A few different people here have mentioned tv advertising as the major influence behind the rise of obnoxious cutting in mainstream movies; but I’ve always assumed that music videos were the main source of the problem. Does anyone know of books or articles that examine the evolution of this trend?
Anybody have any recommendations of films set mostly around one location with limited staging options? Need to do some research.
“one location with limited staging options.” Rope springs to mind. Also, I think the entirety of Lifeboat takes place in a small boat (I’ve never gotten around to seeing it though).
Unfortunately, I don’t think it would be wise to follow Rope stylistically :) Although I did really enjoy that film. Thanks Mathias
David Bordwell talks about the trend—what he calls “intensified continuity”—extensively. See his book The Way Hollywood Tells It.
I think you could do a lot worse than follow Rope stylistically.
Ya what’s wrong with Rope?
Mathias, music videos are advertising. They sell records. It’s just a form of advertising that allows directors a bit more creative leeway (though the censors still loom). In each case, though, the time pressure tends to act upon the flow of images more aggressively from the outside.
When I was coming out of SVA, I briefly interned in the music video department at Def Jam. VHS copies of fine cuts would come back from MTV with time code and a list of edits the censors demanded. The in-house producer would scroll through the tape in his office while shuffling papers, talking on the phone, checking his pager (this was 1994, haha). He would quickly tell the AVID editor (or editor’s assistant? or an intern?) how to make the changes, what shots could be jammed in over the offending ones.
I remember watching this process and thinking, “So that’s why most music videos are so spastic.”
But that was fine for videos. That kind of ragged assembly is appropriate and fun for short format music advertising. Some of it even qualifies as art. But back in ‘94 I never imagined that this style of throwing images together would swarm television drama and then Ho’wood movies. That year we had two classically-told 100 milliion dollar hits, Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump. Neither is a masterpiece, but what power they do carry owes a lot to their respect for the frame and the cut.
When Natural Born Killers came out that same year, pushing the Eisensteinian clusterfuck style Oliver Stone had revved up in JFK to a certain nerve-wracking limit, we were warned.Justin,
I meant the fact that Hitchcock shot that film in uninterrupted 10 minute masters, no cuts. It was an experiment, of sorts. I love the film, but I need to have a little more flexibility than that.
I love long takes, but quick cuts can definitely be used very well at times.
Rope definitely pushed the moving camera to extremes, but I like camera movements. I think they’re great for establishing a sense of context — Rope is all about the social context that gives rise to these two killers, so everything has to be seen in relation to something else. Fluidly. You know what I mean? A cut tends to say — “This is not that,” “This is X, this is Y.” Whereas a moving camera puts everything on the same level, and in the case of Rope, indicts the entire milieu of idle rich, super sophisticated partygoers.
Natural Born Killers certainly did rev things up an extra notch, it felt at the time a little exciting but also quite nauseating like a rollercoaster ride, i remember that head-spinning sickness i felt in the cinema, (almost as strong as the sickness that engulfed me when watching Amélie from the front row, but that was too much icing sugar). I’ve not seen NBK since but doubt if it would have quite that effect now given that that hyper style has become much more common and i/we may be so much more immune. I’m not sure how much it was deliberately imitated, and whether we were headed in that direction anyway, but it was some sort of landmark- not a catharsis or a culmination of intensity, before peace settled on us, more like a catalyst for an ongoing Fascist reign of terror, a ravenous dark force, Hollywood blackshirts whooping up the baying masses and feeding them ever stronger doses of the drug, the swirling exhilaration of speed, blood and violence, crushing more sensitive souls and quiet observation in its wake. And there above us Dark Knight stands towering, the speed generation’s vengeful God, and resistence is futile, we are to be pounded into submission with the earth-shaking stomp of giant feet, flung back and forth across cavernous spaces, and pulverised to the roar of merciless engines.
I must reach once again for Basho:
Old pond
Frog jumps In
Sound of water
Key Largo is a good example of a film shot in only a few locations, and where most of the film takes place in one or two rooms.
Kurosawa’s Lower Depths is an extreme example.
What do you guys think of films that are dialogue heavy, like Rohmer or Before Sunrise for example? Uncinematic?
And do you feel like such “uncinematic” films still have merit?
I’m pretty glad you started this thread Kenji, but waiting for something like this forawhile.
Dialogue heavy films are not inherently uncinematic. If movies are any reflection of reality, then most of the communication of a film is nonverbal. That’s not to say words aren’t important, but more often than not it’s the subtext of the exchange where an audience derives meaning.
Dialogue can just as easily move us as composition, music, and behavior can. Some ideas of a film are best expressed through the spoken word, between one character and another.
Does the image often overwhelm the dialogue? Of course, but like I said, the same can be said of life.
I don’t want to make any generalizations about Rohmer, but I saw My Night at Maud’s recently, and I’d have to say that I found at least parts of the film “uncinematic” in that the only point of interest for long stretches was the dialogue. I find long philosophical conversations of that sort in films pretty tedious (and the philosophy was of a pretty low caliber too).
I haven’t seen Knife in the Water but from what I have read it takes place mostly on a boat and it only features three characters.
Speaking of editing i was watching Lang’s M today and there’s one scene when the crime boss is saying something and he makes a sweeping arm gesture but then it cuts to the police chief finishing the sentence and the motion. It was great. Also the way he uses certain images (the bay rolling into the shot, the empty plate) to “tell” us that Elsie is being kidnapped without actually showing us. I was blown away by this movie.
Sandwiches, Rohmer films are certainly not uncinematic. This equation of amount of dialogue (or lack of it) with cinematic is simplistic if not absurd. Rohmer expresses himself visually, there are delicate give-aways often undercutting the dialogue. He also has an interest in nature and settings, use of colour, as well as small gestures and body language. Guerin’s film In the City of Sylvia, which has very little dialogue and has been praised as very cinematic soon brought to mind Rohmer and this was reinforced when i saw The Baker Girl of Monceau. Rohmer’s problem is that his mastery doesn’t draw attention to itself, he makes it seem very natural and easy.
Here’s an example of the sort of scene from My Night at Maud’s that I was thinking of, and here’s another
When I saw the film my initial response was that these long discussions of Pascal would lose hardly anything if I was listening to a radio play rather than watching a movie (these would be tedious conversations to listen to in any medium). But I’ll try to keep an open mind if someone would like to take the time to explain to me why such scenes are not in fact “uncinematic.”
“cinematic” isnt some gold standard that directors must live up to. “cinematic” is a code word for classical construction. if we use rohmer as an example, he was part of the french new wave, which was a modernist trend, an anti-classical trend in cinema.
a better question is if these scenes are boring or not. a film can be cinematic or not. but as hitchcock said, “the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.”
Mathias, take the 2nd scene and try it with the sound off. There are choices to be made with who’s in shot, what that suggests, little gestures, expressions, small details you can’t get in radio or theatre, it doesn’t have to be restless camerawork or fast editing, there’s room for stillness too to allow concentration on relationships etc. Cinema is the moving image, it doesn’t have to be a Wellesian display of tricks. People often mistake the dialogue in Rohmer’s films dialogue for characters simply articulating his ideas, as if its him speaking not the characters, whereas sometimes they can be self-satisfied, and undercut; Rohmer is always more sophisticated than his characters, and aware that some can be pompous and egotistical. There is a sensual side to his films, and they can also be beautiful to look at. It’s precisely because his style is very often quite refined, delicate and economical without drawing much attention to itself that he’s undervalued. This is a sign of maturity i think. He has done stylised films but in general it’s the naturalness that impresses me
Thanks Kenji. I grant, of course, that in the scenes in question there will be things that we wouldn’t get if we weren’t dealing with a movie: “who’s in shot, what that suggests, little gestures, expressions, small details you can’t get in radio or theatre.” What I was suggesting is that those scenes wouldn’t lose much if you were just listening to the dialogue; in other words, the kind of details that you’re pointing to don’t seem to add very much to the story being told. That’s why these particular parts of the film seem uncinematic to me; not because there is no “restless camerawork or fast editing” but because the visuals don’t seem to be contributing very much to the story being told (though maybe I’m wrong about that).
Here’s another way to put the point: what would have to change about these particular scenes for them to count as “uncinematic”? Would there have to be absolutely no editing? Would the actors have to sit completely still and never change their facial expressions? If so, then every movie ever made is “cinematic” and the word is useless.
When I think “cinematic,” I think sweeping cinemascope pans of wide open country, big skies, or extreme emotional close-ups. It is sort of a buzzword, and I think it’s mainly used to define what film can do that other arts can’t — it can move unlike painting and sculpture; it can show without description unlike literature. But yes, it’s basically as useless as saying Wagner is “musical” or T. S. Eliot “poetic.”
“…that focus on spatial arrangement of characters and composition is more indebted to theatre.” – “long take directors” (Kenji)
The above quotes for some reason remind me a bit of director Lewis Milestone’s take on John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” (1939). Especially a few of the authentic outdoor scenes, in the fields. They seem so lovingly composed and yes, staged, as do the people moving through them. I know that’s what they’re supposed to do, but I guess re-watching the film recently made me realize how well Milestone had managed to do so in such a setting. There’s a poetic elegance in that movie, it seems to me, despite the bleak elements.
This thread was over 2 years ago but it came to mind just now when coming across a quote by Manoel de Oliveira:
“an extremely constraining and reductive conception of cinema that thinks that it is necessary to use pans or make the camera move in and out and that language belongs more to the theatre. No, the cinema is everything. Language is a precious element of cinema because it is a privileged element of mankind” .
Right. At some point in the younger days of cinema, it was no doubt advantageous to de-emphasize the more “theatrical” aspects of cinema in favor of those unique to the medium (because initially the grammar of theater expression was so much more developed than the grammar of editing, camera movements, etc.), but at this point it seems more or less arbitrary to pesist in such distinctions.
Dialogue is one extra rich layer- like long takes or editing, all parts of the potential of a great medium. Problems can arise with a “look at me, aren’t i clever and cinematic” approach, from shallow egotism rather than genuine love of the medium or a clear reason behind it. So it’s not how long a long take is (never mind the length, feel the quality- tho of course nothing wrong with length + quality!) or how rapid the editing, but what they achieve. There’s a bigger divide now than in the past between Hollywood speed and contemplative cinema. In the wrong hands long takes, like minimalism, can carry a risk of mannerism.
recently read a book named Cinematic storytelling very good one.
Boone
Random examples of the kind of mis en scene cinema (outside of the the rareified festival circuit) is rapidly losing/has possibly lost:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMYLjlpP0NY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_NRQ0tEx-Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX9-9ae0ymI
and, hey, Christopher Nolan/Paul Greengrass/Peter Berg et al, if you want real terror, real disjunction, real “convulsive lyricism” (to borrow a term from Jonathan Rosenbaum), you gotta earn it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy2Cv43OKgw