the student can learn from the mentor. The good mentor does not attack the student, battling to break through their defenses, the good mentor invites, excites, challenges, questions, taking down those barricades of misconception and insecurity not by assault but by guidance in order to construct the sturdy houses of insight. The good mentor is as vulnerable as the good student. The good mentor shows the student how vulnerability, not infallibility, is the key to growth. The good mentor passes on the baton of the teacher to the student, rendering the student mentor to themself. 

Akira Kurosawa, on winning the Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the age of 80, said “I don't think I understand cinema yet”. That's what the teacher, the student must admit to themselves. It's never going to make either of us into Kurosawa, but it will keep us on the journey of question and discovery. Because filmmaking can never be entirely learned, so it can never be entirely taught, but that doesn’t mean that effective mentorship isn’t invaluable… and when the mentor teaches the student to become their own mentor, that’s effective mentorship. 

You can’t teach creativity. No. But you can learn it. It’s how you learn it, how you can be enabled to learn it,  that’s the question. 

Peter Markham January 2021

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Well-known decade, band, singer, voice.

A student came with a question. The question. Not “How do I work with actors?” (important, yes), not “How do I block a scene?” (depends), not “What do I need to know about lenses?” (let the physics serve the storytelling, the emotion), not “How much rehearsal do I need per page?” (maybe you have the wrong idea here?), not “How many scenes should there be in a movie?” (you’ve definitely got the wrong end of the stick), nor “Should I storyboard or not storyboard?” (pre-visualization, on-set flexibility the bigger considerations), but “How do you find your voice?” 

“How do I find my answer?” I mused. If only I knew, I could pen a best-seller, rest up into my dotage. Impulse, too often my muse, instructed me to offer a few pithy references. Susan Sontag on how limitations form voice. (Know them, embrace them, and there you have it.) T S Eliot on how “immature writers imitate, and mature writers steal.” (It’s not what you pilfer but how you use what you’ve the pilfered.) Hilary Mantel on the creative act—coming from the gut, she posits, reflecting from her head. (Nabokov said that the act of writing a story begins with a throb.) Offer half a dozen such maxims, I hoped, and that way I’d disguise my inability to come up with an answer. But no, I realized—it was high time I thought this inquiry through, providing the student with more helpful considerations even if a definitive answer might prove elusive.

First things first: what do we mean by the concept of voice? It's a word everyone uses, a notion we all affect to understand—but do we? Where to start? Always a challenge when common usage has long since buried meaning. Back to basics then—what’s in the dictionary? As a Brit my go-to is the Shorter Oxford. Open the app… enter voice, a nano-pause and… the literal meaning heads the list: Sound produced by the vocal organs of humans or animals…  A moment to consider. What are we looking for? Voice, in our sense, is used metaphorically, thus that sound correlates with… what? Address? Style? Tone? Choice of subject matter, genre, dramatic register, world? Which? Then: produced by the vocal organs. How might this work figuratively? What might vocal organs represent? The psyche of the filmmaker? Their persona? Their background, personal history, circumstances? Their traumas, complex PTSD, general screwed-upness? Or something more mysterious? Their soul? Their creative soul? (How do you define that?) Or are the processes of filmmaking themselves, the story-making, story understanding and articulation, the processes of pre-production, collaboration, the shoot, the cut and post-production, are these, metaphorically speaking, those vocal organs, aquiver at the delivery of story? Or is the filmmakers choice of material—the story and characters, their milieu, conflict, theme, drama not the aforementioned sound itself but the vocal organs, the means of its dissemination? 

Then follow the figurative definitions. (A word can be like a tree—a trunk of original meaning, branches its usage in varying contexts, twigs and leaves its figurative resonances.) The right to have a part or share in the control or deciding of something; an opportunity to express an opinion etc.; a say. This helps. Decisions. Selection. Chosen mode of expression. Opinion. A say in what we know as “the conversation”. All are aspects of a filmmaker’s vision. Then, again: The expressed opinion or will of the people, a group, etc. Stop there… a filmmaker can speak for a community, a culture, can give “voice” to the oppressed, the under-represented, the marginalized, the disrespected, the abused, those blocked from opportunity, participation, and fulfillment by the structures of society and politics and the people these serve. Black filmmakers, Latinx, female, LGBTQ, working class directors, writers, cinematographers can voice (note the use of the word as a verb) the soul, agendas, sensibility, humanity, the dignity of where they come from—the paradox here being that in doing so they render the particular universal. Add to this the individual voice of the artist and we have a voice within a voice, a double resonance for double amplitude. And there’s another word here to help: Will. Voice as the will of the filmmaker. Their inclination, determination, assertion, their sense of purpose—in telling their story, in posing its insoluble questions, in finding and showing its poetry, its mystery, its mischief. Soon after comes this: an expression of a person's opinion or preference. Preference. Voice as the sum of the filmmakers’ preferences maybe, for genre, mood, character configuration, single or multiple narrative point of view, for tenor, scope and scale, for showing or suggesting, seducing or provoking, whispering or shouting. Later and we find this: Utterance or expression of feeling, opinion. Utterance. This I like. A movie as the utterance of the filmmaker. Later still, and even better: The agency or means by which something specified is expressed, represented, or revealed. Voice as agency, the agency of the filmmaker in communicating their vision to the world, the power, the act of doing what they do, the practice, the capability, the talent. Next up: General or common talk; (a) rumour, (a) report. Not sure the first helps us, the general, the common (unless these haven’t been voiced before) but I like (a) rumour very much. More than (a) report, although the distance inherent in a report might yield voice—the dispassionate stance, unsugared, unbeguiling, frank and honest no matter what the image, the action shown. I favor rumour (American rumor), because a rumor can be unreliable, manipulative, mischievous, can exaggerate, sensationalize, hone in on our desires, our fears, can circulate and resonate—the filmmaker not as clinical witness but as conspirator, as winder-up, stirrer-up, rogue chemist of emotion, desire, dread. There’s usually something irresponsible about about a rumor. It comes with the territory. That sounds like the voice of a filmmaker, of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Ramsay, Martel, Barry Jenkins, Lynch, Arnold, Park Chan-wook, except that these directors aren irresponsible in order to be responsible—they spread a rumor to reveal a truth, subverting apparent reality to unearth the questions beneath its veneer. 

I missed this, earlier in the dictionary: the quality of a verb as indicated by a particular voice. active voice, middle voice, passive voice. Can a filmmaker’s voice be active or passive? Active as in interacting with/participating in the energy and emotion of the story and characters—by lighting, lensing, camera angle and movement, by editing—the interplay of story and storytelling. Like Scorsese, Aster, The Safdie Bros. Can voice be passive on the other hand, the filmmaker patiently observing, their camera often static, framing broadly perhaps, and usually “invisible”. Like Edward Yang, like Chloe Zhou maybe, like Ozu himself, master of tension simmering under equanimity, his Tokyo Story yielding a single brief tracking shot in 135 minutes of exquisite stillness. And what about middle voice? As in “the window broke”, rather than “the stone broke the window”? Maybe sometimes for the filmmaker yes, as and when they vest inanimate objects with agency—it’s not the stone that breaks the glass but the glass itself that takes the decision to fragment. Not voice entirely perhaps, but an element of it—cause before effect—a fundamental resource for the storyteller. 

There follow the musical definitions: A person's capacity for singing. Good. The filmmaker’s voice as their capacity for the song their film sings. Then: Also, a constituent part of a fugue. True of a filmmaker’s voice if they revisit themes, questions, worlds, characters, tones, each of their movies both echo and reinvention of previous ones. Like 2 minutes of a J. S. Bach fugue lasting a lifetime. (The longer the career, the richer the voice?). Also we have: Each of the lines or notes able to be played simultaneously on a musical instrument. A sense here of voice as a combination of tones, the sweet and the sour, the violent and the lyrical, the majestic and the satirical, the sad and the funny. The filmmaker as prestidigitator of tonality—their juggling of attitude towards their material in order to create anticipation, uncertainty, and suspense. 

One other brief reference—in my book What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay I say that voice suggests a perspective on material, a vision of life and humanity particular to the filmmaker. This suggests a conscious engagement, but there’s more to it than that, I might have added…

Time to return to the student’s question: how do I find my voice? As an audience we may know voice when we see it. A director may know it when they perceive it in the work of another director but can they spot it—should they be blessed with it—in their own work? Is it better that they don’t? Might they become too self-aware, too self-serving should they do so? And if it's better they don’t see it, how could they ever consciously find it, or know when they had? Shouldn’t finding it be an unconscious process then? Perhaps, to go on from that thought, it’s not the filmmaker who finds their voice but the voice that finds their filmmaker? Let the filmmaker meet their tasks, forming and understanding their story, designing how it’s to be told, telling it—in the casting, shooting, editing and post—from one project to the next while trying to think not “Where and what is my voice,” but “Does this work?”, “Does this excite me”, or “Do I have to do it this way—what other ways are there?”or “Is this a question I cannot put out of my mind?” or “Is this the film I want to watch, that I have to make so I can watch it because no one else has made it?” Yes, make the film that—were you not the filmmaker—you would want to see. Recall Nabokov’s throb, the charge you felt when you first engaged with the idea, the story, the screenplay. Keep seeing if you feel it again—maybe not each and every day but often enough to keep you on the rails of authenticity and truth, truth to what excites you about the project, to yourself, to life. 

My AFI alum Zal Batmanglij made a feature The Sound of My Voice. Maybe it’s when you hear the sound of yours as you make your film even though you might not entirely understand it, as indeed you should not—because who can understand their subconscious completely—that you get the inkling you’ve found your voice, or it’s found you. Was it always there perhaps, waiting for the opportunity to speak? Or has it been it born with your filmmaking, the pearl of art from the grit of process? And how might it compare with your everyday persona? Is it louder than you? Quieter? More flamboyant? More restrained? You yourself probably can’t tell because you’ve sensed rather than found it. And maybe sensing is better than finding, because if you’ve found it you know it too well. It’s no longer a mystery, no longer works subconsciously but, out in the open of familiarity, loses its potency, loses its connection with heart and guts.

So I’ve arrived at my answer to the student’s question: It’s not a matter of “How do you find your voice.” but “How do you sense your voice?” 

You don’t search, you listen.

Peter Markham January 2021

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Moral equilibrium as audience wish, truth as story’s need.

Lady Justice stands over London’s Old Bailey (from Wikicommons).

As in life, we crave justice in a movie—unless we happen to be a sociopath or are so politically or egotistically driven that our moral compass is overshadowed by alternative considerations. Justice bestows a sense of ethical architecture, of meaning therefore. With justice in the world we feel safer. Without it we are prey to laissez-faire malevolence. The courtroom drama, the whodunit, the courageous mission to take out the evil mastermind all come with perennial appeal. The western, as it used to be (not so much in its seventies reincarnation and on), saw the sheriff defeat the outlaw, restoring the rule of law amidst the inchoate moral landscape of freshly timbered townships, and of the vistas of desert and plains in which they stood. Justice enshrines fairness. Justice betokens deserved outcomes. With justice the living can sleep easy, the dead too, their misfortunes redressed. With justice we find equilibrium, without it, disorder, or worse…

Yet at times, justice in a film gets out of hand—seeing Spotlight with an audience was like finding oneself in the midst of a mob baying for punishment. Abuse? So first nail, then penalize the perpetrators! And celebrate the restoration of moral order as their sordid conspiracy comes crashing down! No moral ambiguity. No uncertainty. No epiphany. Reassurance all round as the ancient festive spirit of the execution of those found guilty yet again finds its followers. Watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, those around me went wild when the just desserts were dished out lavishly to the Mansonian wannabe perps. When all else fails, Tarantino seems to imply, fiction is the go-to for capital punishment even before the capital crime can be committed. But capital punishment of the malefactors it is, which is what that audience wanted. It’s what it got too, and on steroids.

Everything has a price, actions as well as goods, Nietzsche tells us in his Genealogy of Morals—those who commit bad deeds might be likened to debtors, so it’s only the credit that punishment affords that can restore moral liquidity. The greater the debt, the more extreme the payback required to return the debtor to Square One. Tough, should it get them only so far as Square Zero and out for the eternal count—since those who forfeit the lives of others must have their debt wiped out by forfeiting their own. Such a penalty its said to be condign—appropriate to the measure of the crime. Then the balance sheet is clear: “Let the punishment fit the crime!” sings the Mikado, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s eponymous, orientalist comic opera, one-upping any merely condign sentencing. “And make each prisoner pent/Unwillingly represent/A source of innocent merriment!” he warbles on, moving from justice as an eye for an eye to justice as spectacle. Isn’t that what Tarantino chants too, over 130 years later? Like librettist Gilbert though, he’s being satirical, isn’t he? But whereas Gilbert’s targets were contemporary politicians, QT, crafty as ever, aims his wit at his own audiences, hankerers for ultra-violence, especially when they see it as the callous Mikado does, as “innocent merriment”. What a filmmaker like Michael Haneke delivers with a stiletto (to draw upon violence as metaphor), Tarantino delivers with all the trimmings (to draw, figuratively too, upon the less tumultuous realm of cuisine). The audiences of both are hoist by their own petard (more metaphor—a petard was a bomb) although it rarely seems to get what’s going on with Tarantino’s sly digs. There’s another difference too: the Californian cloaks bloodshed in justice, while in his Funny Games, the Austrian goes in the opposite direction. There’s no subsequent “entitlement to cruelty”, as W. G. Sebald puts it in his collection of essays The Natural History of Destruction. Haneke offers no justice, only punishment—and of the victims too, not the criminals. Not only is there no catharsis, at least in the usual purging-of-offensive-emotions sense of the concept—but there’s consequently no justification for the mayhem witnessed throughout the movie. Things do not work out to be OK by the end, the thrills and spills of the film’s journey earning themselves no excuse in the ultimate moral rectitude of a tautly calculated Tarantino extravaganza. The audience walks out of the Haneke movie theatre not feeling pure as the driven snow, or elated, as might be the case after Tarantino’s grand guignol, but vaguely disgusted with itself. 

I digress. I was talking about justice, not cruelty and its pleasures for those so inclined—even if these ingredients often go together: what would any revenge thriller be without its ultimate retribution, the twofer of justice and violence hand in glove? Revenge, I was told by my Eng. Lit. teacher at grammar school in Southern England some time ago now—revenge is a concept we find unpalatable today. Presumably she never went to the movies, because we didn’t and we don’t. Whereas the Elizabethans had their Hamlet, the topic of that year’s study, we had our Point Blank and The Killers. After John Boorman and Don Siegel have come many more filmmakers on the trail of the assailant, the betrayer, the kidnapper, the murderer—revenge as maybe the most dramatically compelling form of justice never gives up the ghost. The genre offers the screenwriter’s protagonist an objective, and obstacles forcing them to take action in order to overcome them—the ready-made dynamics of dramatic narrative. Revenge offers its own twofer of desired opposites also: transgression and decorum. In order to vanquish the bad guy and exact justice, the good guy has to behave like a bad guy, so audiences get to enjoy rooting for heroes rendered anti-heroes. “He may be a killer, but he’s our killer,” so to speak. That’s okay then… But take a look at Soderberg’s The Limey—the protagonist in that Brit-ophile movie, in arriving at the moment of his revenge, sees deep into the darkness of his own soul—the film’s moral corrective to the moral corrective of violence the character has been seeking throughout the story. Or revisit Klimov’s Come and See to discover vengeance against Nazi brutality rendered impossible to administer without the new crime of infanticide being committed by the central character. It’s as if the journalists of Spotlight, in chasing down the guilty, had in their pursuit learned something of their own shadow—as subterranean as that of the priestly predators.

Justice need not necessarily be coupled with violence of course. Humiliation can do the job just as well. Or the truth can. Scorsese exacts justice by having the Henry Hill of Goodfellas condemned to a life of humdrum suburban dailiness. Even a pardon can work wonders—Bob Woodward says that when he met Gerald Ford to discuss the pardon he granted Richard Nixon, Ford showed him a yellowed and torn newspaper article—the former president had evidently yanked it out of his wallet on many occasions—reminding its reader that in accepting a pardon, one admits to a crime. Ford had thus led Nixon to condemn himself to his legacy of guilt. 

The poetic justice of the west, now economically rendered as its eastern counterpart karma, is another narrative device for restoring moral order. Here it is as if the universe steps in to impose moral propriety on a story. (It may also derive from a character trait, but again that seems linked to broader truths of the human condition). At the end of René Clément’s 1960 Purple Noon, Tom Ripley’s final expedient homicide is revealed when Philippe’s corpse, swathed in canvas and wrapped in an anchor chain, is found attached by a cable to a propeller when the victim’s yacht is pulled from the water. Ripley, unaware of the failure of his murderee’s disposal, will now be arrested, his crimes undeniable. He will “get what’s coming to him”, courtesy of happenstance, that most mercurial character of all patient schemers. Poetic justice might result equally in a reward for the virtuous, but it is from seeing the villain get their comeuppance that we perhaps derive our most satisfying gratification. Another aspect of poetic justice, fate, also comes into play here. “We meet our destiny on the path we take to avoid it,” Carl Jung said. Fate is the cosmic leveler, and when we find Ripley helpless in the face of its merciless sway, we feel reassured. Justice lies at the heart of the universe, we discover, a universe that actively imposes it—in story if not in life, though not of course in all stories…

Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley, made thirty-nine years later, ends less unhappily for its anti-hero. Like the Clément movie, Minghella’s is adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel, the first in a pentalogy of psychopathic sagas, but unlike its predecessor holds to Highsmith’s less reassuring denouement. Ripley’s killing of Philippe is not uncovered. Like Haneke’s lethal young home-invaders in Funny Games, Tom gets away with his culling but while cinema’s moralist implicates us in the sadism of his characters, Highsmith and Minghella seem to be suggesting that our fascination for Ripley’s machinations—and his survival by the skin of his teeth by means of his tactical agility and cunning—is ample purpose for the telling of the story in itself. Let’s just enjoy—if that’s where story takes us, so be it. Reading about, or watching a Ripley narrative is like following a drama of intrigue, except that there’s just the one plotter and we can't but help want them to succeed. That’s another instinct, similar to the desire for transgression—and in Tom Ripley we have the arch-transgressor (Tom rather than Thomas, sets him upon as our pal)—one by which when a character endeavors to make something work, no matter how dark their doings, some undeniable part of us wants them to succeed. The job well done appeals. Easy to accept when the detective is hunting the criminal, or when Spotlight’s righteous journalists are exposing a corrupt cleric. Not so soothing when Ripley sets about his internecine business.

Another vehicle for the battle between our admiration for operational skill and our hope for morality is the monster-as-mentor canon. From Dr Mabuse to Hannibal Lecter, the bad-guy-as-genius has brought about the defeat of other bad guys by means of the manipulation of some subservient good guy. Clarice Starling would be nothing without Lecter, serial killers free to perpetuate their carnage. So what’s she supposed to do? Tell the devil to behave himself? Have him sent into solitary, there to languish in silence while she falters in her attempts to apprehend the culprit out there somewhere (but where?)? Because we accept that’s not an option, we get to have our cake (if not our liver) and eat it too. Transgression, wit, shocking cleverness, justice—a cake of layers too sate the filmic appetite. Lecter takes us on to noir, or neo-noir, its current manifestation—now that the endearing innocence of the forties and fifties has been vaporized by successive disillusionment over the decades. Neo-noir—a murky ocean in the plummeting fathoms of which justice swims, or drowns, alongside the sharks of moral ambiguity and cynicism. Too many injustices to mention. Too many unhappy endings. What would a neo-noir be without one? With justice imposed? If justice arrives, it must come at considerable cost. With horror, justice tends to be even more elusive. In Rosemary’s Baby, in The Wicker Man and its progeny, Ari Aster’s elegantly terrifying Hereditary, as with countless other examples of this quintessentially cinematic genre, it is evil that ultimately triumphs. Our fears win out over our hopes as order is restored after our descent into nightmare—not the order we’ve been counting on though, but the orchestrated theatre of atavistic ritual, an arena perhaps deeper in all of us than its urbane courtroom counterpart. 

King Paimon reigns supreme at the end of Ari Aster’s Hereditary (cinematography Pawel Pogorzelski).

Suspense is crucial to storytelling. The storyteller teases the listener, the reader, the audience, with their wants, fears, curiosity, emotions, empathy, longings, expectations, their respectable social selves and their stubborn interior selves. Our desire to see justice finally played out is gold for the storyteller. Along with “what is going to happen next”, moral uncertainty is one of around seven main categories of suspense. We can’t leave a movie until we know justice has prevailed. With Aster, or with the sobering… no, unsparing critiques of Andrey Zvyagintsev—Leviathan and Loveless—we may find that by the time we discover our hopes dashed, it is too late. We have stayed with the movie only to learn it is the movie that will be staying with us…

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Barack Obama quoted Martin Luther King Jr when he repeated the words of abolitionist Theodore Parker. Does the universe have an arc though, moral or otherwise? Is it indeed shored up by any teleological buttressing? Easier, maybe, to restrict our questions to cinema. Movies have arcs, we are told, character arcs, story arcs, arcs of visual language maybe, of imagery, of shot design. They may also make telling use of a moral arc, although in articulating one they might do better to avoid moralizing. Does that moral arc need to bend toward justice though? Or should that be left to the inclination we bring to the film, whether satisfied or not in the end? “A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children than writing novels,” said Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps the same applies to filmmakers. That does not mean that a writer should impose justice on a story—if the story refuses it, the writer, if they are honest, is left powerless. Story must win over worthy intention, yet the writer’s sense of justice and of injustice can survive. It’s the friction between the two, story and storyteller, that gives the story, the film, its power.

Justice yields closure but if a good story requires completion in some sense, it also requires an afterlife. When that afterlife, that resonance, is sacrificed to the cause of justice in the narrative, an injustice is done. Justice, indeed, has another meaning, and it is in that other sense we recognize the stories that do themselves justice. That’s the justice, we discover, we wanted all along.

Peter Markham  December 2020

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay (Focal Press/Routledge).

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

I recently saw this post on social media from an aspiring young filmmaker: “Is there any point in studying film history?” Only if you prefer to escape cultural amnesia, I thought, irritated by the very idea of not studying the work of filmmakers over the decades. But then, annoyed by my own annoyance, I reflected that this person had every right to ask such a question. Not only that but the fundamental nature of the enquiry is to their credit. They weren’t saying there was no point, just asking whether there was one and if so what it might be. While I have always taken it for granted that there is indeed a point, it would never have occurred to me to think it through had that prospective cineaste not asked his question. The term “film history” could mean many things of course: the history of film production and manufacture, of filmmaking technology, of distribution, of movie stars and celebrities, of the culture and community of filmmakers and film lovers. While I wouldn't for a moment denigrate the historians of any of those topics, nor seek to limit the boundaries of film history, or any history, I would have to admit it’s the language of the moving image and the storytelling it facilitates, and how generation after generation find ways of making this work, that for me is always the most exciting arena.

A Canterbury Tale, written by Emeric Pressburger, directed by Michael Powell—the duo calling themselves The Archers, who were responsible for several of the greatest British movies ever made—was released in 1944. The film begins with a group of medieval pilgrims journeying across the English countryside to Canterbury Cathedral, inspired in the Powell-Pressburger mind by the pilgrims of Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales. One of the pilgrims releases a falcon into the sky. As the pilgrim peers up, the bird soars away into the heavens. Then, as it sails through the air, we see something unexpected happen. There's a transition in image, in time, sudden, magical, inspired. With no cut, no camera move, without reframing or adjustment, the falcon transforms into a Spitfire, the single-engined fighter plane adept at combating the Nazi Luftwaffe as it attacked Britain (and once, in the process, taking out my family’s home—empty at the time, as luck would have it). The sky of the 1400s becomes the sky of World War II. Pressburger and Powell have defied the constraints of time and culture. The poetry of the image, of the juxtaposition of images has been rendered a narrative device. Creature has morphed into machine, nature-made into man-made. The past has become the present, or what was for the filmmakers the present. Chaucer’s literature has become cinema and the story of the film moves on. Simple, clear, innovative, masterly. One example of the combined genius of Powell-Pressburger.

It was Martin Scorsese who pointed out to me that Stanley Kubrick's similarly deft transition in 2001—a fibula tossed into the air by a triumphant hominin transformed mid-spin into a tumbling spacecraft—was inspired by that very gem of cinematic language in A Canterbury Tale. The past, through Kubrick's agency, becomes the future. With a single cut, Powell-Pressburger travel through 500 years while with his edit, Kubrick spans not just countless millennia but human evolution over millions of years. Primitive weaponry is rendered state of the art technology, brow ridges frontal lobes, savagery grace, sky cosmos. And that's only the film’s beginning… what’s to follow in every way meets the lofty expectations set up by its prelude. The mystery only deepens, the journey taken only expands, the film only becomes more magnificent…

What would 2001 have been, had Stanley Kubrick not seen that earlier movie? Would he have found some other manner of visual time travel? A different juxtaposition of imagery? But what might that have been? And what, come to think of it, had been the source of inspiration for Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell to begin with? Had they seen an earlier film that made use of some similar transmutation, its combination of affinity and contrast affording a comparable thrill of dissonance? Or had they simply looked up one morning as a bird flew overhead before yielding the empyrean to some subsequent Supermarine Spitfire? Was it movie or was it life that provided them with the solution to the challenge of girding the centuries?

Jean-Luc Godard opined that there are two kinds of director: those of “free cinema” who walk in the street with their head up, and those of rigorous cinema who walk with their head down… fixing their attention on the precise point that interests them. Powell-Pressburger, it strikes me, were of the latter category, as was Kubrick. Those of this rigorous tribe, perhaps, are the ones who derive most benefit from the riches of past cinema, from its reservoir of storytelling language. For them, that language, the nature of the image, its selection, its framing are indivisible from the thing itself. There is none of the assumed duality between content and style—the baggage of pre-20th century preconceptions of a fixed objective reality. The world and story of the film, the screen on which it plays out, and the emotion, thought, and gut sensation of the audience work together as one symbiosis, the process that is the movie. In truth though, there never was a tabula rasa upon which the “free” cinema filmmakers might conjure their images, drawn from life to be merely transplanted onto the blank screen. What is witnessed in the world must inevitably be filtered through the acculturation of the screenwriter, the director, and the cinematographer before being transferred to their movie. Has there ever been a director who has never seen a film? A single film? Could there ever be? How could anyone make a film without knowing what a film is? (Louis Le Prince was perhaps an exception, when he shot the modest seconds of the Roundhay Garden Scene in 1888, or maybe Thomas Edison was a virgin filmmaker when he began to make shorts five years later, but even they, and the contemporary Lumiere brothers, and other pioneers, had to be aware of still photography, as photographers had previously been informed by the work painters.) And would that film or those films seen before not have remained to some extent or other in the filmmaker’s mind as they visualized their own? Wherever it is that art begins, it does not begin in a vacuum. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we copy, we steal, we develop, we subvert, we reinvent, we plunder and reuse whether consciously or unconsciously, what has come before us. No way around it, not without going back to those Kubrickian hominids and their oblivious frolics.

A directing fellow at AFI, outstandingly talented and subsequently enormously successful, once remarked to me after we’d spent hours in class going scene by scene, shot by shot, cut by cut through a Hitchcock movie, that “we don't make films like that anymore”. Why, he asked, should we have spent all this time analyzing the visual storytelling of a movie made so many decades ago? He was, I suppose, asking the self same question as the aspiring filmmaker in that post. My reply was that the class was not only about the solutions Hitchcock found to the challenges he faced, but also—and perhaps primarily—about those challenges and questions themselves, universal to movie storytelling throughout the decades. I wasn't telling him to make movies exactly like Hitchcock’s, I said—although that would perhaps be no bad thing—but to be able himself to find the key questions, ones that otherwise he might not spot, so that he might come up with his own solutions, his own modes of visual storytelling. I might have added that language—any language, on the page, on the screen, of the spoken word—is constantly shifting and changing as it’s pushed and pulled by the pressures of culture, the search for meaning, for function, for the need for renewal, so that it can be ever fresh and vibrant. The study of even a contemporary movie might, given his preconceptions of ephemerality, be rendered past its sell by date. Good movies—and how we define the term “good” is of course a matter of debate—do not have a sell by date, nor, even, do many “bad” movies, from which we can also learn so much.

We know better than our predecessors, the common assumption goes. We are more sophisticated, more hip, less constrained by tradition, more badass than the old-fashioned dead. We have digital cinematography. We have Avid. We have smart phones. We edit on laptops. Sure. So what happens next? Future generations will top us, as each in turn, one by one, tops the other, a progression of the exceptionalism of the present defiant in the face of the wisdom not only of the ancients but of those still warm in the grave. Technologies change, yes, sensibilities shift, cultures evolve, and we find different ways of telling stories. But many of those ways will be echoes and variations of past approaches whether we are aware of it or not. Our need for story, to hear, to read, to watch, to experience will not however alter—it’s through story and storytelling, the catalyst for our emotional and cognitive engagement with existence, that we come to understand who we might be and grasp some sense of the mysterious universe in which we find ourselves.

Such a mysterious firmament presides over 2001, itself now an “old movie”. Is there any point in studying it? Is there any point in studying If, Rosemary’s Baby, Once Upon a Time in the West—films made in the same year? What’s to learn from Lindsay Anderson, Polansky, Leone? Only the dramaturgy of cinema, the language of the screen, the intractable and paradoxical truths of myth and life. Only the troubling but sublime glory of the image. Only the art of what will happen next? Only the emotions and sensations inside us all. Only the world in which we find ourselves. Only us.

And it’s that that is the point, the point of studying film history.

Peter Markham November 2020

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Gazing toward the Pacific during a chemo session.

There’s something I say to filmmakers in my classes, for many years at AFI Conservatory but now online worldwide, to the effect that as we follow the course of a story we long for a victory of some kind while fearing a defeat, yet in a good story what we discover at its end is a sense of meaning, often paradoxical, often hard to articulate, but with a resonance that renders either outcome almost irrelevant. The tragedy we dreaded, we find, offers a reward. The painful ending reverberates, stays with us while the happy dénouement we longed for withers in our memory from the moment we leave the movie theater (in the days when we could attend such venues) — unless it’s come with a cost so that along with the victory comes the pang of defeat. This sense of meaning — and it generally comprises of questions, contradictions and mystery rather than easy answers or moral reassurances (Spotlight went dark for me the moment the lights came up, if not some time before) — is what story and storytelling offer us. Through paths of emotion denied the philosophical treatise, story speaks to us in all aspects of our humanity. Yes, I love philosophy: Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Kant, Aristotle, Locke, Lao Tzu — but it’s Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lynne Ramsay, Lucretia Martel, Andrea Arnold, Barry Jenkins, Martin Scorsese and Ari Aster who get to me deep down in my heart and guts. It’s through their work that I find connection, a sense of meaning, of truth. A story, Nobel laureate Alice Munro says, has a sturdy sense of itself, of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. Those filmmakers don’t seek to shelter or beguile us, don’t attempt to make everything “alright”, but to show us what they’ve let be built out of its own necessity: a story, like it or not, to take us to the core of something we cannot deny, ignore, still less escape, but to the contrary must come to accept.

This weekend marks exactly eight years since the procedure I underwent that saved my life. That transhiatal esophagectomy left me deprived of a couple GI tract components — let’s not dwell on the details — but otherwise left me in one grateful piece. Thanks to the craftsmanship of the surgeon, my guidance from the oncologist and the care given me by the health workers who made my treatment so much less unpleasant that might otherwise have been the case, here I am today, sitting down trying to do justice to what I want to say. I may be several superfluous pounds lighter, may not be able to scarf down a burger and bun with bacon, cheese, pickles, tomato, lettuce and all the rest of it, not able to scarf down anything for that matter, perhaps a little askew physiologically, and a touch more fragile to be honest, but I remain above ground, on the planet, and struggling still to work out what’s going on with the world, with my life, with the lives of everyone around me — a bewilderment now all the more puzzling given the events of the last few months.

Where’s this going? you’re wondering, as you ponder any unlikely connection between the golf ball-sized obstacle lodged in my craw eight years ago, the treatment that rid me of it, and my pontification on the nature of story and why it proves so essential to the lives of so many of us. To explain, I need to recall those days of chemo and radiation, the surgery and recovery period after, and the course of brutal “insurance” chemo following. Chemo does you in — no profound revelation in my saying that. The nausea, the shriek of pain as your hands and your feet morph into shrunken talons one moment, and a polystyrene numbness as they succumb to neuropathy the next, tend to wear one down. The radiation doesn’t help either, although the radiation folk accuse the chemo folk of the side effects as the chemo folk accuse the radiation folk — such Hitchcockian transfers of guilt offering only passing amusement. Then comes the surgery, the cut in the neck, the slit down the front. The snatching out of what lies in between. Post surgery the feeding tube arrives, conduit for nutritional substances distinctly less than appetizing. Not a bundle of fun.

And still… it wasn’t all bad. The biweekly chemo sessions, the major hits, had me gazing, over my feet, out of the window before me to Santa Monica Boulevard, hurrying away to the Pacific and a distant glimmer that struck me as the sparkle of hope, the infinity it intimated seeming the harbinger of some manner of timeless permanence. There were the aforementioned health workers too, people who seemed to enjoy a selfless devotion to those of us fortunate enough to be in their charge. Diversity, along with kindness, reigned supreme among their ranks, so that for once, despite my English predilection for outsiderness and miserablist alienation in general, I began, somewhat unusually, to feel a part of humanity.

Yet there was something even more profound, if that’s possible. There were moments when, lying back plugged into dangling sac-fulls of chemo agent — the heavy artillery as I used to describe it, irony the means of consolation — I thought of the opening title sequence of the first Star Trek episodes, a show my family would watch together after “tea” when I was in my early teens and living deep in leafy southern England. (Each ep was as good an introduction to philosophy as any book). Cosseted under my blanket and in my reclining chair at the UCLA Medical Center, I one morning discovered myself hurtling at warp speed into that all encompassing cosmos, clusters of stars, of galaxies rendered speeding pinpricks of light to rush past me as I tore forth into the darkness ahead. Stars, stars, and more stars, as if the big bang was never going to stop — not much a bang as one perpetual roar of joyful existence. This was me, nano-sized, accelerating forward; this was the universe, fathomless in its unimaginable dimension, coming at me at the speed of light, inviting me into its heart… Somehow, in that moment, I became a part of it, at one with it, and no matter how minuscule I might have been — a Lilliputian dot so tiny I barely existed at all — without me it could not have been the same universe: different only imperceptibly, admittedly, but different nevertheless. I could not escape belonging to it, nor, sentient or insentient, could it escape my belonging.

People talk about “battling” cancer, about “beating” it. I never battled or beat anything. What was I supposed to be fighting against? Myself? The replicating cells were a part of me, not of anyone else. What what was I supposed to be battling with? And how? I found myself not so much battling as traveling, and with those brief seconds of interstellar overdrive came to see I might accept my place in the universe, accept it as I’d previously found it difficult to accept very much of anything, so that although I have not the slightest wish to return to the predicament of that fall, winter, and spring, I came to accept what it was I was going through. There was a truth in it, a mystery, one I neither had to “battle”, nor resign myself to passively, but one I found I could accept actively. This was my decision, my agency, and yet with the rescuing humility it presented. Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it, Henry Miller wrote. No certainties, no homilies, no easy answers, but a truth like that derived from a good story built of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you, but to have you live with it, in it, through and by it.

I wore my chemo pump in my sleep. I wore in the shower. I wore it to class. I wore it as I worked with the students on the stories they wanted to tell. It made my hands and my feet shriek as they morphed into talons, then tingle with the numbness of neuropathy, then twist tight again like the dead contorted feet of a bird clinging, as if still for dear life, onto thin air. But with this pump came the memory of that warp speed Star Trek epiphany and the acceptance it afforded, just as with the stories and films those students were striving to put up on the screen might come the acceptance of paradoxes known and accepted only through the journeys along their narrative paths.

We know when we see a good movie, when we follow a good story. We know, and it pleases us, when we can do nothing but accept it. We know when the sense of meaning it offers connects us to ourselves, to each other, and to the universe of which we form our human part. And with movies there’s no need for sickness, for chemo, no pump, no talons, no polystyrene feet, just the screen, the drama, the emotions, and the sense of meaning that only story can deliver, taking us deep into its core as its stars rush past, so that we may live with it, in it, through and by it.

Peter Markham October 2020

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Never have so many young minds aspired to a life in filmmaking. Over the last couple of decades the number of film schools has burgeoned, applicants have multiplied, the technology for shooting and cutting a movie has become exponentially more available, and the number of shorts sent on a wing and a prayer to festivals has increased beyond what previously might have been imagined. Suddenly, however, a force arrived out of left field to render filmmaking—a challenge even in the most favorable of circumstances—barely practicable across much of the country. Movies on Zoom or shot strictly within the home flourish maybe—ingenuity tends to find a way—but the complexity of communication on set, its nuances, intimacies, detail, and flow that for practitioners become second nature, or should, are rendered fiendishly challenging even with a Covid-19 compliance officer present. How does the director talk to the actor while socially distanced and wearing a mask? How does the director block a scene, or discuss camera placement and framing with the DP? How, above all else, does everyone stay safe? Covid-19 compliance officers see to that but of course add to costs few can afford. Plus, it has to go wrong just once before the shoot is called off. Under the circumstances, even the weekend iPhone production gets to be tricky, while nothing more than a two minute short becomes a mountain to climb.(Brevity, admittedly, is ever mountainous.)

What then is the aspiring filmmaker to do?

Denied the shoot, maybe this is the time for the budding cineaste to learn? And when learning by doing stops being practical perhaps it's time to commit to learning by learning. After all, it wasn't so long ago that there was no such thing as a smartphone. Before, the world lacked digital cameras, and before that camcorders. Those in the know, might have worked on 8 mm but this was so much more laborious than the ease afforded by contemporary technology. How then did a filmmaker learn? Orson Welles said he worked out how to make movies by watching John Ford’s Stage Coach. Martin Scorsese watched Welles, Fellini, Hitchcock, and the canon of just about any director he could set his eyes on. Isn't it time, now, for those at the start of their careers—and maybe those well into them too—to follow in those footsteps and learn (or relearn) by watching? By “watching” I mean watching not as a consumer, not as a critic, an academic, a sociologist, philosopher or any other category of viewer out there, each adhering to their own particular criteria of assessment, but as a filmmaker, hungry to understand. Observing and listening to both the working minds of those who have come before them, and those currently excelling, the rookie director gains insight into the practice, the challenges those storytellers have encountered and the questions they asked. The student, the filmmaker can figure the means, language, connective tissue by which they made (or make) their movies work, firstly in the world, story, and characters of the narrative, then on the planarity of the screen, and then through the address this makes to the hearts, minds, and guts of their audience—without whom a film can never amount to much more than a forgotten artifact.

These masters would think, ponder, reflect, and closely analyze the elements of dramatic narrative, of visual and auditory language that constitute a movie. In the recent imperative to go out there and make yet another short, in the drive to get up and running on the set or on location, in its excitement and immediacy, that lonely process of the mind can so easily be forgotten. Why bother to learn, why wait, when you can simply go ahead and do? 

Even before Covid-19 however, there existed a corresponding factor to dilute the singular journey of the filmmaker—the conflation in all manner of educational programs of disparate topics under the one-size-fits-all banner of “film production”, under which both movie manufacture and creative filmmaking are conceived of as being a single domain. This framing, seen for example in books on so-called film technique and aesthetics, serve only to confuse the student. What if the teachers of creative writing for the novel, for the short story were to give classes on the keyboard, on the computer screen, on the process of book production, the printing, the publication, the distribution? How would that work out for the aspiring author? The category of “film production” is not only misconceived but seduces the student away from the “candy” that is their story and voice, tempting them toward the factory and conveyor belt of its production. The amalgam of the processes of pre-production, physical production, and post production, its skillsets, codes, and subcultures with the creative acts of story-making and storytelling through the language of the moving image can be, and indeed often results in, a debilitating compromise of the emerging—and by its very nature lonely—voice.

Don't get me wrong, those who devote their lives and careers to the manufacture of movies and TV are right be proud of their camaraderie and skills. They should be respected and valued for their dedication to the industry. Without them, no story could be told, no audience sit before that glorious screen, no truth or emotion or mystery conveyed by a movie disseminated. And yet, without the story and the storyteller, there would be no need for the craftspeople. The relationship is a symbiosis, yes, but it consists of two entirely different arenas. When the sovereignty of story and the loneliness of the storyteller are pushed to one side, overshadowed not only by the structures and practice of production but by the worlds of business, marketing, and distribution, the student of filmmaking—as this relates to story, character, and visual language—is subsumed into the universe that serves it.

Fortifying the path through this misconception both at film schools and among a thriving no-film school community, there follows the invitation the fledgling filmmaker yearns for—the beckoning from the club of “working professionals”, the ones who, claiming the knowledge that needs to be known, are seen to have put education behind them and “made it” into a select echelon graced by common assumptions, by awards, by celebrity. “Be one of us!” the industry educator cries. “Come join our coterie!” “Embrace the certainty of professional status!” And so the lonely odyssey of filmmaker as outlier, as dissident, as misfit becomes hamstrung even before it has begun. Herd mentality wins out, group think prevails, the precious resources afforded by the loneliness of individual progress lost to the winds of the craving for belonging. The only interesting ideas are heresies, Susan Sontag said. Well, heresies don’t get you into the coterie—that ticket demands commonplaces.

I worked as a 1st AD, a location scout, and production manager in BBC Drama and Films in the UK for over a decade. I could suss out and nail down a great location, I could schedule a movie, I could run a set, anticipating problems and solving them before they arose, solving them when they arose, I could anticipate the coverage of a scene, know how it might be “hosed down” (in journeyman terminology), I could direct the background action, and I could judge the framing of an image on the basis of the chosen lens without looking through the camera, but I learned very little about story and storytelling, about the rich language of the moving image, its flow of energy, its power as a source of emotion, cognition, visceral sensation,  I didn't understand how a key image could encapsulate theme, I didn't understand narrative point of view and how the director and the editor might articulate and shift this, connecting the audience to one particular character or another in particular scenes or at crucial moments or—should this be the desired approach—throughout a movie. I didn't understand the challenges of tone and its modulation, I didn't understand how genre could have so fundamental an impact on how an event might be the depicted, even—in the context of a particular dramatic narrative—on the validity of that event to begin with. In short, I understood what surrounded the creative process while having failed to explore that central endeavor itself. I thought of myself as part of a club, together with the rest of the crew, in a hallowed community of professionals and yet… and yet, although I would try to deny it to myself, I always ended up feeling lonely. I had interacted with others but said nothing. Then, when I began to direct, I wanted even more desperately to belong, now to the community of directors, to be a member of that esteemed group, safe and sound in that home, that noble family.

It wasn't until I found myself teaching—and when I realized my daunting responsibility toward the development of the young directors under my tutelage—that I came to see what constitutes the progress of the filmmaker through an entirely different (metaphorical) lens. Many of the teachers who were my peers, excellent as they were, would be eager to shepherd their students into the club while I found myself in thrall to an altogether more exciting task: the facilitating of diverse, distinctive sensibilities and voices through the exploration of story and craft. This was not only an act of kindness—nothing wrong in that, whatever the current zeitgeist—but a collaboration to lead the student toward notable, compelling, and above all distinctive filmmaking. When the emotion of a story and the emotion rooted in the one telling it finds agency up on the screen, personal vision speaks. Second-guess perspectives, afforded by those content to conform, to play by teacher’s rules, to be members of the club by contrast resonate less. Films of such complexion offer at best immediate gratification but along with the empty cartons and cans of concessions left strewn across a movie theater’s auditorium, are quickly forgotten and having fallen short in conveying the questions of life common to us all leave us with a sense of emptiness. We have seen it all before and now we've seen it again. Paradoxically, it is the singular vision that is recognized by, and resonates with us. The personal becomes universal and stays with us after the movie has come to its end. It is the individual creative soul that speaks to our common humanity, its loneliness which speaks to our togetherness, not as members of any club, or clique or self congratulatory subculture, but as people of all backgrounds and kinds going about our lives day by day.

We are living through tough circumstances certainly, and for some their predicaments are formidably severe, yet for filmmakers, the opportunity not to be distracted by the imperatives of manufacture and membership but to focus on the heart of story and emotion, is there. Together  with their peers, the new cineaste can be lonely, and lonely be together, so that when moviemaking becomes a touch more doable—and this can’t come too soon—the films they make connect at an enduring level to the audiences they draw.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers, James Baldwin wrote. You learn the answers in order to gain admittance to the club. Outside, you search for the questions to connect you with the biggest club all—humanity.

Peter Markham  October 2020     

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)  

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Sabrina Doyle on set. (Photo by Henry Drayton)

Taking the first steps into filmmaking on a professional basis and subsequently developing that career in its early stages are paths that have ever presented challenges and uncertainties above and beyond those encountered in other fields. Finding one’s voice, honing one’s craft, getting oneself noticed in the saturation of competition, aspiration, and general noise, each presenting a hurdle to be overcome, have never by themselves been sufficient guarantee of success without the added contingencies of luck and circumstance. Will the screenplay of the talented filmmaker be noticed by the appropriate enablers? Will the sensibility of the material and its cultural focus mesh with the zeitgeist? Will the filmmaker prove their mettle when it comes to the actual making of the movie? Whatever might be the state of the nation and the world once the movie is ready for release, there remain battles to be fought over festival screenings and distribution. With the arrival of Covid-19, these steep mountains to climb were transformed into the sheerness of a cliff-face. Moving from screenplay to production became tougher than ever. Shoots, in so many parts of the US, became supremely tricky: how does one block a scene given the imperative of social distancing, how are notes to be given to the cast on set, what about the communication between departments, a dialogue of both clarity and nuance, and how does consultation with Covid-19 advisors impact these aspects of physical production? Once a film has been completed, filmmakers find festival screenings, festivals themselves severely disrupted, while the distribution one hopes will follow has been left in the throes of continuing uncertainty. Should the filmmakers wait for a release on the big screen, not knowing how long that wait will be? Or should they go for streaming in order to get the film out into the world? Hard for anyone, even the most experienced practitioner, to know.

As former head of the directing program at AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles, which I left in the summer of 2018, I decided to glean the experiences and consequent insights of my alumni who have been dealing with this situation. Writer-director Sabrina Doyle, for example, wrapped her first feature Lorelei at the end of 2018. She would have finished post-production early this year were it not for the onset of the virus. The indie’s premiere was scheduled for Tribeca in April but with only weeks to go the screening was canceled. “It was a real sucker punch,” Doyle says, “because you hope for that kind of splashy premiere to launch your film and career, and that just went away in an instant, and the industry didn’t step in and collectively come up with a plan for all the indies, like mine, that lost their big SXSW or Tribeca moments.” She explained that Tribeca is inviting this year’s films back next year, a gesture she very much appreciates, although by then domestic distribution deals are likely to have been worked out. The moment, in other words, will have been lost. This process happens now via online screeners—just not the same as the buzz of a festival and its audiences. Fortunately, Lorelei was invited into competition at the Deauville American Film Festival where it won the Jury Award, and one hopes it will  now achieve the distribution it deserves.

Zoé Wittock was somewhat luckier with her astonishing debut Jumbo, the movie premiering at Sundance in January of this year before screening at Berlin at the end of February, thus slipping in before the pandemic stole the headlines along with the regularity of life for so many of us. So far so good but then Covid-19 stepped in and the film's initial theatrical release in Belgium had to be scrapped, switched instead to VOD in March. The movie’s been screening theatrically in France and has been released in Canada, while Dark Star has acquired distribution rights in the US. Its inclusion in the “New Voices” section of AFI Fest had just been announced. Jumbo is a distinctive film from a film maker with a distinctive voice. In steadier times it would surely be winning more notice, but its take is so fresh it's likely to pick up more of its enthusiastic following over the coming months. 

Another feature debut from AFI alumni screening at this year’s Sundance was the mischievous Palm Springs. Directed by Max Barbakow, written by Andy Siara, the movie broke the Sundance sales record, being picked up by Hulu for streaming and by Neon for a limited theatrical release. Without Covid however, but with audiences in movie theaters across the nation in thrall to its agile plotting and generous heart, it would surely have garnered a wider devoted following. 

AFI alum Dubois Ashong was a week away from the start of shooting in the Dominican Republic for his debut feature Geechee, starring Andrea Riseborough, when Coronavirus made itself known to the world and the producers were forced to bring the entire unit home. After weeks of uncertainty, Ashong was able to return to his locations in late July, the production withstanding both a passing hurricane and a crew member catching the virus. The screenplay to his movie, which tells the story of a haunting by the souls of enslaved Africans, is both terrifying and deeply moving. Very much a film for our times, Geechee promises to be more than deserving of a theatrical release—maybe when the time comes that might be possible. It is of great concern then, and sad news indeed, that the shoot has been currently shut down after a crew member was injured in a mistaken ambush by local police. Thankfully they are apparently not seriously hurt. Covid-19, it would seem, is far from the sole problem to assail the new generation of filmmakers.

Dubois Ashong on the Set of Geechee (Photo by Carlos Rodriguez)

Fortune on the other hand, with the assistance of their considerable talent of course, has thus far favored other AFI alumni who have a not immediately been in production, at least as directors. Deft comedienne Oran Zegman has been slated by Tri-Star to direct the remake of Troop Beverly Hills as her directorial debut. Mattson Tomlin meanwhile, who when we met earlier this year, informed me that he works on eight or nine screenplays every day as a screenwriter—a boast I believe, given his astonishing capacity for productive endeavor—and having written the screenplays to both The Batman and Netflix’s current hit Project Power, is now directing the sci-fi thriller Mother/Android for Miramax. Even a global pandemic, it seems, hasn't blocked the progress of these alumni.

Indeed, the most daunting challenges in these troubled times are perhaps those facing aspiring filmmakers either still at film school or just beginning their adventure. The expense in terms of finance and time of attendance is no laughing matter, nor does a film student have the certainty of a career, as many of their contemporaries in other less unpredictable professions might have. They need to be strong-willed and yet I rarely found any fellow at AFI Conservatory to be arrogant or entitled. What struck me most was their courage—impressive in the face of their embarkation on such a high-risk path—which has been supported by programs tried and tested over decades to meet their needs. Film schools in the current climate, certainly those on the West Coast, and certainly those for whom production and learning by doing is at the core of their pedagogy, have needed to adjust curricula years in their evolution in order to adapt to current circumstances. How much of an impact such changes will prove to have on the development of students is difficult to assess, while the inevitable uncertainty of such adaptive approaches alone can hardly have been reassuring for those who succeed in achieving admission to the top schools only in the face of intense competition.

Alum Hao Zheng by contrast, was fortunate to come out of AFI Conservatory in 2019 with a student Academy award for his thesis The Chef. Already a couple of projects previously scheduled for current production have been pushed, thanks to Covid-19. Invited also to Disney’s new Launchpad program for directors, he has to be finding it particularly frustrating not to be embarking on this new adventure but having to wait. Hao tells me he's been busy though. “I never call myself a writer-director as I love collaborating with other writers,” he says. “But this ‘down time’ allowed me to spend more time on reading and practicing my own writing.” He says he’s been using the time to catch up with his fellow filmmakers. “I think because we have more free time now and are desperate for social connection we actually talk a lot more with each other than before, sharing our ideas and perspectives.” The silver lining to a dearth of production perhaps? A time for reflection, for learning, for consolidating one’s understanding of one’s craft, for developing new material. and for communicating with peers—maybe then, just maybe, all is not yet lost…

Peter Markham   October 2020

What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay:

An Essential Guide for Directors and Writer-Directors

Focal Press/Routledge

You have conversations with yourself in coffee shops and hotels and put those conversations onto the page. Before long you find yourself with the book you wanted to write and realize this inner interlocution is to be made to all. Today this is happening. With huge thanks to the 450 or so directors in my classes over my years at AFI Conservatory, and to the filmmakers of other disciplines I was lucky to get to know, I'm proud to say today is publication day in the US and UK for my book What's the story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. These pages are a tribute to all of you. Something I could never of done without our work together, work that continues with the filmmakers attending my current classes and consultations. Onto the next book now but meanwhile I hope this snippet from today’s offering whets your appetite…

https://www.routledge.com/Whats-the-Story-The-Director-Meets-Their-Screenplay-An-Essential-Guide/Markham/p/book/9780367415877

https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Story-Director-Meets-Screenplay/dp/0367415879/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GS4U6NXF1R2K&dchild=1&keywords=peter+markham&qid=1599592714&sprefix=Peter+Markham,aps,202&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Whats-Story-Director-Meets-Screenplay/dp/0367415879/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1UYZSJNIJ8D66&dchild=1&keywords=peter+markham&qid=1599592973&s=books&sprefix=Peter+Markham%2Caps%2C279&sr=1-2

What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. Focal Press/Routledge

Available at Amazon, Book Depository, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, blackwells.co.uk, routledge.com

When I came out of AFI Conservatory in the summer of 2018, I pretty soon realized it was time for me to write a book on filmmaking. It didn't take long to see that the topics we explored at the school might be developed and expanded, and that I could explore them at deeper levels in such a volume. 

I’d always loved class with the directing fellows, always been energized by interacting with such singular talents, such youthful wisdom, but without the constriction of time limits and class schedules, I had the opportunity to do something newly exciting and to take the required months and focus to do this properly. I came up with a list of topics in about twenty minutes, but then the real work started… 

My seventy page proposal was received favorably by publishers, of whom I felt Focal Press the most appropriate avenue for what I planned to achieve. Then came the writing of the book itself, and the months of engagement with the chapters and what I wanted to think about and question and say in them. 

After submitting a draft to Focal Press and receiving invaluable insights, comments, and correctives from peer reviewers, I went on to complete the book. Only the copy editing remained, and here I discovered yet another delight in the process of writing and publishing, copy editor Steven Holt proving not only formidably literate, but a cinephile also. Then, with one or two late adjustments, the work was done. 

Now you can read the result. I hope you will enjoy this book, I hope it will prompt you to think deeply about your own exploration, your own take, and I hope very much that you will be able to draw from it valuable nourishment for your filmmaking and appreciation of the art of visual storytelling. Entitled What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay: An Essential Guide for Directors and Writer-Directors, I believe that creative filmmakers of all crafts also, as well as lovers of film and story will find both challenges and the rewards that come of them in its pages. After all, the seed is one thing but the fruit is another—something the teacher is always anticipating with eagerness…