The complexity of viewpoint

I think I now understand one of the biggest hurdles that confronts an artist doing a narrative film— viewpoint. What makes film so strange is that the viewpoint is always changing. Sometimes you're showing a story from the perspective of one character. Then another. Then you're showing something objectively (like a bomb under the table). It's really weird—not something that artists are typically trained to do.

An artist learns to paints a portrait from her own point of view. You don't usually collage three separate paintings together—one from the sitter's view, one from the sitter's mom's view, and one showing all the things that the sitter cannot possibly know but might still affect her (e.g., the bomb under the table). But that's exactly what film is like with the added complexity of using fictitious characters. Alexander Mackendrick describes how film involves removing a certain kind of authorship—

In effect, when translating into dramatic form a story that has been written only for reading, the first character to be removed is often the author himself. The screenwriter will work through the original text and ruthlessly eliminate all editorial comment, every phrase, adjective or adverb added by the author as a clue to how he himself wishes the action to be interpreted by the reader. He will retain only those adjectives, adverbs, similes and metaphors that are of immediate practical value to the actor, cameraman, editor or any of the other craftsmen whose media of expression are images, gestures and sounds—those things that can be represented on screen. (pg. 16, On Filmmaking).

It is this removal of this kind of authorship that is baffling for many artists including me. When artists can't remove themselves from a film, they are often tempted to visually impose meaning, crushing the life out of characters. This is what happened with Heaven's Gate and Mirror Mask (see earlier post). What doesn't work in film is to stand back as an omniscient creator and manipulate and color-correct significance into existence. Instead, you have to inhabit the space of the film and work in and through the characters. In narrative film, viewpoint is not something literal, but something that emerges in a multiplicity of fragments. Just thinking about it is dizzying.

It now makes sense why musical theater would be a productive metaphor for the artist interested in narrative film. Musical theater is like a bridge between the two disciplines. In film, an audience infers a lot through performance, characterization and story. In musical theater, there is less inference. You have a chorus singing the interpretation—"I hope I get it... I hope I get it..." (in the video at top). The author's voice is much clearer. It makes sense that a score would be of particular interest to an artist if it does indeed carry significant authorial intent.

Still, the issue goes beyond music and extends to the way drama is structured. The initial cut of noise film made sense technically but did not have a clear point of view. Point of view, in this case, means something far different from camera angles or color or other factors that artists grasp immediately. Instead, film point of view seems to refer to the way characters, information and elements perform in relationship to a protagonist. In the primitive way I think about it in noise film, I just ask myself the question, "how does Ben feel about this?" and that's how I make a decision about where a segment ends or what the music sounds like. The linear logic is still there. But now, Ben's emotions dictate the structure. Edit #45, a primitive strategy indeed.