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(Front and back cover: The Art of the Filmmaker.)
FILM DIRECTING CLASS
New Book: Extracts. #1 New Release on Amazon. Dates & Times of Corresponding Shot, Image, Camera as it return.
HELLO FILMMAKERS & FILM WATCHERS,
I’m proud to see my new book The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen as #1 New Release on Amazon. Publication is scheduled for 26th September, so I’m hugely grateful for all the pre-orders. The book is also available in the US at Oxford University Press and Barnes & Noble, and in the UK at Amazon and Blackwell’s.
To whet your appetites, here are some snippets from over 300 pages of text and screenshots:
How do we understand the filmmaker’s art? Of what is it comprised? What are its principles, its methods, the spectrum of its approaches—across the generations, across cultures, across sensibilities? What factors form its foundations? What are its facets, its imperatives, its functions and purposes? Does it adhere to hard and fast rules, or is it more supple, an agile art—an amalgam of arts—adapting to the different challenges each film presents its filmmaker? Or might it perhaps derive its genius from both polarities? Is it informed by intuition, by recognized technique, or again by something of the two seemingly incongruous wellsprings?
An image on the screen may indeed be beautiful, may incorporate perfect symmetry, but it may also be ugly, messy, florid, even grotesque. What is important is not that it’s pleasing to the eye, painterly, or picturesque— although it may have those qualities if that is appropriate to a film’s visual discourse— but how it functions in relation to the material it depicts, how it relates to the language of the film as a whole and to the filmmaker’s address to their audience—one that conveys emotion, cognition, visceral sensation perhaps, and suggests (and often dictates) the fears, wishes, and questions the viewer experiences in the process of watching a movie.
Composition, mise en scène, framing, geometry and line, shape, color, light, contrast, depth of field, and eye trace, orchestrated within the deliberate design of the filmmaker, form an address to the audience, and rather than being organized simply to please the eye, convey information, emotion, and visceral sensation with deliberate intention.
The domain of the fiction beyond the screen requires authority if it is to come to life. It may not offer an accurate impression of any actual physical place or space and may be created by the filmmakers through camera placement, lensing, and cutting, but it must appear credible within its genre and universe.
What are the broad dynamics of our emotional engagement? The emotion generated by film storytelling can be immediate or cumulative. It can be subdued or intense, or can have a timed delay, coming with the hindsight afforded by revelation and realization, while it may be at its most powerful at a story’s end.
Information can be direct, implied, ambiguous, concealed, revealed, portioned out, or delivered in a single instant. It can be shown visually; indicated sonically; or conveyed in dialogue, in a voice-over, or through a caption. The novice filmmaker often tends to shy away from offering direct information, believing it to be too obvious, too “on the nose,” which they see as a failing. They may even avoid communicating it altogether, or may not even know it themselves. They mistake vagueness for ambiguity or dereliction of duty for cleverness…
Storytelling, indeed, is about much more than propelling a story forward at every step of the way. Suspense, to give a fundamental example of the storyteller’s resources, would be hard to elicit if scenes were always progressing.
How might we conceive of the relationship between the language of visual story-telling and the meaning it communicates? In Chapter 2 we saw how the discourse of the screen is indeed a language, but does this differ in any way from the language of written or spoken storytelling?
The proficient filmmaker considers the criteria for framing in terms of both the shot itself and its relationship to others. How much “air” should there be around the subject? How little? How much might the degree of one or the other convey tension or release?
We might think of camera as concept. We should also consider it practice. Let us explore the notion of concept first, followed by the specifics of practice.
Does the camera sometimes participate in the action, even making itself complicit? Might it offer a comment on what it shows—by its angle (high, low, oblique, dutched), by the resulting mise en scène—thus rendering itself a critical camera?
As opposed to its reality on the set or the location, the nature of space on the screen, which may already have been modulated by lens choices, can in the cutting room be created, refined, rendered malleable, ambiguous and made to serve the drama. Through selection of available coverage and angles the editor may offer a faithful recreation of physical reality or its fictional counterpart.
The decision to subtract sound and deliberately implement silence is as important a step for the sound designer as the addition of effects. Robbed of sound, we feel uneasy and long for its return, thus experiencing suspense. When a scene is quiet, absence of sound is entirely appropriate, but when an episode is noisy, the muting, even eradication, of sound can prove viscerally chilling.
New cultural influences and depths, new and diverse filmmakers, fresh stories, new worlds, and material previously ignored or excluded bring about the ongoing invention and agility that renders cinema a living universe.
My Shot. Image. Camera Course, distilled from my Sundance Collab Weekend and The Art of the Filmmaker returns in its two 3-hour sessions on:
Saturday & Sunday 12th/13th August 10:30 AM – 1:30 PM Pacific
Register at:
To end this missive, here’s a comment from Susan Sontag that I would read to my AFI directing class:
The writer must be four people:
The nut, the obsédé
The moron
The stylist
The critic
1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.
A great writer has all 4 — but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2; they’re most important.
Thank you Ms. Sontag—so let’s hear it for all nuts and morons who write! (You may be nuts, but you’re never really morons.)
Peter
(Screen capture from The Quiet Girl. Writer-Director: Colm Bairéad. Cinematography: Kate McCullough. Character Cáit played by Catherine Clinch.)
FILM DIRECTING CLASS
Movies and the ‘Passive Protagonist’. Thoughts on New Films. IG Live Sessions. Shot/Image/Camera returns. Rising Voices. John Patton Ford. Ozu speaks. New Year’s Wishes.
HELLO FILMMAKERS & FILM WATCHERS,
I was so struck by Colm Bairéad’s feature debut The Quiet Girl and its young ‘passive protagonist’ Cáit that I wrote my first Medium article of 2023 as a reflection not only on what students of film dramatic narrative are told is a no-no—a passive main character—but touching too on some of the other oven-ready hand-me-downs the new filmmaker is often led to accepting as absolutes.
I don’t see things that way. Some of the recent and current films that, along with The Quiet Girl, I’ve personally found remarkable cover a range of genres, aesthetics, and voices unconstrained by easy instruction. The outstanding Saint Omer from documentarian Alice Diop, Aftersun, Close, Playground, Reuben Ostland’s masterly satire Triangle of Sadness, Spielberg’s auto-fictive The Fabelmans, Bardo, Pinocchio, EO, ground-breaking documentary Three Minutes: An Extension, and the gripping Navalny probably, in their many different ways, defy and disprove most of the platitudes filmmaking students imbibe (while paying for them too!).
As for my own approach to filmmaking education, I am told that new book The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen will begin the production process over the coming weeks. (As with a movie, one is on tenterhooks until it actually gets underway.) I believe I treat the reader as an interlocutor, someone who can engage with the questions I ask and come away with a new or refreshed awareness that will keep them thinking as they practice their art or as they simply watch movies. That, at any rate, is my intention…
IG Live sessions restart this weekend with writer-director-producer Barbara Stepansky, creative force and screenwriter behind the searing Netflix #7 show Woman of the Dead. (3:00 PM Pacific, January 14th on IG: @filmdirectingclass).
Courses begin in 2023 with a second iteration of my new SHOT. IMAGE. CAMERA sessions—a distillation of my SUNDANCE COLLAB immersive weekend and elements from the The Art of the Filmmaker. Saturday/Sunday 21st /22nd January 10:30 AM – 1:30 PM PACIFIC. Recordings available for a limited time. Register at https://www.filmdirectingclass.com/classes-1/classes-shot-image-camera-the-practical-aesthetics-of-the-screen
Finally, I am excited and honored to be giving a series of classes to RISING VOICES SEASON 3. My great thanks go to Costanza and Doménica Castro for their kind invitation. When a voice rises, our minds and hearts rise with it.
And before I go… Huge Congratulations to my AFI alum John Patton Ford on his nomination to the DGA Best First Feature Award for his gripping Emily the Criminal. John—you are an amazing filmmaker!
My quotation from my AFI classes this month is from Ozu and relates to what I began by saying:
There’s no one form you have to follow… When an outstanding film appears, it creates its own special grammar. If you shoot a film just as you like, you can see that.
Wishing Everyone a Happy and Productive 2023.
Peter
(Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash.)
FILM DIRECTING CLASS
New on Medium: NOTES AND HERESIES FOR THE YOUNG FILMMAKER. Thoughts on the successes of alumni. MOONLIGHT course returns.
HELLO FILMMAKERS & FILM WATCHERS,
The other day, as I was considering what to write for my next Medium Article, the idea came into my head that instead of composing sentences and paragraphs, as I had been doing daily during the last year of writing my new book, I might try setting down phrases and thoughts that I hoped might prove incisive, transgressive, stimulating, and in one way or another, useful—particularly to young filmmakers, but to everyone else too. Fragments and insights I wish I had realized much earlier started to come to me—the sort of statement, motto, jab of (I hope) inspired thought I offer from time to time in classes and consultations. So, with deference to Bresson and his Notes on the Cinematograph—a work of exalted vision worthy of a lifetime’s contemplation only the foolhardiest would attempt to emulate—I began to set out some precepts, maxims, aphorisms, and what have you that I hope the reader might, from time to time, return to, such as:
· The student aspires to be the master. The master learns to be the student.
· Don’t rebel against the past, rebel against the present.
And:
· Style comes from the soul.
· Don’t be vague—be precise. Render your ambiguities exact.
· Don’t ‘cut to the chase’, cut to the suspense…
Then came many more. Easy to read. Prompting reflection. Pithy but I hope resonant—the way I see things, at least. Agree, disagree, but I hope you find these shreds of realization helpful.
https://pmarkhamca.medium.com/
There are many aspects of being an educator that are gratifying in ways others would find hard to imagine. The appreciative comments from attendees of the recent Sundance Collab immersive and the Narrative POV course that followed have been especially welcome. Another is the success of so many alumni—too many, I’m proud to say, to list here. One in particular that thrills me is the screening at Venice this month of Hanna Västinsalo’s feature Palimpsest. I still remember the eeriness of Hanna’s early work, haunting frame by frame and defiant of analysis, so I was excited to see her movie’s title—a favorite word of mine and one I use in class in the context of the traces left behind of elements in a film’s evolution. Hoping to chat with Hanna in a forthcoming IG Live!
https://variety.com/2022/film/global/palimpsest-hanna-vastinsalo-space-hobos-heaven-1235359225/
Pleased to announce the return of my Moonlight course! There’s so much to learn from a detailed, extended appreciation of this great film. Recordings will also be available after, so if you haven’t taken these classes already you can join me for them at https://www.filmdirectingclass.com/classes-1/masterworks-scenes-from-barry-jenkins-moonlight
10:30 AM – 1:30 PM Pacific. Friday/Saturday/Sunday 16th/17th/18th September.
My best to you all!
Peter