Quo Vadis, Rope, Dangerous Liasons, Gattaca & aestheticized death (spoilers)

Today I watched parts of Quo Vadis, a film I'd never seen before. I was mesmerized by all the Nero scenes; Peter Ustinov was born to play debauched Roman leaders. I was struck by how they portrayed Nero as an aesthete—jaded, childish, egotistical, and constantly in search of new experiences. In this version of the story, Nero burns Rome not only to clear the way for the creation of "Neropolis," but to aesthetically experience the tragedy itself. One bit of business that I loved was when Nero shed tears for a lost friend—carefully, one from each eye, into a special crystal vial.

While watching the film I realized how much I am attracted to this particular theme—aestheticized death and violence. Some of you know I love the movie Rope, which I've seen dozens of times. In the film, two friends commit murder to prove their intellectual and artistic superiority as Nietschean supermen (based on the famous Loeb-Leopold case). The theme also occurs in Dangerous Liasons in which John Malkovich and Glenn Close's characters play a decadent game that results in the physical death of one character and the social demise of another. This kind of aestheticized violence is what I was hoping for in Gattaca. For some reason I was expecting a dinner scene in which Ethan Hawke's biologically inferior character tried to keep up with the biologically superior dinner guests, bluffing his way through potentially career killing verbal interchanges.

The theme is the foundation of one of my story ideas in which exotic decadence is played out in a fake Asian setting. I found that in my mind I had mixed this up with my other pseudo Asian setting idea. In this short film, women fight each other in single-blow matches, an idea which probably comes from both Hero and the end of Sanjuro (or was it Yojimbo?). Here, the fight lies not in the fight itself, but in the preparation for the fight. So the women spend the beginning of each match sitting before their opponents, scrutinizing each other's dress and posture for tactical strengths and weaknesses. Then, in a single blow, it is over. One is dead and the other survives. The victor is the one who makes the best decision in sizing up her opponent. In the end, our heroine loses her first and only battle; in this game, one can never lose more than once. As we pull our from her bloodied face Psycho style, we hear her voice over: "I always thought that if I lost, it would be because I failed to see something important. I never thought it would be because I didn't see anything at all."

I think the whole thing works well as a short film. It has to look beautiful, sumptuous. I always think of it as looking like the fantasy sequence from Rampo Noir--



There wouldn't be a lot of dialogue. Just set up the macro anticipation of what will happen in the final death match. Then just put in a lot of micro anticipations: the training, the setting, the loving, tears shed into crystal, all painfully beautiful. It also works as a second short film because it expands on noise film, but not by too much. Only voice over, no sync sound. A few actors, but no acting with a capital "A." Real sets with green screen backgrounds.

Crank, Knowing

I've been going through the film shot by shot coloring. It's gratifying in the sense that the film looks so much better but it takes a long time.

Pick up this month's American Cinematographer for interesting features on Crank High Voltage and Knowing. Crank was shot on a Canon AH-10. This is the same camera we use at school.The whole production with its small cameras and home-made rigs (you should see their home-made "bullet-time" rig) sounds totally "DV Rebel." See the trailer here. In the article, the DP said he doesn't go for the 'shoot gray stretch in post' approach. He keeps his histograms right-leaning.

Knowing, with Nicholas Cage, was shot on a Red camera. So a lot of mainstream digital cinema action out there.

Secret sauce bleach bypass

This image shows the difference between beta 2 (bottom) and my semi-home-made bleach bypass look (top). My technique is a labyrinthine and lame way to achieve effect but it's the only practical approach I've found. Apple Color has a beautiful bleach bypass effect but I have a hard time getting the result I want. Plus, Color itself is such a pain to use because of the way it makes changes and edits so difficult. Magic Bullet Look's bleach bypass looks too thick and I've never been able to get it to look right. Here's the formula. My approach requires Looks but you can probably do something similar using only built-in filters.

In FCP, use a standard 3 way corrector to adjust the overall brightness and contrast of the image. Then apply the neo noir filter to make the clip black and white. I like to add a bit of grain—6. The neo noir filter adds a bit of diffusion which makes the light areas glow like film.

Copy the clip and place the new clip above the original clip. Then, in the new clip, replace the neo noir filter with any of the film Looks. Usually these film looks are gaudy. The approach I'm describing makes any of them usable. I've been using the Bistrocity look. I've been pronouncing it to rhyme with atrocity but I think it's supposed to be Bistro City.

Apply the Overlay blend mode to the top layer. Adjust its Opacity if necessary.

Essentially, this technique has two layers of footage, the color one on top and the b/w on bottom. The color layer has the Overlay blend mode applied.

Correction-again

After trying the interesting but unusable super 8 test I was pretty sure I was going to make noise film b/w. Then my computer went down and I had to get the disk replaced. So then I was playing with the film and combined the b/w version with the color version and got pretty much what I wanted originally--a very rich, super-saturated black look so maybe I'll go with this. This one uses the old Overlay blend mode trick in which you put two layers of video together and apply Overlay to the top layer. The difference in this case is that the bottom is b/w effected through Magic Bullet Looks with some added grain. It's a time consuming render because there are actually four simultaneous corrections + the blend mode going on but I think it looks nice.

Breaking the rules

The Spirit just came out on DVD so I had to rent it. The badness of it was so etched in my mind from my first viewing that seeing it a second time was a disappointment. The Spirit is just not good enough to be bad enough to be good. It's incompetent. And the problem with incompetence, apparently, is that in the long run it's dull. The first time I saw it I thought The Spirit might be saved with a better edit. Seeing it again I suspect that there's nothing that can help it. Its weaknesses are structural and more deeply embedded than I thought—

>Talk about the difference between 'showing' and 'telling.' The Spirit is all telling which makes it difficult to tell what's happening. It's as if Miller created his characters by labelling them "good guy," "bad guy." The Octopus, for example, is talked about in hushed tones. But we only see him doing the most paltry of evils and that's only at the end of the film.

>The scenes have no direction in the "they don't go anywhere" meaning of the word (well, in the "directing" sense also). Therefore, they don't make sense. The much maligned opening fight sequence between the Octopus and The Spirit, for example, has no reason for being. There is no objective to the fight. Worse, the Octopus himself KNOWS that there's no point to the fight. Characters wander through the film aimlessly puppeteered by a meandering plot.

>Despite its non-stop exposition, the film doesn't convey enough information for the drama to make sense. It's like sitting there trying to listen to something you should be reading.

In The Spirit Frank Miller tried to break the rules. But he made a fatal beginner's mistake. He didn't realize that "breaking the rules" really means "transcending the rules." This is what the old saying "you have to know the rules to break them" means. Breaking the rules doesn't mean creating without rules. It means that one is incorporating "the rules" into one's work but in indirect, invisible ways, sometimes even working around the rules. The error of the beginner is to not see structures, either acknowledge or negated, which remain invisible.

Some discriminations

The 'post Spielberg' style is associated (negatively) with thrill-ride, blockbuster, mainstream cinema. But I think it's important to note that the style itself is not problematic. More often, the problem is the way in which the style becomes an easy way to replace understanding with roller coaster experience.

For example, this is a little thing but it annoys me. In Jurassic Park there is a sequence in which the T-Rex stomps closer and closer to the car. We don't see him. Instead we see ripples in a plastic cup. The DVD extras shows the prop guy talking about how hard it was to create that effect. And that is the problem. The problem comes out of the mind, not from experience. Does the water in a cup ripple? It sort of does, but not as pretty as it does in JP (yes I tried it). And that's the problem I have with so many feature films. Subjective emotional experience takes precedent over any understanding of the way things work. It's almost like a perfect description of Kierkegaard's definition of aesthetic experience in which the world becomes so uninteresting that our encounter with it must be intensified into poetry. Even water moving in a cup has to be a visual effect. This is what I'm always complaining about—the falling spaceship in Superman Returns, the crowd scenes in Lord of the Rings, Here, psychological devices replace understanding.

Still, the post-Spielberg style does not necessitate this use of psychological devices. In fact, I tried to do a lot of post-Spielberg moves in noise film but they were just too hard. Few people have seen one of the early desert shots in which we see Ben looking at a photo from a high angle crane shot. Then the wind comes and the photo blows into the sky right toward the camera. We tried a bunch of times but could never make that shot work.

Then there was the desert blood reveal that I storyboarded. We would see Ben's feet walking toward the car from an underneath-the-car view. Then rack focus close to see blood dripping. The camera cranes up slowly showing us blood dripping down the side of the car door. The camera then stops in the window which we can see is cracked and bloody. Through the window we see Ben walking closer and closer to the car. I didn't try that shot because we couldn't go back out to the desert. But I doubt we could have gotten that shot anyway. It would have necessitated using a long lens on a crane plus two focus pulls. The shaking from moving the long lens would have been enough to make the shot impossible (though I wonder if we could have stabilized the shot in post?). These shots contain many post-Spielberg elements. However I designed them for grace and efficiency, not psychological effect.

The question that arises is whether the reality of shooting in the post-Spielberg style encourages a certain take on things. Yes, the style itself is not a problem. And yet, to make it work requires an extraordinary control over mise en scene. Your blood has to be dripping just right. You have to use a lot of hardware and personnel to get the camera move right. Plus, any visual effect has to be seamless. In the shot of the photo flying overhead, we were trying to use a real photo pulled by fish line. I knew that using a CGI photo wouldn't look good (even good CGI tends to look fake to me). So in my thinking, you have to have all that control plus you can't use effects. At a certain point, working in the post-Spielberg style becomes counterproductive. But I think it can be done. One way is to give up attempts at photorealism. Going slightly theatrical would make the approach possible.

Eye candy

What Bettman calls "eye candy" I call "abstraction enters into the film via narratively-justified mise en scene." The reason this idea is important is because it is subtle, much less obvious than the self-consciously artistic approaches that have become commonplace among post music video directors. It is indeed a "missing link" between mainstream cinema and art film.

You can see a good example in Spielberg's Minority Report. At the beginning of the film Tom Cruise's character is desperately looking for a house in which a murder is about to take place. When he discovers the right address he bolts for the house. We see this from a variety of angles with the camera shutter strobing to intensify the action. One notable shot shows Cruise running toward the door while in the foreground, a child's merry go around spins ferociously adding to the strobing effect. The action then continues as Cruise runs up the stairs past the railing, with each rail continuing the strobing effect.

The child's merry go round is so well justified in this context that it recedes from our memory. All we remember is the intensification of action. This is one of the main differences between Spielberg and Lucas. Spielberg is less obviously abstract; Lucas more obviously so.

The missing link

I'm really enjoying Gil Bettman's book (see last post). It's sort of the missing link between the various approaches to filmmaking I've been outlining in the blog. So here's what we have so far.

THE FOUNDATION

1. Film requires a series of micro-level and macro-level anticipations. Without these anticipations you get bored or lost.

2. Film is structured around the emotional arcs of the protagonist. It is through these emotional arcs that we are able to "enter into" the film. Film is not a series of events strung together chronologically. The protagonist's emotional arcs determine what events are meaningful and how they are meaningful.

BETTMAN (missing link)

1. The camera must show everything that needs to be seen.

2. The camera must focus attention on the center of the drama.

3. Abstraction enters into the film via narratively-justified mise en scene. (My definition of what Bettman calls "eye candy.")

ART FILM

1. Art film integrates modes of modernist abstraction into filmmaking (e.g., machine approaches, gestural approaches). In more mainstream films, these modes are rationalized within a narrative. In less mainstream approaches, the modes are unjustified.

2. Bettman strongly argues that in mainstream film, technique cannot overshadow a narrative. In other words, when a shot calls attention to itself it draws you out of the moment of the film. I would suggest that the contemporary film audience has learned to be simultaneously both "inside" and "outside" of the film. For example, a lot of the shots in The Matrix call attention to themselves while simultaneously being rationalized within the narrative. Another approach is to break the spell of the film testing the ability of the audience to maintain interest. This is how the opening title of Se7en works. The narrative is propelled forward at an infintestimally slow pace; it is almost put on hold.

First time director by Gil Bettman

This is a great book, probably the best presentation of mainstream camera and actor blocking I've found. Bettman divides films into two categories—pre-Spielberg and post-Spielberg. In the pre-Spielberg era, directors shot mostly static masters and close ups cutting them together in the edit. In the post-Spielberg era, directors keep their camera and actors moving, transforming one shot into another and still another while using various lenses to add dynamism by "forcing perspective."

In most ways, noise film is pre-Spielberg. Consider the dead bird sequence. As Ben sees the dead bird we see his reaction. Then there's a high angle shot of Ben looking into the sky. Then wide on the dead bird. Then close on the dead bird. Four shots. The post-Spielberg approach would be different. We might still see Ben's reaction and then cut to a high angle shot of Ben looking into the sky. But then the camera would swoop down past Ben toward the truck and start traveling slowly along the truck's body toward the door building anticipation. Then the camera would enter the door and we'd see a first glimpse of the bird. What is that? we'd think. The camera travels closer and then tilts down as we see the bird sprawled out below us in blood. Then, with the bird centered in frame, the camera would begin to rotate to convey disorientation.

It's easy to see why this approach has become the standard for mainstream filmmaking. First, it is highly technological. It expresses production value—money—in its virtuostic use of the camera (which requires a certain size crew and certain investment in hardware). I still believe that the hallmark of certain institutions is their merging of financial clout with aesthetics to provide a competitive advantage. Second, the style exagerrates the emotional content of the scene. We know Ben has seen something terrible. As the camera creeps up on the door, suspense/anticipation builds. Once we enter the car door, more suspense. We see some weird shadowy shape in the light. Then we get closer. Still the same shot. Yes, it IS a bird. As we pull out slightly, the camera rotates expressing Ben's confused emotional state and changing world view. This style is particularly appropriate for the nature of the medium. As I described in my post on Basic Instinct, building anticipation and jerking people around constitutes perhaps the purest substance of narrative film.

There's one part of me that thinks it would be fun to shoot in the Spielberg-ian way. I'm sure that for a lot of directors, this is directing—choreographing the camera in a dance with the subject matter. But the other part of me feels that this style takes away from the story. It's like dressing up something that doesn't need to be dressed up. It's like writing in all caps and exclamation points or substituting suspense for wonder (see earlier post). And yet, noise film is a post-Spielberg film. My dislike of editing cutaways into a master is likely an acknowledgment of mainstream film style. Noise film's camera blocking is simplistic, but it's post-Spielberg simplistic—almost as if it was shot like the storyboards for a mainstream film.

Final super-8 kinoscope test

Here's the version that was reshot to produce a better exposed image.

RE: Convert noisefilm to Super 8 test

Untitled from ron s on Vimeo.

The guy from the lab emailed me today and said that the first kinescope didn't come out well. It was too dark and there was too little detail so he had to reprocess the film. Yes, FILM. Still, he uploaded a copy so I could see it (see above). I was trembling like a 12 year old opening a copy of Penthouse when I started it up in Quicktime player. The result was... interesting. It really does look like Super-8 or at least the super 8 of my memory, only blotchier. I love the jitter (or is that judder?). The indoor stuff is dark, but the outdoor shot came out OK. There's a lot of grain. I can see using this approach for other projects. Much easier than shooting actual Super-8.