B0041VYHGW EBOK (5 page)

As ever, we’re indebted to the McGraw-Hill publishing team, particularly Nadia Bidwell, Betty Chen, Chris Freitag, and Mel Valentin.

Film is a young medium, at least compared to most other media. Painting, literature, dance, and theater have existed for thousands of years, but film came into existence only a little more than a century ago. Yet in this fairly short span, the newcomer has established itself as an energetic and powerful art form.

It’s this aspect of film that we explore in this book. The chapters that follow show how creative people have used film to give us experiences that we value. We’ll examine the principles and techniques that give film its power to tell stories, express emotions, and trigger ideas.

But this art has some unusual features we should note up front. More than most arts, film depends on complex technology. Without machines, movies wouldn’t move, and filmmakers would have no tools. In addition, film art usually requires collaboration among many participants, people who follow wellproven work routines. Films are not only created but produced. Just as important, they are firmly tied to their social and economic context. Films are distributed and exhibited for audiences, and money matters at every step.

Chapter 1
surveys all these aspects of the filmmaking process. We start by considering film art in general, and we look at one film that illustrates how skillful and effective that art can be. The chapter goes on to examine the technology, the work practices, and the business side of cinema. All these components shape and sustain film as an art.

Motion pictures are so much a part of our lives that it’s hard to imagine a world without them. We enjoy them in theaters, at home, in offices, in cars and buses, and on airplanes. We carry films with us in our laptops and iPods. We press the button, and our machines conjure up movies for our pleasure.

For over a hundred years, people have been trying to understand why this medium has so captivated us. Films communicate information and ideas, and they show us places and ways of life we might not otherwise know. Important as these benefits are, though, something more is at stake. Films offer us ways of seeing and feeling that we find deeply gratifying. They take us through experiences. The experiences are often driven by stories, with characters we come to care about, but a film might also develop an idea or explore visual qualities or sound textures. A film takes us on a journey, offering a patterned experience that engages our minds and emotions.

It doesn’t happen by accident. Films are
designed
to have effects on viewers. Late in the 19th century, moving pictures emerged as a public amusement. They succeeded because they spoke to the imaginative needs of a broad-based audience. All the traditions that emerged—telling fictional stories, recording actual events, animating objects or pictures, experimenting with pure form—aimed to give viewers experiences they couldn’t get from other media. The men and women who made films discovered that they could control aspects of cinema to give their audience richer, more engaging experiences. Learning from one another, expanding and refining the options available, filmmakers developed skills that became the basis of film as an art form.

The popular origins of cinema suggest that some common ways of talking won’t help us much in understanding film. Take the distinction between
art
and
entertainment.
Some people would say that blockbusters playing at the multiplex are merely “entertainment,” whereas films for a narrower public—perhaps independent films, or festival fare, or specialized experimental works—are true art. Usually the art/entertainment split carries a not-so-hidden value judgment: art is high-brow, whereas entertainment is superficial. Yet things aren’t that simple. As we just indicated, many of the artistic resources of cinema were discovered by filmmakers working for the general public. During the 1910s and 1920s, for instance, many films that aimed only to be entertaining opened up new possibilities for film editing. As for the matter of value, it’s clear that popular traditions can foster art of high quality. Just as Shakespeare and Dickens wrote for a broad audience, much of the greatest 20th-century music, including jazz and the blues, was rooted in popular traditions. Cinema is an art because it offers filmmakers ways to design experiences for viewers, and those experiences can be valuable regardless of their pedigree. Films for audiences both small and large belong to that very inclusive art we call
cinema.

Sometimes, too, people treat film
art
as opposed to film as a
business.
This split is related to the issue of entertainment, since entertainment generally is sold to a mass audience. Again, however, in most modern societies, no art floats free from economic ties. Novels good, bad, or indifferent are published because publishers expect to sell them. Painters hope that collectors and museums will acquire their work. True, some artworks are subsidized through taxes or private donations, but that process, too, involves the artist in a financial transaction. Films are no different. Some movies are made in the hope that consumers will pay to see them. Others are funded by patronage (an investor or organization wants to see the film made) or public monies (France, for instance, generously subsidizes film projects). Even if you decide to make your own digital movie, you face the problem of paying for it—and you may hope to earn a little extra for all your time and effort.

The crucial point is that considerations of money don’t necessarily make the artist any less creative or the project any less worthwhile. Money can corrupt any line of business (consider politics), but it doesn’t have to. In Renaissance Italy, painters were commissioned by the Catholic church to illustrate events from the Bible. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci worked for hire, but it would be hard to argue that it hurt their artistry.

Here we won’t assume that film art precludes entertainment. We won’t take the opposite position either—claiming that only Hollywood mass-market movies are worth our attention. Similarly, we don’t think that film art rises above commercial demands, but we also won’t assume that money rules everything. Any art form offers a vast range of creative possibilities. Our basic assumption is that as an art, film offers experiences that viewers find worthwhile—diverting, provocative, puzzling, or rapturous. But how do films do that?

To answer that question, we’ll go back a step and ask, Where do movies come from? Most basically, they come from three places. They come from the imagination and hard work of the filmmakers who create them. They come from an extraordinarily complex set of machines that capture and replay images. And they come from companies or individuals that pay for the filmmakers and the technology. This chapter examines the artistic, technological, and business sides of how films come into being.

In
Day for Night,
French filmmaker François Truffaut plays a director making a movie called
Meet Pamela.
Crew members bring set designs, wigs, cars, and prop pistols to him, and we hear his voice telling us his thoughts: “What is a director? A director is someone who is asked questions about everything.”

Making a film can be seen as a long process of decision making, not just by the director but by all the specialists who work on his or her team. Early decisions come as the script is written and the various elements are designed. More decisions come daily during the actual filming, especially as unexpected problems or opportunities arise. Decisions continue up to the point where the director okays the last shot to be completed. These decisions could be as important as who plays the lead or as trivial as which buttons look best on a costume.

A great many decisions, however, do affect what we see and hear on the screen. There are the artistic choices made by the filmmakers. What lights will enhance the atmosphere of a love scene? Given the kind of story being told, would it be better to let the audience know what the central character is thinking or to keep him enigmatic? When a scene opens, what is the most economical, understandable way of letting the audience know the time and place? Which is more dramatic, to show an explosion or just have it heard from offscreen? The sum total of all such decisions culminates in a finished film.

Sometimes the decisions have to do with the business side of the production. What are some ways to save money? Which of the planned special effects beingdone on a tight budget are more important and necessary? These decisions, too, affect what we see and hear in the finished film. Other times the decisions are practical ones that won’t affect the look or sound of the final film, as when a source of electricity has to be found to power the lights when a movie is shooting on location.

In this book, we’ll be looking at two basic aspects of film art: form and style.
Form
is the sum of all the parts of the film, unified and given shape by patterns such as repetition and variation, story lines, and character traits (
Chapters 2
and
3
).
Style
is the way a film uses the techniques of filmmaking. Those techniques fall into four categories: (1) mise-en-scene, or the arrangement of people, places, and objects to be filmed (
Chapter 4
); (
2
) cinematography, the use of cameras and other machines to record images and sounds (
Chapter 5
); (
3
) editing, the piecing together of individual shots (
Chapter 6
); and (
4
) sound, the voices, effects, and music that blend on a film’s audio track (
Chapter 7
). Throughout the book, we’ll discuss how they can be patterned and combined to create movies that entertain us, inform us, and engage our imaginations.

The first time we watch a film, we usually don’t know or think about the artistic decisions that were made during its production. For much of film history, most spectators never got a chance to learn much about the making of a specific movie. Today, however, DVD supplements offer “making of” documentaries and voice-over commentaries by the filmmakers. The Internet offers a vast array of clips, articles, and interviews about specific movies’ creation. Let’s examine how choices made by filmmakers lead to artistic results by looking at the production of a single movie.

Michael Mann’s
Collateral
was released in 2004. It’s a visually beautiful psychological crime thriller. Set in Los Angeles, it introduces Vincent (Tom Cruise), a mysterious man who hires a cab driver, Max (Jamie Foxx), to drive him to a series of appointments in the course of one night. When Max learns that those appointments are a series of killings, he struggles to break their bargain and escape. But Vincent forces him to carry on as an unwilling getaway driver. In the course of the evening, the two men spar verbally and gradually force each other to confront his flaws.

Mann and his crew made thousands of decisions during the making of
Collateral.
Here we’ll look at five important choices: one that impacted the film’s form and one apiece for our four categories of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound.

Scriptwriter Stuart Beattie originally set
Collateral
in New York City. Max was to be portrayed as a loser, hiding from the world in his cab and getting little out of life. Vincent was to goad him about his failures until Max had finally had enough and stood up to him. Once Mann came on board as director, he made numerous changes. The setting was changed to Los Angeles. Max became less a loser and more a laid-back, intelligent man content to observe the world from behind a steering wheel and to interact with his passengers, endlessly delaying his plans to start his own limousine service. The story largely consists of this pair interacting, so Mann’s decision to change Max’s traits altered the nature of the conflict between them. Moments of reluctant mutual respect and even hints of friendship complicate their relationship. This more appealing Max becomes our point-of-view figure for most of the film. Unusually for a film about a professional killer, we don’t see the first murder but stay with Max in the cab until the shocking moment when the body falls onto his cab roof.

The switch to Los Angeles profoundly affected many aspects of the film’s style. For Mann, one of the attractions was that this tale of a random crossing of destinies took place almost entirely at night, from 6:04
P.M
. to 4:20
A.M
. He wanted to portray the atmospheric Los Angeles night, where haze and cloud cover reflect the artificial lights of the city back to the huge, flat grid of streets. According to one of the cinematographers, Paul Cameron, “The goal was to make the L.A. night as much of a character in the story as Vincent and Max were.”