Or: Every Good Story Demands a Sacrifice

Photo by Mikhail Vasilyev on Unsplash

Just think! Shakespeare could have improved Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Othello by miles if only he’d thought to have his protagonists do some character or other the occasional good turn. The Greeks of course were the worst at this egregious omission. Why didn’t it ever occur to Sophocles to let Oedipus to do some kind deed, help some vulnerable unfortunate along the way to his nemesis? Millennia later, Nabokov then Kubrick screwed up too. Look at their Humbert Humberts. Imagine how much better Lolita, both novel and film, might have proved had Humbert x2 rescued the Hazes, mother and daughter from his despicable machinations. And that Alfred Hitchcock and his Norman Bates…? What could the master have been thinking?

Didn’t any of these folk realize that you have to let the audience off the hook? Make it easier for it. Give everyone a character ‘to root for’? Help the poor things make it through the tale, comforted as it progresses by the kind spirit of some good at heart protagonist?

Or wait! Did they get it right all along…?

Okay, so Abraham, at the last moment, spares Isaac — a cat in the form of his son — in what, for me, is one of the most powerful, resonant myths I know, a story that has long defied my analysis from the time when, as a child, it terrified me (and still does). But even in this episode, there’s a sacrifice at the end, one which Abraham feels obliged to perform. A poor ram turns up at just the wrong time, its life duly forfeited to the Almighty (who saves the boy but dooms the hapless ruminant).

We have offered sacrifices, animal and human, to one deity or another since time immemorial. Myths and legends have been culling young gods without mercy. Those sacrificed on the battlefield are regarded as heroes. We are fascinated with, even obsessed by the premature passing of youthful stars and celebrities sacrificed to the gods of fame. A chess player sacrifices a piece to win a maneuver, perhaps a game.

Sacrifice — from the Latin for making holy.

When a character saves a cat, as the well-known book tells us, they redeem themselves. Now we invest in them, so our moggy-protecting instructor says. When a character strangles a cat, indeed when the writers murders the lovable creature (because it is the writer who is ultimately responsible), they perform a sacrifice, often for the sake of a good story (which perhaps is rendered, in a sense, also holy). Okay, perhaps we then have a problem with the character (although not always too much perhaps, given the populism of mainstream bloodlust and badasserie). Such an issue though, may prove not to be an obstacle to our engagement with a story.

Behold (for example) the anti-hero! Charles Foster Kane. Tom Ripley. Frank Sheeran. Lydia Tár.* No feline salvation there! Quite the contrary: grimalkin corpses abound. No sentimental or redemptive get-outs. The audience is dragged kicking and screaming along with the movies’ shocking protagonists. Ripley even gets away with his crimes (although not in René Clement’s Purple Noon — here, Alain Delon’s success might reveal just too dangerously a perverse glamour in punishment-free murder).

(*Poor box office for Tár because of a toxic protagonist in a chilly movie or because she is a conductor of symphony orchestras. Methinks the latter. Audiences will go for malevolence but not for Mahler.)

A character doesn’t even need to be an anti-hero in order to esschew the practice of Felis catus salvation. Look at the Graham family in Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Annie saves no one, her attempt to bond son and daughter, and later to reunite husband and son with her deceased child turn out to both be intractably disastrous. Far from saving his sister from her nut allergy convulsions meanwhile, Peter brings about her cervical schism. Control freak husband Steve attempts to save everyone throughout but helps nobody. Do we care about a family powerless in the face of a determinist universe in which no cat nor indeed the family dog stand an earthly? Do we stick with the movie? Well, I do. I care and I follow the drama avidly, incapable of escape like its cursed family.

If the concept of Saving the Cat is rooted in the notion of redemptio, this iswhat we may wish for in a character. It offers us the reassurance that human nature might be essentially good.

But quite apart from such a bromide, is such reassurance really what story is about?

Nobel Laureate Alice Munro says that story should have a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. Munro saves few cats in her short stories — she’s too busy attending to the vicissitudes her tales demand.

It is the lauded Canadian author who here gives the lie to the facile cat-saving platitude.

Save the Cat? Far from it. A good story needs ample room to swing one.

Save the Story more like! And the truth it might reveal…

NOTE: No actual animals were harmed in the writing of this article nor does the writer intend that any creature — purring or otherwise — at the hands of any reader, should be.

Peter Markham March 2023

Or do we discover it anew with each film we see?

(Screen Capture from Distant Voices, Still Lives Writer-Director Terence Davies, Cinematography William Diver & Patrick Duval.)

There are those who know. There are those who question.

There are those who have nailed down everything. They take it easy as they speak. They know their stuff—movies and movie-making—have them wrapped up neatly, no doubts, no cracks, no mischief, no mystery.

Then there are others who never settle but accept that for every certainty they encounter, and any they might dare embrace, there will soon enough come a heresy to challenge it…

Akira Kurosawa, on accepting his Honorary Award at the Academy Awards at the age of 89 (not before time) said, “I don't feel that I understand cinema yet.’ Imagine! The master who gives us Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, whose canon ranges from Forbidden Fortress to Dersu Uzala, who mesmerizes us with Kagemusha, with Ran etc., etc., etc., announces that even after decades of indescribably astounding filmmaking he finds himself nowhere near to comprehending the nature of his art.

Many, mortals by comparison, fail to get even that far—as far as the realization there might be something to explore. They keep within the confines of production, of technology, of financing, marketing or distribution. Involved with filmmaking in one way or another, they nevertheless watch and understand movies as business people and consumers, bringing minimal curiosity into their viewing.

Others, versed in the language of the screen, seasoned in its craft, may prove the opposite. They watch and understand not as consumers but as analysts or critics, in the process oblivious to the emotion, the wonder, the horror, the devilment, the heart and humanity (or otherwise) that flows from the screen.

Both groups miss out…

Then there are those among filmmakers and film watchers who are by contrast fascinated by cinema’s vast, endlessly varied, unpredictable terrain.

They know they don’t know, that in order to know, which they never will, they must continue their journey with film throughout their lives, a voyage of viewing, feeling, thinking, of actively engaging with movies, watching and making them, of taking the emotional blows they deliver, their visceral machinations, their opening of the heart or their witness to that organ’s tragic shutting down, of thrilling to the language of image and sound, of composition and mise-en-scène, of color, line and other visual elements (what I call ikones), of storytelling on the planarity of the screen, and on the vibrant theatre of the imagination this conjures on the screen of the mind—the interior drama that as much as what we witness within a movie’s frames, possesses us.

Watching the crop of recent and current movies, the impossibility of ever entirely grasping cinema, its borders unbounded, its quintessence indefinable has more than ever become apparent to me. Perhaps I might even edge a touch closer to understanding Kurosawa’s state of perpetual learning....

The piercing youthful trauma of Close with its unassuming world and poetry of the everyday riven by tragedy, the widescreen philippic and merciless staging of Triangle of Sadness, the Bressonian minimalism of Saint Omer, austere, decisive, utterly captivating, the flamboyant visual dynamism of Elvis, the final, existentially devastating shot of Pinocchio, EO’s transformation of the uninflected visual discourse of Au Hazard Balthazar into Skolimowski’s new inflected wonders, the precise progression and juxtaposition of image and moment in Aftersun with its ultimate unleashing of emotion, the dazzling articulation of narrative point of view in Decision to Leave, the humanist camera and deft metafiction of No Bears, the muted, simple, effortless majesty of The Quiet Girl, the unremitting claustrophobia—both of space and narrative—in Vortex, the hyper-dynamism and wrenching drama of Athena, a veteran’s consummate mastery of material and tone displayed by the auto-fictive Steven Fableman—from one film to another, I have found myself rediscovering cinema again and again…

This serves to remind me: the screen capture I chose for this article points to an experience I had many years ago. I’d come out of university and by tubing and sprinting between London cinemas (movie-theaters here in the US)—The Electric in Portobello Rd, The Gate in Notting Hill Gate, The Everyman in Hampstead, The Academy in Oxford Street, The NFT on the South Bank—I was absorbing three movies a day, taking in the canvases of Mizoguchi, Renoir, Ophuls, Hitchcock, Fellini, Visconti, Hawks, Fassbinder, Kubrick, Von Stroheim, Lang, Capra, Peckinpah, Chabrol, Bertolucci, Rivette, Antonioni, Ferreri and whoever else I could discover.

Even so, as I worked more and more in production in the BBC studios on multi-camera dramas, I found myself accepting a different mindset—that of three, four, or five huge video cameras on their massive mounts peering into the sets and at the actors in them. Here, staged action was covered by this cumbersome machinery of recording. This was filmed theatre, one-dimensional coverage that dulled my sense of the journey of images that forms a film.  

It was Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives and especially this slo-mo overhead angle, its formal precision, its functional elegance, its devastating emotion, its visual and human poetry,  that one day was to free me from that insidious prison. The sterile video studios dissolved, their proscenium arch mentality draining away as decades of BBC TV video drama were exposed to me as one sad dead end of misconception.

The life and language of the movies I had found by dashing across London from one screen to the next, the emotions and amazement I had experienced, were back.

Cinema had returned!

These revelations have continued since. As they do for those of us who don’t profess to know all there is to know about film. The filmmaker of each good movie we watch, we realize, has got there—to new understanding—before us. We catch up for a moment perhaps, then move on to others whose cinematic grasp proves once again to be ahead of ours—as surely as those filmmakers themselves discover on encountering great work from their peers…

Such is the illimitable genius of cinema, a cosmos of screen and soul to render our understanding of it ever incomplete. We may content ourselves nevertheless that in its never-ending revelations there lies immeasurable reward. 

Peter Markham  February 2023

How the Shibboleths of Filmmaking Education Shut Down the Filmmaker.

Screen capture from The Quiet Girl. Writer-Director: Colm Bairéad. Cinematography: Kate McCullough. Character Cáit played by Catherine Clinch

Upon watching Colm Bairéad’s remarkable feature debut The Quiet Girl, its central, almost silent young protagonist powerless to act in the face of the situation in which she finds herself, I was struck by what so many filmmaking educators would construe as the film’s fatal flaw: it follows the story of a passive protagonist!

Admittedly, central character Cait at one brief point runs away from temporary guardian Sean in his cowshed while later, of her own volition, she fills a bucket from a well, but that’s about the limit of her agency. According to the story-by-rote instructors, this movie isn’t supposed to work, but…

It does! Brilliantly!

The Quiet Girl is compelling, profound, moving, and in the opinion of many, one of this year’s finest movies. And yet, for most of its length there’s barely a force of antagonism for Cáit to battle—her hostile father is neither seen nor heard from for most of the film and Sean is initially distant rather than confrontational.

Another current cinematic triumph is Lukas Dhont’s wrenching Close, co-written by Dhont and Anjelo Tijssens. From half-way through its devastating story young protagonist Léo—played with unflinching truthfulness by Eden Dambrine—is powerless to act in the face of his shocking sense of guilt.

Alice Rohrwacker’s 2018 Happy as Lazzaro was yet another example of a deeply telling film centered around a passive protagonist. Lazzaro is the village simpleton, innocent, unchanging, a prey helpless against forces of antagonism of which he is barely so much as aware. And yet… his oblivious presence proves transformative to those in the world around him.

So again… the film works!

And what of Ari Aster’s hapless Hereditary family, at a loss to act against the diabolical conspiracy that ultimately destroys it? Powerful forces of antagonism militate against the characters in this case but the doomed Grahams, in failing to grasp the nature or extent of their plight, have little clue about how to deal with the elements marshalled against them. 

Indeed, none of the protagonists of these films attempt to rise above their circumstances—another precept of so many movie-maker teachers when it comes to character and story.

Look, don’t get me wrong! Coming into the faculties of American film schools in which I have over the years taught, I’ve encountered many wise and generous colleagues, entering with them in working companionships that now, as an independent educator, I miss. I’m all the better for these experiences, as are their students for so much of their teaching.

But there’s a thrust in the pedagogy of many film schools, a culture of certainty, absolutism, and unbending rules that serves a misplaced wish of many students for easy answers, an approach tailored also to meet and satisfy accreditation bodies that tend to demand clearly definable ‘goals’ and ‘outcomes’. The no passive protagonist rule is one piece among the decrees of this mindset, the protagonist must attempt to rise above their circumstances prescription another. (Perhaps these imperatives are rooted too in America’s adversarial individualism—more a manifestation of day-to-day cultural assumptions than any inevitable aspect of cinematic narrative.)

And there’s yet more forbidding instruction handed down:

The protagonist must change.

Every scene must move the story forward.

Every scene must embody conflict.

The protagonist must face an obstacle in every scene.

It’s all about ‘rising tension’.

You can’t write a screenplay unless you know Three-Act Structure.

A movie must be of a single genre.

Why this need for safety in certainty? Is drama about certainty? Masterly director Alexander Mackendrick said that drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty. Can we then be certain about the means of creating this? Why should we be? Surely, what is important is not to build a film on the rigid foundations of received ‘wisdom’ so much as finding the means—whatever those might prove to be—of making it work on its own terms.

A story, a character can possess us with its truth, its force, its need to be told. Why deny this identity, this necessity by imposing extraneous tenets on what may be a work’s fragile evolution. Let it breathe! Let it speak for itself! Let it come to life! Let it show you how it has to work!

Chaining up story and character with inflexible canons serves only to shut them—and you the filmmaker—down.

The same might be said for a film’s directing. When it comes to educators’ approaches to this boundless art, we hear again so many pithy maxims:

It all happens on set. (No! It happens some time before that, in what is known as prep but I call formulation, and afterwards too–in the cutting room. Kieslowski said the most important stages are screenplay, casting, and editing—no mention of the set…)

Shoot and cut according to film grammar. (No! Do this according to the language of the film you are making.) Grammar is not language, language is not grammar.

Always match angles and shot sizes. (That’s grammar, not language.)

Don’t return to the same shot size. (Whaaaaaat?)

Never cut from a moving to a static shot. (Nonsense taught me on the BBC Director’s Course. Help!)

Don’t cut from a wide shot to a close-up without intervening sizes. (Ditto.)

No more! In stating the platitudes there’s a danger you will find them sticking.

What’s behind this habit? 1. Reductionism is easy. 2. We seek simplicity but reductionism is dogma, not simplicity. 3. Teachers need to justify themselves—and many do that by repeating fixed instructions. 4. Those in positions of power in film production want ready-made criteria in order to help them  assess the worth of projects. 5. Students see knowing the rules as a means of entry into the club of the knowing. 6. They see thinking for themselves as a barrier (as it so often is.) 7. No one has to actually think at all.

Once we’ve accepted and absorbed simple rules and regulations, we may feel we’ve arrived. But it’s not about arriving, it’s about striving. Not about knowing but finding and asking the questions. Not about switching off but switching on…

Maybe you should not seek to finish being a student so much as begin to be one. A student of the art of filmmaking, of story, of the screen—the conduit between story and audience. A student of the art of your film, of each one.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said (if I may quote a non- and indeed pre-filmmaker): Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail. 

Peter Markham January 2023

Life. Myth. People. Soul. The Real. The True.

From Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Cinematographer Robert Burks. Kim Novak as Judy sees a figure rise from the darkness.

Mike Leigh says films should be about ‘real people’. Presumably, he’s arguing against the confections of the mainstream, the heroes and villains of the Manichaean escapism pervading much of it.

It’s the ‘real people’ he cites, with their vulnerabilities, shortcomings, illusions, needs, and everyday humanity who provide him with the grounded catalyst for his work. He looks around, so he suggests, he observes, takes in, then brings that perceived reality to the screen.

Since his films attain such heights we would do well to listen to his strictures. Just watch his Another Year — to take only one example of his work — the rewards of such cinema are immeasurable.

And Mike Leigh is far from alone. Watch Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake or consider the writings and cinema of Abbas Kiarostami. Whether informed by observation of people, specific or general, or by ‘real life’ stories they have come across, these filmmakers give us films without which our sense of cinema and the human condition it reveals, would be rendered much the less…

While such dramas may be those of the everyday world, contained within the registers of our familiar experience, they may also draw on more extreme scenarios. Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Romain Gavras’ Athena show the communal anger and violent precarity of Paris’ banlieues with unflinching mastery.

The stakes in this canvas are, unmistakably, life and death, and literally so.This is cinema at most heady. All too recognizably human, yet narratively wrenching, formally kinetic, visceral.

What more, within a spectrum that ranges from the everyday circumstances of the oeuvre of Ozu to those explosive events portrayed by insistent social commentators such as Ly and Gavras Jr, is there to be said? Isn’t it this ‘reality’ alone that affords a movie its authenticity?

Let’s step back. With a genesis coinciding with the influx of immigrants through Ellis Island, germinal American cinema needed to find stories and characters to engage newcomers from across Europe, many of whom could barely, if at all, speak English. A mass of different nationalities, religions, cultures, and perspectives.

So the task befell to filmmakers in a time of rapid nation-building of creating instant, universal myth, with its gods and goddesses, its devils, its fabulation, its heightened realities, its revelations of the human soul.

Mythopoeia thus became the business of those early filmmakers — in contrast to contemporaries in older cultures with mythologies long since formed.

Once this nascent cinema had connected with a diversity of ethnicities and cultures, as it succeeded in doing, so it began to appeal to other audiences across the world.

Yes — Black America was ignored, denigrated, native America was reduced to enemy-hood, women were permitted minimal agency in filmmaking and as characters on screen, while, apart from caricature, Asian Americans were largely omitted.

Something in these movies though, a brashness, a primal drive, a resonance, came to burrow beneath the defenses of the older, settled, more sophisticated cultures of the immigrants, and of the countries they had left behind, breaking through even there.

The characters of that cinema were nothing like Leigh’s ‘real people’ — instead they were constructs of humanity incorporating a commonality to touch us all.

Our needs, fears, hopes, vanities, the universal stuff of our lives — the human soul in all its paradoxes and mysteries — came to the silent screen, continuing into ‘the talkies’, their larger than life characters honed and fortified as genres developed.

Westerns, Screwball Comedies, Gangster movies, Noir, Horror, War Movies, Romances — each were built on the artifice of worlds removed from the humdrum dailiness of their audiences’ ‘real life’. At their worst they presented, and still do, confections of minimal substance. At their best, they offered, and may do still, myths to nourish our collective psyche.

Where indeed, are the ‘real people’ in much of the world’s greatest cinema?In what sense, for example, are any of the characters in Vertigo — widely regarded as one of film’s most profound treasures — anything like ‘real people’?

Hitchcock, a petit-bourgeois, Jesuit-educated Londoner with a fear of women and a dread of intimacy used his consummate sense of cinematic language to render the turbulence of his psyche visible. The only way to get rid of my fears is to bring them to the screen, he said. (Did he succeed in getting rid of them? We will never know although I doubt it.)

Yet, out of this very specific, damaged Englishman came a cinema universal in its language and imagery, in its revelations of raw humanity. One, even if exclusively male-based, that has stood the test of the decades.

Hitchcock wasn’t looking outwards at the people in the street, in the community, going about their lives as best they could, for his authenticity. He was looking inwards. Into his terrors, inadequacies, confusions, desires, guilt. Yet somehow, this distinctly peculiar man found in the petrifying currents of his pathology the richness that rendered his canon universal.

Go to Kubrick! Alex the Droog, Redmond Barry, Peter Sellers’ Dr Strangelove — any real people among them? Go to the epic Westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawkes. To Rueben Östland’s recent Hogarthian Triangle of Sadness even. Truth, not mere ‘reality’ is what informs the vibrant, compelling characters of such cinema.

Homer, Borges once wrote, wasn’t at the siege of Troy. Homer was a poet of myth, not a war reporter, not the estimable Pontecorvo making the magnificent Battle of Algiers but the conjurer of a timeless universe of battling mortals, gods and goddesses who have enthralled, haunted, and graced the ages.

It was through those heroes and villains, those gods and goddesses that through the barriers of time, geography, and contrasting cultures we have sensed the truths of the human condition.

Note well then the advice of Mike Leigh, Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, and others but be aware also that there is more to cinematic and fictional characters than the reproductions of ‘real people’ — as these masters themselves well know or did know. (Farhadi’s antagonistic official in A Hero, for example, is a construct of the hostility the protagonist must face — not a ‘real person’, or anything like one, but a functional component of the filmmaker’s deftly composed dramatic narrative.)

Mere re-creation may bring us to a recognition of some specific reality. To the contrary, the artifice of a character, especially when drawing on the inner roiling of our souls, can bring us to the recognition of universal human truth…

Peter Markham December 2022

A Film’s Universe Beyond Character and Action

Photo by Phil on Unsplash

Some filmmakers have itchy fingers. An event finishes/An event begins. ‘Cut to the chase!’ ‘The story must move on!’ We’ve heard it all. The ‘industry professional’ speaks. Something must always be happening. It’s a one-size-fits-all screen in the cult of one individual slogging it out against another individual. ‘Don’t let up!’ ‘Don’t bore!’ the regurgitators stipulate. Right, and ‘Don’t think! Don’t feel!’ ‘Don’t imagine.’ The audience must be rendered passive ‘Don’t stop’, the sure-of-themselves-educator insists, or like the cartoon character who runs of the cliff and keeps running, only to plummet a suspended second later (if anyone remembers them), your movie will nose-dive, your audience’s attention span dropping precipitously with it…

‘The audience is fickle. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go,’ said Billie Wilder. Let’s be honest—there was one great filmmaker! Someone we would all do well to listen to. Makes me think of the Safdies and Uncut Gems… Their story on steroids. The violence of the visual. Energy extreme. We’re grabbed—and not only by the throat. We’re taken on what we call ‘a ride’. And there’s no getting out of the speeding, skidding, dizzying vehicle we’re in until it hits its devastating denouement and the movie finishes not with a whimper but a bang.

And yet… is that all there can be?

What happens before the characters arrive and the action starts—or after the action has finished and the characters have left? ‘Nothing’, you may say. But what does that nothing look like? What if we were to see it? The space and setting alone. The colors and tones, the shapes, lines, depth. The light, the dark. The left, the right. The up, the down. Does time pass in this realm devoid of human time? If so, what is the sign of it? Or is it frozen? Static. Stopped like the beat of our hearts as we perceive it?

Show an empty space to someone and they are immediately perceptive. They want to know who or what is about to fill it. (Abbas Kiarostami)

Who is about to appear? Where in the frame will they make their entrance? What is about to happen? And when? We have to look but are made to wait—and so the act of looking is intensified… More than witnessing the screen we experience it.

Or, if the action is over, and if the characters have left the frame, what remains? The echo of it. Of them. The resonance. The ghost of the event. The objects, the room, the hallway, the place, the vista holds a charge, a memory. And just as it lives on in the emptiness before us, so its emotion reverberates within us… and the mystery of it too…

Not the passing gratification of the immediate but the quiet trace of the moment.

Ozu was the master of this compelling absence. His ‘pillow shots’, as Roger Ebert called them, possess the screen as for other filmmakers, and for Ozu himself elsewhere, an actor might, through their performance. The master’s sense of composition and mise-en-scène, of tone and later of color, his elegance of shot design, his aesthetic of grace, of both harmony and contrast (a bright red kettle against the affinity of a room’s muted tones), serves to hypnotize and delight us even as the pain of a story’s drama lingers. We are afforded the privilege of bearing witness as no character in the film can. They’re not there. There’s nobody around, just us. No one to see us. Or it. The emptiness is ours alone. We are free of time, of movement, of being—almost. A little universe we have all to ourselves. And its invisible hint, just maybe, of the numinous…

There’s no there there. But with Ozu, who cares? Each split second of that frame is precious.

The universal principle?—Breath is as much a facet of cinematic narrative as breathless drive. Emptiness offers function also. It punctuates. Its frames build the stanchions of structure, the markers between ‘narrative units’: scenes, sequences, movements, acts. The measure of the dramatic narrative, the perspectives on the world, the ellipses in the passage of time, a weave in the fabric of a film’s visual language. The respite enriches—not a faltering but a replenishment.  

The empty frame gives what the page never can—our world without us. What we inhabit discovered uninhabited, like the haunting rendezvous of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, its lovers failing to turn up as arranged in a place that has no need of them, and had none to begin with. Pure space. Pure time. The pure presence of absence. Plenitude in vacancy. A sense of what might be us from a universe without us.

But the unpopulated image can, in and of itself, yield a dynamic. The tensions of composition with its ikones of visual rhetoric—Bruce Block’s abstract elements of visual language, their arrangement and proportions, and the frames within the frame—and of mise-en-scène—the placement of specific components, characters, and objects within the frame, these serve to animate the inanimate. Energy expressed through a geometry of form and significance that infuses drama into a stillness that exists only without humanity. A combination that takes the eye on a journey over the screen, our ‘eye trace or path’ as we watch a movie, a narrative of the frame that, for its duration, lacks nothing.

The voice of place, of dark and light, of thingness, color, dimension, speaking—as it compels us to listen…  

Peter Markham November 2022

Image of Harold Pinter from TheatreGold.

Once, at the BBC Rehearsal Rooms in North Acton, London, I traveled several precious floors in an elevator with the great playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter—master of the pregnant  pause. Nothing was said, although I wanted to say so much. Nothing could be said. Speech would have been banal. The pause, technically, was not a pause at all since there was no dialogue to either side of it. It was simply a silence. A silence within a silence.

Years later, in a Beverly Hills parking structure, I found myself elevator-bound with formidable actor Martin Landau. I wanted to say how excited I was merely to find myself in his presence. Here was a man who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock on one of my perennially favorite films: North by Northwest. Again, I was struck dumb, even if Mr. Landau was not to the pause as Mr. Pinter was—more to the oblique but piercing glance perhaps, of which there were one or two, oblique though not piercing, and not from him…

A couple of years before, I happened to be in Manhattan, in a store on Lexington on the Upper East Side trapped in a packed ‘lift’ (as we English call them) alongside Robin Williams. My fellow elevator travelers could barely contain their excitement at such shoulder-to-shoulder proximity to a celebrity and during our collective anabasis, one of them, in investigative frame of mind, asked the star ‘How is you get recognized so easily?’ To which the ensnared Williams replied, “Must be my face, I guess.” Excruciatingly embarrassed by the awkwardness of it all, I couldn’t wait for the doors to open so I could make my escape…

But why the elevator anecdotes?

In my childhood in working class South London, and later in the verdant Hampshire of my teens, no one knew anyone famous. Actors, writers, directors, musicians, artists—whether famous or not—might have existed on another planet, a heavenly body to which none of us were ever likely to travel. The dictum prevailed that what mattered was not what you might know but whom you already knew.

It’s true, at least in my experience as an educator, that those from family backgrounds of writing, teaching, the arts, the legal world, the stratosphere of sophistication arrive in class with advantages—having grown up with ‘the conversation’, or one not so far removed from it. (On the other hand, there can be considerable pressure for these so privileged to repeat their parents’ level of achievement—which can’t be easy either.)

But not only are other communities, even when marginalized, awash with cultural richness to draw upon, you the individual student—whatever your grounding—are free to learn by engaging with the work over and above with the artist.

My point is that you don’t need to know anyone ‘of note’ or be within the same milieu as anyone. You don’t need to be in the vicinity of anyone in particular. That, alone, is not going to get you anywhere.

What you need is to engage with the material of the filmmakers who excite you. Yes, the path to a career, even to making a movie is long and challenging but there’s little point in embarking on that odyssey if you don’t engage in an understanding of the art you wish to practice…

Listen to and read interviews and Q&As, sure, which can give the impression of proximity to a filmmaker. Feast on the insights and pearls of wisdom they can offer. Know though, that some of the most profound lessons you learn from those you admire are the ones that come through close, forensic exploration of their work, and which you discover for yourself.

Realization is more enlightening than instruction.

Proximity to the working mind of the artist is more revealing than social or physical proximity to their person.

You create that meaningful closeness for yourself. You make their work your fellow elevator traveler, leaving the artist to their privacy. You may then, in some respects perhaps, come to know them better than they know themselves. After all, what artist of note is not, ultimately, a mystery to their own conscious awareness? What they express most potently is not what they know but what they strive to know… 

Along with the work of the artist comes your ongoing engagement with the nature of the human soul. This nebulous but all-pervasive entity, present in all (or most, perhaps) of us, is there in all its contradictory aspects for us to endeavor to comprehend—as best we can.

If you want an elevator companion, there’s none more dizzying than this soul. Our needs, behavior, motivations, paradoxes, mischief, mystery, paradoxes, our transgressions, aspirations, flaws and failings, our understanding, our lack of understanding, our strength and our vulnerability, our vision, our myths and stories, our truth—you’ll need the tallest skyscraper for your elevator ascent (hopefully not descent) with this protean character…

Do not remain silent though. Talk, Listen. Probe. Tease. Engage. For they are your interlocutor as, floor by rising floor, you come to wonder at the subject and power of your art…

Peter Markham  October 2022

(Alex Wolff as Peter in Hereditary, Dir. Ari Aster, Cin. Pawel Pogorzelski.)

Not part of a filmmaking institution these days, I teach mainly the aspects of filmmaking I most care about: story, storytelling, the language and practical aesthetics of the screen, while I emphasize also the imperatives of ‘The Three M’s’—mischief, magic, and mystery. I don’t venture forth on the business, on production and its structures, or give careers advice—all of which I leave to others. Nor do I conflate these topics with the art of the filmmaker under the too convenient but unhelpful one-size-fits-all banner of ‘film production.’ (My career as 1st AD and Production Manager, successful as it was and my careers as director and filmmaking educator have involved entirely different modes of thinking, universes apart.)

Nor do I presume to teach the vital skill of working with actors—there are plenty of people who do that, some of them very good indeed. And there are plenty who teach this as though it’s all a director needs to think about (while, sadly, there don’t seem to be too many who want to teach anything else).

Yet it isn’t as though I don’t have experience of working with actors…

Time ‘on the book’ as an AD in BBC Drama and Films, in rehearsal in the North Acton rehearsal rooms in West London with John Schlesinger and Alan Bates (Google if you don’t know who they were), with Anthony Hopkins, with Anthony Minghella and Alan Rickman provided a privileged education in the approaches of so many different directors and actors.

Then directing Ralph Fiennes, then others in TV drama in the UK. Then, as 2nd Unit Director, watching Martin Scorsese direct Leonardo di Caprio and Daniel Day Lewis…

Even so, I offer no courses on the director and the actor. And yet, the more I focus on what so fascinates me — the filmmaker’s conjuring of the fiction, their manifestation of it on the screen, and that screen (and the speakers) as the filmmaker’s address to the audience through visual and auditory language — the greater my astonishment at what the actor brings. How paradoxical: the more I think about form and the more enjoyment this gives me, the more I’m in awe at how the actor — in many of the most telling of moments — comes to possess the frame.

This doesn’t happen only when they are speaking. It comes with silence too—more often perhaps. The character doesn’t even need to be doing anything, at least in terms of physical action. The actor just has to articulate the instant or the series of instants that take place within…

The great John Huston once said (and don’t ask me when or where—although I always remember his words), Action is in the mind.

What did he mean?

Perhaps he was referring to the narrative of consciousness, the succession of the increments of an inner, silent monologue—or dialogue perhaps, if we think of self as interlocutor to self. The micro-story hard for the screenwriter to write, the territory of actor and lens, the facial language and nuances of expression externalizing the interior passage of perception and realization, of cognition and—most importantly—of CHANGING EMOTION, of acceptance and of the decision-making that follows. The fundamental nature, no less, of the interaction of self with world.

Often here, the camera is still, or moves with respectful stealth, the frame determined by performance, by the eyes, the slightest shift of sinew, of mouth, lips, jaw, blink and breath. The actor brings to life a suggestion of soul and its emotions—muted but all the more eloquent for such restraint—that comes to possess the shot.

Frances McDormand gives a consummate example of this in Chloe Zhao’s flaneurial Nomadland when, towards the movie’s end, having visited her former home for the last time, she steps out of its back door, pauses, settles, scans the vista before her, absorbs what she sees, reflects upon it, pauses again for the barest instant, then, as she sets her jaw, takes her decision to commit to a life on the road… A journey of heart and mind to which the camera is subservient, the audience in thrall, actor and character alive, emotion refulgent. The face as the very canvas of being throughout these brief seconds. A passing of time to arrest time. In short—Cinema.

Elsewhere, in Ari Aster’s matriarchal conspiracy horror Hereditary, Alex Wolff as Peter gives us an instant of the realization of the incomprehensible—the most terrifying of epiphanies we could experience—after the thud of Charlie’s abrupt, brutal decapitation. Limpid, frozen, aghast at and absorbing of the horror at one and the same time, Wolff inhabits the trauma of his character as his performance dictates the frame’s tense dimensions. His eyes, almost imperceptibly, tearing up, the reflection of his car’s tail lights blood red against the night, a fleck of cold green-blue teasingly icy, Peter/Wolff’s gaunt demeanor, rigid in shock, generates a rush of terror that freezes the soul. We feel a churning together with an intensity of arrested time that puts us at the mercy of the actor…

Wolff controls the space, the passage of time, and the pitch of emotion within the frame.

Disclaimer: I, Peter, was privileged to teach, or rather work with Ari Aster in my class. The thrill of seeing his mastery up on the screen, and the mastery of Alex Wolff as Peter he unleashes, beats everything. (My childhood favorite tune, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf perhaps presaged the coincidental [?] concurrence—who knows?)

Look for these instances when you watch a movie! Now bring them to life in your own work…

Peter Markham September 2022

(Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash.)

· Know your story.

· Tell your story.

· Do what works.

· Be mischievous.

· Discover!

· Don’t think like everyone else.

· Don’t talk like everyone else.

· Join no club.

· Learn from the wisdom of the generations.

· Learn from those unlike yourself.

· Listen to the masters.

· Hear the questions of the neophytes. They are the best.

· Seize your own questions. Ask them!

· The student aspires to be the master. The master learns to be the student.

· Don’t rebel against the past, rebel against the present.

· Put what hurts up on the screen.

· Conjure your fiction, address your audience.

· Embrace uncertainty.

· Beware common thinking.

· Beware the ‘industry professional’.

· Deplore celebrity. Respect people.

· Read! — literary fiction, essays, philosophy.

· Feel! Acknowledge your emotions.

· Look! Outside. Inside.

· BELIEVE IN CINEMA!

· Analyze, intuit, dare, explore, challenge, realize.

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

· Style comes from the soul.

· Don’t be vague — be precise. Render your ambiguities exact.

· Don’t ‘cut to the chase’, cut to the suspense…

· Tension over conflict.

· Drama as journey. Drama as ambush. Drama as stealth.

· Dissonance divides your viewer — for which they will thank you.

· Don’t please everyone. Welcome detractors.

· Subvert.

· Defy your audience’s moral righteousness.

· Defy.

· The integrity of vulgarity. The sublimity of elegance.

· Open the heart.

· Reveal the soul.

· ‘Film production’ is an industrial, not a creative process.

· Filmmaking is a creative process.

· ‘Camera’ as concept and practice, not brand or model.

· Camera as servant. Camera as master.

· Seek simplicity, not reduction.

· Emotion. Cognition. Visceral/Neural/Enteric/Tactile Sensation. Vision.

· Mischief. Magic. Mystery.

· The unknowable in the familiar.

· The aesthetics of the screen are practical.

· Cinema can never be explained.

· Know composition. Know mise-en-scène.

· ‘Coverage’ of a scene is not storytelling.

· Film ‘grammar’ is not film language.

· A size, a framing, an angle relates to other sizes, framings, angles.

· Vista to vignette.

· The flow of energy.

· The power of ‘negative’ space.

· Screenplay. Casting. Editing. (Kieślowski.)

· ‘Prep’ is a misnomer — it’s already happening!

· No, it doesn’t all happen on the set.

· Know your intentions.

· Let your film take you where it will.

· Your film works when it outgrows you.

· Subscribe to no agenda.

· Don’t be ‘well-meaning’.

· Never preach.

· Draw from your community, time, and place.

· Step outside them.

· All fictional worlds are imagined.

· All fictional worlds derive from experience.

· The specific is universal.

· The general is nebulous.

· Realize the moment.

· The actor brings the moment to life.

· You bring the moment to life.

· Support, challenge the actor.

· Every actor is different.

· Spontaneity in performance

· Artifice in performance.

· Mastery of the actor.

· Naiveté of the actor.

· Immediacy. Distance.

· Cassavetes. Bresson.

· Language of the actor. Language of the screen.

· Listen to the actor, especially when you are certain.

· The actor tells the micro-story.

· You tell the micro-story.

· Territory and its boundaries — the primal currency of staging.

· Be a diplomat, a collaborator, a politician, be cunning, be compassionate.

· Be parental. Be a child.

· Be strong. Be vulnerable.

· Don’t play the simpleton.

· You are responsible. Own it.

· Persistence, resilience, application, stamina, motivation, humility.

· Process not product.

· Underthinking is the problem, not overthinking.

· Overthinking is not knowing how to think effectively.

· Never abandon enquiry.

· The partnership of mind, heart, and gut.

· The symbiosis of psyche and universe.

· Trust yourself, not your ego.

· You might be wrong.

· The gift of doubt.

· Bring your mentors inside, then challenge them!

· Look for what lies in front of your nose.

· Seek the truth.

· Make mistakes and learn.

· Stay young. Grow old.

· Diligence!

· From big to small, to big, to small, to big, to small, to big, and so on, and so on…

· Filmmaking the fabric of your hours.

· Keep those in your life close.

· Love!

· Watch cinema!

· Do it!

· Now!

Peter Markham September 2022

(Screenshot: North by Northwest. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Cinematography: Robert Burks. Rock face: Robert Boyle. Shoe, sock, glove: Harry Kress. Hands: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint.)

‘Drama’, commented Alexander Mackendrick, ‘is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.’ How often, here in the US, have we been told that drama in the movies is about conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict was all I heard over the years of my film school teaching. Not from the students but from the faculty. If a short wasn’t pumped up with conflict, with wall to wall conflict, woe betide the filmmakers! Then came a fellow European. (Despite the iniquitous, malicious Brexit, I regard my English and Brit self as European—as my ancestry, from Spain to the Ukraine, attests). Equipped with the intellect my colleagues so vehemently opposed, this new teacher maintained that the drama of a film is a question not of simply of conflict but of friction. At last! I thought, I have the word, the language, the concept, and so—freed from the tyranny of conflict—I breathed a sigh of relief…

If conflict necessitates two opposing forces, friction suggests instead some manner of mismatch. Of goal or aim perhaps, of emotion, of desire, cognition, approach, need, character. Not the simple punch-up, literal or figurative that seems the imperative of conflict but a universe of possibilities. Got it! I thought, Home and dry…

Yet the journey was far from over—as, indeed, it never will be—for a couple of years later, a student at the school, Chinese, brilliant, further explained to me what the captivating, irresistible, addictive quality of drama in cinema is about. Tension! they said, as I eagerly seized on this fresh draft of enlightenment. Tension! Now I have it. I’d known of the Mackendrick comment since I’d read Paul Cronin’s compilation of his teachings at CalArts: On Film-making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director but this one word encapsulated his insight.

Anticipation + Uncertainty = Tension. The math of drama. (Wait… I’m no reductionist. There’s more to come…)

What I had suspected all along was at last becoming clear. The conflict that so many American filmmaking educators see as requisite, is the consequence of our nation’s cultural foundations. Where adversarial individualism is the creed on which all else is constructed, the mantra without which there can be no ‘freedom’, you will, sooner or later, end up with conflict. No escaping it. Fistfights, firefights more so—the gun as quintessential American fetish and instrument of individualist agency, catalyst and culmination of ‘action’, of story, of denouement. This Cinema of Conflict can be understood as a front for cultural nativism. The Cinema of Tension, on the other hand, is universal…

How is tension manifested? Firstly, in the realm ‘beyond the screen.’ The fictional story, world, characters, situations, events we come to believe in as we watch a movie. In the suspense of the dramatic narrative, in wondering what will happen next. Looking at the frame here from North by Northwest—will Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill grab Eva Marie Saint’s Eve Kendall’s gloved hand and prevent her falling to her death? Or not? This cliffhanger—is it about conflict? Sure, it happens in the context of conflict—Martin Landau’s Leonard and the goons serving James Mason’s villainous Philip Vandamm are pursuing our fleeing couple. But this moment, so consummately captured within the frame, is tense indeed, is Mackendrick’s anticipation mingled with uncertainty. (The artist creates. The critic defines. Mackendrick—an American who grew up in Scotland who saw far beyond ‘conflict’—was, it seems, both.)

That last point, ‘within the frame’, reveals another manifestation of tension—the nature of the frame and how what I call its practical aesthetics convey information, emotion, and physical sensation of one form or another. This prompts another word and concept vital to our consideration, one I heard stressed by Iranian master filmmaker and teacher Asghar Farhadi, that again takes us past the simplistic conflict—and that is: Contrast.

Look at the frame in question closely. There’s up, there’s down. There’s fear, there’s hope. A gloved hand, an ungloved hand, one female, one male. The foot, the hands. There’s light, there’s dark. Human presence, mineral indifference. A close rock face, a sliver of distant sky. The augury of contact, the omen of severance. The potential for salvation, the threat of mortality. Continuity or finality… The defiance of, or the succumbing to… gravity. Will there be a rising, an anabasis, or a falling, a katabasis?

Let’s add another word, related of course to contrast: Dissonance. The glove and the loafer, hardly suitable for rock-climbing! Human-made items against a natural background. Comfortable social life juxtaposed with primal struggle. Sophistication with autochthony. The ephemeral with the permanent…

In the shot’s construction meanwhile, in its composition, the diagonal formed by the reaching fingers renders the vectors of visual tension both lateral and vertical, tautening the rectangular frame as it holds us—incapable of looking away—helpless in its timeless instant...

With the shot’s tactile, primordial promise of touch comes also the sensual and the sexual, and the anticipation, the tension this brings. Thus, Hitchcock heats up his suspense. Visionary of cinema Michael Haneke has commented that all storytelling, whatever its genre, its emotional terrain, its stakes, must incorporate suspense. Cut to the chase! Say the filmmaking educators. No! Cut to the suspense. Hold it! Prolong it! ­Render it unbearable! (Tarantino has this down, and excruciatingly so…)

So, what do we have?…conflict, friction, tension, contrast, dissonance, their visual articulation, suspense… Anything else fundamental to the workings of a movie?

A couple of my alumni, again Chinese, observed that, as they see it, cinema is not so much about conflict as it is about a vibe. Imagine any American filmmaking educator saying such a thing! A vibe? They’d be out on their ear! Asian cinema might work in such a nebulous manner, the cultural nativist might suggest, but its American counterpart?  Well…yes. It might indeed. Think of Aristotle’s eudaimonia, his word for which there appears to be no direct translation but seems to approximate to the ineffable engagement (pleasure?) we take in following a story, a journey incorporating emotions often far removed from delight: anxiety, fear, terror even, sadness, pity, grief, anger, as well as joy—in short the spectrum of human feeling. Then there comes the distinct gratification afforded by the visual language of the screen—composition and its elements of space, shape, proportion, line, tone (light to dark), and color palette (what I call ikones), and mise-en-scène, the placing of specific elements, characters, objects, segments of an environment within the frame. Even while watching harrowing events, one’s visual sensibility revels in the filmmaker’s articulation of their canvas and how it relates to the narrative…

Let’s add awe, wonder, spectacle to our criteria. The flow of energy within the shot, across the cut and the transition. The mesmerism we experience before vista, vignette, the play of light, the meshing of sound, music, and image. The frissons prompted by misdirection across the vectors of the frame, over the axes of the drama, changing from moment to moment.

So…the eudaimonia offered by the narrative and its visual representation—might we not see this as the vibe my alumni described?

Finally (almost), let’s not forget The 3 Ms. Mischief. Magic. Mystery. So much more compelling than the simple, ongoing fracas demanded by the dogmatic conflict-ist. The properties of myth, the imagination, the subconscious. The quintessentials of the soul—without which there can be no cinema…

Let’s end though, with the words of Yazujiro Ozu, taking us from the metaphysical to the vibe of the grounded everyday:

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

That simplicity, the modest register of daily interaction, is maybe the most difficult drama of all to achieve. The cliffhanger of our quotidian exchanges perhaps? And the uncertain anticipation that informs our experience of being alive—one instant to the next…

Peter Markham August 2022

…with the most demanding interlocutors…

Photo by Geoffrey Moffet on Unsplash

As you make your film, who is it that you talk to? Okay, so there are the conversations with the writer (if they’re not you), plus those in prep, during production, in post—in other words the constant, ongoing, to-and-fro conversations with your team and their departments, with the actors, VFX, SFX, stunt arrangers, fight arrangers, producers, colorists, sound designers, and so on and so forth—and I mean no respect to those I haven’t specified and those I am, unforgivably, forgetting. Then there are the conversations with those to whom you approach for counsel—your friends, your fellow practitioners, your significant other. Yet, although the first category of exchanges are essential, while the second frequently prove invaluable and you would be nowhere without them, they are not the focus of this article...

I'm talking here about the conversations with your two most challenging interlocutors. Or That is what they should be. One is on the inside, the other, the outside. You need to be engaged with both, need to allow them to challenge you, question you, bother you, counter you, excite you, inspire you, embolden you, and even then, when you think you know all you need to know and there's nothing more to be considered, you need to allow them to stop you from shutting yourself down. Because it’s this pair of implacably awkward customers who will serve to wake you up and render your process fit for purpose.

Let's take the first one. The interlocutor you fear the most. The one you constantly beg to shut up. The one who torments you with your doubts, your fears, your uncertainties, insecurities, bewilderments, and indecisiveness. That troublesome inner voice and the recalcitrant self behind it...

 You.

 Talk about a shape shifter! One moment this You of yours is wrong, the next, right. How do you tell which is which? A location works, or it doesn't. You’ve found the actor for the part, or you haven't. A scene is necessary, or it isn't. You have the time in the schedule to shoot a sequence, or you don't. It never stops... Should this be an over the shoulder or a single? How close to, or far from the actor’s eye-line to place the camera? You take a decision and that maddening Youdemands the counter option. Is it instinct you’re hearing, or is it sabotage? There's your knowledge of craft and there’s your intuition. There’s your intelligence, and your gut. What you've learned and what you feel. Your frontal lobes, your amygdala. Your analysis, your hunch. Which to go with? 

Perhaps, on occasions, you get lucky. You and your You agree. Even so, you may feel you need to double check but your You assures you that the decision you’re about to take is the correct one. But perhaps the element of doubt continues to hiss its subliminal whisper—as if within your You, there is yet another voice, an interlocutor lurking within your interlocutor, more Yous within Yous, Russian doll style. No. That way madness lies, not to mention the inner cacophony that leads to it...

Ignore you're inner Yous at your peril, but surrender to them and, equally, it could land you in trouble. You yourself are taking into account circumstances, context, practicalities, considerations of which your militant inner chatterbox seems blithely ignorant or doesn't give a monkey’s about. Perhaps what you’re hearing are old dogmas, obsolete assumptions you haven't quite managed to shake off. You tell yourself it's time to move on. The decisions you take now, and the reasons for taking them, you insist, once they are proved right, will then become the mindset of your future inner voice—until they, in turn, are replaced by fresh insights. On the other hand, your You, unencumbered by daily pressures, is maybe offering sound guidance after all, seeing more clearly what is truthful and what is not than you can—knowing in its gut, the gut within your gut, what is going to work despite your reservations to the contrary.

 Not easy, any of it, but without this first conversation, where would you be? 

Second conversation. The one you have with your audience. Not the actual folk you hope are going to watch your movie but the faceless individuals you imagine, the phantasms responding to every cut, every element of direction—even those of which any regular audience will be only subliminally aware (if aware at all). In a classroom in Beijing I once saw a poster pinned to the wall: Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. underneath him, the words: When I make a film I'm the audience. Martin Scorsese.

In other words—imagine yourself as your audience watching the scene you are shooting or cutting. Not only do you formulate the components of the screen as an address to the viewer but as you do this—and if you're not doing it you're not doing your job—you are putting yourself in their imaginary place as they respond to that address. Are they/I engaged or bored? Do they/I understand what is going on? If they/I—let’s say we—don't understand, are we confused or have we registered the question the scene poses? Are we bewildered or do we get the ambiguity? What do we feel? What do we know? What do we think is going to happen next? What do we want to happen? What do we fear will happen? What do we want a character to do? Or not want them to do? What do we dread them doing but need to see them do? What will happen to them or perhaps to others if they do it? Or they don’t? What was it that happened in the past that we don't know but the characters do? Does this moment seem too good to be true? Could it be the calm before the storm? Why aren't the characters as concerned or worried as we are? Why are they more concerned? What do they know that we don't? Do they know what we thought they didn't? Do they know more than we thought? Who knows best, us or them, this character or that?

Most important of all: do we care, or have we switched off? Or have we forgotten about the rest of the world and is this all we want in life from this moment—to be watching this film, following this story, these characters, alive to their emotions and to ours? Whether we like it or not! Whether it's comfortable or not! Do we just have to keep watching? For the next moment, the next, the one after that, and all that follow... 

This is your second, simultaneous conversation. Sometimes, of course, you won't know what your audience is going to feel. There are times when you don't know yourself. All you know is that there is something intriguing about what’s going on in your film, a sense of significance, of promise or foreboding. You just want to tell the story. You don't know what emotions, what reactions it will prompt. You just have to tell it. And let it speak for itself, which you know it will... 

But if you don't imagine yourself as your audience, your actual audience may experience your film in a very different way from the one you intended. It may misunderstand your story, telling itself another, one very different from yours. It may laugh when it's supposed to cry, or cry when it's supposed to laugh. It may miss what makes you want to make your film, whether you can explain it or not. You may even find that your audience is watching another film, conjured by itself. Better by far that you make sure it’s watching your movie. 

Your two indispensable conversations. Into your film and out from it... 

Peter Markham February 2022