The primal shock of sudden movement.

Screen capture from Hereditary (2018), Writer-Director Ari Aster, Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski.

When I looked for a screenshot of the nun’s appearance as she first rises into frame at the end of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, I found myself getting nowhere. I couldn’t find a static frame in which this ominous figure begins to be remotely discernible.

I tried later shots, as James Stewart’s Scottie glances over and the film cuts back to the nunnish newcomer, but then she’s already there and simply seeing her without having first succumbed to the shock of her abrupt rise into shot, conjures little horror.

I couldn’t understand. Why, no matter how many times I’d watched this masterpiece, had I experienced the most seismic of shudders, my blood running cold in the instant it took the image I thought I had seen to register?

How come I couldn’t find a single still frame of that jolting moment?

Resigned to failure, I reflected that I had no screen capture to illustrate the article I wanted to write, a piece on under-the-skin chill in horror movies as opposed to the more common visceral or body horror. Yet that single instant in cinema is the most powerful example I can think of what might be described as a subcutaneous jump scare. (A down to earth term for what I used to call a frisson, a word that covers sudden shivers or thrills of other natures too.)

What should I do then, I wondered in my frustration? Find a frame from another film, I thought. I pondered on. De Palma’s Carrie! That’s it! Yes! The hand reaching up from the earth to grab the mourner friend’s arm.

So I try for a screen grab of that. But nothing there barely does justice to the moment either. The movement is so rapid that any individual frame shows little but a peripheral blur. There’s a fundamental difference to the Vertigo shock though — here, as the image moves, we see and we know what we are seeing. While the sudden movement jolts us, we know immediately that this is Carrie’s arm. With Hitchcock’s nun by contrast, we know nothing of who or what we are seeing until the subsequent shot of her.

Master cinematographer Robert Burks lights — or rather darkens — the shot of her appearance for that very effect. Whereas De Palma’s DP Mario Tosi ensures that we register Carrie’s posthumous arm, because that is what the movie needs at this point, Burks shrouds Hitchcock’s mysterious phantasm in impenetrable shadow.

Then, finally, it came to me. I got it! After seeing the Hitchcock vignette more times than I can count — my memory on each occasion subsequently conjuring the image in that split second that was never actually there — I finally found the epiphany of what it is that happens

It’s a movie, stupid! I thought.

The fright I experience is the result of sudden MOVEMENT pure and simple. It’s this abrupt shift alone that scares the living daylights out of me!

And it is NOT seeing clearly what or who it is making this movement that renders the moment so alarming!

What could be more primal — primordial more to the point? What Hitchcock is giving us is the jump scare any creature with eyes to see, or receptors to sense, experiences. The impression, imperfectly sensed, of a sudden change in the environment. Of something else out there! What might it be? A living thing? A mortal threat? A predator?

The most primitive, instant, neural alert that we, like any sentient being, experience.

(With their unremitting, brainless bombast of noise, score, and montage, horror movie trailers completely miss this element, so rarely scare anyone.)

Surely there’s foundation in Hitchcock’s Jesuit education as a boy for a Catholic nun as Scottie’s nemesis. Obsession, desire, erotic longing must be followed by damnation. The inner turmoil of the artist precipitates their greatest art. In Vertigo the master’s greatness, perhaps spurred by his upbringing, is manifested in his articulation of our most fundamental engagement with the world, the abrupt realization of something uncertain and undefined present outside of ourselves.

What shot, then, I wondered, could I use to introduce this article, which would now focus almost exclusively on under-the-skin horror? What, in considering sudden movement, might suffice?

I came up with what you see above, from Ari Aster’s Hereditary — a sudden draft from left of frame and the faint susurrus of it we hear that prompts Annie’s shiver as she’s been looking to Joan, out of shot to frame right. We don’t see that breath, but we do see the abrupt swish of Annie’s hair and the turn of her head as her hand and shoots up.

Unexpected, sudden — a movement literally from out of left field! This, I thought, is the framed jump scare I’ll go with…

As Hitchcock’s nun comments: God have mercy!

Peter Markham July 2023

A reflection on my obsession with ominous obsession…

From Frantz (2016), Writer-Director François Ozon, Cinematography Pascal Marti. Inspiration: Broken Lullaby(1916) by Ernst Lubitsch.

Is it simply the image radiating on the screen that draws us so helplessly to Cinema? Is it a story told through its flowing visual language? Is it the deep, overwhelming emotions the medium conjures? The mesmerism of vista, the dread of shadow? The heightening of a fictional world that envelopes us? The desperate journey of a flawed but irresistibly compelling character? The grace of an innocent? The duplicity of an anti-hero?

Is it the visceral dynamism of the “action” movie”? Is it the quiet, intimate drama of looks and gestures, the friction and tension of dailiness revealed through what remains unspoken?

Is it the suspense of the cliffhanger, of what it might be that lies in a closed box, of the protagonist capable of going one way or its transgressive opposite, of the impossible moral dilemma, the devastating epiphany, the fate perhaps, that awaits the oblivious unfortunate? The true identity of the stranger, the true meaning of the event, object, sound, sight yet to be revealed?

Is it the charisma of the star? The experiential nature of an art which fools us into thinking we can stay safe as witnesses before rendering us impotent at the mercy of a power both overwhelming and insidious?

Is it simply the drama that plays out on the screen’s planarity, captured from optimum angles, observed from a distance one minute, engulfing us in its turbulence the next?

Is it the thrill, the hypnotic spell, the voyage out of ourselves that we come to discover takes us into ourselves?Might it be the quiet contemplation of one film’s resonant understatement or the fairground antics of another’s brash flamboyance?

Is it spectacle or is it something commonplace we might see each day but given fresh significance by lighting, framing, or by context afforded placement in the cut?

Or are we drawn to the movies simply to escape, to divert ourselves, to taste the excitement of danger, violence, death but without cost, to thrill to the erotic, the sensual, the seductive — to realms of desire and delight denied the humdrum life of the audience around us? (Although perhaps not all of it!)

What is it that you can’t resist and so draws you in? Is it any of these — or is it something else?

I was recently watching Francois Ozon’s 2016 Frantz. The first part of the movie is a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s poignant 1932 Broken Lullaby in which, after the end of the First World War, a French soldier, burdened with remorse, visits the family of the German soldier he has killed. Mistaken by the dead man’s parents and fiancée as his friend, the protagonist finds himself unable to reveal the truth…

Ozon takes the story further. He puts us in the narrative POV not of the penitent Frenchman but of Anna, the German fiancée who, not knowing of his past, falls in love with him. After he leaves without revealing his identity or what he did — in the process prompting unbearable suspense — Anna decides to travel to Paris in search of him.

As she seeks out his whereabouts, and the camera journeys with her over her shoulder or — as I recall — becoming her eyes, I was reminded of another film, one to which I have always been inescapably drawn. Hitchcock’s Vertigo has long been my favorite movie. As James Stewart’s hapless “Scottie” Ferguson heads with unhesitating determination to his devastating fate I am tugged along with him, reveling somehow in an odyssey I know can only end badly.

Anna and Scottie, I realize, follow a path with which I’m familiar. Somehow I know it, so I identify with them.

Vertigo (1958), Director Alfred Hitchcock, Screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, Cinematography Robert Burks.

My nightmares have lasted most of my life, terrifying in the darkness of early morning hours until, strangely enough, with the arrival of the pandemic they stopped. In these tenebrous episodes I would find myself, like Anna and Scottie, en route through some barely defined interior, some street or alley draped in shifting shadow toward some as yet unknown but undoubtedly terrible revelation. Meanwhile, even I as moved relentlessly forward, some nebulous presence would approach me, like a dollying camera, from behind — never seen and never quite making its unthinkable contact before I’d wake, screaming down the neighborhood and surrounding environs.

Here I have, what I now see, draws me to Cinema.

Ozon’s Anna and Hitchcock’s Scottie are obsessed, Anna with finding the French soldier, Scottie with the enigma of Madeleine. There are countless remarkable movies that lack any such obsessive protagonist but it is obsession, the obsession that certain cinema captures and conveys so obsessively, that obsesses me. Just as in my sleep I have walked obsessively along so many ominous paths toward… and only to be ambushed by… what?

The Godfather, to many, is the film they regard as the greatest. With his myth, Coppola exposes the guts of America and perhaps the dynamics of patriarchy and family more ancient. Vertigo, by contrast, and Ozon’s Frantz, with their myth, and maybe the weekly nightmares screening in the cinema of my sleeping mind, conjure not the canvas of power and bloodline but burrow even more terrifying into the defiant, lonely, primal psyche.

Even if we do not all share in Londoner Jesuit-educated Hitchcock’s flawed persona—admission: I’m a Londoner by birth if not similarly acculturated — or have experienced what I believe may have been the complex PTSD behind the chilling claustrophobia of my scenarios, the phenomenon that leads me to Cinema, I realize, has nothing less than universal reverberation…

Such a journey is of course, one that we all venture along as we voyage, day by day, to the final unknowable event that, sooner or later, awaits us…

Peter Markham June 2023

Presumptuous thoughts for your dismissal or (illuminating) comments…

From JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963), Director Don Chaffey, Screenwriters Alan Beverly Cross, Jan Read, Cinematography Wilkie Cooper, Talos the Statue by Ray Harryhausen.

In a recent article from Far Out (https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-130-films-martin-scorsese-calls-guilty-pleasures/), which refers to another from Film Comment back in September 1978, writer Jack Whatley draws our attention to what was once Martin Scorsese’s list of ‘guilty pleasures’ — movies that may be bad in many respects but which the master had enjoyed.

It was finding Jason and the Argonauts in this miscellany of 130 titles that prompted me not to reflect on ‘guilty pleasures’ as I disagree with the assumption underlying it (that we are in some way guilty when enjoying a film, and presumably that means a “bad” film) so much as the notion itself of a “bad” film.

What is it that makes a film “bad? For that matter, what is it that makes one “good”?

How, for example, could I consider as being bad a film that utterly transfixed me as a boy for its 104 minutes? (Did I see it at the Tooting Granada or the Streatham Odeon?) Is it supposed to be bad because it isn’t historically accurate? So the Greek myths it’s based on were “accurate”? Of course not. How can the mythic be accurate” Accurate to what?

Is it bad because it has a giant statue that comes to life, that there are skeleton warriors, a multi-headed monster, and its fantastical action is complemented by characters speaking in accents about as far from the sonorities of the ancient Aegean as from what was then my South London twang?

Is it because by later standards Ray Harryhausen’s gorgeous stop-motion animation looks so determinedly ‘old, school’? (Not allowing that — it still has its magic.) Is it because, even if the events it depicts may be those of fantasy, it may not in the process follow the most credible or accomplished dramatic narrative?

Is it because it’s corny, pulpy, preposterous and doesn’t represent the height — or anywhere near it — of the art of the filmmaker?

It’s years since last watched this Hellenic hokum so I can give no definitive answer to any of these questions but what I will say is that this movie possessed me as a callow boy and that coming out of the cinema (movie theaterhere in America), I saw that gargantuan bronze Talos stepping out of the film to tower over the streets of Tooting and Streatham, intent on wreaking havoc across its tracts of terraced (row) housing amongst which stood my own family flat.

Jason and his A’s stimulated my terror, wonder, and hungry imagination.What more could I have asked? Only that it actually move me. But more of that later…

A film that knew itself, Jason’s screen odyssey seemed to me truthful in ways I could not at the time of first encountering it begin to understand.Now though, I would insist that, for all of its thunderous flaws, Jason and the Argonauts has an “integrity” that bad movies do not have.

Although “bad” in many ways, it’s good not only in its magical spectacle but is sound in the most important respect: it cleaves to its own identity, and this self-knowing gives it authority.

What then might be the aspects of a movie that might render it “bad”? (As I think most are.) You might argue that this is down to purely subjective judgement. You don’t like a film? So then it’s mediocre? That’s not a reason of course. We can dislike movies but still recognize their value.

Some suggestions for a “bad” movie. This is a movie that:

Proselytizes.

Evades the moral questions it prompts.

Has story problems.

Shifts genres to fix its story problems.

Uses transitions to avoid story issues.

Uses promiscuous narrative POV to avoid storytelling issues and to prompt maximum titillation.

Had characters that are one-dimensional.

Hides its failings behind high production values.

Churns out the same old tropes and clichés.

Pulls its punches.

Has no punches to pull.

Leaves no traces in one’s memory, no heart, no challenge, no sense of itself, nothing.

Panders shamelessly to contemporary culture and assumptions, whether they be facile or laudatory.

Dishes out the usual populist sadism and sentimentality.

Tries to make the world a better place.

Tries to make the world a worse place.

Wallows in its own righteousness.

Betrays no trace of visual sensibility.

Doesn’t tell its story.

Doesn’t have a story to tell.

Affects a knowledge of its world when it has none.

On the other hand, what does not necessarily make a film “good”?

Everyone loves it.

Critics go for it.

It wins awards.

It’s based on a literary masterpiece.

Its milieu is respectable, posh, privileged — financially or culturally.

It’s violent.

It shocks.

It’s non-violent.

It doesn’t shock.

It has good actors.

It looks good.

It looks gritty.

It has spectacular VFX.

It had a high budget.

It’s tasteful.

It’s distasteful.

Its craft follows all the “rules”.

Its craft is careless.

So what is it that I think makes a film “good”? Contradicting my earlier observation, may I give a few subjective insights? (For a more thorough, analytical approach see my new book, to be published this September: The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen, Oxford University Press — please forgive the plug.)

So… a good film:

Moves me (which J and the As didn’t, although that I forgive)

Amazes me.

Stays with me.

I can’t entirely explain it, sometimes even quite understand it yet somehow it still gets to me….

After three weeks of rejecting it, I wake up thinking “That was something!”

It knows itself.

I can’t tear my eyes away from the screen.

I can, but then discover I can’t.

It presents a paradox, a question for which there is no answer.

When I’m watching it, I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world or doing anything else.

I discover this during the experience of watching it.

I discover this as it ends.

It takes me on a journey I didn’t expect.

It reveals a voice I can’t deny and so don’t want to.

It reveals cinema in a fresh way.

It possesses me.

It leaves me amazed at cinema.

It leaves me astonished at just being alive to see it.

Its imperfections form its perfection.

And most important of all: It reveals the enduring mystery of the human soul.

Lastly, there is this:

I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

Novelist Marilynne Robinson

That seems to me helpful in distinguishing between “good” and “bad” cinema — at least if we accept and revere our glorious narrative form as art.

Which I do.

Peter Markham May 2023

Or how cinematic wisdom lies in uncertainty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Markham April 2023

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