How you relate, authentically or not, to your material.

View from the writer’s backyard. South London. Early 60s. Photo: Peter Markham

There’s a faculty member at the film school in which I used to teach, a rare educator of perennial popularity from whom I learned much. He talks about what material you can relate to authentically. When you carry a connection to that story rooted in your own history and experience, he says, then that world, that story, its milieu, its characters, the emotions it brings to the screen will ring true. When you have nothing in common by contrast, but only affect a bond — in short, when you don’t know what you are talking about — those emotions, no matter how heightened, how intense, how strident, are likely to prove false.

The term he uses, to describe the universe of the self from which this authentic conduit to material springs, is your backyard. It conjures a vision of a specific, familiar place from your past. This vignette in your head, resonates as synecdoche, metaphor, and symbol too. Synecdoche because as a part of your childhood home, it stands for the entire place, your first neighborhood, first town, first city etc., etc. Metaphor because its image conjures images of other things, of particular objects and items, and of people — parents, parental figures, siblings, neighbors, friends at school, the bullies you endured, or the unfortunates you bullied — should you have been so inclined. Symbol because it conveys abstract entities — your formative history, your psyche, your place in the world and your perspective on it.

Michael Haneke — for me one of the best living filmmakers on the planet — once said: My students… pitch only the gravest of topics. For them it’s always got to be the Holocaust. I usually tell them, ‘Back off’. You have no idea what you are talking about. You can only reproduce what you read or heard elsewhere. Others who actually lived through it can tell it so much better than you ever could. Try to create something that springs organically from your own experience.

Then came László Nemes with Son of Saul…

Write what you know, we are told. Don’t meddle with stuff that lies outside your experience. Maybe, but then… how do we define ‘what we know.’ Is it a place, a backyard? Is it a community, a milieu, a culture? My own childhood was spent in South London in a flat with no bathroom, no inside loo, no fridge, no washing machine, no phone, and with a minimal backyard bordered by broken fencing with a rotting shed cobwebbed to the back. 49 pupils to one teacher in my class at the forbidding primary school down the end of the street. Then there were my grandparents, aunts and uncles north of the Thames with their glottal-stopped London patois. The smell of boiled bacon, milk stout, mustiness, of old, cloacal London itself. The family’s criminality, masked by jollity was kept from me at the time — just as well too — but it was there alright, lurking like a shadow denied its casting over the street.

Was the combination of all that that my ‘backyard’ then? Could a filmmaker coming from there relate only to tales of socially disadvantaged Londoners in grim settings south and north of the Thames? Or do you get a choice of venues? Can you pick and choose somewhere else, somewhere you might have lived later on?

My family moved to the country when I was twelve, to a village not far from the sea and set amidst heathland and forest. Now we had a bathroom, an indoor loo, a back garden rather than a yard. After a few years, we even had a phone. Eventually my Dad had a car, even if it had seen better days by the time, with varying degrees of success, it ferried us around. I was regarded as a ‘townie’ by the local boys, though they were kinder than the toughs back in London. They spoke with a Hampshire burr, so my London speech stood out. They would say cahnrrr. I would say kawnah. The word as written is corner. I attended the local grammar school where again the air of gentleness contrasted to the murderous machismo of my London grammar. And there were girls there, and I was hitting my teens… So might this not equally have constituted my ‘backyard’?

Or is what we know not a place at all, not living conditions, not a social class, not the people around us, not our position in society when we were growing up, not even our acculturation — although I’m not denying the impact of ethnicity and history on us and our sense of identity — but something more? Because — doesn’t what we ‘know’ lie within us?

It’s this that we have a sense of. It makes us what we are, even controls us if we’re not careful — and too often even when we are. And it’s that sense which suggests to us whether we can relate to a story, to its characters, to the questions it raises, or even to something we can’t pin down but know the film has to be made in order to find it. The instinct — the hunch, isn’t that our guide to authenticity?

Homer was never at Troy, Borges said. The towers of Ilium were not Homer’s backyard, yet didn’t he, or they — if a composite of writers (or she, if that was the case) — rattle off a couple of more than epic poems to weather the millennia? Wouldn’t Homer have had to relate authentically to his material to bring off this feat? We can never know, of course, how he/she/they connected to those stories, but surely it wasn’t because they’d spent their childhood holed up in the belly of a wooden horse.

So what prompted me to list details of my early years then? Isn’t it because I feel so strongly about those experiences? That backyard squashed between the thin strips of yard to either side — didn’t I post a photo of it at the top of this article. Why? It’s an element of myself, that’s why. It brings out emotions in me. Pain, joy, fear, claustrophobia, calm, loss, yearning, wonder…

Write what you feel! says filmmaker Rosita Lama Muvdi. Yes. Your backyard is what you feel. The same goes for filmmaking in general, not only writing, because if you don’t feel your connection, how can your audience feel the film? And when you work with what you feel you can work with what you don’t know but can imagine. We can’t know the past, more so the future, but if we can feel them we might bring them — or at least their approximations — to life on the screen.

It’s not always comfortable though, what you feel. Maybe it should never be — at least when you’re looking for a productive relationship with your material. W.B. Yeats, in his poem The Circus Animals’ Desertionwrote of the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Isn’t that the place that constitutes the backyard my former colleague was promoting? Our soul? The soul that, no matter how messed up, how disordered, how despoiled, that cries out for stories, characters, images, for form — whether skewed, elegant, or both — and for voice, in order that it might speak out, both to our fellow human beings, and to itself.

Because a soul that speaks to itself, speaks to us all.

Peter Markham January 2022

The Sentence and the Image

Photo by Juraj Gabriel on Unsplash

Who hasn’t been reduced to pursuing reading solely in the search for material to adapt for a movie? Novels, novellas, short stories — riches to be mined for narratives, for characters, for worlds. Sometimes you dip in, know this isn’t the one, dip out, move on. Other times you’re not sure, so read on before throwing in the towel, then move on. In rare cases you’re left wondering. Could this work? But you don’t quite get that throb of motivation and before long the book gets forgotten. Or maybe you just know in your bones — this is the one! Is the option available? Can you afford it? What kind of budget are we talking? What locations are needed? Etc, etc…

But what if you find yourself enjoying the novel, or novella, or short story for its own sake? What if you can’t stop turning the pages? What if you cease to care whether it’s material to be mined for a movie or it isn’t? What if you get to the end and wish it hadn’t ended, and all you can think about is finding more work by the same author? Might this be the point at which you arrive at a realization?

This is what happened to me when I read The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. I’d never come across anything like it before and just wanted more of the same. This book could never become a feature (maybe a metafictional hybrid) but it freed me from habitual sorties into literature (and sub-literature) in search of plunder. I went on to read novel after novel — and not just those by ‘Max’ Sebald. Before long I was notching up 60 or 70 literary novels per year (including a smattering of ‘genre’ — the Master and Commander novels of Patrick O’Brian in particular).

But as I was lapping up the pleasure of each chapter, each page, each paragraph, each sentence something unexpected started to happen. I found myself looking at Cinema, and TV in ways I hadn’t looked at them before. It was helping me watch them in richer ways. I started to think about the language of the page and the language of the screen. What are the differences? What the similarities? What can one do that the other can’t? And that’s before considering issues of the respective natures of the narratives that the different languages serve — exterior vs interior life, discursive discourse vs Billy Wilder’s clean line of action, variations in structure, in the way character reveals itself: through inner thoughts vs through action, in what is told and what shown, in what works as a story over 300 pages maybe and what works in 90 minutes or a couple of hours.

Every one of those topics invites a lifetime of thought. Accept simple rules and someone, some writer or filmmaker, some novel and film — or work of non-fiction transformed into a feature, such as book and movie of Nomadland — will come along to prove you wrong. Or you’ll watch Tree of Life again, or Killer of Sheep, or 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, or Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and think: if those can be movies, what can’t be a movie?

Then there’s the consideration of one language as it relates to the other. Words on the page, images on the screen…

Too much to discuss in one brief stab, so let’s consider just the nature of sentences on the page. It goes without saying that sentences are linear. Whatever the syntax, the order of words and clauses, and whatever the punctuation, you begin at the beginning and end at the end, even if the beginning is the end and the end the beginning. It’s different on the screen. The image is just up there…

Say you have a family gathered around a table… On the page you read through the sentence, the paragraph, to see, one by one, who’s there. On the screen you can see, in an instant, the entire gathering. Or say you have a street or a vista — landscape, cityscape — described on the page. Your sense of it is cumulative as you follow the sentence and its increments of information. On the screen by contrast, there’s a cut from one frame to the next and in a split second it’s all there: whole neighborhoods, streets seen from above, stores, houses, cars, pedestrians, cats, dogs or you discover are rolling fields, a river, mountains on the horizon. You just blink and the screen gives you everything…

Or does it?

Where do your eyes settle on that image? Which store, car, pedestrian, cat, dog, neighborhood, street? Do they settle on one field, one bend of the river, one mountain peak in particular? And if they do find a point that attracts immediate attention, where do they go next? Then after that? Is it a flash of light? Is it movement amidst stasis, a stasis amidst movement? Is it color? Is it sound — a dog barking, a car revving its engine, a river in full, flooding flow? Is it an absence amidst presence, a presence amidst absence? A clearing in a forest, a tree in a meadow, then to the figure walking and to the edge of frame that they hurry towards? Or does the energy in the frame propel your focus…?

No sooner have we registered an image, than our eyes journey across it, from one point to another — what’s known as eye-trace or eye-path. That way we get a visual ‘sentence’ up on the screen, even with just a static image. Or the camera can dolly, pan, tilt, boom, show one character, object, space, then another, then another — as it edits within a single shot.

Still, it’s not quite the same as reading a sentence. When we do this, images appear on what I call, ‘the screen of the mind.’ Yet when we see images on a physical screen, that also happens. We see in our mind what the images on the screen suggest, what the story we witness leads us to anticipate. So, here we have two screens, whereas prose can give us only one — that which exists solely in our heads. With two screens we can imagine what lies outside of the frame. With two screens, one can be for what is seen, one for what is heard. With two screens we can experience a absence: when we see that a character missing from a group around a table, we see them appear instead on the screen of the mind. With two screens we can experience a dissonance: when we see a character partying whom we know is soon to get bad news, in our heads we see them reacting to it. We could of course read such scenarios on the page, but we would have to see the described absence, see the described blissfully unaware partygoer on the only screen available to us — the one in our mind, the one on which we would also see the opposite images, the character present or in the latter instance, the character in shock.

It’s that duality of experience, the external and the internal, the screen out there and the one inside, and the differences and contrasts between them, that makes for some of the most powerful cinema.

But I would never have reflected on that if I hadn’t spent years loving reading sentences on the page and following the stories they tell. When filmmakers read as well as watch — and do both avidly — they become better filmmakers. Who is the best-read filmmaker I’ve ever known, ever taught? Ari Aster. Who is the most film-literate? Ari. Who gets imprimaturs from the likes of Bong Joon-ho and Martin Scorsese? AA. Who made Hereditary, Midsommar? The same.

There! Case closed.

Peter Markham October 2021

Not a beat but...

(Photo by Daniel Gregoire from Unsplash.)

On the page, it’s easy to read a simple action in a scene without giving it a second thought. A character sees something, registers it, and reacts. Another hears the doorbell, goes to their front door and opens it to see who’s there. Another hears a comment, glowers, and stands up from their seat in protest. Someone sad hears good news and smiles. Someone happy is told something bad and grimaces. Someone searches for something in a drawer—when do they find it? Someone else l rummages for a coat in their full wardrobe. I could go on…

I like to call such minutiae not beats but micro-stories. I don’t mean the term in the sense of a very short story under 1,000 words or so in length, how the expression is used in fiction. Even that would be a macro-story by comparison with what I’m talking about. I don’t even mean one of Félix Fénéon’s estimable three-line stories (translated by Luc Sante and published by New York Review Books—a present to me from my much-missed mentor in teaching Gill Dennis). Nor am I referring to Hemingway’s deft For sale: baby shoes, never worn (told to me by another mentor of mentoring I’m so much the less without—Frank Pierson). What could be more micro than that despite its dark chasm of a backstory? (Was it Hemingway who wrote it though?) 

No. I’m talking about how the brief steps of a moment in a scene happen in a sequence that forms a vignette of behavior, of reaction, and action, although not necessarily in that order—our interaction with the world at the most fundamental level. (Perceive/assess/react/think/decide/do.) 

I’m also talking about storytelling, even in this granular form, as a teasing of the viewer or reader—another kind of micro-story. We anticipate something happening, but just how will it happen?

New filmmakers often fail to tell these little stories. Even experienced directors and editors can screw up, missing out a step, an instant, a shift, a look, even several. Because these mini-episodes often take place between lines of dialogue—an exchange of silent looks, for example—they can be easy to miss. 

Say someone sad sees a group of children laughing loudly as they play. What’s the micro-story? 1. The sad person. 2. The laughter of the children. 3. The sad person looks to see who’s laughing. 4. We see the person’s POV of the children. 5. Back to the sad old person although NOT TO THEIR SMILE but to THEIR SAD FACE AS THEY THEN SMILE. 

In other words, we need to register not their completed reaction but the change in it as it happens. Think of how many accomplished directors and editors make the mistake of rejoining the sad old person only after they have already reacted. They miss that beat within the micro-story and as a result sever the connection of audience to character. By the time we’ve come back to the sad old person, they’ve moved on and we’ve missed THEIR MOMENT OF CHANGE—the granule that stories are made of. 

Say that after hearing the doorbell ring, A. opens the door to see who’s there. Okay. Say we are ‘with’ this character, in their narrative point of view, and we don’t know who is on the other side of the door. What’s the micro-story? 1. A, seen in profile—so there’s no chance of us seeing the caller—opens the door. 2. NOT THE CALLER, but with the camera outside the door, we see A again as they look to see who’s there. 3. Then, the camera inside, WE AT LAST SEE THE CALLER. 4. A’s reaction—happy, startled, relieved, horrified, whatever—and we see it as it happens. 

The act of perception, of what is perceived, and of the reaction to that is the story of our most basic engagement with the world. It’s very simple but laced with suspense—especially if for a moment we are not sure exactly what is perceived and if, for another, we are uncertain of our character’s reaction. By articulating that, by showing it, beat by beat, you are telling its micro-story. You are also teasing your audience—making them wait. You don’t ‘cut to the chase’ (in other words the character’s realization), you cut to the suspense, even if it’s only micro-suspense. 

Here’s another example of how a filmmaker teases their audience with a micro-story. One scene into Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, we find boy protagonist Little running from a group of bullies. He dashes up the stairway to camera right to a row of apartments and tries the first door he comes to. Does it open? Of course not. He tries a second. Same result. He tries a third, this one opens—and he enters. That’s a micro-story that observes the rule of three. Third time lucky, and he’s in, after we’ve been kept in suspense along the way. But as he enters, he leaves open the door’s outer iron gate—and that begins the next micro-story: 

1. A bully appears from camera left, not having run up the staircase to camera right like Little but one camera and entering frame left so that our anticipation of a bully appearing is met but not in the way we expected.  2. He runs to Little’s door, its gate swung open so that we expect to see him follow Little into the apartment. 3 He tries the door but finds it shut, unlike the outer gate, so that he can’t go in and can do nothing but bash his stick against it. 

There… no dialogue but two micro-stories within a scene.

Say a character opens a drawer to look for something. Don’t have them find it immediately. Put something in the way. Put two somethings in the way. Only by sweeping aside one, then the next, do they get to find what they’re looking for. An action is rendered a story, a beat a narrative. Show this and you make the audience wait for the reveal too. Make them wait and you make them believe!  

Micro-stories, the molecules that constitute the fabric of the scene…

Peter Markham September 2021

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

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

… Or why are you already making them?

Photo by Avel Chulakov on Unsplash.

1.     To make the world a better place.

This has been said to me more times than I could count. If this is your reason, become a front-line health worker, a community activist, or join an NGO and support people in need, just don’t cloak your ambition in phony altruism. Art that aims to make the world a better place is invariably bad what’s more. James Baldwin said that the purpose of art is to uncover the questions the answers have hidden. Anton Chekhov said that the writer should not solve the problem but present it. Movies are not about teaching us how to behave, they’re about showing how we do behave—and the questions those behaviors open up. On the other hand, much of cinema, though not all by far, surely helps develop our sense of empathy, which has to improve our engagement with our fellow humans. Much though, is also primordially savage. Whether that purges our primordial instincts or serves to desensitize us, we can argue about, but people who think watching movies can make the world a better place are not watching movies, not thinking about them with sufficient care. Cinema is dangerous, even when it’s Ozu’s.  

2.     To win approval, love, and fame.

If you want to win awards, critical acclaim, fame, popularity, celebrity you’ll be trying to copy everyone who’s been successful in such ways in the past. You probably won’t win approval, awards or anything else. If you set out on your own path but only so as to hit the big time and have thousands of fans, you will be an iconoclast under false pretenses. Unless you risk failure, humiliation, and court comprehensive rejection then the films you make will never be true to you or to themselves. But be warned! Even if you take that risk, that may not work…

3.     To become a member of a select club.

That way lies conformity of thought and approach, and an end to critical thinking. Be a misfit. Clubs are rooted in common assumptions and common thinking. Avoid them and their self-congratulatory coteries.

4.      To make money.

Try real estate, finance, banking, cryto-currencies, state-of-the-art batteries. 

5.      To be cool.

Please… No! Be awkward. Be gauche. Be unfashionable. If inelegance is in, be elegant. If elegance is in, be inelegant. Don’t get tattooed—one day you’ll look past it although I won’t be around to see it.  Maybe looking past it is inevitable anyway, should we be lucky enough to grow old, tattooed or not.

6.     To achieve your dream.

If you’re dreaming, you’re asleep! Martin Scorsese. 

7.     To avoid doing a proper job.

But John Ford said ‘Directing is a job of work’. So it’s still a job?

8.    To save yourself.

Now we’re talking! You won’t succeed but if you don’t need to save yourself, and desperately, your films will be boring. Art is best practiced by the damned, the doomed, the denigrated, the dispossessed, the desperate, the disdained, the doubtful, the delirious—or some among them. Saving someone, anyone else, by some other means, is a more noble act.

9.     To free yourself from your fears.

Again, this probably won’t work, but why not give it a try? Hitchcock said that you should put your fears up on the screen. His sole means of coping with them. Do that as well as he did, and whether you succeed in mastering them or not, you won’t be doing too badly. 

10.  To give voice to your people and community when that voice has been silenced.         

Yes! Do it!

11.  To tell stories.

There can surely be no greater motivation. The compulsion to tell a story, the drive, the need will serve you better than any other inducement. And when you let a story go where it has to go, whether you like it or not, whether you think audiences will like it or not, when you are serving the story rather than insisting the story serve you, your preconceptions, some message or moral you want to dish out, then you’ll find yourself on the right track. A good story poses questions, challenges common assumptions and thinking, makes mischief, conjures deep emotions, and reveals what we creatures are—perhaps in some tiny, daily, but profound way, perhaps with deep existential vision yet one that somehow proves all too grounded and familiar. A good story invites good storytelling. When you make a film you make use of the interfunctionality of dramatic narrative, visual language, sound, and performance to serve that act of storytelling. 

Master these crafts and you’ll discover why you wanted to make movies…  

Peter Markham  August 2021

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

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

What’s Right for You?

From a storyboard by the eleven year-old Martin Scorsese

You don’t want to go to film school? You can breathe a sigh of relief. You’ve saved yourself as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. But how do you go about learning your craft?

You have many ways—more than ever before…

1. Just make movies. Find your story. Write a scene, storyboard it—if you can draw—or at least have a strong sense of what shots you need, convince friends to act and crew, pick up your smartphone, go out, shoot, cut on a laptop. Don’t expect a masterpiece. See where you went wrong. Do it again. Make new mistakes. Recognize them. Acknowledge them. Write a better scene. List better shots. Convince your ever-patient friends to join you one more time. Shoot/cut again. See what works and what doesn’t. Do it again. And again. Longer scenes. More scenes. Are you telling the story? Show your film to others who don’t know the story and ask them to tell it to you. Find out what they understand and what they don’t. See where you could have told your story more successfully. Repeat the exercise. Show it to other others. Did the story come across more clearly? Now ask your audience whether they felt anything. Did the emotions you intended to communicate come across? Did unintended emotions somehow work their way in? Did your audience feel anything at all? Why any of these outcomes? Performances? Energy? Rhythm? Shot selection? Lensing? Lighting? Camera placement and/or movement. Cutting? Sound? Music? STORY? STORYTELLING? What went wrong and how might it be out right?

In other swords, learn by doing.

2. Just watch movies. Ones you love, find compelling, are fascinated by. Watch a second time, and a third. Watch scene by scene, shot by shot, staging by staging, image by image, cut by cut, transition by transition. What’s working? How does it work? Can you draw universal conclusions from these examples? Think of the world and story within the film. Think of the planarity of the screen that depicts that world and story, of framing, composition, mise-en-scène, color, contrast, depth of field, depiction of space (deep, flat, ambigiuous), of line, shape, and geometry. Think of the nature of the events depicted and how they’re depicted. How does this modulate tone? How convey EMOTION? Is the emotion authentic? What is the story of each scene? How have the filmmakers ensured that you understand that story? How is information conveyed? What in dialogue? What in image? What in sound? What in staging, camera, cutting? What is the subtext? How is that communicated to the audience? What questions does the scene raise? How do they engage the audience? Look at the ‘units of narrative’, as I call them—the scenes, sequences, maybe ‘chapters’, the acts or ‘movements’, and think of how they work both within themselves and within the movie’s connective tissue, how they form structure, and what that structure might be—three acts, five acts, many acts, something else perhaps. Think of energy, pace, rhythm. Fast forward to get a stronger sense of this. Then speed backwards. Listen to the sound design. The music. Watch without sound. Listen without picture. Think how all these elements relate to your own filmmaking. Which of these approaches might you yourself emulate? Which do differently? What do you understand that you didn’t before? What had you not even thought about before?

In other words, learn by watching.

3. Listen to/read the masters. Plenty of ‘masterclasses’ online, Q&As, podcasts, documentaries, books, articles. Be hungry! Listen! Absorb! Think!

In other words, learn from the best.

4. Take individual classes, courses, workshops. In-person. Online. From practitioners (who can teach). From teachers (who understand practice). Go to acting classes, to understand where actors are coming from.

In other words, be hungry to learn.

5. Read books. Filmmaking books, about filmmakers, by filmmakers, about story, dramatic narrative, visual language, visual storytelling, working with actors, everything you can get your hands on…

In other words, learn by being voracious.

6. ‘Read, read, read!’ as Werner Herzog instructed, in a Q&A at AFI Conservatory. And he wasn’t talking about books on filmmaking either. Read novels, short stories, meta-fiction, auto-fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, writers such as James Baldwin, Susan Sontag. Educate yourself! Find original thinkers and writers, the ones who challenge ‘common thinking.’ Consider what the language of the moving image can do that written language can’t. Consider what the latter can do that the former can’t. Consider what they can both do.

In other words, learn by learning.

7. If you can, visit a set but don’t be seduced by the processes of production. Look at what is happening in front of the camera and with it. Everything else is there only to make that work.

In other words, learn by observing.

8. Work in production where you can find an opening, but don’t get sidetracked. Know where you want to go.

In other words, learn the crucial difference between filmmaking and film production.

9. Embrace your loneliness. Make sure you don’t need the club but the club needs you. As the great Yazujiro Ozu said: An artist without an air of loneliness is very boring.

In other swords, learn by listening to yourself as well as to others.

10. Do all of this AND go to film school too?

In other words, learn by all the above means…

In short, not going to film school is as much a commitment as going to one. It’s not an avoidance of a decision—it’s a decision. In many ways it’s the harder option. You don’t have a structure in which to learn. You have to maintain focus, application, a sense of direction without instructors or curriculum to guide you. On the other hand, you are free to discover by yourself. You won’t be given hard and fast rules of dubious, even erroneous wisdom. No instructor will look down on you. But then teachers can be very good indeed, but you’ll never get to be mentored by one of these. You won’t have a support system either unless you set up one yourself—which you can if you find like-minded aspiring filmmaker contemporaries with mutual commitment to learning.

Remember though—the best masters are the best students. These are the filmmakers who never cease to learn. So whether you choose film school or no film school, you are only beginning a journey that is just that— not a destination but a journey…

Peter Markham May 2021

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

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Which is Right for You?

 From The Ronin Student (Director Angela Chen, Cinematographer Andy Hoffman).

“It’s not wha’ yer know, it’s ‘oo yer know!” my mother told me, when, as a callow youth, I yearned to get into the world of film and TV in my native England. To an extent, given the English class system at the time and our place in it, she was right. Even so, by whatever means you find to progress, knowing someone or simply being around someone at the right time, don’t you have to know, at some ,point something? If you can’t write, simply acquainting yourself with a screenwriter isn’t going to teach you how to construct the screenplay for the next Parasite. Nor is hanging out with a director going to transform you into Chloe Zhao! If you know a producer,  even if they give you a gig, it doesn't mean you’ll do a competent job. 

So it is “Wha’ yer know!’… But where and how do you best learn it?

There’s little doubt in general expressed in social media about the value of film school. “Not worth the cost!” is the consensus—from those who have never been, but also maybe from some who have. (Very many been feel they’ve rewarded by the experience.) The cost can indeed be considerable, frequently amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unless you’re blessed with private wealth then, and lots of it, the debt you’re inviting is not a factor to be ignored. It’s not the only one to consider however…

Say you are entertaining the notion of attending film school, ask yourself first of all, what it is you’re looking to learn and become? Perhaps you want to work in production? As an AD, a location scout, a production manager? So find an opportunity in the industry at ‘entry level’ and work your way up. Or win a place on the DGA program. The skills you are looking to learn can be fairly easily defined. They’re not in debate, and their practitioners don’t practice them in vastly different ways. Not so much skillsets, as set skills. You want to learn from ‘industry professionals’, those who know their stuff, which to them affords validation and status, and aren’t so concerned with the art of filmmaking as the machinery and processes of production. 

Perhaps you want to learn a creative craft that involves technical skills? Cinematography? Editing? Sound? You could go to a film school that is essentially a technical school and have access to equipment—hardware and software—to teachers adept at their operation, and to practical experience. The equipment element is less of a factor now though, or certainly for cinematographers. In the past, access to 16 mm, even 35 mm cameras, and later to high-quality digital cameras was a major factor in attracting the aspiring cinematographer. With the advent of smartphones and their flourishing use however, albeit with the assistance of sophisticated lensing, this becomes not so much of a consideration. Today you don’t need an expensive  camera—film or digital—to go out and make your own movies. See this: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/may/09/films-shot-on-smartphones-herald-new-age-for-cinema-say-directors?

It’s not only a matter of equipment though. You don’t became an editor simply by learning how to use an avid. You become an editor by learning the rich complexities of storytelling through the language and address of the moving image, by understanding rhythm, narrative point of view, dramatic tension, the flow of energy, the flow of emotion, and above all—the flow of the human soul. You won’t learn any of this merely by becoming adept at a piece of machinery, which is all you’re likely to get at those film schools that are little more than a technical/trade/vocational training schools. You need more. You need a true mentor or two, the kind of mentor you might find at a reputable film school—although you can find poor examples there too.

Returning to the needs of cinematographers—you would benefit from an education in the physics or light and lenses, which you can find in books, yes, but more so at a school that offers a specific program in cinematography.

The predominant reason for going to film school however is the aspiration to become a director. If that’s your need, you should consider the differences in structure and approach between the various institutions. 

There are the schools that accept all applicants and there are those that are selective—often highly so. In the case of the former, be careful. They may cost less but even so, your money may not in the end prove well-spent. Courses in these schools invariably conflate directing with production, technology, and the industry, while in accepting everyone, they create a general, across-the-board, contemporary mindset and sensibility. They may spend little time on any rigorous exploration of dramatic narrative and its representation on the screen. They may see the director’s work as happening only on the set, directing the actors (yet offer less than adequate classes in the ways of approaching this). On the other hand, you may find excellent mentors—some the alumni of selective schools who pass on the mentoring they themselves have experienced. But remember: the main purpose of the non-selective film school is to make money, not to advance the art of directing, or indeed the art of anything else.

Such schools may not be accredited by a reputable body or may have the imprimatur of organizations with less heft than those which approve the curriculum of a selective school. 

Selective film schools are invariably tough to enter. They are also more expensive, although some will offer scholarships. If you are lucky enough to get accepted into one, you are likely to find yourself among a high-calibre class—that’s if the selection process has been effective, which may not always be the case. 

These schools may be further divided into those that offer general filmmaking classes, those that,  focus on screenwriting and directing, perhaps producing, and those that offer discipline-specific classes—for directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, production designers, and producers. The disadvantage of the first and second is that in actually making movies, students will take turns to direct, produce, dp, edit, while there will often be no production designer. This results in most of the crew doing jobs they are not motivated to do and in which they have had minimal training.

At the discipline-specific school by contrast, every member of the creative team will be (or should be) committed to their craft. The process of production will therefore be closer to that of the ‘real world’, the sets more efficiently organized, the nature of the collaboration more productive, more mature. There is also the added bonus afforded by the possibility of forging working relationships with practitioners of other crafts to take onward into post-school filmmaking, even to entire careers.

There may be disadvantages though. The faculties of the different disciplines may hold to varying approaches, even contrasting core beliefs, which can lead to combative postures on the part of the students. Some teachers will even project grudges accumulated from their professional experience onto their classes, setting them up in opposition to one or other craft. Then again, team members will be paying the same fees for tuition so may expect an equal say in how a film should be directed, which can render the director’s work subservient to a committee, and make the process less like that of the ‘real world.’

A huge advantage of the selective, non-specific discipline school for the director, and especially the writer-director is that voice may be more encouraged and nurtured. The filmmaker won’t be expected to make compromises demanded by other members of a team. The drawback is they may experience very little filmmaking at all, a short or two of five minutes or so, followed by a thesis on leaving the program. Some schools do not demand a thesis at all. Also, because students are set on individual paths, and because the films they make are not utilized as teaching tools in the classroom, they are less likely to learn from peers whose contrasting approaches and insights can yield an education as valuable as any provided by faculty—very often more so.

One precious benefit of many film schools, selective or not, discipline-specific or not, is the increasing diversity of the intake. Make shorts by yourself, with your friends, and you are less likely to interact with others not from the same background. Studying alongside, and working with students from other parts of the world, other states, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations is a gift to any aspiring filmmaker, to any person open to learning. The riches of different histories, experiences, philosophies, and consequent insights, are as enabling as any outcome of lessons in an accredited curriculum.  

Another benefit: the sense of community offered by some film schools is a resource that the individual, setting out alone or with friends, fails to get. At certain schools this can lead to a community for life, to collaborators for life, some of whom won’t even have been in class with you at the same time. It can be a support system in the face of a fiercely competitive, rapidly changing filmmaking world, one that all too often fails to recognize talent, commitment, and voice, and has little hesitation in knocking you down at every step. In that sense then, as in others I’ve mentioned, film school can prove an investment in more than the foundation of craft.

Then come teachers, some outstanding, many good, others mediocre, some even damaging. Some teach to justify themselves, to hand down rules and regulations they feel themselves privileged in knowing. Some want to create clones, mini-me’s of themselves. These talk down to the student. The best teachers learn from those they teach. The best teach the student how to become a student for life. They don’t teach, they mentor—in other words they facilitate. And as regards directing—perhaps it cannot be taught so much as enabled. Beware in particular, those educators who want to “give back”. Sounds as though they themselves have stopped learning, as if they conceive of wisdom as some tablet of stone, never-changing, to which they have access and alone can read from. 

Where is such a sage monolith? What could it possible say?

Then there are the notable practitioners a film school may bring in for a class, workshop, or Q&A. Such visits may prove life-changing for a student, who gets the chance to asks questions directly to those who inspire them, and to listen to an informed discourse rare in the haphazard nature of most talks for laymen. Even so, teaching from celebrities may not always prove beneficial, since those who can do are not necessarily those who can teach. (You might argue the reverse in some cases.)

Yet whatever the approach and effectiveness of the teacher, there will be filmmakers in the past, or just arriving on the scene who made or make movies that work in a completely different way to the tenets the student has been taught. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the insights of the educator so long as the student has been encouraged to challenge them, to continue the process of learning in later years, and so long as they have been motivated to search out the iconoclasts, rebels, and savants who subvert convention… Teachers may be opinionated, which is fine and may prove stimulating—just as long as they don’t try to imprint their tastes onto their classes and as long as they hold the sensibility of the student with respect equal to that they accord their own.   

A final note when it comes to considering film school—don’t narrow your education, don’t restrict yourself to filmmaking, don’t be insular. The human universe is too huge. Study other subjects: theatre, literature, music, philosophy, visual art, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and so much more… 

Above all be hungry to learn!

The title of this article is Film School or No Film School. What then of the No Film School option? That’s what I’ll be looking at in Part Two…

Peter Markham June 2021

 (Citizen Kane, Director: Orson Welles, Screenplay: Herman J. Mankiewicz, Welles, Cinematography: Gregg Toland / Vertigo, Director: Alfred Hitchcock, Screenplay Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor, Cinematography Robert Burks.)

A friend recently introduced me to a book that claims profound insights into how artists set about their work. Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David W. Galenson https://bookshop.org/books/old-masters-and-young-geniuses-the-two-life-cycles-of-artistic-creativity/9780691133805 posits the notion that there are polarities of creative process, the conceptual and the experimental. 

The conceptual approach, Galenson writes, is the M.O. of the artist, writer, director who first gets an idea, plans their work meticulously, then once ready, paints, writes, or shoots and cuts it to its pre-planned perfection. No hesitation, no stumbling, little sweat—100 per cent inspiration, zero per cent perspiration. That achieved, maybe a few times over, they move on to a new concept, nail that, then again move on to a fresh domain. Galenson gives Picasso as an example, his work marked by distinct conceptual shifts that each changed the nature of his canvases, changing perceptions of painting itself. Others follow in the wake of such a figure, adopting their assumptions, techniques, aesthetic tenets, and manifestos. 

Conceptualists tend to do their best work early in their careers. Later efforts tend to be less sought after, less significant. Their reputations are as early bloomers. 

A filmmaker he cites in this respect is Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane follows the life of a driven, less than attractive protagonist through the wide lenses, deep focus, and low angles of Gregg Toland’s famed cinematography. Like Picasso, Welles’ produced his most highly regarded work, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons in his case, in his twenties. The terms ‘boy wonder’ and ‘enfant terrible’ come to mind. (Qualification: Touch of Evil came later.)

The conceptualists are the finders.

The experimental approach is the M.O. of the artist, writer, director who looks for their idea through the process and agony of creating the work itself, who lack any template to be faithfully followed. A term used at the film school in which I taught was NATO—not attached to outcome, which I always thought supportive of the dedicated student striving to create successful work but unsure of its precise eventual nature. Such an artist will have a limited sense of exactly where their work is going but will beaver away through successive versions, drafts, cuts until they have something they must finally step away from. Galenson gives the example of painter Paul Cezanne, who admitted he was never sure how any of his paintings would finish up. 

In contrast to the conceptualists, the experimentalists tend to create their best work later in their careers. They are the late bloomers. It’s their ‘work ethic’ that yields their achievement. (What in the world has work to do with ethics? Work describes activity, not morality.)

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving, said Lao Tzu. The experimentalist is perhaps such a traveler, with no fixed plans—with little idea even of their eventual destination.

A filmmaker Galenson posits in this respect is Alfred Hitchcock, whose greatest films, unlike those of Welles, are generally considered to be those of his later career (if not the ones of his final years). Hitchcock’s preoccupations can be traced throughout his canon of course—transference of guilt, son-mother relationships, icy blondes, oneiric ventures into the psyche, heights and acrophobia as sublimated dread of sexual impotence—but somehow in Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, Marnie they appear most organically encapsulated into story, character, and visual language than in his earlier films, impressive as many may be.

This is Hitchcock as ‘old master’, the opposite to Welles as ‘young genius’.

The experimentalists are the searchers.

Here I find myself wondering what a clear, obvious example from human history of the conceptual approach in terms of creativity and inventiveness might be. Perhaps the wheel. The wheel has to have been invented in one fell swoop. You wouldn’t come up with a single segment, see it not work, add a second segment, witness the failure of that, add a third and a fourth and so on until you ended up with the first ever complete wheel, one that finally worked. No. The wheel had to have come about in one conceptual leap (or revolution more like).

What, I ponder, might have proved a contrasting example of experimentalism? Think about Italian writer Italo Calvino’s insight into the folk tale—Calvino said that anonymously written folk tales took shape over generations. They achieved their perfection through the collective, generational mind of storytellers over the centuries, each adding, subtracting, shifted, re-working the drafts of their predecessors. Were it not for the tales being committed to the page and so finally, as it were, frozen in time, maybe the process would be continuing, never to stop perhaps, each generation imbuing such narratives with its own take.

But is Galenson being overly schematic? Is his reductivist, statistics-based approach adequate in revealing the process of the artist? Doesn’t the creative act require both a degree of conceptualism and a measure of experimentalism? Doesn’t the conceptualist undergo more than a few drops of perspiration as they set out their templates? And don’t they sweat the odd bead in finally executing their work? Doesn’t the experimentalist require the odd moment of inspiration, those instances when some insight strikes, when an answer mysteriously reveals itself as the artist is making a coffee, taking a shower, out for a walk after hours upon hours at their desk when the solution eluded them?   

When the solution came, it came, as always, through the back door of the mind, hesitating shyly, an announcing angel dazed by the immensity of its journey, wrote John Banville in his novel Kepler. Is that how these pearls of progress arrive, delivered by some dazed ‘angel’ from some distant, unfathomable place, the domain of wisdom whose messages to most of us are intermittent at best?

Galenson believes that a conceptualist can become an experimentalist, but an experimentalist can never become a conceptualist. The former may at some point forego their blueprints and move straight to the canvas—the literal one or its metaphorical counterpart—there to make the adjustments necessary to finalize the work, in the process discovering changes that blueprints could never have prompted. The experimentalists on the other hand need the ordeal of constant revision, the re-writing—which is where the actual writing happens. They will never change into a conceptualist because they cannot overcome their hard-wiring. This doesn’t matter, Galenson argues, because art is achievable through either approach.

While I agree that the polarities can indeed be found in particular young geniuses and old masters, and that one movement, Impressionism say, or Abstract Expressionism, may have been driven by experimentalism while the schools that followed were founded on the opposite, for most artists—and I would argue, filmmakers included—there exists more a shifting spectrum. Hitchcock, for example, in contrast to Galenson’s evaluation, did show the traits of a conceptualist throughout his career. He was especially prepared before setting foot on the set, leaving little to chance: Many people think a film director does all his work in the studio, drilling the actors, making them do what he wants. That is not at all true of my own methods… And indeed, it wasn’t. For Hitchcock, “prep” was as much process as the shoot and the cut, even more so.

As an experimentalist on the other hand, he also developed as a filmmaker, honing the exploration and articulation of his obsessions over the course of his career. From The Lodger (1926) through films such as Notorious (1946) to Psycho (1960), and on to Marnie (1964), his movies bring the power of the mother figure to the screen with ever increasing potency, not to mention psychic disturbance.   

So… what are you yourself? Conceptualist or experimentalist? Or are we all, should fortune smile on us, to greater or lesser extent something of both? 

Peter Markham May 2021

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

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

From Bringing Up Baby, 1938. Dir. Howard Hawkes. Cinematography Russell Metty

How do we think of function in the context of a story? As it pertains to a scene, a shot, a beat? What purpose they serve perhaps. How they work. The result they lead to. How they relate to something else. Their part in the connective tissue of the story. Maybe their place in the structure. Some point of no return. The end of an act or movement. The start of another. What they set up, pay off, invite, answer, challenge. How they move the story on. How—if they don’t—they merit inclusion in the storytelling. The emotion conveyed. The cognitive engagement of the audience. The bonding of reader/audience to character. An injection of energy. A reversal in the journey of a character, a change in the direction of the story, or the introduction of a new element. A moment of wonder, horror, spectacle, mystery. A contrast to what is to follow, which will render that next step all the more powerful. A seed of suspense. Another, perhaps contradictory layer of character. A new angle, new understanding…

Many possibilities. So much to consider. But common across the board lies the imperative of order, of organization, coherence, meaning.

What—by contrast—do we understand by the word mischief? Troublemaking perhaps. Transgression. Stepping beyond the bounds of decorum. Defacing the fabric of the status quo. Ripping it up. Heresy. The seeds of discord. There’s the currency of populist idiom of course: kicking ass, killing it, crushing it, badassery—cruelty-as-fun the thread, it seems to me (not mischief but conformism to contemporary taste). Accepted morality upended though—there’s mischief for you. There’s mischief as wit too. An amusement. A joke. A comedic flourish. A sly comment or turn of events. An unexpected juxtaposition, funny, jarring, ironic, startling, wrenching. An image blatantly incongruous. Tonal dissonance maybe, warm/cold, joyful/painful, celebratory/sobering. A surprise. A shock. A spirit of disorder, irresponsibility, craziness, freedom from constraint, anarchy. Maybe the narrative takes a surprising step from which we fear it can never recover. A defiance of expectations. Contrarianism. Wild inventiveness. Game-playing—with the story, with a character, with the reader/audience. A misdirection. A trap laid for that hapless reader/audience. A trick. 

The concept of mischief is itself mercurial. Does it suggest harmless fun, or something devilish—something innocent, childish, or something fiendishly contrived, something naughty or something malevolent? The mischief of mischief we might call this—the more you think about it, the harder it is to pin down its meaning.

The common thread though? Rebellion. Subversion. Troublemaking…

Totally unsuited bedfellows, one might assume, these dueling concepts…

Take a look at the ending to Howard Hawks’ 1938 Bringing up Baby. In this classic of the screwball comedy genre, Cary Grant’s paleontologist David Huxley has spent four years attempting to complete a fossilized Brontosaurus skeleton but has been lacking one single bone—the "intercostal clavicle." Katharine Hepburn’s Susan Vance, having found the missing item, brings it to Huxley, who, perched atop a platform next to the almost complete skeleton, tries but fails to prevent her from climbing a ladder to give him the bone. As she reaches the top, and the two at last profess their love for each other, the ladder sways wildly from side to side, prompting Vance to clamber onto the skeleton, which brings about the collapse of the entire Brontosaurus, leaving her swinging from her romantic partner’s grasp… 

Surely, in all the function-meeting-mischief episodes in movies can there be few other examples so perfect. The romance we’ve been desperate to see succeed throughout the movie is finally affirmed. The skeleton and its absent "intercostal clavicle" are finally re-united. But with what astonishing invention! No sooner is all this achieved, than the hapless Brontosaurus falls to pieces. Huxley’s goal of completing the fossil is snatched from him in a second—you can’t achieve your true goal without losing your false goal, the film seems to tell us.

With entropy comes new harmony, with collapse consolidation, with the disintegration of the old the birth of the new, with the break-up of fossilized bone the flesh-and-blood joy of love, with the demise of the insentient beast the triumph of the sentient characters, with the descent of the skeleton the ascent of Vance, with the peril afforded by gravity the rescue afforded by love, with loss, touch—in short, a symbiosis of opposites, expressed with comedic mastery through the language of the moving image… 

Mischief and function in one and the same event—story coming to life on the screen…

Peter Markham April 2021

 https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

How You Show What You Show

From The Man with the Movie Camera: Director Dziga Vertov, Cinematography Mikhail Kaufman.

Most social media posts, when discussing camera, refer to the physical entity, a device for capturing an image. Such posts are usually concerned with models of camera. Alexas, Reds — what have you. Filmmakers like to post pictures of themselves alongside a camera — una macchina fotografica, as an Italian would say, a machine, an object, a thing. Just as a guitarist might be pictured with their Fender Strat, a violinist with their precious Stradivarius, so cinematographers like to be seen with the tool of their trade. And why not? Theirs is a dignified craft, the camera its instrument and symbol.

Next meaning: camera as gizmo for navigating the physics of light. How it works in terms of lensing for example, whether tight, neutral, wide, fish-eye, macro, diopter, prime (of differing vintages), zoom; the relative depths of field and the compression or expansion of perspective each afford; how the stop controls the amount of light let in and how this affects the image. All of this is complex, fascinating, illuminating (literally as well as figuratively) stuff. The camera, for all its technical complexity however, is a tool for artists — cinematographers and directors — and it is that aspect which is the topic of this article.

There’s the action, the event, the place or object seen, and there’s the camera, the apparatus that sees it, capturing it as as an image. Obvious! you might say! Simple — what more is there to talk about? Actually, a great deal if we were to ask what the relationship of the camera to what it sees might be, and what possibilities exist for this precious bond.

When a camera is static, when it simply observes the action, the place, space, or object in an uninflected manner, perhaps in their entirety in terms of framing, with the lens at eye height, we might think to call that camera an observing camera. We might also call it a passive camera, a minimal camera maybe. It doesn’t do anything but look, doesn’t pass comment, doesn’t interact with what it shows, doesn’t reflect in any way the energy or emotion of what it sees. This camera stands back, remains neutral, dispassionate, does not impose. (The lighting of a scene is a separate consideration and may not on be passive of course, even while the camera might be — a topic I’m leaving to one side here.) This doesn’t mean the filmmaker is necessarily passive too — theirs may be a deliberate choice, perhaps to avoid passing judgment, perhaps to offer a neutral, objective view, or to allow for a cumulative engagement with story and characters on the part of the audience: you watch, you wait, but before long you find yourself drawn in, held for the rest of the movie…

When the framing is more deliberate however, perhaps not showing an entire event, perhaps seeing it from a particular angle, raking maybe, or as in the case of an overhead shot, god-like perhaps, or maybe even looking away from the event, or concealing it behind some foreground obstruction, obscuring it so that the audience has to do the work of imagining it — then the camera is doing something more than observing. This camera has become an active camera — not merely capturing the event so that it can be passed along by way of the screen to the audience but putting itself between the event and the audience by presenting what’s going on in a selective manner.

Such an active camera might at times also be a critical camera. What do I mean by that? Take a look at the final moments of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, say. Frank Sheeran, by now toward the end of his life and holed up in a rest home, is seen through a partially open door. Earlier in the film Jimmy Hoffa has explained to him that he cannot sleep with the door closed. The door must always be ajar, maybe as a means to escape or perhaps so that any malefactor lurking beyond might be spotted. By this point, Sheeran himself has become subject to the same paranoia, trapped by the need always to have a means of escape. Here the camera is a critical camera, I might also describe it as a moral camera — not one that moralizes but offers a moral perspective. The critical camera makes some comment on the film, its world, its character, perhaps counter to that held in or by one or other, maybe moral, maybe ironic, maybe both. It’s a camera that inflects — perhaps the framing is “precise to the millimeter” (Godard’s words) and thus makes its comment, or the juxtaposition of elements in the mise-en-scène is designed with a critical agenda in mind, and/or maybe it’s the camera’s placement (as in the case of that Irishman shot, outside the partially-closed door and peering in) that does the work of commenting.

The terms motivated camera and unmotivated camera are well known.In the case of the former, the camera takes the cue for its move from what it shows. A seated character rises and the camera dollies back to contain them in the frame. Someone walks down a corridor, and the camera follows. Where a character moves in one direction, perhaps toward the lens, while at the same time the camera moves towards them, perhaps meeting them, then panning to hold them in the frame as they now move away, this is referred to as a counter move. The camera is motivated by the energy of what it shows but chooses to move in a different, even opposing direction. In the case of the unmotivated camera, it moves of its own accord, independent of what it shows, its energy, its movement or stasis.

In either case, one might describe this camera as active or dynamic, as opposed to the passive camera mentioned earlier. It’s a camera that appears conscious, has an energy, an agency, whether of the movie or its own, motivated or unmotivated, is visible — unlike the invisible passive camera (although the judiciously motivated camera may indeed be rendered invisible) — and either collaborates with, runs counter to the material it shoots, or decides on its own journey.

An active camera, when entering the world of the film and its characters, when it’s motivated by or reflects its energy in some way, and when it connects with the emotion or visceral sensation of an event, we might call it a complicit camera. This camera might be going along with some game the film is playing, by angle, lensing. movement, framing, by mise-en-scène. In some instances, it might be adopting what I call hyper POV — placing itself in the most dynamic position, the most kinetic, the location of the most intense action, the greatest, most extreme physical drama. It might thrust itself forward to reflect the vector of a projectile for example or be situated smack in the path of an oncoming explosion. Less sensationally, it might relate to the narrative POV of one particular character, its progression of placement and/or movement the foundation for the cutting that will connect the audience to that character above any other, perceptually, in terms of action, viscerally, or/and most importantly — emotionally.

Ari Aster, the most literature-literate as well as film-literate student I’ve worked with, once reminded me of Nabokov’s term “ecstatic prose.” Might we not also talk of the ecstatic camera? The camera that weaves and swoops and soars. Might we also call this a flamboyant camera,the resource of flamboyant style? This is the very opposite of the aforementioned observing camera. It takes us on a journey rather than simply showing it. It has us tighten our seatbelts. We travel with it at our own risk, as if on a fairground ride. Even so, we cannot resist its heady voyaging.

And yet the observing camera, by patience and stealth can bring us also to a place of emotional peril. Observing/passive/minimal camera, critical/moral camera, complicit camera, dynamic camera, ecstatic/flamboyant camera — no particular kind is necessarily better than any other but when the camera knows what it is doing, when it knows what it is, just as when a film knows what it is, then that camera functions to the best effect. How the camera chooses to capture the image by means of relating to it, renders it not so much a gizmo for the nerd or the fetishist but an instrument of storytelling, potent as the painter’s brush, the eye of the soul and at the same time the eye into it.

Camera! Treasure it! Revere it! Make mischief with it! Hide with it! Reveal with it! Dance with it! Watch with it! Spy with it! Fly through the heavens with it! But know your camera at all times.

Peter Markham April 2021

What Matters, and What Doesn’t

With New Filmmakers (Photo: Meiyi Art Education)

Why do so few posts in social media filmmaking groups ask questions about story, about world, about character, about their representation on the screen, the forms this can take and the ways in which these can work? About the emotions a movie conveys, the thoughts, fears, wants, questions, suspense, conflict, joy and pain? Why should there be a preponderance of inquiries about this model of camera or that, this microphone or that? Why only the most naïve assumptions about ideas and story development? (I have an idea. Hey! Where can I find a proper writer?—Better to find an improper writer, yourself perhaps, or do you have only an idea but no story?) Why do these groups tend to devolve into mere jobs and crewing boards, into technology boards rather than forums for the creative exchange of questions and explorations as to what lies at the heart of film and tv: namely story, emotion, the human soul among other human souls, with itself, in the community, out in the world, then the means of conveying this—the language of the moving image in its multiple permutations?

Do novelists discuss their keyboards or computer screens? Are the best guitarists obsessed only with their Fender Strats and amps or do they care more about the notes they play, and how they play them? Picasso said that critics discuss theory while artists discuss turpentine but went on to talk about so much more than paint thinner. Anyway, isn’t this contrast false? Are theory and production the sole alternatives, courses in film studies and classes in film production polarities to exclude all else?

Doesn’t art have to work in some way before it can be distributed? And shouldn’t we discuss the different ways in which this can be achieved?—not a matter of going about theoretical analysis but pursuing the thoughts that inform the practice. Are we theorizing when we think about what the filmmaker needs to focus on as they create their film or are we dutifully exploring our art and craft? Shouldn't we be keenly aware of the domains in which a film comes to life, for example, and of how we might undertake to make each of those realms work to the best effect? Shouldn’t we reveal the nexus between dramatic narrative and its manifestation on the screen?

Let’s put aside the platitude about “overthinking” (ever the caution from the populist)… Let’s at last start to think!

My approach contrasts with filmmaking pedagogy in general, which I see as insular, limiting, and too all-embracing—a one-size fits all affair. I developed it during my time teaching in a graduate directing program that I came to head for eight years, and in the period since, working as an independent educator. Testament to its effectiveness might be measured by the success of some of my alumni, also taught by my estimable faculty colleagues of course: Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), Duke Johnson (co-director Anomalisa—Venice Film Festival Golden Lion), Asaph Polonsky (Gan Foundation Award—Cannes Critics Week), Zal Batmanglij (The OA), Eva Husson (Nominee, Palm D’Or—Cannes), Sam Esmail (Mr Robot), Drake Doremus (Sundance Grand Jury Prize), Amy Wang and Asher Jelinsky (both Gold Awards—Cannes Lions), Mattson Tomlin (Mother/Android), and the top three places in the Student Academy Awards won by students under my supervision TWICE—something never achieved by any other film school. I could go on…

How then does my approach differ from the norm? Here are some of the ways:

1. It distinguishes creative filmmaking from film production, procedure, workflow, manufacture, industry, and distribution.

2. It focuses on story, storytelling, and the language and what I call the practical aesthetics of the moving image. (Forget the style vs substance cliché! Time to integrate!)

3. It explores the language of the moving image, not the grammar.

4. It sees a movie as coming to life in FOUR PRIMARY PLACES:

a. The world of the story.

b. The planarity of the screen.

c. The hearts/minds/guts of the audience.

d. Its resonance in memory.

5. It incorporates references to the arts, literature, and philosophy, as well as to film and tv.

6. It seeks the crucial questions, not dispensing the ready answers.

7. It promotes creative Voice over prospective membership of any moviemaking club, over training the filmmaker to talk, think, assume, be like everyone else.

8. It understands story, screenplay, casting, preparation, shooting, editing and post-production as one organic, integral process.

9. It sees preparation as formulation and progression, not simply time spent readying for the shoot.

10. It teaches the effectiveness of the contradictory alliance and interdependence of function and mischief.

The following represents my approach well:

I had a professor at AFI named Peter Markham, who I really loved, and he said that filmmaking at its best is really mischief-making. That really stayed with me. That is exactly how I feel. Ari Aster. Toronto Sun. June 2018

I take inspiration from these two quotations:

1. The only interesting ideas are heresies. Susan Sontag.

2. The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers. James Baldwin.

I remember, how on Gangs of New York, on Stage 5 of Cinecittà in Rome, Martin Scorsese would walk from the video village to the set to give notes to the actors, and then back again—with eyes down, seeing no one, following in the footsteps of his assistant who would clear his path. For him it was as if the machinery of production, the camera, lights, dollies, tracks, ADs, set PAs, the entire crew, the cavernous stage itself did not exist. There was the film only, in his mind, in front of the lens, in the cutting room ahead, and finally on the screen before an audience and within their emotional and cognitive engagement. With every step he took, the “Fellini Stage”, its walls, its accoutrements, and its population melted into thin air as the fiction he was creating—increment by fastidious increment—came to life. I recall also his chuckles, his joy in the sheer mischief of it all. The invention, the wit, the freedom from common thinking. And I remember too his unremitting rigor, even if once, when an extra was injured, he was the first to stop the shooting, raise the alarm and ensure that help was on the way—dedication to one’s art need not preclude kindness or humanity.

For me, coming up as an AD provided a different experience. As a 1st AD and production manager I could schedule a film, lock down a location, run a set, anticipate a scene’s coverage, know the framing of a shot simply by knowing the chosen lens, direct the background action, anticipate and solve problems, and generally facilitate the process of physical production—but I was a million miles away from the film, its story, characters, and world, and from their representation on the screen. Only when I came to direct, and still later to teach, could I begin to pierce the membrane of the filming process to engage fully with the nature of filmmaking itself.

It is through this contrast in my career and what it revealed to me, together with what I came to see as the creative needs of so many of my remarkable directing students, that my approach to teaching filmmaking came about. Perhaps it’s not even so much teaching as working with—I don’t pass down tablets of rules or wisdom but together with the student, search for and dig out the questions and challenges that inform the effective vision, articulation, and execution of the story and the film.

It’s not about the set, the crew, the gear, the paraphernalia, about technical know-how, the culture of production, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging, the professions, the careers, the daily grind or the yearned-for glamour.

It’s about the film and the thinking that goes into it…

Peter Markham March 2021

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

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass