How our terminology restricts our understanding.

(From AFTERSUN, 2022, Writer-Director Charlotte Wells, Cinematographer Gregory Oke.)

What do we mean by the term ‘negative space on a movie screen? An expanse of emptiness, of lack of action, an area beside or outside the place in the frame to which our eyes are drawn, a section of the screen devoid of image, of people or objects, a blankness, that (seemingly) lacks tension — aren’t these some aspects of what we might understand by the term negative space?

It sounds so pejorative. After all, it’s a negative, a minus, a less than anything. You’d think there’d be an opposite term, a positive space. There isn’t, or if there is I’ve missed it, but it’s there by implication. It’s as though no space in the frame matters if something isn’t filling it — and that something needs to be a person or an object, an event, or some presence or other at the very least.

How might we usefully reconceive this phenomenon?

Firstly, how might ‘negative’ space prove to be functional space? How might it interact with other areas of the frame? Have an effect on them?

Asw ith the frame-within-the-frame, an area of “negative”, apparently inactive space can give rise to a new aspect ratio. The newly proportioned segment on the remainder of the screen that contains something — the “positive” space, as it were — is afforded additional emphasis. Such an approach is effective in 2.35:1 especially although can work in other formats of course, the greater the blank area the greater the effect on the constricted remaining section.

This goes for an image too. In Charlotte Regan’s 2022 Scrapper, there’s a shot in which a blank, off-white (as I recall) monochrome wall takes up the entire 2.35:1 frame. Gradually, to the bottom right of the screen and not in close-up but decidedly tiny in the picture, the hands of the young female protagonist rise into shot — all that can be seen in front of the blank wall. The effect? It’s mesmerizing. The moment, the simple, unremarkable action is rendered somehow significant. We watch intently what we might otherwise barely notice.

Think also of where the filmmaker might situate blankness. To the left of the frame, to the right, centered or around the third so as to divide the screen into three sections, three frames. These variations serve to surprise, stimulate, and refresh the visual interest of the viewer, whose shifting gaze travels now around one area, now another. Emptiness and presence dance around the screen, occupying alternating domains. The frame becomes dynamic, a universe for the viewer’s visual journey in its simplest aspect.

There’s a related insight we need to consider. In what part of the frame do we find the space? Top, bottom, left, right — don’t these sections have inherent qualities? Stable/Less stable. Home/Away. Past/Future. Heaven/Hell. Death/Life. Safety/Danger. Setting out/Returning. Where there’s space, where there’s action, what the screen direction of any movement, and what (usually subliminal) meaning is afforded by the relative positioning.

And how might this agility, spatial, lateral, vertical, relate to depth? After all, empty space may be found in a mid- or background of a shot, but also in foreground — perhaps a surface devoid of detail, perhaps one out of focus so that any detail is indiscernible. Again, the viewer’s visual engagement is enhanced, focal planes of something and nothing interacting.

When it comes to the technique of short-siding, blank (“negative”) space can be notably effective. Two characters converse. In one shot, one, in profile, looks to camera right, the other, in the intercut shot to camera left. In a widescreen format, the first might be seen on frame left, the second frame right. Say in both shots there’s corresponding “negative” space across the rest of the screen. That space in each shot, will hold a tension. Each is weighted. The dialogue, the characters’ looks give each space a charge. They may be ‘negative’ but they are active.

Such an approach might indicate a physical distance between the characters also. But when they are not in the same place, on the phone to each other, the effect can emphasize their geographical separation too.

Say, to the contrary, that each character is placed close to the side of the frame to which they are looking, the device known as short-siding. In this case, the space behind each will be devoid of charge — unless we anticipate the appearance of another character or element, so that the shot becomes suspenseful. (When will x appear? we wonder.) When there’s no such expectation, the charge of each shot will rest in that narrow sliver of the screen between the characters and the frames’ edges.

If we are not expecting some new entity and one suddenly appears, then we are surprised, startled. The empty space, abruptly active, thus prompts a jump scare. The emptiness was a misdirection.

Such dynamics of charge or no charge might apply to any lateral composition, not only one utilized in cutting between profile singles. (And to a vertical axis, particularly with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio.) If we expect a “negative” space to be filled we may be either held in suspense — in which case it is rendered potent space — or if we know the new element to be merely innocuous we may become bored because such anticipatory framing goes on for too long.

We might also consider how a shot introducing a scene might consist almost entirely of absence. Perhaps there are elements bordering the frame to one side of the other. This can be seen in the screen capture above from Charlotte Wells’ remarkable debut feature Aftersun, in which we begin, as the camera slowly pans right, to a see Calum’s arms in the mirror to frame right as he practices his tai chi movements. As the camera movement continues, his arms come into the foreground of the shot — and then we understand what we are seeing.

In other words, the initial emptiness over which the camera passes is instrumental in the process of revealing the meaning of the shot.
A second consideration might be the value of emptiness per se in the frame.I’ve written about this before in Cinema’s Mesmerism of Absence but it’s worth repeating — and in relation to the points above — that absence, that space itself, room in the frame, passive space we might call it, can lay claim to the screen. Like the passive character, this might be heresy to the practitioner or teacher of aesthetic and dramatic plenitude but given that by orders of almost infinite magnitude emptiness would seem to be the larger component of the cosmos, why shouldn’t it be granted territory within the frame of a movie now and then? And why, what’s more, shouldn’t we savor the presence of absence?

Like stillness, like silence, like nothing happening, and the resonance such a hiatus can foster, “negative” space is a fundamental, essential cinematic resource. Without seeing what is not there, we cannot truly see what is.

Besides… without emptiness there can be no wonder.

Peter Markham

May 2024

The discourse of the screen. A philosophy of being.

From L’Argent by Robert Bresson. 1983. Cinematography Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel

Monter un film, c’est lier les personnes les unes aux autres et aux objets par les regards.

To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks.

Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph.

There are, it seems to me, not just the obvious one but three profound insights in this sentence from one of cinema’s greatest artists and thinkers.

The first, it goes without saying, can be found in the word looks. Obviously expressed perhaps, but with his brevity, the master’s simplicity encapsulates a wealth of cinematic understanding.

One of the most common faults in editing by new directors and editors, at least in my experience, is a tendency to cut on dialogue. A first character speaks. CUT. A second replies. CUT. The first responds. CUT. The second speaks CUT. Etc., etc….

As though when it comes to editing, it’s all about dialogue — a cinema that, as Hitchcock put it, consists of pictures of people talking.

Dialogue is one aspect only of human interlocution (even if its rich multifunctionality — and indeed disfunctionalities — rewards more plentiful consideration than is often given).

Silence is another. Perhaps more loaded than speech, deeper too. The eloquence in an absence.

So what is the vehicle of the silence?

The look.

Bresson continues thus:

The ejaculatory force of the eye.

The look as agency.

Looks connect (bind, he says) one character to another, to others, to things, places, to events, to thoughts even, to emotion.

What other properties of looks might there be?

Looks prompt fresh camera placement.

Looks prompt new angles.

A look up can motivate a high angle down, one down a low angle up.

Looks prompt changes in shot size.

Looks motivate camera movement.

Looks determine the direction of camera movement.

Looks inform the speed of camera movement.

Looks direct the eye path of the viewer over the screen — across the frame, up, down, left right, and across the cut.

Looks afford charge to one part of the screen over another.

Looks may prompt POV shots.

Looks may prompt cuts to wider shots of the looker, what they look at placed in foreground.

Looks can take the viewer into a character’s narrative POV…

Looks reveal thought, understanding, emotion.

Looks subvert/contradict words.

Looks reveal subtext.

Looks shift to tell a “micro-story”.

Looks downward suggest interior reflection.

Looks sideways suggest anxiety or thought/knowledge a character is hiding.

Looks reveal reaction.

Looks may determine the duration of the shot — between blinks. (See Walter Murch’s book.)

Looks motivate the cut.

Looks spark the transition from one scene to another.

Looks prompt score.

Looks emphasize a sound,

Looks engage the viewer.

Looks command the screen.

Looks seduce.

Looks accuse.

Looks defy.

Looks invite.

Looks acknowledge.

Looks define.

Looks celebrate.

Looks weep.

The look is the heart of the face.

Looks reveal the soul.

Looks form our primal language.

With Bresson, looks (as well as hands) render the performance of the actor — an art drawn from theatre — superfluous, even alien to cinema. Quite a heresy, given the embrace of Method and Meisner by actors and directors in much of American moviemaking. Quite a minimalism too…

And quite an austerity for those of us captivated and moved by the mysterious, magical, mischievous métier of the screen actor, their nuances of expression, stratagems of speech, intuition of the psyche, their exacting, precarious craft…

What else though, do the words of Bresson’s maxim say about the art of film? This leads to the second profound insight.

He uses the verb lier — to bind.

When a character looks to another, they are, in his mind, bound to them. The two are together and it is cinema that discovers this togetherness. This is a very different dynamic from that of a movie that reflects our (America’s) culture of adversarial individualism. In that context, a look may serve to separate. It can confront, oppose, and when weaponized kill — emotionally, viscerally, even, on occasions perhaps, literally. (Or else, it submits.)

Not a binding in our common humanity but a dividing in combat for power.

Drama is conflict, you might insist. But it can also be friction, tension — or as especially bright Chinese directing students of mine put it: a vibe.

What it is not, is harmony, or only for moments perhaps and often uncertain ones at that, maybe at a movie’s end (maybe not!). Bresson is not arguing for harmony though. In his vision, so it seems, we are bound to each other in this common humanity of ours — and what could be more dramatic than that with all of its contradictions, unresolved questions, failings, iniquities, puzzles, chasms, peaks, shadows, lights, despair and joy?

The third insight apparent in Bresson’s celebrated note relates to the look that binds characters to objects.

Not only are we bound together person to person but we are, each of us, bound inescapably to all forms in the world, the universe. Yes, even the individual, seen as a distinct, sovereign, solipsistic being in our western competitive culture, is in the understanding of Robert Bresson, inextricably bound to the simplest inanimate object.

For him, character and object exist together in a shared universe and it is cinema — transcendental as any art — that reveals that universe of mysterious togetherness.

Thus… Looks in Bresson’s and perhaps all cinema, we might reflect, reveal the nature of existence — of presence and the commonality of being.

Peter Markham

April 2024

On liberation from the hubris, agenda obsession, and hype of the present.

Bessie Love taking direction from Alice Guy-Blaché, 1918. (Picture from The Irish Times.)

There I was, eighteen and troubled, at grammar school in Brockenhurst in the south of England’s New Forest. I’d been chosen to play Shakespeare’s troubled prince in a symposium on Hamlet with a visiting troupe of professional actors. Not because I could act, then, now, or ever but because, like Denmark’s eponymous protagonist, if not quite to such existential extremes, I was troubled, sort of…

The day had been stimulating intellectually and practically — the actors proving generous, natural teachers — when after, we sixth-formers had the chance to mingle and chat with our visitors.

Among the group was former American silent movie star Bessie Love, who was born in 1898. Ms. Love is the young woman sitting on the horse in the photo above.

Coming from a working class background and having been told that my hopes of getting into film and TV would get nowhere because “you don’t know the right people”, I somehow summoned the temerity to ask Ms. Love if I was being completely stupid to imagine such a path remotely possible. It was her response — to the effect that there was no good reason why I shouldn’t follow my aspirations — that provided me with the permission I needed in order to pursue a career in film.

Years later I found the photo above, a moment from 1918. The woman giving direction is Alice Guy-Blaché, the first known female director.

So there I was at the end of that afternoon at school, a couple of handshakes away from a pioneering filmmaker, one of the first narrative movie writers and directors, born in 1873.

Taking into consideration the new filmmakers who are or have been under my tutelage, I can count myself among four generations of cineastes.

Add to this some people I’ve worked with — such as master filmmaker John Schlesinger, born somewhere between the dates of Ms. Love and myself — I might claim to be in a community of five generations. When the children of my alumni become filmmakers as — global circumstance allowing — they surely will, that will make for six generations over, maybe, as much as two hundred years.

Martin Scorsese, master filmmaker, historian, teacher gave a speech recently at the PGA Awards in which he described how, when he’d been awarded an honor there at age 22 for his student short It’s Not Just You, Murray! Cary Grant let him know how to approach his moment onstage (by kissing award-giver Elke Summer). So right here you have Scorsese’s connection to Grant and everyone Grant worked with — Hitchcock, Capra, Hawkes, Ingrid Bergman, Kathryn Hepburn, Eva Marie Sainte and many more.

Then look at the legions of filmmakers Scorsese has inspired and informed both by his own mastery and by his championing of past practitioners.

A long, long way — all of this — from the ephemerality of much to be found day upon day on social media. The current hype, the tribalism, the awards season fixation, the cultural lockstep conformism, the lack of original subject matter, the unthinking regurgitation of popular idioms, and the peremptoriness of critical thinking present a sliver of the rich terrain offered by the possible decades of discourse on cinema and its timelessness.

To be fair, there are posts recognizing and bringing attention to movies and filmmakers of recent and less recent decades, and often from the adherents of contemporary trends too, the all-round cinephiles I mention with respect. Amnesia has not (yet?) eradicated film history, which at its best lives and breathes still.

There’s a general point to be made here also. An aspect around long before social media and information overload. (So many movies are currently released, it’s tough even keeping up with the present.) I’m talking of the perennial tendency to look down on those who came before us, as though we know better, do stuff better, are more aware, more understanding, and just comprehensively superior. Hardly a new habit.

For some cinephiles it’s no different — even among talented but new practitioners. One now notable writer-director-producer, after I had taken the class through hours of shot-by-shot, cut-by-cut analysis of the cinematic mind behind Hitchcock’s 1946 Notorious, asked me why I’d taken up so much time on this since “we don’t make films this way anymore”. No, but filmmakers still face the same storytelling challenges, still utilize the same resources even if the technology has changed radically, still work with the image and with sound — and let’s hope with actors rather than AI generated non-beings.

It’s insight gained into how Hitchcock recognized these elements and how he so consummately handled his articulation of them that renders my session more than a class in film theory or archeology. Far from that, it’s an exploration of filmmaking practice — at any time.

(With their subsequent experience and brilliant successes, the class member in question has since retracted his question — an important lesson for me in that some of the most effective education happens not in the instant of its dissemination but over the course of the years that follow.)

Some of us tend to restrict our viewing to contemporary fare. Someone, I seem to recall, once wisely observed that there is no such as an “old” movie, only one we haven’t seen. Indeed!

I’m not saying everyone has to meet the likes of Bessie Love, although that’s surely going to be an inspiring pleasure for anyone so fortunate.

I’m not arguing for the merits of some golden age or for nostalgia for the greats of the past. This has nothing to do with sentimentality or any lack of respect for the young. And I’m aware of the limitations of the past: few female filmmakers, few people of color, few working class cineastes (Martin Scorsese, Terence Davies — you showed the way.)

I’m saying we should take our place proudly and with humility, in the community of cinema’s generations… to be joined, let’s hope, by those who follow us…

In fact, let’s have it all — past, present, future. A screen that knows no generational exclusivity.

Peter Markham

February 2024

When turmoil in life informs turmoil on the screen…

From Black Narcissus 1947, Written, Directed, Produced by Powell/Pressburger, Cinematographer: Jack Cardiff, Eyes: Kathleen Byron

What are some of the ways filmmakers bring their material to life? What are the resources of their process?

Telling a strong story well. ✓

Utilizing the skills of visual and auditory storytelling. ✓

Conscious art and craft of all elements of screen language. ✓

Facilitation and direction of performance. ✓

Conjuring images on the viewer’s “screen of the mind” ✓

A take on, perhaps a vision of the human condition, often sub-conscious, involuntary. ✓

Instinct, intuition. ✓

Stamina, determination, focus. ✓

Belief. ✓

Drawing on personal experience. (Whether harnessed unconsciously or deliberately.) ???

I might not have thought of including this last category were it not for my recent viewing, one of many over the years, of Black Narcissus, the Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger masterpiece of erotic intrigue among a community of Anglican nuns who find themselves situated in a village community high up in the Himalayas.

The film, adapted from the novel by Rumer Godden, traces how Sister Superior, the young Sister Clodagh and the troubled Sister Ruth both experience forbidden desire for Mr Dean, agent for “The General”, who presides over the village. The intrigue this prompts results in uncontrollable jealousy on the part of Sister Ruth — which leads to shocking consequences.

I hadn’t been aware or the personal relationships of some of those on set until — after this viewing — I read about them.

Deborah Kerr, who plays Sister Clodagh, and Kathleen Byron, who plays Sister Ruth were both romantically involved with director Michael Powell, Kerr before, Byron during production.

So the love triangle on the screen mirrors the one on the set, the director corresponding to the fictional Dean.

(Here the triangle is comprised of two females and one male while in the Powell/Pressburger The Red Shoes, it is the other way around — two males and one female. In both cases though, it is the emotional dimension and depth of the women that is central to the drama.)

Was this parallel in the lives of the filmmakers the catalyst for the film’s erotic electricity or with such a screenplay and such a cast would that have come about regardless of the personal chemistry? Did personal emotion intensify the onscreen drama? Did Powell ensure it did? And did the cast have any choice in the matter? Were they enabled as actors or were they exploited?

Were Kerr and Byron so ‘professional’ they could block out their feelings or were they, as sensitive artists, at the mercy of their antagonism? Did they use this, either consciously or subconsciously? If so, did it help or hinder their work?

The two protagonists of Trần Anh Hùng’s 2023 The Taste of Things, Dodin Bouffant and Eugénie, played by Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche, were formerly romantic partners who had a child together. The director has commented he was uncertain as to how their connection might affect their performances as fictional lovers. In the event, he said, the ex-couple’s congenial relationship proved helpful in their approach to their characters, and perhaps to their understanding and realization of their quiet but enduring romance.

Krzysztof Kieślowski, in an interview from the early nineties, commented that, while he was giving a class in which he was using a scene from Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, he first tried two married actors, then two unmarried, finding no advantage in working with the married couple — nor, he said, did he find it detrimental.

The irony here is that in Bergman’s original TV series, the director — who based the work on his own experience — had been married to Liv Ulman, the fictional Marianne in the onscreen episodes. As in Black Narcissus, Bergman’s drama was in part, and perhaps a considerable part, auto-fictional, director and actor(s) playing out a fictional parallel to their personal emotional dynamics.

Surely, the affairs of director Michael Powell with two of his cast, and the tension on set that reportedly resulted, informed the film’s palpable sexual tension to a considerable degree. And surely, an actor must draw on emotions and experiences they know, of whatever nature, in order to bring out those of their character. A director might well enable them to do this — surely an aspect of good filmmaking.

Hitchcock said that the filmmaker should put their fears up on the screen.Taking into account these two masterpieces from Powell and Bergman, perhaps they might put on the screen the tribulations, the pain and drama of their romantic lives too. Does that entail the manipulation of the actors? Or is it a resource for them, prompting some of their best performances?

Would Black Narcissus be the dark classic it is without its tempestuous nourishment? Of that we can never be completely certain — but let’s treasure the movie we have.

Peter Markham February 2024

Never underestimate the genius of Film — or that of its new voices.

Elliott Crosset Hove in GODLAND 2022. Writer-Director Hlynur Pálmason, Cinematography Maria von Hausswolff.

Is there a new generation that really values cinema anymore? That’s the dark thought. Richard Linklater.

Born in the final couple of decades of the 1800s, virtuoso of the 1900s — sound, color, widescreen bringing developing language — then beginning, finally, to open up in the current century to voices previously suppressed and denied, Cinema, so Linklater suggests, nevertheless may be withering on the vine.

Why does he say this? Is it true? Coming from such a brilliant cineaste, the comment surely warrants our singular attention.

Established and revered exponents are still going strong. From Scorsese to Wenders to Spielberg to Herzog, from Campion to Almodóvar, from Kaurismaki to Holland the work keeps coming, often among the best of their respective oeuvres. (Haneke, sadly, has been missing in action for a while now, while Terence Davies has been lost to us too soon.)

More recent generations continue to bring astonishing work to the screen.There hasn’t been a movie from Lynne Ramsay for a while but Andrea Arnold’s cinematic Cow from a couple of years ago is a gem. Bong Joon Ho persists in amazing us. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla constitutes yet another fine film from this intensely intelligent, deeply engaging director. Nolan is at his best with Oppenheimer, Haynes with May December, Payne with The Holdovers.

Of late, we have Yorgos Lanthimos, Barry Jenkins, Ari Aster, Chloe Zhao, Celine Sciamma, Sam Esmail, Julie Ducournau, Alice Diop, Kauther Ben Hania, Charlotte Wells, and so many others.

You may disagree with specific examples here and there (and of course those cited go nowhere near to scratching the surface), but the nature of the generational flow of substantial cinematic outpouring seems to me undeniable.

In just the last couple of years the output has been overwhelming. We have Celine Song with Past Lives, every element of cinematic language articulated on the screen. There’s Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland, its cinematography by Maria von Hausswolff limpid, breathtaking as the landscapes it presents, crystal precise as the portraits it paints.

The sheer number of remarkable movies and movie-makers continues to be astonishing.

Should we be considering other factors though?

The development of streaming as an element in the Linklater pessimism perhaps? The filmmaking giants now work with Netflix, Apple, Amazon however. This way, they’ve been able to give us movies the studios would never have greenlit. (As a half-American do I say ‘greenlighted’?) But is this a mixed blessing?

Watching on TV, on this device or that, does this keep viewers from the big screen? Many movies wouldn’t get made unless they are streamed though; there wouldn’t be audiences for them in the theatres because they wouldn’t exist in the first place.

How about the preponderance of tablets, iPads, smartphones, etc. Is this causing the language of visual storytelling to change? And for the worse?

But is this change such a bad thing? Doesn’t a language need to keep evolving if it’s to stay alive? Mightn’t those devices inform that evolution? Is screen language really becoming less ‘cinematic’ as a consequence of their use or is it becoming more flexible, growing in its forms of address by drawing on our various current modes of visual interlocution?

When TV made its entry into the lexicon of the screen, there were at least a couple of ways in which Cinema responded. Close-ups became more prominent, for example. The wide screen was adopted more and more. (Here close-ups became less prominent when some directors simply treated the frame as though it were depicting a stage, its lateral axis containing the action in wide shot.) The Cinerama format of 2.65:1 (three 35 mm cameras covering the action, three projectors and a curved screen its machinery) was seen as a way of attracting audiences away from their Academy Ratio (4:3) TV sets. 1.85:1, 2.35:1 were also tempting while at a time of black and white TV, Technicolor in the movie theatre was also considered a draw.

Now though, new filmmakers are reverting — if reverting is the right word — to academy ratio. The power of the vertical, as opposed to the lateral axis, is again being recognized. (See the above frame from Godland.) Perhaps not so much in mainstream, commercial movies though…

And as for black and white — what Wim Wenders once described as ‘the most beautiful colors’ — the palette was not long excluded from movie discourse .

Are these concerns — of the nature the screen we watch a movie on, its technology, its shape — irrelevant to the question of cinema’s survival however?

Is there a more of a problem in the movies that are made, distributed, and consumed? Movies of particular types? Franchise movies? Superhero movies? And the nature of the industrial structure that enables their manufacture?

Is it also a question of audiences and their acculturation? Their expectations? Their concept of the film viewing experience? Does it follow that, because of types of movies currently prevalent and a movie theatre environment geared to seducing the viewer into becoming a pampered consumer of them, audiences are becoming less discriminating? Is it that Cinema needs discerning adherents in order to survive?

Writing in 1926, Virginia Woolf commented: People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious,”. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies…

And she continued, in relation to the act of watching a film: The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.

Later, she gives the game away when she says: Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?

What was she talking about? Of course thought processes can be rendered visible without words. Simply cutting from a look to what the looker sees then cutting back to their reaction, for instance, reveals a character’s thoughts. The actor’s nuances of expression reveal a character’s thoughts. A camera move, its placement, a cut, color, lighting, soundscape, score, composition, mise-en-scène may all convey thought processes.

She complains that movies dumb down audiences only to then reveal she has no idea of how the language of the screen works. (Nor could most viewers articulate this, although they nevertheless understand it.) Presumably, given the date of these observations, she’s talking about silent movies. She’s writing in the year before Gance’s Napoleon is released and a quarter of a century into filmmaking by Chaplin and Griffiths, in the age of Eisenstein, Von Stroheim, early Lang, early Dreyer.

Such filmmakers already brought a rich, highly developed film language. Audiences were smart enough to follow it then — as they are today.

So does it come down to the stories we are being fed these days? Simplistic combat between good and evil, Manichaean struggles to be won by the superheroes who once were the gods that all Americans, no matter ethnicity or faith, could worship, but who have now become the interchangeable cyphers generated by corporate business. Has product replaced myth, the eyes taking in the pabulum on the screen as the stomach absorbs the junk concessions accompanying it?

Maybe, maybe, maybe… but let’s not forget those amazing new filmmakers, and where they come from, and what they bring that is new and fresh.

Even as a straight white male, as a working class London boy I was told that I would never get into filmmaking in any capacity whatsoever because ‘you don’t know the right people.’ (The English class system — don’t you just love it.)

Think (or perhaps you know) how much more of an impossible mountain to climb this aspiration has been for a woman, or anyone from most of the world’s population, who don’t look like me. Movie-making, for most of its history, it goes without saying, has been the province of the well-to-do male. (Scorsese is one of the few giants to emerge from the working class.) Now the barriers are coming down, even if there remains a way to go.

It is from these previously ignored, disenfranchised swathes of humanity that the survival–NO, THE REAWAKENING — of Cinema is coming about.

A Cinema for all of us. The screen of the human soul. What’s in you, what’s in me, up there in the language of the image: moving, static, beguiling, shocking, tempting, repelling, mesmerizing, sobering, oneiric, inflected, uninflected, devastating, revelatory, transgressive, decorous, indecorous, magical, austere, flamboyant, intricate, plain, serene, dynamic, subversive, celebratory, unflinching, reaching out and reaching in — to our perception, our thought, our visceral sensation, our emotion, to the very nature of our being…

Like us, as Cinema — as it lives and breathes, the equal of any art — ever affirms.

Peter Markham January 2024

1. To shoot the actors. 2. To shoot Cinema.

Publicity from The Taste of Things (2023) Writer-Director Trần Anh Hùng, Cinematography Jonathan Ricquebourg.

Trần Anh Hùng, Writer-Director of The Taste of Things (for which he won the Best Director award at Cannes), France’s entry into the 2024 Academy Awards, in a Q&A after a recent screening of his film, commented that there are two types of director.

The first group, he says, shoots the actors. They film performances then cut the resulting shots together. They cover the actors’ actions, dialogue, flow of emotion and then choose from these what they wish their audience to see at any given moment.

I know this approach well. Working in production at the BBC TV studios in London after coming out of university, I saw the “simply point the camera at the actor” method.

Four or five cameras would be lined up across the front of a set. A “vision mixer” would sit up in the “gallery” while the director, perched next to them would call out the shots and instant cuts. The scene would have been rehearsed extensively in the BBC Rehearsal Rooms in North Acton, between the taped outlines of the sets.

All that remained was for the actors to perform in the actual sets as each scene played out in the studio while the huge , unwieldy video cameras simply recorded their performances on the inadequate analogue videotape of the day.

There was little thought given to the language of the screen.

Movie cameras don’t have to be placed at the front of the set of course. (Hou Hsiou Hsien did this in Flowers of Shanghai however, only to create a film of impenetrable visual tedium — such a contrast to some of his other remarkable work.) A movie camera can be placed anywhere to get any angle on characters and action, should the director so wish.

The editing process is different from that old studio practice too. Not simultaneous. Not instant.

The approach is the same though. The actor is what matters. The recording of their performance for the subsequent recreation of the scene in the edit drives the process.

The next type of director, according to Trần Anh Hùng — and he’s one himself — is the filmmaker who strives for a screen that is cinematic. This is the filmmaker who thinks in terms of the flow of images, not of movies as filmed theatre.

“Cinema”, according to this remarkable Vietnamese-French filmmaker, is the highest of three levels of the director’s movie making:

3. Story. 2. Theme. 1. Cinema.

When 3. and 2. have been established, the director can strive for 1.

Trần talked of the precision he adopts in this final and essential stage. He knows exactly when a shot starts and when it ends, and this is how he shoots. Thus he anticipates his edit in granular detail. In this, he says, he draws inspiration from John Ford who would hold up his hand in front of the lens, moving it away only as he called “Action”, holding it up again as he called “Cut!”

Ford, of course, was working at a time when directors had very much less say in the editing of their movies. He was ensuring that his film would come out as the one he intended to make. Trần’s circumstances are different although this he didn’t mention. But for him certainly, this philosophy works to dazzling effect.

I wouldn’t recommend filmmakers in general be so dogmatic however! The master Krzystof Kieslowski would take footage from anywhere, from before “Action” had been called, from after he had cut, from anywhere the camera had happened to be rolling.

And what’s wrong with the filmmaker giving themselves several options,allowing leeway in when a cut is made in the edit, and enabling flexibility in the modulation of rhythm?

Perhaps then, not all directors need be solely in Trần’s purist tribe, admirable as that might be? Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski has described how Stephen Spielberg will sometimes specify exactly the shot he wants his DP to get while on other occasions will wait to get onto the set to work with the actors and go from there.

Such a master — perhaps America’s most underrated filmmaker — surely has permutations of possible shooting strategies for a scene already in his head before the shoot though. With such consummate grasp of the language of the screen, this director is hardly one to opt for performances patched together.

Nevertheless, this flexible approach is perhaps typical of many directors who neither adhere strictly to the vision of Trần Anh Hùng nor settle for mere coverage.

There are many more ways of categorizing filmmakers. Many more possible polarities. The restrained vs. the flamboyant. The purist vs. the eclectic. The vulnerable vs. the predatory. The “sacred” vs. the “profane”. Those who conceive every detail early on vs. those who practice patient evolution… The montage vs. the long take exponents. The visual storyteller vs, the visual “grammaticist”. Plus other opposites…

My point is that Trần Anh Hùng posits a declarative philosophy that— whether we agree with him or not—prompts us to reflect. His championing of what he calls precision is, whatever the filmmaker’s individual process, a call for rigor and comprehensive connection to, and engagement with, their material. And these are virtues that may be manifested in so any ways…

So filmmakers might do well to listen.

Peter Markham December 2023

Filmmakers and the Psyche of the Moment (From Medium February 2021)

From Ammonite, Cinematography Stéphane Fontaine

How aware is the filmmaker of the messages their film might be communicating? Not the intentional but the unintentional ones. How aware should they be? How aware can they be? And how much is an audience conscious of the messages they receive? Do the unintentional missives of the filmmaker follow pathways into the unsuspecting minds of their audiences more insidioius than any intentional messaging? Certainly, a director like Hitchcock could intentionally sway an audience one way or another by a simple sound in the background barely noticeable but subliminally efficient in evoking, say, a wish for a character to travel (a train whistle), or to lay the foundation for a suspicion of guilt (a police siren). Filmmakers use intentional subliminal messaging all the time — or they do if they’re proficient. The audience doesn’t realize how it’s being played, and even if it did, probably wouldn’t complain. Cinema, its practitioners know, delves deep into the psyche, into subterranean depths we all of us share. Do they realize though, that it works the other way too — that if a film can exert influences over its audience, the zeitgeist, the undercurrents of contemporary culture and its leanings can also exert a power over its makers — whether they go along consciously with those inclinations or they don’t? Once those proclivities have become embedded in a story, the story exerts agency over filmmakers unaware of the meaning they then reinforce.

It was Abba Kiarostami who said that a film would mean nothing if it didn’t tap into the memories of its audience, whose members recognize the emotions it evokes and recreates them within themselves. Those emotions may echo the filmmaker’s own as well as having been brought to fruition by the story, the characters, the situation. If the director and their collaborators know what they’re doing, they will have allowed those reservoirs of feeling within themselves to inform their movie. But there are times, surely, when those feelings are too deep, too shared, too universal, to be recognized, even by the creative team itself.

It’s hard enough to grasp the contours of one’s own psyche, but to understand how the psyche of a nation might impact one’s work at any given time, seems to me far more challenging. There’s the conscious recognition of contemporary events, contemporary conflicts, and how these can fuel a story and its drama, but that understanding is limited to known thoughts and feelings about the frictions of the day. Looking back at a period in history can yield insights the contemporary observer has missed. Events, issues, moods, fears and desires may often be the symptoms of deeper instabilities, roilings we cannot comprehend until we see them through the perspective of hindsight.

In 2016, the UK, by means of a plebiscite corrupted by misinformation, voted by a small majority to leave the EU. The visceral instincts were obvious: hostility to immigrants, to people of color, a hankering for some golden age that never existed, a craving for lost imperial power coupled with an island mentality came together to bring out the worst in people. I suspect that few filmmakers supported the move to turn the nation’s back on the European project. Indeed, I can’t recall any notable director or screenwriter hopping onto the xenophobic wagon. One would imagine then, a dearth of Brexit messaging in movies produced during this time.

Not so.

The Darkest Hour presents a Churchill hagiography. A complex man battling with depression, also a racist, a snob, responsible disastrous Dardanelles campaign of the First World War and the Bengal famine, is portrayed as a rollicking populist. Traveling on the tube, which he never did, hobnobbing with passengers of color, which he never did, paradigm of the plucky Brit, Darkest Hour’s Winston comes across as an epitome of the Brexit mentality. Europe was going over to the Nazis — parallel to a controlling, predatory EU, led by Germany as proclaimed by the Tories and the Brexiteers. Darkest Hourwas the perfect vehicle to match their manifesto, and yet few seemed to notice. Performances were praised, direction lauded but the message of the film..? No comment. It dived in too deep to be discerned.

Dunkirk delivers similar plucky Brits, extricating themselves from a dastardly Europe. How the lump in the throat swells when the cottages on the cliffs of England are finally glimpsed, and how the demons of patriotism arouse us! Is Christopher Nolan a Brexiteer? I have no idea. The interweaving of the broad canvas he conjures with the intimate dramas he brings to life hold me and I marvel. But seeing those cottages, those cliffs, and knowing the Brits in their little boats have outwitted the German war machine brings home what’s going on. “Let’s get Brexit done!” Old Etonian Boris Johnson would chunter. He needn’t have bothered. Dunkirk already had.

If those two films don’t offer character assassinations of Europe sufficient, 1917 steps in to fill the gap. Lumbering as the tanks of the day, the movie piles on the contempt for “Johnny Foreigner”. A German pilot, rescued, turns, of course, on his rescuer as against all the odds a single Tommy journeys through an improbable topography, nothing like its historical counterpart, to alert his fellow Brits of some cunning scheme by The Hun, thus managing to get the message through in time to condemn the plan to failure. Germany vanquished again, the Brits in their trenches — ever stoic in their chthonic substrata — prevailing.

The Anglo-catabasis continues with The Dig — England’s treasures excavated deep in the earth when a stubborn archaeologist of modest birth unites with a toff landowner to begin the excavation of the Sutton Hoo treasures. As with Churchill down in the London underground (catabasis again), upper class and low join together to get things done. Former glories are rediscovered, the inheritance of the soil, the safety of the past, history salvation for the present. An Australian director, yes, but the English collective psyche holds sway all the same. Ammonite digs even further, reveling in Mary Anning’s discovery of fossils emerged from the mud. What more perfect symbol for the tired delusions of perfidious Albion than a fossilized ichthyosaur, once lord of the ocean but now reduced to a lump of rock in a glass display case? England as relic. Says it all.

The movie version of Downton Abbey shores up the Brexit edifice, with its upstairs/downstairs bubble, so at odds with the vision of European director Michael Haneke, whose masterly White Ribbon by contrast eviscerates the class system of a rural community early in the last century. Perhaps TV’s The Crown will spawn a movie version before too long, we English reminded of our place — both on the class ladder and in our “splendid isolation” from those continental neighbors across the Channel.

A counter-current? How about Steve McQueen’s visionary Small Axe films? This is England, The Clash sang, and McQueen now reveals, with rather more penetrating vision. Stripped of sentimentality, unflinching in the face of unremitting assault on London’s black English by the Metropolitan Police, righteous in McQueen’s anger but leavened by his warm humanity, these gems glow with the compelling narrative of a new Britain, one we might have missed had we been relying on Brexit Cinema. The story continues, not subsumed into some fake past but vibrant in the present as it reaches to the future. The final film Education begins and ends with 12-year-old protagonist Kingsley Smith gazing up at the stars in a planetarium. (A promise of anabasis). I’m with Kingsley, I reflect. Cosmos over territory. Possibility over fear. Wonder over nostalgia.

Conscious messaging, surely, on McQueen’s part, and an answer to the doubtlessly unconscious leanings of some of his contemporaries.

Peter Markham February 2021

The symbiosis of learning and invention

(Abel Gance, 1889–1981. Filmmaker, innovator from the past, inspiration for the present and future. Image from silentera.com)

The English conservative commentator Michael Oakeshott observed that:

The task of the teacher is to free his pupils from servitude to the present.

(Mr. Oakeshott, why are the teacher’s pupils necessarily his?)

The English/American liberal commentator of this article replies:

The task of the student is to free their teacher from servitude to the past.

Question: Could both Oakeshott and myself be correct?

A highly successful writer-director-screenwriter, at the time my student, once asked why I’d spent over ten hours taking the class through Hitchcock’s Notorious when we don’t make movies that way anymore.

Another student, after I had broken down one of Scorsese’s complex sequence shots, its consecutive, component vignettes, its layered focal planes, dual passage of time, and bravura camera movement, remarked But we don’t shoot like that now!

It was as though they were suggesting that understanding the thought behind the execution of a shot limits us to parroting that shot mechanically rather than informing our own insights so that we may better formulate our own, fresh approach…

After one recent class, a notably talented young cinematographer said to me I didn’t realize you could learn from an old movie!

It’s as though each generation thinks it has to start anew with no foundations to build upon.

As though what has come before had built-in obsolescence.

As though the nature of human experience, of desire, love, fear, hate, lust, intimacy, need, vanity, insecurity, heroism, cowardice, violence, compassion, disappointment, aspiration, hope, thought, reflection, denial, epiphany change inexorably generation by generation…

As though the nature of story and the challenges of storytelling mutate decade by decade so that the questions asked today by say… Emerald Fennell or Charlotte Wells are somehow radically different from those asked by say… Edwin Porter or Charlie Chaplin.

As though the screen, that planarity before us, has altered more than its aspect ratio and morphed in its nature, age by succeeding age, into something indefinably different from what it’s been before.

As though the screen’s language, its practical aesthetics of today bear no resemblance to its preceding counterparts.

As though changes in technology, in equipment, in cameras change everything else.

As though changes in taste change everything else.

As though we are with each superseding generation doomed to cultural, emotional, and artistic amnesia.

As though we are condemned to invention without memory.

As though memory is an obstacle to invention.

As though awareness of the past is an obstacle to new vision.

As though learning and knowledge must be severed from the creative process.

As though there can be no evolution, only a starting out again… and again… and again…

I once read that PT Anderson kept TCM on in every room in his house so that as he moved from one to another, he could maintain sight of the images from the movie playing.

Perhaps that’s why PTA, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese recently joined forces to protect the network:

https://ew.com/tv/tcm-insiders-detail-fight-to-protect-turner-classic-movies-network/

Because when the past is lost, so is the present, so is the future.

As an educator, I’ve been fortunate to have worked with many outstanding new filmmakers. Among the most film-literate, probably the most film literate (not to mention the most literature-literate) has to have been Ari Aster. Ari’s encyclopedic film history awareness hardly seems to have prevented him from becoming such an astonishing and inventive newcomer over recent years.

New technology, new “platforms”, new methods of distribution are often presented as fundamental cinematic progress. They are not. Of course they may have profound effects, for the better or worse, on the well-being of the art of the filmmaker, but the delivery system is not the item to be delivered. The conveyor belt is not the candy.

Each generation finds its own voice. Each its own idioms. Each its own stories. Each its own cinema.

But also… each discovers its own understanding of the past, of the language of its predecessors.

And that fresh insight prompts, informs, nourishes, inspires fresh invention.

So perhaps: The task of the teacher is to free his pupils from servitude to a present which owes nothing to its past.

While: The task of the student is to free their teacher from servitude to the fixed past and show them how what has come before can be understood in new ways that prompt new approaches.

Plus, of course, astonishing the teacher with those new approaches…

Peter Markham September 2023

An unapologetic screed against disrespect for cinema.

(Screenshot from the Fandango app.)

You know how it goes.

It happens after the 20 minute blitzkrieg of mindless trailers, each of which leaves you never wanting to see another movie in a movie theater or be in the vicinity of anyone who might be titillated by such overcooked and unremitting bombast.

It happens just as the first frames of the film you’ve come to see appear on the screen and you are focusing with all of our expectant faculties on image, sound, energy, event, trying to take in the reverberations of emotion and tone, and searching already for some sense of connection and meaning in what is up there.

You are thinking that no matter on how many occasions you have experienced this thrill of cinema, now always seems like the first time, that what is familiar is also fresh, that film as a phenomenon itself is being born before your very eyes, and you with it, new to the world, pristine to the ages, when…

To read please on go to Medium at:

https://pmarkhamca.medium.com/movie-latecomers-what-are-they-thinking-36f8151c1e8d

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on all posts at Medium.com

https://pmarkhamca.medium.com/ :

And how the term “prep” reveals a faulty mindset.

Screen capture from Powell/Pressburger’s 1948 The Red Shoes.

There have been masters in cinema who have worked in theatre and there have been those who haven’t. There are teachers of filmmaking who went to theatre school or worked in theatre and still think that way and there are those that didn’t and don’t.

Ophuls, Mizoguchi, Bergman, virtuosi of cinematic language, were also adept in the discourse of the stage. Even Ken Loach was interested in plays before he was drawn to movies. Hitchcock, Dreyer, Godard were by contrast cineastes pure and simple. Ramsey, Arnold, Martel are some of the many contemporary directors whose cinephilia, so far as I understand, has needed little or no nourishment from the stage.

I can think of filmmaking educators who think cinema is theatre with a camera pointed at it — or rather, they don’t think, they assume. Thus they differ from the best exponents of both art forms who understand the nature of each.

I’ve heard that the Prague Film School, decades ago, wouldn’t allow first year directing students anywhere near a camera. Their first task, it was understood, was to elicit performance without regard for the screen. This may as well have been a theatre program. Performances and staging established, the next step, by inference a subsidiary step, inferior to the physical production of an event was seen as the recording of the action on film and its piecing together.

It’s purely what’s in front of the camera on set or on location that matters is the supposition here. That’s when and where it happens. This is theatre with camera and editing added.

Such a mindset leads to further misplaced thinking…

Fix it in prep! Fix it in post! So they say. Fix what? And why fix? Why prep? And what does it mean?

Let’s first consider prep. What does this term suggest but the assumption that nothing actually happens until the actors arrive on set. That’s wrong. The decision-making that occurs in the shoot by no means marks the beginning of the filmmaker’s work, which may start as soon as they conceive of the idea of their film, or write the screenplay, first encounter a draft of one or collaborate with a writer on their script.

Preparation is not preliminary to the making of the movie but is part and parcel of that making.

Prep might be better described as formulation, a process through which nothing is fixed but everything is developed, the time when visualization in part and in whole comes together, when sets are designed and locations chosen, and when casting occurs — in itself the foundation for performance.

These tasks continue with the shoot, with the discovery on set of revisions and improvements of planned staging and shooting, with the actors’ and director’s conjuring of performance, and with the input of circumstance and the unanticipated vicissitudes, accidents,, and sundry surprise offerings the universe tends to provide. Even with the best formulation this can prove the filmmaker’s ‘thinking on one’s feet’ stage.

Next comes post. Forget the term fix. You don’t fix things in post. Post is not triage. It’s not mere salvage. Or rather it shouldn’t be. This is where the filmmaker travels further along their symbiotic journey of intention and discovery. Where, through editorial art, the elements of storytelling, emotion, and meaning, take flight. Where sound design modulates and vivifies the world of the movie. Where, at last, the film gets the upper hand over the filmmaker and in the best of circumstances says This is what I am.

Throughout the entire process, the making of the film is both realization and evolution, evolution and realization. Not merely the mounting of a production on set and its “coverage”.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 The Red Shoes, contains a breathtaking ballet sequence that in the way it morphs from a front-on view of a proscenium arch stage to dazzling cinematic montage reveals a profound understanding of the natures of theatre and film. Here, the representation of a theatre event is transformed into the artifact that constitutes a movie.

Space and time, constants in the physical world of the theatre, give way to their modulated and manipulated cinematic counterparts. What never happened as a complete scene on set comes to fictional life on the screen.

Complete scenes can of course happen on set or location. Complete movies even, as is the case with Balint Kenyere’s astounding short Before Dawn, shot in a breathtaking single take by cinematographer Matyas Erdely. Without pre-visualization however, without rigorous, forensic formulation — the creative work of several cinematic minds — such a powerful work could not have been achieved. It was in the formulation that the vision of the film found its form. Its execution, even if the skill involved beggars belief, was purely technical and practical.

Hitchcock even once commented he wished that once he had a film together in his head, there would be no need to make it. Luckily for us, he was denied his inclination!

Nevertheless, as his mindset shows us, the master made cinema, not filmed theatre…

Peter Markham July 2023