Directing Cinema: film directing

Showing posts with label film directing. Show all posts

Friday, 7 August 2009

First-time film directing

Ted Hope, film producer and author of Truly Free Film, a fabulous blog about very indie film-making, has just posted nine videos to YouTube (all accessible above) which capture the conversations that he and Christine Vachon had, at the beginning of this year, with Alan Cumming, Jeff Lipsky, and Lee Daniels to talk with them about what it was like to sit in the director's chair after being established in other roles within the industry.

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

María Luisa Bemberg: online resources

Miss Mary, (María Luisa Bemberg, 1986) starring Julie Christie, Nacha Guevara, Eduardo Pavlovsky, and Luisina Brando.

Following up my last blog entry on theories of women's film authorship, I have just posted a pre-publication version of a chapter on the early films of Argentine film director María Luisa Bemberg that I finally published in An Argentine Passion: The Films of María Luisa Bemberg edited by John King, Sheila Whittaker and Rosa Bosch (London: Verso, 2000).

Bemberg was an early favourite director of mine; I loved teaching about her films which were produced against the kind of political and economic backdrop that would dissuade (and did dissuade) many from attempting to make any kind of cinema, let alone the kind of feminist cinema that Bemberg launched herself into making later in life, at the still tender age of 58. I learned an awful lot about filmmaking just by studying her films, as well as the work of other filmmakers in whose films she had professed an interest (including, especially, Ingmar Bergman, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson). In turn, of course, Bemberg has been an important influence on a number of young filmmakers, most notably another favourite of mine, Lucrecia Martel (see HERE). Martel's films have been produced by Bemberg's legendary producer Lita Stantic.

My chapter looks in quite a lot of detail at her decision to become a director following frustrations with the work of other filmmakers who directed her scripts. As she declared in 1989, "I had to stand behind a camera in order to be true to my own script and to unravel the common thread to all my transgressing characters".

In honour of Bemberg and her films, below is a list of high-quality and freely-accessible online studies of her work:

In English:

In Spanish:

In Italian:

Raffaella Bassetti, et al., María Luisa Bemberg: la passionaria . Italy: Associazione L'Occhio delle donne, 2004.

Camila (María Luisa Bemberg, 1984) starring Susú Pecoraro , Imanol Arias, and Héctor Alterio

Tuesday, 2 June 2009

Links to Auteurism and Film Authorship Resources

Director Jane Campion (right) and cinematographer Laurie Mcinnes on the set of After Hours (1984). Photograph (1981) by Gayle Pigalle

For your general delectation and educational delight, here's a whole shiny host of links devoted to film authorship and auteur theory. These resources are all Open Access (freely accessible to all on the internet). The list has consequently been cross-posted at my Open Access-campaigning blog Film Studies For Free. The list will be kept updated at FSFF, so do feel encouraged to bookmark the post there.

Thursday, 2 October 2008

Mamet on directing film

Short but good Bloomberg interview with David Mamet (Night Talk, July 2006)

On of my favourite writers on film directing is film director David Mamet. He's not my favourite film director, but his short, insightful and peppery book On Directing Film is a very good read and, along the way, argues for the 'objectivity' of film directing; it's a kind of self-help guide cum film-school-degree-zero.

Here are some of the key snippets from that book on what Mamet thinks that film directors (should) do:

‘The main questions a director must answer are:
“where do I put the camera?”and “what do I tell the actors?; and a subsequent question, “what’s the scene about?”'
(On Directing Film, p. 1)

‘The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.
The work on the set is nothing. All you have to do on set is stay awake, follow your plans, help the actors be simple, and keep your sense of humour. The film is directed in the making of the shot list.
The work on the set is simply to record what has been chosen to be recorded. It is the plan that makes the movie.’
(On Directing Film, p. 5)

‘It is always up to you to decide whether you are going to tell the story through a juxtaposition of shots or whether you are not.
It’s not always up to you to decide whether or not that process is going to be interesting.
Any real technique is going to be based on things within your control. Anything that is not based on things within your control is not a real technique.'
(On Directing Film, p. 103)

Mamet has also made a film about filmmaking: the wonderful State and Main (USA, 2000). Here's the trailer:

Posted on YouTube (link HERE) by lidiablogspot on May 8, 2008

[See also Matt Zoller Seitz, 'From the short stack: David Mamet on the Steadicam', on the great The House Next Door blog]

Thursday, 25 September 2008

Good Directing: The Dark Knight 2

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, USA, 1942)

My series of discussions of 'good directing' continues today, as promised, with my drawing on VF Perkins' article 'Moments of Choice', first published in The Movie, no. 58 (Orbis Publishing, 1981) and republished online (link HERE) by the Australian film journal Rouge (issue no. 9, 2006).

I do this because it's hard to begin discussing good directing in relation to a particular film without a detailed sense, in advance, of what the potential components of a good directorial performance might be. One of the best, and certainly the most detailed, senses of this, I believe, can be derived from Perkins' subtle understanding of mise en scène as the complex film texture (my phrase) that emerges from many 'moments of [directorial] choice' (his phrase).

I will begin by snippeting (in their original order) what I think that 'Moments of Choice' sets out as the component parts of fine film directing in classic, 1930s-50s Hollywood films - 'Old Hollywood', as Perkins refers to it below.

[Just to contextualise the first snippet in my list, Perkins opens his article with a remarkable discourse on Orson Welles's expensive choice to build a set for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) 'inside the largest available refrigeration plant', showing the lengths to which some Hollywood directors went in achieving their 'vision'. He concludes that passage with this next sentence.]

"The very breath of an actor can be made significant when the director places it in an expressive relationship with the other aspects of the scene."
"[D]irecting a film is always about making choices of this kind – hundreds of them every day and at every stage in the translation from script to screen."
"Many of the choices are matters of craft. The director works to make the scenes vivid and varied, so as to achieve an arresting presentation of the characters and their story."
"The most promising script, judiciously cast, will still fall flat if the director is unable to get all the elements of the production working together – either in harmony or in lively contrast – so that the end result flows when it is played to an audience. If it does not work on the screen, we are likely to think that there was not much of a story or that the performances were lacking. But often the fault lies in the director’s inability to find a style that brings the material convincingly to life. Just as often, it is the director who should take the credit for our belief that we have seen a credible and forceful story with colourful and engaging characterisation."
"Old Hollywood was well aware how much its product stood to gain, as entertainment, from a style that rendered its drama effectively and made it look, move and sound as if it had a sense of direction."
"[Old Hollywood] expected directors to be capable production managers and to complete their work on time, on budget and without major damage to studio morale. But it also valued and rewarded the ability to control performance, image and editing so as to create moods and viewpoints through which the story could persuade and grip the audience."
"Physical aspects of production like décor and dress can help the actors to feel themselves into their roles. But the detail of performance that brings the characters to life – movement, gesture, intonation, rhythm – has to be established on the set. Here the director’s job is, particularly, to hold each and every moment of performance within a vision of the scene as a whole so that the impact and effectiveness of today’s scene is not achieved at the expense of what was filmed last week or what remains to be shot. The continuity of the end product is, most often, an impression that has to be constructed and protected in spite of the radically discontinuous method of shooting."
"The pacing of a scene may seem just right in itself, but how will it look when the audience reaches it halfway through the film? Directors work in the knowledge that nothing is right ‘in itself’ but only in relation to the developing design. Balance and proportion are crucial."
"[I]n movies everything is designed to be filtered through the eye of the camera and remade in the patterns created on the cutting bench. [...] The camera’s frame and the editor’s scissors provide the means whereby the director carves a particular path through the world constructed on the set. [...]Selection and sequence are the keys to viewpoint that the director controls. [...] Cutting and camera movement are both means through which direction shifts and manipulates viewpoint."
"[T]he expansiveness of a film style is so much a matter of balance, of what happens when you put together, in a particular way, a posture, a facial expression, an off-screen voice and a camera viewpoint. At the very centre of the director’s job is this task of co-ordination. Direction works with the various talents of highly skilled artists to ensure their contributions meet in a coherent design."

I would further summarise Perkins' points as follows. Fine film directing in 'old' Hollywood involved:

1. Taking responsibility for 'expressive relationships'

2. Achieving the 'vivid and varied' presentation of characters, scenes, and story as part of the translation from script to screen

3. Getting the end result to 'flow' when presented to an audience; including taking responsibility for the appropriate shifting and manipulating of spectatorial viewpoint, as well as for the 'developing design' -- the pacing, balance, and continuity -- of the end product as a whole.

4. Ensuring that the contribution of all the creative participants in filmmaking meet in this coherent design, thus achieving, in the final product, a style which, amongst other things, might give a particular film a rich sense of direction.

On this final matter of style, in the last part of his essay Perkins draws an interesting distinction between the full directorial achievement of ‘style’ and that of ‘manner’, as follows:

Many directors seem to have lived quite happily within these prescriptions [those of 'the classic ['Old Hollywood'] approach which valued formal design only so long as it supported the spectator’s involvement, understanding, pleasure and belief in the narrative' and in which 'quite strict notions of what was appropriate were in play'], being ready to exert their skills within a range of genres to achieve effective versions of the accepted manner. The limitation of such adaptable know-how was that it would seldom carry a film beyond the qualities of the package originally handed down by the studio. A movie directed by, say, Michael Curtiz would be neither more nor less than the sum of its carefully blended ingredients. Sometimes that was enough. It is no mean praise to say that Casablanca (1942) was as good as its script and cast.
But it is probably fair to claim that Curtiz’s best films achieve a dramatically effective manner, rather than a style. The various elements of the film are harnessed only to a reliable judgement of what will make the story work. More is possible. The films of Ophuls, Ray and Sirk, among others, are there to demonstrate how, with no sacrifice of movie-craft, the director can bind the movie together in a design that offers a more personal and detailed conception of the story’s significance, embodying an experience of the world and a viewpoint both considered and felt. At this point, manner becomes style.

Personally, I don't think it is possible to 'quantify', or indeed to 'qualify', very good, Hollywood, film directing any better than this.

In my next post in this series, I will turn my attention fully to Christopher Nolan's direction of The Dark Knight, and ask some questions of it, including the following:

Will Perkins' thoughts, which were very much intended to be contextually specific (referring to the classic Hollywood years), help us to discern the extent of directorial achievement in Nolan's contemporary Hollywood work?
Will they help us know what to do with an interesting issue raised by Len Esten (of the Illiterary Fiction blog?) in his comment about my first post on The Dark Knight: what of those moments where films seem deliberately to choose not to be 'vivid and varied' but, indeed, to be potentially ponderous and verbose (e.g. the 'psychiatrist sequence' near the end of Hitchcock's Psycho [USA 1960])?
Do we need to have lots of information about the production process in order to apply Perkins' insights about 'moments of choice'? Or can his insights be applied retroactively, the choices, and thus their 'directorial quality', 'read' off the resulting texture of the finished film?

In the meantime, please feel encouraged to comment about these and other questions on this topic.

© 2008 Catherine Grant

P.S. There's an insightful and beautifully written blog post -- entitled Good Manners -- on television authorship and mise-en-scène (in particular relation to Kim Manners' direction of fifty or so The X Files episodes) by Sergio Dias-Branco, my very talented friend and former colleague in Film Studies at the University of Kent, the first of several upcoming posts by him on this important topic.

Wednesday, 10 September 2008

Film directing in La Nuit américaine/Day for Night: agency within constraints

Opening sequence of La Nuit américaine/Day for Night (François Truffaut, France/Italy, 1973)
(YouTube clip posted by siobhanalba)

In François Truffaut’s great 1973 film, some of the forms of 'agency within constraints' which comprise on-set film directing are clearly represented. We see (and hear) the call to ‘Cut! ('Coupez!’), actioned by the director Ferrand (played by Truffaut himself). We also watch Ferrand perform urgent gestures, in between takes, in his repeated attempts to get the actors (Alphonse, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud and Alexandre, played by Jean-Pierre Aumont) to do his bidding.

Film directing on set (like assistant directing on set, for that matter, too) is an activity thus shown to be largely comprised of performatives -- in other words, the doing of things with words (verbal utterances) and gestures (physical utterances), 'doings' which are executed in the hope of generating certain actions in others (with no automatic guarantee of success, it must be added); as well as of necessary (preceding or concurrent) reflexive processes (decision-making, etc.). In this sequence, individual directorial actions are shown in (unpredictable) interaction with the agency of those others who occupy different places in the on-set hierarchy.

What I love about the opening sequences of a number of films about film directing (see my previous posting on this topic), is that, as we can see in La Nuit américaine/Day for Night, there is often a hugely celebratory quality to the (re-)presentation of the processes of filmmaking. In this instance, the opening sequence of La Nuit américaine concludes with a virtuosic crane shot (repeated later in the film); our view of the plateau (film set) is dramatically pulled back and up, away from the organised bustle of the set, a move underscored by the equally soaring, or swelling, strains of the film's musical theme.

The scale of the visual spectacle in this sequence, together with the exuberance of its musical accompaniment, evoke for me notions of orchestration and, especially, conducting. The latter idea, in particular, resonates because of the presentation of Ferrand/Truffaut’s gestures as he verbally and physically directs (guides, orders) and conducts (leads) his actors and technicians. Because of the mode chosen here of the director's 'irruption' into the film (a jump cut from a long shot of the actors performing to a brief close up of Ferrand/Truffaut speaking), Ferrand (and Truffaut) is seen as a Little Big Man, compelled by his vision, and repeatedly, even frantically, trying to impose it throughout the various (fragments of) takes that we see, before, it seems, finally getting everything more or less together. The subsequent crane shot then leaves us with a harmonious and pleasurable image of cinema, produced under its usual ‘factory-like conditions’ (V.F. Perkins, Film as Film [London: Penguin, 1972], p. 158); the shot retrospectively imputes some calm, harmonious method to the evident, partial discord and madness of the whole process.

Alongside the depiction of the activities of a director, what is also graphically figured in the opening sequences of La Nuit américaine/Day for Night, then, are the huge constraints of the space within which the director’s activities take place. Here and in other films (another good example would be David Mamet's State and Main, 2000), this space (here, that specifically of the plateau) is clearly shown to be a ‘time-space’: a field of, and for, action which is constrained by time, by ambient conditions and practicalities, by multiple agencies, and by the need to co-ordinate/orchestrate the activities in this field, these circumstances, to get everything (or as much as humanly and technically possible) done in time.

(Some thoughts on the conceptualisation of the practice of film directing, which draw upon 'Film authorship studies and the concept of agency', a paper I gave at the Screen Studies Conference, University of Glasgow, on July 1, 2000).

© 2008 Catherine Grant

Friday, 25 July 2008

Some sense of available choices

Just before departing on a short holiday, I wanted to post some thoughts about films about film directing and directors (e.g. Ed Wood [Tim Burton, 1994], Gods and Monsters [Bill Condon, 1998], Shadow of a Vampire [Elias Merhige, 2000], Living in Oblivion [Tom Di Cillo, 1995], State and Main [David Mamet, 2000], Sex is Comedy [Catherine Breillat, 2003], and The Five Obstructions [Jørgen Leth/Lars Von Trier, 2003]) -- which have been central to some of my university teaching about film directing, but also form the basis of a chapter in the book I am beginning to finish on contemporary auteurism: Directing Cinema: The New Auteurism.

In an essay in Movie which treated questions of film authorship (V. F. Perkins et al, ‘The Return of Movie,' Movie 20, Spring 1975, p. 12), the editors of that journal wrote that ‘in order to recognise particular sets of choices, one has to have some sense of available choices.’

Whether they are ‘fictional’ or not, films about film directing represent what it is difficult to to conjure or to conceptualise in words, even after meticulous film-studies research. They give us moment by moment evocations of the multiple agencies involved in the creation of films. They reveal that the individual agency of filmmakers is almost always creatively enabled by the necessary structure and constraints of the processes of production (say, of deadlines, of collective working, of budgets, of on-set disasters) as well as by the agency of others involved.

The films often give us a better general, but also a more precise and specific, sense of the kinds of choices available to a director than much academic writing on cinema, which often only attempts to recognise the multiplicity of these choices for the purposes of thematic or interpretative reading -- such are the usual limitations of film authorship studies, alas. But there are lots of other interesting and equally authorial questions that can be asked of films and film directing that can be inspired by on-screen representations of movie-making.

Not all writing on filmmaking is so limited, of course. In the following words from the brilliant chapter 'Direction and Authorship', in his magisterial book Film as Film (London: Penguin, 1972), Victor Perkins notes:

On film, as in any impure medium, we do not find one coherent material given stable form. Rather we are offered a variety of materials, disparate in kind and function, brought into relationships which we can hope to find pleasant, beautiful, amusing, surprising, significant and so on. The film-maker’s control is over these relationships rather than over the separate elements from which they are constructed.

Being in charge of relationships, of synthesis, [the director] is in charge of what makes a film a film. […] The director’s authority is a matter not of total creation but of sufficient control. [pp. 183-184]

I can only assert, in conclusion, here that, like Perkins, these contemporary films about directing (as well as classic ones, such as La Nuit américaine/Day for Night, directed by François Truffaut, France/Italy, 1973) testify to very few obvious traces of the Romantic conception of authorship and artistry, even as they usually also point to the indispensable role of the director in all aspects of contemporary filmmaking and film culture.

See you again after my break, when I will hopefully post some more thoughts from my book chapter on these matters.

© 2008 Catherine Grant

Tuesday, 15 July 2008

‘The Director must not be credited’: Authorship, Auteurism and the Films of Dogme ‘95

Although the original Dogme ’95 Brothers agree wholeheartedly with the anti-bourgeois impulse of the 1950s and 1960s directors of the French New Wave, the Dogme manifesto makes it clear that the ‘means’ of those directors – the creation of a cinema based on auteurist ‘personal expression’ – were flawed. I quote their tongue-in-cheek condemnation: ‘The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby… false! […] Predictability (dramaturgy) has become the golden calf around which we dance’ (ref. HERE) To correct these and other flaws, the Vow of Chastity intends its participating directors to forswear their role as film artists, to ‘refrain from personal taste’ and, importantly, to regard the film instant as more important than ‘creating a “work”.’

The Dogme ‘movement’, however, remains a remarkably auteurist enterprise, on the whole, with its highly visible and audible interventions -- in advertising, review snippeting, and newspaper, magazine and documentary profiles -- by filmmakers whose names may not appear in their film credits, as the manifesto requires, but whose names and ‘personas’ clearly help to provide an extra brand label (alongside that of ‘Dogme’) with which to sell their films, to orient audience expectations, and to channel meaning and pleasure.

These realities of the contemporary independent film market aside there is, nonetheless, a great deal of variety in directorial practice among Dogme films. In a later, full length version of my work for publication, I shall examine three different versions of authorship among Dogme filmmakers, by comparing the case of Lars von Trier, moving from relatively high budget ‘art’ filmmaking to the ‘artisanal’ practices of Dogme in Idioterne/The Idiots (Denmark, 1998), Harmony Korine’s relative consistency from Gummo (USA, 1997) to Julien Donkey-Boy (USA, 1999), and the case of the Argentine first-time filmmaker José Luis Marqués and his very low budget film Fuckland (Argentina, 1999; I will henceforth try to avoid use of the profane title), passed as Dogme #8. In this much shorter version of my work, however, I will be focusing just on the latter film, since it offers a particularly interesting case study of the claims around the ‘instant’ and the ‘work’ that the original manifesto raises. I shall examine these claims not only in the light of the film’s aesthetics but also, more briefly, in the light of the publicity surrounding Marqués’s film. While it may not surprise us that the semi-humorous ‘intentions’ of Dogme directors are much more complicated than they might at first seem, the ways in which they ‘work’ in the circulation of films in an inescapably auteurist independent cinema culture prove to be important ones to consider in the context of contemporary film authorship more generally.

[Note: Much of the following information about the film was taken from its original website between 2000-2001, originally HERE – at a URL long since taken over by a different film company, who promote, inter alia, Argentine porn films]. The film was shot in one week in December 1999, when its Argentine director José Luis Marqués took three digital video cameras, two actors (one British and one Argentine), and three other technicians and production assistants to the British-occupied Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. The title of the film comes in part from a common mispronunciation of the British/colonial name of the islands by non-native English speakers. The Falklands, or Malvinas as they are known by much of the rest of the world, continue to be the subject of the historical Argentine claim for sovereignty that had led, in 1982, to the war between Britain and the South American nation.

Marqués and his team were among the first Argentine citizens to land on the islands since the war, taking advantage of their opening up to Argentine tourism. They did not inform anyone that their intention was to make a film, and much of the film they made was shot clandestinely, with one camera adapted to look like a still camera, and the others either fixed so that they appeared to be switched ‘off’ when they were actually recording, or hidden in bags and coats. The crew and the actors pretended not to know one another. And in addition to this general secrecy, the British actor Camilla Heaney was not told what the idea for the film was. She was just instructed about her character (an Islander born and bred, working as a nurse) and was told to improvise as situations unfolded. None of the many islanders who appear in Marqués’s film knew that they were ‘performing in a film.’ So the film is a very interesting experiment in mixing fiction and documentary.

The finished seventy-minute long film tells the story of Fabián Stratas, played by an actor of the same name, an underemployed magician who travels on his own to Port Stanley, the islands’ capital, on a mission to impregnate a Falklands inhabitant. He explains his preposterous motives in a speech in Spanish at the end of the film, which I translate here: ‘If other Argentine patriots follow my example, in a few years the islands will be full of Argies. And if this place were full of Argies, it would change. You know how? They want to be English people. Let them. But the next generation will be the one to make decisions. Then we’ll talk.’ The film’s premise, which many spectators in Argentina and elsewhere found offensive especially in the light of the protagonist’s constant expression of racist, xenophobic and misogynist views, is actually a humorous interpretation of the indiscreet comment by an Argentine government minister some years ago that the best way to re-conquer the islands would be to buy up all the land bit by bit. Rather than by capitalist stealth, or again by war, the film suggests that any future ‘re-conquest’ lies (not entirely consensually) in making love.

Fabián succeeds in seducing an islander, played by Heaney, and leaves the island in triumph, unaware that she has recorded a message for him on his video camera. This reveals that she was aware of his falsity, if not the real reason for it, and was sickened by his cavalier treatment of her. The proto-feminist message does not arrive at its intended destination, however. It is played back only to a non-diegetic audience, while the blissfully unaware protagonist takes a shower and sings along a rock version of the Argentine national anthem, while the final credits roll.

Rolling final credits? Surely not - this is a Dogme film. But, of course, like the other certificated films, it breaks a number of the manifesto’s rules: non-diegetic scored music and sound, most notably the protagonist’s voiceover; the digital video shooting, although the film was transferred to Academy 35mm; and José Luis Marqués’s name as director is the first to appear in the final credits. Nonetheless it seems clear that for the Dogme brothers, the improvised spirit of the film (and its to-the-letter adherence to all other rules) deserved to be rewarded with the label Dogme #8. As for the director, he disingenuously remarks in a number of interviews and statements that he can’t remember which came first – the idea for the film or the idea that it should be filmed according to the Dogme Vows of Chastity. Interestingly, on the website originally devoted to the film, to which I will come back later, the director reproduces nine of his own Vows, which in some ways add to the Dogme manifesto’s constraints, but which were produced after making the film. The vows that concern my central question in this paper about the privileging of the ‘film instant’ over the ‘directorial work’ read as follows:

3. Each actor will operate his own camera.

7. The director will not participate in the moment of filming.

9. The mise-en-scène will depend exclusively on the circumstances of each moment.

Let me offer up for your contemplation a clip [posted on YouTube on May 11, 2008, by leosargento] which exemplifies the role of the protagonist’s voiceover, and his typically clandestine mode of filming (although there is plenty of English-language dialogue, apologies for the lack of subtitling for the dialogue in Spanish):

On the film’s original website, just before the director goes on to list his extra Vows of Chastity, Marqués makes the following observations:

Some time after making the film, a few people confessed to me that at certain moments they couldn’t tell what nationality the film was. This game that I had set up, mixing action with reality, ended up confusing the film crew, and caused a lot of uncertainty and suspicion. In practice, we all became actors because each of us had a role to play. At the same time, it was a very interesting inversion that occurred: the actor acted as director, and the director had to become an actor.

In a sequence roughly halfway through the film, though, this inversion is fleetingly stalled, as the director, (or one of the technicians under his direction) picks up the camera and engages in handheld shooting of a love scene involving the main actor (as in the screenshot below).

Although it is very likely that quite a lot of the ‘disembodied’, moving footage for the film was shot by people other than the main actor, this sequence is one of only two in the film where we can clearly see that it cannot be the actor holding the moving camera. The other sequence is at the end of the film, set back in Buenos Aires, when a moving camera closes in on the tiny screen of a digital video camera to take in the message that Camilla has left for Fabián, and then there is a parallel edit to a shot of Fabián in the shower. In both of these sequences, an invisible but detectable ‘Hand of God’ moves the camera, and risks breaking the film’s illusion, or ‘game’ as the director puts it.

The director’s brief comment about the confusion over the film’s nationality also raises the question of directorial control, and the issue of whether or not it is ‘his’ film, and therefore an ‘Argentine’ film, displaying a discrete point of view about the events it narrates which might be ‘knowable’ in advance. Obviously, his method of filming means that in many key ways, Marqués cedes conventional directorial control. This clearly enhances the element of ‘unpredictability’ so cherished by Dogme filmmakers in their attack on the sensibilities of bourgeois cinema. Even as he had a loose objective or story, Marqués could not know at all in advance exactly what form the ‘instants’ in his film would take: as they happen, then, these ‘instants’ are, in a very clear sense, directorially ‘uninflected,’ to use term much beloved of David Mamet in his book On Directing Film.

To use the Dogme manifesto expression, they are lacking in ‘dramaturgy’. This makes Marqués’s film, rather more like a ‘documentary’ than even the other Dogme films. While most of these films use improvisation to a greater or lesser extent, and also borrow many of their practices from documentary and news filming (the use of multiple, handheld cameras, for instance), their greater reliance on pre-planning, the relatively conventional location set up of their film crews, and the knowledge of most of their ‘actors’ that they are appearing in a film (even if they don’t know exactly what will happen) results in a much greater amount of directorial ‘inflection’ during the filming process.

But a strange disavowal about other forms of directorial control has occurred in discourse on this film and on Dogme more generally. For example, no mention is made in any of the publicity on Marqués’s film that I’ve seen of the post-shooting assembly of the film, and its relation to aesthetic choices that were clearly made during the pre-production process. In any film, editing is obviously where the ‘instants’ are selected and finally juxtaposed to form the ‘work’, and is a process usually overseen by the director, especially in independent film practice. An analysis of the aesthetic organisation of Marqués’s film reveals it, like all the other Dogme films, to be a remarkably ‘motif-ridden’ work. Its non-diegetic music and post-dubbed sound effects draw on allusions to horror cinema sound design, and serve to underscore the film’s expression of anxiety surrounding the clandestinity of its filming. This aural manifestation of uncanniness is matched in the film’s visual style by the preference for strange camera angles, lens distortion and unusual variation in focus, all of which, admittedly, emerged organically from the mode of filming. There is also the ‘less organic’ insertion of progressively more anxious montage sequences of curious images from around the islands, representing the protagonist’s increasing nightmare about discovery and the consequences of his actions.

The film’s general atmosphere of stealth, magic and ghostliness, (strikingly similar to motifs in other Dogme films, such as Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen [Denmark, 1998] and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive [Sweden, Denmark, USA, 2000]), is clearly connected, consciously or unconsciously, to the casting of a well-known magician for the part of Fabián, and we see him performing several sleight of hand tricks to entertain the people he meets. But, in the case of Marqués’s film, as we have seen, this kind of directorial ‘inflection’ has not only taken place during pre- or post-production. In its duration, the film draws attention to the ongoing process of its formation as a ‘work’ precisely on those occasions where it chooses visibly to break its own narrational rules. In Marqués’s film, the ‘Hand of God’ has to intervene to enhance the ‘strangeness’ of the ‘instant’ in ways that a static camera could not capture.

Finally, I would briefly like to consider the matter of directorial inflection and the display of auteurist agency in relation to the role of marketing and publicity of this film. José Luis Marqués’s job in an advertising agency made him well placed to emulate the low budget marketing strategy of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, USA, 1999). A cinema trailer was launched not directly to advertise the forthcoming film (which had not then secured a release date) but to draw public attention to the film’s website, where the ‘character’ of Fabián presents his experiences as a ‘true story’ and a ‘how to’ manual, putatively in order to encourage other Argentines to visit the islands to continue his ‘mission’. The website also prominently displays the director’s rationale, and the film’s status as a Dogme product. When the film was distributed to 60 cinemas across Argentina on 21 September 2000, and was subsequently shown at film festivals around the world, the director appeared at premieres and screenings, often accompanied by his main actor, to ‘tell the story’ of the film’s unusual production. Press interest in the film has been very high wherever it has been shown. By the time they got to the cinema to watch this film, then, the audience was rather more aware of what was going to happen in Marqués’s film than most of the people who actually appear in it.

In a chapter in his 1991 book A Cinema Without Walls, Timothy Corrigan writes that

[In the cinema] Auteurism as agency […] becomes a place for encountering not so much a transcending meaning […] but the different conditions through which expressive meaning is made by an auteur and reconstructed by an audience […] the commercial status of [the director] now necessarily becomes part of an agency that culturally and socially monitors identification and critical reception. [p 105]

Corrigan examines the role of directorial publicity in contemporary filmmaking, and concentrating on a ‘“semi-textual” strategy that is often taken for granted in the relation between a filmmaker, the films, and an audience’ (p. 107), he argues that

The interview […] is one of the few documentable extra-textual spaces where the auteur, in addressing cults of fans and critical viewers, can engage and disperse his or her own organizing agency as auteur. Here, the standard directorial interview might be described according to the action of promotion and explanation: it is the writing and explaining of a certain intentional self; it is frequently the commercial dramatization of self as the motivating agent of textuality. (pp. 107-108).

While we learn very little about his ‘self’ from first-time director Marqués’s many multimedia interventions in the promotion of his film, we can certainly bear witness to numerous examples of the commercial dramatization of his story of the film production. These stories, as well as directly informing us of what to expect from his film, also tell us more indirectly of his undoubted ingenuity, skill and bravura – the stories generations of filmgoers have wanted to hear from many other ‘New Wave’ film pioneers.

In conclusion, it should not surprise us that ‘Dogme’ claims about auteurism and ‘uncredited’ directorial authorship turn out to be false, or at least to be overstating their case. Indeed, this is typical of the entertaining sleight of hand characterising the whole enterprise of this film ‘movement’. But it is important to remember that the Dogme manifesto has not generated an avant-garde filmmaking practice, but a variety of ‘art’ filmmaking, especially in terms of distribution and reception. The generic issues of diversity within standardization are of paramount importance, therefore. It is hard, if not impossible to imagine a form of commercially viable filmmaking that could be truly ‘unpredictable’, and while the films of Dogme ’95 make an extremely good stab at this, their necessary immersion in the practices and discourses of auteurist film distribution and exhibition means that their ability truly to shock us is attenuated by the otherwise rather conventional ways in which they have reached us.

[Conference paper originally given by Catherine Grant at the Society for Cinema Studies Annual Conference, Washington DC, USA, 27 May 2001]

© 2008 Catherine Grant

Wednesday, 30 April 2008

Auteurism: a definition

A lot of what I'll be writing about in this blog will concern film directing and the concept of auteurism. Some of what I will write will be a little (too) 'academic'; some of it a lot less so. But, in any case, it probably makes sense for this first post to set out what I mean by the term 'auteurism'.

Here's a definition that begins a book chapter I've written called 'Auteur Machines: Auteurism and the DVD'. The chapter will be published shortly in a great book called Film and Television After DVD, edited by James Bennett and Tom Brown, for Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies series:

Auteurism, like many other features of cinema, is a matter of supply and demand. It is a way of both making and experiencing films, and increasingly of selling them, in which the largest part of the control of the intellectual and creative work involved in the filmmaking process, or of the responsibility and credit for this, is actively taken up by or ascribed to the film’s director. Contemporary auteurism comprises a complex series of interrelated film production, marketing, and reception practices and discourses which are all underpinned by a shared belief in the specific capability of an individual agent – the director – to marshal and synthesize the multiple, and usually collective, elements of filmmaking for the purposes of individual expression, or to convey in some way a personal or, at least, “personalized” vision.

A much longer exploration of contemporary auteurist film culture will be appearing in the book I intend finally to be finishing over the summer. That's when I will voluntarily cease, for a while, to be a well-paid Film Studies lecturer, after eighteen long but good years in academia (at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, then at the University of Kent, Canterbury), and will hopefully get to spend some more time writing about film.

This book, to be called Directing Cinema: The New Auteurism, is one I've been working on for Manchester University Press for the last few years. It attempts an in-depth investigation of the ways in which contemporary film directors, their discourse, and discourse about them act in the contemporary global practices of film production, distribution and exhibition, and in contemporary film cultures more widely. Commercial developments in film production and marketing, especially since the 1970s (Neale 1981; Caughie 1981; Corrigan 1991), and geo-cultural, technological and structural developments since the 1990s have meant that a much larger number and a wider variety of directors than ever before acquire a public prominence that was once the preserve of established “auteurs” (Grant, 2000).

I consider film directors as agents, or subjects, who have direct, intentional and reflexive, if obviously not completely all determining, relationships to the cultural products they help to produce, as well as to their reception (Grant 2001). Following Judith Butler, I see agency as a “reiterative or re-articulatory practice, immanent to power and not as a relation of external opposition to power” (Butler 1993: 15). This means that, for me, while directors (as agents) make or direct films, by choosing, doing and saying (sometimes) original things, as individuals what they cannot make or “direct” is the discursive or conceptual framework of “directing” itself. In order to be seen as directors (and as particular kinds of directors), they can therefore only “re-make” or “re-direct,” or, cite or repeatedly perform, the kind of work that is socially constructed as being that of a “director,” the kind of work that we, the audience, want from directors (see also Grant 2002, for further theorizations of contemporary auteurism).

Circular, huh? It is, sort of, but it will hopefully also be productive and a take which may help to get discussions of film directing out of all sorts of historical, problematic, Film-Studies' impasses.

Anyway... I aim to unpack and unpick a lot of the above in future posts as I get to grips with finishing the book. But I will also be jotting down other less dense thoughts (!) about what film directors, nowadays, do and say.

© 2008 Catherine Grant

References:

Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter, London and New York: Routledge.
Caughie, J. (ed) (1981) Theories of Authorship, London: British Film Institute.
Corrigan, T. (1991) A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Grant, C. (2000) ‘www.auteur.com?’, Screen, Vol. 41:1: 101-108
_______(2001) ‘Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women’s Film Authorship’, Feminist Theory 2:1: 113-130.
_______(2002) ‘Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Auteurist “Free” Adaptation’, Screen 43:1: 57-73.

Friday, 7 August 2009

First-time film directing

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

María Luisa Bemberg: online resources

Tuesday, 2 June 2009

Links to Auteurism and Film Authorship Resources

Thursday, 2 October 2008

Mamet on directing film

Thursday, 25 September 2008

Good Directing: The Dark Knight 2

Wednesday, 10 September 2008

Film directing in La Nuit américaine/Day for Night: agency within constraints

Friday, 25 July 2008

Some sense of available choices

Tuesday, 15 July 2008

‘The Director must not be credited’: Authorship, Auteurism and the Films of Dogme ‘95

Wednesday, 30 April 2008

Auteurism: a definition

Directing Cinema

Hitchcock and 'Hitchcock'?

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Wednesday, 30 April 2008

Hitchcock and 'Hitchcock'?

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