Noise film & musical theater

Last night I finished a cut of the first section of the film, a version in which the basic plot points seemed clear and made sense. But something was missing. The cut reminded me of Ed Harris's Pollock or Terry Gilliam's Tideland. Both of those films were like long sequences of events stitched together without any unifying idea or emotional progression. In my case, it was difficult to connect emotionally to the logical cut. There was no entry point. It was like watching objective events flicker by.

So I spent most of the day trying to figure out how fix the edit. I refused to believe it was a matter of developing the character. If there's one thing I feel strongly about it's not having a "character you care about." I then spent some time thinking about emotional content. There seems to be something about emotions that makes artists wary. I was thinking of Dave McKean's Mirror Mask, for example. You hire all these actors and then hide them behind masks! But in a sense, that's what I asked Ben to do since I directed him to act in such an emotionally restrained manner. Maybe it's a mistrust of actors, or the belief that you can convey emotion in other ways.

As an exercise, I started to think about how musicals work and how you sing out your thoughts and your feelings. I then started imagining noise film as musical theater. We'd start with an opening number in which Ben describes his hopes for the spinner. Then, a big moment: the spinner works! The chorus cheers. It works! It works! Next, there's the mystery sequence in which something happens... and then the spinner breaks. And Ben does his wistful solo about a broken device, a requiem for a broken dream. You get the idea.

So I transposed these sequences back into the video edit. I also added some new film music including stuff from my favorite temp composer George Fenton. So far, this edit works a lot better. The problem I think wasn't the character or a lack of emotion. In fact, I experimented by putting shots of Ben from another scene into the beginning and it looked totally wrong because of his expression. I think the problem was that I wasn't communicating clearly enough how an audience is supposed to interpret the scenes. Using real film music instead of the temp pads really helps because it essentially tells you "this is a scary part," "this is a wondrous part." For something as abstract and emotionally understated as noise film, this helps a lot. In a mainstream film, music is often just one more redudancy. Noise film, on the other hand, may really need these cues to make sense and provide an entry point for an audience.