David Mamet On Directing Film

I read David Mamet's short but excellent book on directing film. His basic idea: follow Eisenstein, know how "the play's the thing" and everything else will fall into place. One of the reasons I respond to the book is because it echoes my sentiments concerning design (e.g. interface design). When I was more involved in that world, colleagues were always trying to fix interfaces using text labels. It drove me crazy. My feeling was that the label should be inherent in structure, that designing meant de-"sign"ing the project so that movement didn't depend on propositional cognition. In fact, half of Mamet's book is about this idea: getting rid of "narration" (what I've been calling "indicating") and letting the structure do the work. It's the same thing that drives me nuts about Trader Joe's cats cookies. There's a little label on the cover that says, "not for cats." That's not the way to solve the problem: change the stupid name!

So now I'm trying to Mametize our project as an exercise. But there's something about Japanese culture that is inherently sign-based. A lot of Japanese TV shows have continuous text scrolls (like we do on CNN here) and a lot of films are also filled with signage (e.g., Rampo Noir). I remember how everything seemed to be a sign in Tokyo, from audio cues on escalators to smells, almost as if Japan was an Empire of Signs.

Plus, our project is based on the idea of narrative, not drama as is Mamet's. My take on narrative stems from Jerome Bruner's work and is something like this: "a sequential working out of a non-canonical situation usually emphasizing human agency." This definition takes us in a different direction than Mamet's understanding of drama. In Mamet's thinking, a hero tries to solve a problem. But I don't think our perpetual motion device really qualifies as a problem. What we have is a narrative describing a potential battle between two forces concerning the development of a non-canonical (e.g., physically impossible) device.

Finally, Mamet's theory consciously ignores any sense of visual pleasure. But for me, this pleasure is a primary reason for watching film and hard to ignore.