One important touchstone for this film occurred over a decade ago in grad school. I read an article describing how instructional films are capable of depicting only certain kinds of information and themes because of dramatic constraints. For example, there is a tendency to frame everything in terms of having "good guys and bad guys." Curiously, I reread the article the other year and found that the article didn't have much to say on the subject. I remember it bringing up the idea but not elaborating upon it. Since that time I've tended to assume that most of my ideas were inherently non-telegenic. One reason for doing the film was to see if this was true. My other concerns...
Modernism
When I say I'm interested in exploring what it means to make a narrative film for people from an art background I'm really asking an old question—how does modern representing work within a narrative context? Mackendrick's book is really helpful because he deals with the issues of modernism in film straight on. As a dean at Cal Arts, he had to and the chapters in his book on the topic are well worth reading. In my experience, the solutions I've seen are unsatisfying: you either get really boring hard-to-watch art films or traditional films gussied up with interesting visuals.
Needs of the drama, needs of the narrative
It's not the fact that drama has protagonists and antagonists that I find problematic. Our project has two if not three such characters. There is Ben, then there is the evil force that he combats and the good force that tries to help him. The problem is two things: drama tends to literalize everything and drama wants characters to be strong. Obviously, as a literal medium, it works better to show your bad guy. But to me, bad guys tend to be invisible. They want their presence unknown and act only by doing tiny, imperceptible things. So that's one of the central problems of our film: how do you take dramatically weak, invisible characters and make a film that still sustains interest? This points to the larger problem of drama and narrative. What do you do when drama calls for one thing and narrative calls for another? Usually drama wins. But I wanted to make something where the narrative wins. So we have a spinner spinning. And the invisible antagonist tries to stop the spinner, a weak character performing a weak action (negating an effect). But I guess to me, that's the way the world works... authentically strong people look like weak characters doing weak things.
Convention & disclosure
I find that one of the things I dislike most about run-of-the-mill movies is their use of certain conventions. It's not Hollywood technique that I dislike, but the unmooring of a convention from any kind of understanding. My favorite example right now is the crash landing of the spacecraft on Earth in Superman Returns. You see the walls start to shake, the scrabbleboard shakes, the dog perks up and then whooosh, the spacecraft lands. The sequence certainly works as drama and communicates the importance of the event. But does a landing rocketship really cause things on the ground to shake -before- it lands? I don't think it does unless it causes a sonic boom. It's not the scientific inaccuracy that's the problem. It's the fact that Bryan Singer is using conventions to describe things outside of his own experience. This is not a problem of film necessarily, just bad film. I guess what I want is invention that comes from understanding... all the way down the line.
The standard response to my complaint is that art is not about accuracy, but about interpretation and communication. I would agree, but I think I have a very specific understanding of interpretation. Interpretation usually refers to exagerrations, style, conventions and subjectivity that help bring life to an art project. To me, interpretation might include those things, but only within the scope of larger understanding. Interpretation is more like truth disclosed and made public.
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