The articulation of the mutable screen

From AFTERSUN 2022, Writer-Director Charlotte Wells, Cinematographer Gregory Oke.

In Walter Murch’s seminal In the Blink of an Eye, he posits six criteria for making the cut, the fourth of which is Eye Trace — the journey of the viewer’s eyes over the screen, from one side to the other, up to down, locked on one spot, transferring to somewhere else…

There is then not only the story a movie tells but also the story of its viewer’s eye trace or eye path, as their attention is drawn to particular places within the frame. Meanwhile, what goes on in other parts can be subliminal, perhaps not taken in at all.

But this is only one example of the constantly changing relationship between the audience and the fluid dynamics of the screen’s canvas.

The movie screen itself, of course, generally remains the same — unless the film employs changing aspect ratios (an effective example of this being Interstellar). Even so, when the filmmaker uses a frame within the frame, the section they define becomes, in effect, its own new aspect ratio. A wide screen is changed to academy ratio, perhaps to something more narrow — maybe to that of a smartphone, as other areas are blocked out by foreground obstructions or taken up by areas of “negative” space.

The director might at times compose several frames within the frame. Windows, doorways, hatches, mirrors, TV screens might contain individual images that contribute to one composite image. Changes of movement or light, the racking of focus, a new emphasis achieved by the orchestration of color or depth, or by shifts of context afforded by dialogue, may switch the viewer’s attention from one segment to another. In these ways, a static frame can be rendered dynamic to the viewer.

A strong instance of this can be seen in Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, in a scene set in a hotel room. Here, the filmmaker defies the limitations of a restricted location — the room and its adjoining balcony — by using a mirror and a character-operated DV cam that pans, settles, pans wildly again, its images displayed on a TV screen. By adding a pile of books, relevant to one of the two main characters, (one volume is boldly anachronistic and another nicely pertinent to the director’s inspiration), and by using the distorted, faint reflection of action in the room on the TV screen once the DV cam has been switched off, Wells creates a composite frame of interconnected images.

The effect of this is to make the viewer have to work to follow the story. Given that one of the characters relates a recollection from his boyhood, there are other images evoked too — in the viewer’s imagination, on the screen of their mind.

Frames within the frame in AFTERSUN

At one point, Calum, played by Paul Mescal, can be seen in crisp focus in a sliver of space to the extreme left of the frame. With the viewer’s attention firmly fixed on him as he talks, the film’s aspect ratio becomes to the viewer — at least subliminally — narrower than that of a smartphone. Wells thus transforms a peripheral area of the screen into the central one in this moment.

(For all of my formalist preoccupations, let’s not forget the miraculous evocation of emotion in this astonishing debut feature — evidence, should it be needed, of the unity of substance and style in the best work.)

The variability of the canvas the screen offers the viewer does not always require frames within frames of course. Varying shot sizes are in themselves a simple means of visual modulation. From extreme close-ups to breathtaking vistas, from a microscopic cell to entire galaxies, this fluctuating universe of visual language offers the director the choice of the range of shot sizes appropriate to the cinematic idiom of their particular movie.

The oscillation of distance from and proximity to subject matter, meanwhile, adjusts the changing nature of the viewer’s connection to characters and objects. When they see them and when they don’t, how they see them, from the front, from behind, obscured or unobscured, alone or in a populated frame — these permutations also constantly quicken the connection of viewer and screen.

This scale and scope and the contrasts presented apply both to montage and to fluidity within the individual shot. A famous example in the sense of changing shot size, of the contrast between distance and proximity is the crane shot in Hitchcock’s Notorious, in which the camera descends from above a high landing, panning to reveal a wide framing of the party scene in the lobby below, then continues to plunge until the shot focuses on the back of Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman, then pushes in further to settle on her closed fist, holding the frame as she opens her hand to reveal the key clutched secretly in her palm.

What this classic shot also reveals is the mutability of the nature of space on the screen. From deep to flat, through mid, variations of space energize the filmmaker’s canvas, concentrating, perhaps restricting, or to the contrary opening up the vision of the viewer — rendered at one moment cavernous, at the next claustrophobic, or vice versa.

Related to this, the axis of the drama and its tension might be lateral, vertical, or deep (x-, y-, z- axes), shifting cut by cut or within a camera move. Characters interact across the frame at one moment, then from foreground to mid- or background at another.

Contrasting compositions also serve to stimulate the viewer’s visual experience — line, shape, proportion are mutable with the filmmaker’s different choices of angle. What might be manifest from the camera placed at eye height, for example, might change radically to a new geometry revealed by one placed overhead.

Movies lacking this cinematic agility, shot for example in endless medium close-ups throughout, interspersed only by wide “establishing” shots, often prove visually dull. Amelie, at least for me, for all its merits posed such an endurance test, its screen increasingly monotonous to behold. (Many loved it, however.) It has to be said though that scenes and sequences in themselves may be intentionally made visually monotonous as the filmmaker traps the viewer in their engagement just as characters in the movie may be trapped in their situation. Same shot sizes, same angles, over and over and there’s no escape — either within the story or for the uncomfortable audience. Effective for a stretch but tough to take and worse, boring, for an entire film.

On the other hand, films with little or no organic visual strategy whatsoever but a random opportunism of form, to me at least, can prove equally alienating.

The viewer’s “visual palate”, as I like to think of it, benefits from refreshment. Like a change or reversal in narrative direction, an oscillation of tone, a shift of place or time, variations in the nature of the screen and the elements within it serve to reinvigorate and maintain the viewer’s commitment.

Peter Markham

March 2025

Cinema: Technical Flaws Reconstrued as Style

Anamorphic lens flare in MOONLIGHT, 2016, Writer-Director Barry Jenkins, Cinematography James Laxton.

Years ago, too many you might say, while doing the BBC Director’s Course in London, I was told to read the BBC manual for the director. This well-intended handbook might well have been the worst, most damaging tome of filmmaking instruction ever printed.

You can’t cut from a moving shot to a still shot, it proclaimed.

Wrong!

You can’t cut from a wide shot to a close up, it instructed.

Wrong!

Camera movement must always be motivated.

Wrong again!

You can’t this, can’t do that…

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

The premise behind all of the nonsense presented year after year in that guidebook of erroneous diktats was that the task of the filmmaker constitutes the strict observation of some form of tyrannical decorum.

It does not. There is no decorum, only the cinematic language the filmmaker chooses as they formulate the visual approach to their movie. The task of the director is to tell the story, engage the audience, conjure emotion and, hopefully, reveal something of the human soul, its paradoxes, mystery, and universality by whatever means they might render effective, by what works. It is not to obey bogus sets of rules and win marks for good behavior.

Martin Scorsese says There is no manual. If he’s right—and I believe he is—then filmmakers should be wary of any such proscriptive vade mecum that comes along, imposter as it’s most likely to turn out to be.

One of the most telling rejoinders to the good behavior and correct grammar mindset of that BBC pedagogy is the evolutionary nature of cinematic aesthetics throughout the decades—and in particular, the way by which technical error or flaw can be the source of fresh visual tropes. Such evolution—from fault to utility—defies any notion of technique set in stone.

An unsteady camera, for example, usually handheld, was long regarded as anathema. Later, it was understood as an invaluable resource for the documentarian, then a means of showing unsteady or violent action in a fictional context. After this, it became an element of style in itself, conveying perhaps a sensibility, perhaps a world free from set form, social, cultural, in which the filmmaker is free to explore, speak, think, feel.

A handheld camera, when not stable, can be a powerful means of expressing a subjective POV, although in this respect it isn’t essential. (I recall the aforesaid Martin Scorsese asking me to shoot an insert — a subjective POV shot to be cut into a scene of high drama — with absolute rock steadiness and not with the panicky shake I had anticipated.)

The handheld camera has indeed for some time been seen not as faulty, as lazy, not as a compromise down to budget or time but as a valid resource, maybe for a scene or sequence, even in the making of an entire movie. With increasingly portable cameras, it has become currency rather than heresy.

This is not to suggest that filmmakers are obliged to employ handheld camera work or that those who do not are somehow missing out or somehow retrogressive. Recently, for example, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door demonstrates fastidious precision in its framing and camera movement. To me, it’s sublime. RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys by contrast, also a current favorite of mine (for what that’s worth), makes use of a highly unstable camera in its adept articulation of subjective POVs.

Documentary, the French New Wave, and the growing imperative to make a movie by whatever means possible have proved instrumental in the acceptance and later mainstream embrace of the unstable perceiver, the unsteadycam.

Soft focus is another manifestation of the slip-up-made legitimate stylistic feature. In a scene I use as a teaching tool, a character, seen in medium close-up, leans forward, and as he does, the focus on him is lost for a split second. Students used to question that. It seemed to them a mistake, something the filmmakers should have corrected on a subsequent take.

No one comments on it these days. They accept it without question. Actually, it never was a mistake, even if it happened without forethought. The movie in question is based on factual characters and events so its style incorporates this element of documentary footage to good effect. The imperfection lends both the staged material and the celebrity star playing one of its main characters the authenticity of a documentary’s captured reality.

This works on the viewer subliminally. They don’t give it a second, even a first thought. Style creates substance. What was once acceptable in documentary — and even there it was once seen as unacceptable—has long since spread to fiction. Or been stolen by it. The inevitable compromises accepted in the former have enriched the designed visual terrain of the latter.

A failure in technique has morphed into a visual device to convince the audience that:

What you see is real. The focus-puller’s blip confirms it!

Before long, this glitch spread to most genres, to fantasy, to horror.

The validation of the error. The endorsement of the blemish.

Look at how lens flares have been similarly accepted into the lexicon. Once the bane of the cutting room, an effulgent smudge or blazing flash can prove gold to the cinematic stylist. Look at the instances in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight for example. A frame obliterated by the ectoplasm of an errant flare. A shot severed in two by the luminous blue streak afforded by an anamorphic lens. (See the screenshot above.)

Consummate work! A real movie! Nobody can argue with this! So the assumptions go.

(Disclaimer: I love it!)

Anamorphic lenses—there's more to consider in this respect.

The distortion of horizontals and verticals to the edges of the frame with these, for example, such as the subtle nuances seen in Anora. (And let’s not forget wide angle, even fish eye spherical lenses and the caricatured geometry they contort into shape. The Favorite, anyone?)

The bokeh of the anamorphic lens comes to mind too: the rendering of spots of light as oval-shaped—this is particularly effective given the reduced depth of field these lenses create. Not an error as such but a distinctive feature now absorbed into the discourse of the movie screen.

The “breathing” inherent in the anamorphic racking of focus—the vertical shift of objects along the deep axis that it causes—has also become familiar. Look at how this insidious spasm animates the frame when the viewer’s attention is drawn from one object or character to another as they subtly adjust along the vertical axis.

There’s yet a further phenomenon in our category of misfit manifestations, again once rejected in the cutting room. Over-exposed frames, the culprits from an unshielded lens, have long been integral to cinema’s ever expanding patois, adding the dynamism of blinding light to the list of the screen’s now respectable transgressions.

The shaky camera, soft focus, the lens flare, lens distortion, anamorphic bokeh and “breathing”, over-exposed frames. It’s not decorum, not set method, but in these instances, it’s error that yields the key to fresh style.

Because when something goes wrong, that something can later go right.

Peter Markham

February 2025

From my February newsletter

My two books for the fiimmaker

Every so often I like to stand back and reiterate what I offer in filmmaking education, how I believe it differs from much of what else is out there and why it yields benefits to directors and other filmmakers from around the world, whatever their sensibility, approach, or genre leanings.

Here is some of what I make every effort to provide:

• Human interaction. Online sessions are LIVE—but recorded so you can watch later as well. 

• One-on-one consultations, thoroughly prepped.

• Questions, exploration, discovery.

• Support in finding your filmmaking self. No one-size-fits-all instruction. “THERE IS NO MANUAL.” (Martin Scorsese).

• Exploring the nature of story, storytelling, the language of the screen.

• No conflation of creative filmmaking with careers advice, industry talk, production procedures.

• No AI.

• Specific examples, forensically analyzed, to illustrate concepts vital to the filmmaker.

• Topics not covered elsewhere.

• References to the arts and philosophy but…

• Emphasis on the filmmaker’s imperative of practicality.

• Centrality of: Mischief. Magic. Mystery.

• Centrality of: Intuition. Instinct.

• Belief in, passion for, devotion to Cinema. 

Above all, I am receptive to your questions, comments, thoughts, and contributing insights.

Please email me if you’d like further clarification.

Peter Markham

February 2025

Is there a difference?

From “In the Mood for Love” (2000) | Writer-Director-Producer Wong Kar-wai. Cinematography Christopher Doyle, Ping Bin Lee.

Awhile back, I attended a memorial for a dear colleague, a writer and educator with a decades long record of achievement in film and TV. No one could have been more generous or encouraging to their students or collaborative with other teachers than this exemplary educator.

One of this sadly lost man’s friends, apparently among his closest, in giving his eulogy, came out with something to the effect that when the writer has written the screenplay and the director goes on to f… it up…

If the roar of applause from the assembled scribes immediately drowned out any possibility for reflection on what had just been said, the import was clear enough without it — film is all about screenplay. The job of the director is to ensure that the screenplay plays out on the screen. Faithfully. Obediently. Rigidly…

In this blunt view, the director is little more than a copyist. Dutiful, loyal, unquestioning as they point the camera at whatever the writer describes. They’re not even some kind of translator, taking language on the page and translating it into the language of the screen, since in the assumed process of the eulogist that evening, the language of the screen, were it ever so much as acknowledged, can play no part.

The screen, we were to believe, is merely a subservient vehicle for the story’s telling, which to all intents and purposes has already been done on the page.

The art of cinema for the director, if we are to believe this, is thus comprised of two elements: casting and the directing of the actors. Otherwise, there are only the processes of production, logistical, professional, while production design, cinematography, costume design, editing, sound design, and score/source music serve only as slaves to the screenplay.

Extremist stuff from just one person of course, although judging from the reaction that evening, it appears not only widely accepted among many screenwriters but passionately endorsed.

Before going further, I want to make it clear that I see screenwriting as an intensely challenging form of writing—maybe the most difficult of any since it involves writing in one medium for another. Screenwriters, meanwhile, are casually and habitually disrespected. And some directors, it has to be said, do indeed damage the writer’s work…

Perhaps they fail to grasp the complex connective tissue the writer has built into their script, proclaiming they are “making the film their own.” (A film surely should be made the film’s own, not the director’s, nor the writer’s.)

They might be utilizing shots and angles striking in themselves but unrelated to the narrative — a purely pictorial approach lacking dramaturgical authenticity. A director might employ a tone contrary to the writer’s intended attitude to their material, leading to confusing results. A director might, to the detriment of the movie, ignore the sense of rhythm and energy the best screenwriters can convey on the page. A director might not have even read a screenplay with sufficient diligence and so fall short in their efforts.

Yes, there is plenty that can go wrong on the director’s side.

Next consideration though — say two directors could each direct the same screenplay and with the same cast, team, sets and locations, would this result in two identical movies? Of course not. Performance, shot selection, angle, framing, sound, editing, rhythm and its manifestation, tonal modulation, articulation of narrative POV — there’s a wealth of factors that depend on a director’s creative decisions. Screenplay alone cannot determine all of these aspects.

There again, could a director ever make a good movie from a mediocre screenplay? Perhaps not, but could they make a good movie with noscreenplay? Yes, they could and they have.

Wang Kar Wei did this with In the Mood for Love, a classic of the new millennium. Mike Leigh’s movies used to involve weeks of improvisation that resulted in his story and characters coming to fruition. Co-Writer-Director of the animated Flow Gints Zilbalodis has commented on social media that once it had been completed, he never again looked at the film’s screenplay when he went on to make his movie.

Surely, a screenplay is a blueprint rather than a hard and fast template? Even Writer-Directors consistently discover this as the concept and articulation of the film they have set down in screenplay form evolves through the practical and developmental aspects of its making, through the collaboration of the creative team, and as the film itself speaks to its filmmaker with increasing clarity of what it needs and what it is.

We might say that the director should be faithful not to the script on a surface level but to its depth and spirit, those products of the writer’s creative subconscious, not to mention the interweaving of its narrative and thematic threads.

The director’s voice is then not a betrayal of the writer’s screenplay but the vehicle for the realization that transforms it into cinematic life.

The seed is not the bloom. The bloom is the bloom.

Peter Markham

February 2025

Which is the true language of film?

Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) | Images: Wikipedia, Philosophical Film Festival.

Pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein asserted that cinema works through the cut:

Eisenstein felt the “collision” of shots could be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience and create film metaphors. He believed that an idea should be derived from the juxtaposition of two independent shots, bringing an element of collage into film.

Another Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, in his monumental book Sculpting in Time, later maintained that film’s essence lies not in the cut but in the passage of time within the shot. Here, a camera holds the shot as events, the world, or simply time itself, pass before our eyes.

Robert Bresson, it would seem, disagreed with Tarkovsky. Like Eisenstein, he proposed that the essence of cinema lies in the cut. Unlike his counterpart though, he was not for any collision of shots but — in accordance with his aesthetic of the uninflected image — stated that the poetry is in the joins and not to be found within each of what he thought should at best be neutrally presented frames.

I’ve heard it posited that the long take reflects our perception of the world.We look one way, look another, at one thing then something else but we don’t cut in between. Instead, we experience an uninterrupted flow. A notable actor once told me that estimable filmmaker Gus Van Sant, with whom he’d just worked, incorporates this insight in his approach to shooting.

Does the contention bear scrutiny through? I’m an enthusiastic admirer of much of Van Sant’s movies and am fortunate to have met the man when he generously visited one of my classes but I seem to recall that editing master Walter Murch, in his book In the Blink of an Eye thinks quite the opposite. That when we look one way, then another, we reflexively blink as our eyes pan.

The cut, he suggests, is intrinsic to human perception.

Perhaps it’s true at deeper levels also, true of our inner “seeing” even? I’m sure I dream in cuts. (Although there’s one camera move I conjure in my sleep that dollies around some dark corner and leads me — with no cut I’m aware of along the way — to encounter whatever terror might be concealed, in menacing wait for me.)

Talking of the subconscious, in the days after major surgery several years ago, while awash in oceans of painkillers, I was jump-cutting from my inner world to the outer, from an interior, weird, self-concocted version of Chinatown to my attending surgeon, nurses, and hospital staff.

Polar opposites: noir on the inside, healthcare on the outside.

Perhaps those jarring transitions from imagination to the witnessing of what was actually happening around me constituted an extreme manifestation of our constant daily switching from thought to vision, from imagined image to perceived event, on and on, on and on? Perhaps, I find myself wondering, the cut is fundamental to consciousness itself?

Even if this were to be the case though— and perhaps it’s a fanciful notion on my part — need the language of film be restricted to the mimesis of our mind’s processes? Shouldn’t the filmmaker be free instead to form and utilize a cinematic language most appropriate to their movie and their sensibility? To expand consciousness rather than merely adhere to it. Why shouldn’t filmmakers invent, innovate, explore, and subvert?

If a visual language functions, if it communicates, creates wonder in us, horror, astonishment, and above all emotion, if the poetry of its imagery shines (or shadows), if it simply tells a story, surely its validity is authentic?

Entire movies may consist of a single shot — or what appears to be one. From Hitchcock’s Rope, to Russian Ark, to Irréversible, to the more recent Birdmanand 1917 (nothing there in the list by Tarkovsky, oddly) the canon continues to expand along with the capabilities of the editing technology that enables this aesthetic. It’s become easier to move the camera too. To begin with, Steadicam appeared, then cameras themselves became much more portable so that individual takes can be achieved with an ease denied to directors of previous eras, saddled as they were with weighty 35 mm Mitchell’s, Arriflexes, and Panavisions.

Yet, montage remains as potent as ever.

Let’s take a look at two scenes from masters of film that illustrate the contrast between the opposing maxims:

Firstly, some opening moments from Bresson’s 1959 Pickpocket:

From Bresson’s Pickpocket, Cinematography Léonce-Henri Burel

Starting with the arrival of protagonist Michel at the racetrack, where he stands behind the woman he’s about to rob… (Not a word of dialogue is spoken throughout.)

1 — Over Michel’s shoulder as he arrives behind the woman. She turns, looks at him.

CUT

2 — 3-shot. Woman. Michel. Man. Woman turns from Michel to the front. Michel looks from her to the front. (Hold shot.) Man looking through binoculars. Michel glances down (to woman’s purse), up, then down again.

CUT

3 — Purse. Michel’s fingers edge toward, feel and loosen catch, edge back.

CUT

4 — Repeat 3-shot, Michel looking to the front. Hold shot.

CUT

5 — Repeat purse shot. Michel’s fingers pop catch of purse open.

CUT

6 — Repeat 3-shot. Michel blinks, looks to the front, glances down then up, looks to the front, again glances down then up.

CUT

7 — Repeat purse shot. Michel’s fingers enter purse.

CUT

8 — Repeat 3-shot, Michel looking to the front. Everyone’s looks from frame right to frame left as they follow the horse race. Man lowers binoculars.

CUT

9 — Repeat purse shot. Michel’s fingers take out a bundle of bills from purse, transferring them to his jacket pocket.

CUT

10 — The scene moves on, everyone heading for the exit.

You could write this in a paragraph as a series of sentences, each describing new steps in the action. Bresson stated:

To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks.

See my article “Cinema’s Currency of Looks.”

For Robert Bresson, the cut consummates the binding, not as Eisenstein’s clash but as connective tissue. Michel, the woman, her purse form an integral triangulated drama. Hard to see how any fluid camera could capture this as well. Even moving rapidly, it couldn’t arrive at each image in time.

In addition, this sequence of shots forms a purely cinematic universe. The physical world here is an impossibility. The relationship between hand and purse is designed for those individual frames. From where Michel stands, the movement of his hand in those shots would not be possible. The actions could not be shot in single take because they couldn’t exist in the real world in the precise configuration shown.

Another virtue of montage then: cinematic precision.

(The use of sound is also vital. Listen to the thunder of the horses’ hooves and where this comes in the scene.)

Next, an example of the converse: the long opening take from Max Ophuls 1953 Earrings of Madame de…

From Ophuls’ Earrings of Madame de… Cinematography Christian Matras.

Here, the extended take could be thought of as the equivalent of onesentence, although the shot is far more elegant than any lines on the page might be. Watch the clip to see how immeasurably superior the shot is to my attempt to describe it in a single sentence (here taken from my first book):

The shot begins with the image of jewels in an open drawer as a woman’s gloved hand points at, and hovers over a pair of earrings before opening an adjacent case of jewelry and effects, again hovering, then reaching to open a closet opposite — in the mirror of which the audience does not see the woman herself — to reveal more drawers, closed but with an extrusion of ostrich feathers, after which — the camera pulling back to show the woman’s shadow — she moves on to open a second mirrored door that like the first fails to reveal her reflection, disclosing a row of dresses and a top shelf of bric-a-brac before she continues to a third mirrored door that once again permits the audience no view of her, inside of which are fur coats on hangers, one of which she takes down, fondles, then replaces before returning to the previous closet — the audience catching a fleeting glimpse of her partial profile now, and also of her other, ungloved hand — to reach for a hat on the top shelf, knocking over in the process a bible, which she retrieves (as again the audience catches sight of her profile) before taking the hat and returning to the dressing table — evidently where she was first situated — and in looking at herself in an ornately bedecked mirror provides the audience with its first view of her face, tries on the hat, lowers its veil, takes up and poses with a jeweled necklace, which she rejects in favor of a crucifix that in turn she discards for the earrings she originally hesitated over, tries them on, slips them into a pouch, rises, and pushing shut one of the closet doors she passes, heads for a bed from which she picks up a handkerchief before crossing to the door of the room and exiting.

End of shot!

How effortless is Ophuls’ mise-en-scène and camera and what they create on the screen compared to my cumbersome prose? (We experience the shot but read the sentence.) Despite shooting the scene with a heavy 35 mm camera, or perhaps because of it, there is a precision in this work that in its own way parallels that of Bresson.

(And I haven’t mentioned the complex use of sound and how that informs image…)

Here’s what this single take achieves: 1. The introduction of the earrings of the film’s title 2. The introduction of Madame de, searching… 3. The camera has the audience follow and accompany her in that search. 4. The audience wants Madame de to achieve her goal even before it knows what this is. 5. The revelation, through her belongings and wardrobe, of her tastes and lifestyle. 6. The misdirection of the audience, who will later come to understand she is far from affluent and has financial problems. 7. The teasing of the audience by the withholding of the character’s face. 8. The introduction of the notion of moral transgression, implied when she knocks the bible from the shelf. 9. The revelation of her sensuality as she strokes the fur of a coat. 10. The eventual introduction of the protagonist as she looks at herself in the mirror, a moment when the audience shares and invests in herbecause it’s been made to wait to see her face. This brings the audience into her Narrative POV. 11. The showing of the environment of her bedroom and its decor — further insight into her world. 12. By not cutting but “editing” with a fluid camera and so utilizing real time, the director places the audience in Madame de’s temporal experience and compels it to follow her.

A couple of consummate examples of each approach then: montage and long take.

Some consideration of rhythm, whether fast or slow, is also central to any discussion of the two cinematic philosophies. With cuts, rhythm can be readily modulated. With a long take, the filmmaker has to be sure they have it right on the day. If they haven’t, they’re going to need to insert cuts anyway. So an inordinate amount of shooting time might well have been take up to achieve an ambitious shot that never makes the movie in its unbroken form.

The notion of rhythm itself deserves exploration. Are we talking about the rhythm of the screen or the rhythm of life? The cinema of Eisenstein and perhaps Bresson, or that of Tarkovsky? Are the two equally valid? Are they mutually exclusive? Is the rhythm of a Tarkovsky slow, long take somehow more “authentic” than the screen tempo of an Eisenstein montage? Why would that be? Because there’s no manipulation of the passage of time, as there will often be in a montage? And so on and so forth… So much to think about.

I’ve also tended to skate over the use of fluid and static cameras, although either can be used for both approaches. With a long take, a fluid camera generally facilitates editing in camera whereas with static camera in such a take, it is the unfolding of the action itself which must offer increments of information.

With montages meanwhile, cuts on the move, particularly when planned, offer a versatility of orientation and energy flow harder to execute in a long take.

In conclusion, I’m not personally prepared to forgo either the Eisenstein/Bresson or the Tarkovsky concept and enthusiastically settle for both. Indeed, most filmmakers adopt whichever method a scene requires, although they may have chosen one particular aesthetic over another in their formulation of the style of their film. There are those, meanwhile, who will go for the long take solely to show off prowess or make innovative use of new technology purely for the sake of it — opportunism which can easily undermine the authority of a film’s visual language. That doesn’t however undermine those examples of the method’s best articulation.

The purists and the visionaries, for that was what the three filmmakers earlier quoted were, reveal to us fundamentals and essence of cinema. The collision or the poetry in the cut. The passing of time in the shot.

Perhaps though, it is in the irreconcilable contradiction of these concepts that the ultimately inexpressible genius of cinema lies…

Peter Markham

November 2024

Three movies day and night

The Electric Cinema, Portobello Road, Notting Hill, London. Est. 1911. (In better nick than during my days there) | Photo by Ewan Munro on Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I wasn’t born into a home with a TV. I saw a film on the big screen before I ever watched one on its smaller counterpart. And what a film it was!

Not long ago, in an interview about his relationship with his father, Robert Downey Jr. looked down at fathers who took their sons to Fantasia as their first film, his own dad having taken him to an X-rated movie as his starter flick. Well, it was Fantasia that my own father, whom I loved, took me to as my first film, so this dismissive comment hurt quite a bit.

I’ve since reflected though, that given Downey Jr.’s barely disguised anger as he spoke, the subtext of his throwaway comment could have been that he secretly wished he’d have been taken to something less odd for a kid than porn — such as Fantasia perhaps.

Dad had left school at 14, was an autodidact, an unsophisticated twenty-five year old, and from a very different, culturally more modest world, than writer Downey Sr. Seeing that film with him when I was three years of age in a cinema in Battersea, South London, and sitting mesmerized in the front row of the balcony, the dark abyss of the stalls below, couldn’t have been more terrifying, more overwhelming, or more consequential…

That was the afternoon I was born. Everything before had been a pre-existence. When Thor threw down his thunderbolts when the brooms danced to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, my wonder, terror, astonishment exploded.

London was blitzed still, bombed out and grey, its architecture stained with black grime — the taint of its black deeds the world over. The whining of Nazi V1 drones and the screams of the V2 scud missiles echoed on, long after the demise of the Reich.

The gas mask in the coal cellar stared through cobwebbed dust with hollow menace. Shadows lurked in every recess of the family flat’s dank hallway, waiting to pounce… and do what? I dreaded to think. The bathrobe hanging on the back of the bedroom door awaited its sudden moment. Fridge-less milk soured in the kitchen sink, place of ablution for dishes, and the three generations of us resident there. Candles sputtered without conviction in the outside loo…

I’m a boomer? There was no boom in fifties’ London. Families, smaller than those of previous generations, knew only ration books, tasteless meat and two veg, blanketing cloud, glottal-stopped cheer, monochrome dreariness. The single car in the street, a sit-up-and-beg, never moved.

No boom was discernible until Thor rained down those fiery projectiles.

Then, for me, cinema arrived… and Cinderella and Gulliver’s Travels soon followed.

England transitioned into the brighter sixties and there came visits to the Odeons, the Granadas to see Tom Thumb, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Jason and the Argonauts, HMS Defiant.

Next, Lawrence of Arabia twice, the first week of release — terror, moral confusion, spellbinding wonder for this ten-year old. (Dad and O’Toole the spitting image.) White savior-ism before the term, although not of course before the phenomenon.

From London to Hampshire’s New Forest for grammar school. TV brought the next steps. Wilder’s Double Indemnity. (Could this be the Fred MacMurray of The Absent-Minded Professor?) Mum’s love of 40’s Hollywood and her naming of every actor in the shot.

Friday nights, BBC 2 and Polanski’s Repulsion. Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Hammer Horror on ITV. Peter Watkins traumatizing with Culloden. Psycho practically mummifying this terrified youth. Quatermass and the Pit at the local “picture house”. Nightmare upon nightmare — we English don’t dream. Dreaming is for optimists. Easy Rider in seaside Bournemouth, universes away from Fonda’s redneck USA.

The seventies. Drama degree at University up in Hull. Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. Lang’s You Only Live Once. Franju’s The Blood of Beasts. A Clockwork Orange in Leicester Square, twice in its first week on a class trip to London. Pretty much left to one’s own devices to assess and understand. Still assessing, understanding, feeling…

Back to London post degree. British Film Institute mail room. Watching from the projection box. Bresson. Cassavetes. Boorman. Borowczyk. Pontecorvo. Wenders’ Alice in the Cities. Salo at the London Film Festival. Writing b-movie reviews for the Monthly Film Bulletin.

Onwards and three screenings a day when not set PA-ing at BBC TV, White City. The Gate Cinema (double bills starting 10 pm). The Coronet next door. The Academy in Oxford Street. That place off Tottenham Court Road near Charlotte Street (forget the name). The National Film Theatre on the South Bank. The ICA on The Mall. The Electric Cinema, Portobello Road (see above) — fleapit of Mum’s North Kensington childhood now screening silents accompanied by arbitrary Beethoven, Chopin piano round and round, round and round. Random score — try it!

Racing, breathless, between venues. On foot, bus, tube — Central Line, Piccadilly, Bakerloo, Northern Lines. Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, The Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff, The Crucified Lovers, Last Tales of the Taira Clan, Capra, Sirk, Fassbinder, Peckinpah, Altman, Chabrol, Siegel, Rosi at the Gate. Von Stroheim, Renoir, Bellochio, Lang at the Electric. Rivette, Dreyer at the NFT. Ophul’s Reckless Moment at that place off Tottenham Court Road (forget the name), plus Oshima’s Ceremony, The Boy, Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge. Angelopoulos, Bertolucci at The Academy. Tarkovsky, Ferreri at The ICA.

New releases. One year alone, 1976: Taxi Driver, The Tenant, All the President’s Men, The Missouri Breaks, 1900, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Illustrious Corpses, In the Realm of the Senses. All this after Barry Lyndon in ’75.

1976 marked the beginning of VHS. Then followed DVD, BluRay and on to streaming. The Criterion Channel. More and more accessible content. More cinema in amongst it.

But could I ever learn as much as I did from those years of dedicated filmgoing around London? From barely catching a breath between one glory and another?

With so much amazing new work, I think I can. The pace of discovery may be less frenetic these days but cinema never ceases to reveal its possibilities. There for each new generation, it’s the gift that keeps on giving — for as long as we have it.

Returning to Robert Downey Jr., I saw Oppenheimer three times after seeing that interview, and there he was, commanding the screen, scene after scene, working with cast, camera, and director and revealing the depths and dimensions of a distinctly reprehensible but all too human character with his unflinching craft...

We may disagree or not on fathers and Fantasia, I reflected, on one movie or another, we may come from very different social and cultural backgrounds, privileged or not, from different countries even, but what film can teach us, whatever our taste and sensibility, is our commonality.

All of which is to say that my self-education in cinema hasn’t only taught me about cinema, it’s taught me about us.

Peter Markham

October 2024

A character rendered the conduit into story

From Three Colors Blue. 1993. Director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Screenwriters Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Krzysztof Kieślowski. Cinematography Sławomir Idziak.

On the page, the writer may adopt a first person narrative POV, a subjective I, who as narrator takes us through the story in their perception. We are ‘with’ them whether we care for them or not. Perhaps we empathize, perhaps we don’t. Love or loathe them, since there is only one I we are, for better or worse, stuck with them.

Characters, on the other hand, might be written as an objective he, she, or they. If so, as everyone knows, the author is writing in the third person.

When we follow several such characters but are kept at a distance, unaware of too much of what they are perceiving, feeling, or thinking—as if we were merely witnessing or observing them—it can be said that the writer is utilizing a third person objective point of view. Less intense, usually, than the subjective mode (depending on the stakes of the story, perhaps).

If, on the other hand, we do know what these characters are perceiving, thinking, and feeling—while at the same time they lack such godlike insight into the minds and hearts of each other—then the writer has chosen a third person omniscient point of view. 

When we see through the eyes of a single character, hear their thoughts, know what they know and no more, when they in effect constitute our conduit into the story, its events, and its world, yet they are not an I but a he, she, or they, the writer has adopted a third person limited or intimate point of view.

I prefer intimate to limited because it seems to me that the boundaries set by this approach do not so much impose limitation as intensify the reader’s engagement with the specific character and their journey. It is as though an I is being disguised as a he, she, or they.

How might we compare Narrative POV on the screen to its articulation on the page? Can the screen do what the page can? Can it utilize this variety of approaches. Or does the audience simply sit back and watch events play out—somewhere in the third person objective/omniscient spectrum?

Most of us with a working knowledge of film are aware of the term POV Shot. The camera lens, placed where a character’s eyes are, offers the subjective view of that character. When they turn, the camera pans. When they look up or down, the camera tilts. When they rise or fall, the camera booms up or down. When they walk forward or move laterally, the camera dollies accordingly. For most of us, this amounts to the sum of our understanding of POV in film. It certainly used to for me.

But Narrative POV in film (as with fiction on the page) is a concept and practice, not a particular type of shot—although this device might well constitute an element of the onscreen modulation of POV.

Hitchcock, with his customary perspicacity, said:

Subjective treatment, putting the audience in the mind of the character, is, to me, the purest form of the cinema. I suppose Rear Window is the best example of it. Close-up of a man; what he sees; his reaction to it. And that can’t be done in any other medium—can’t be done in the theater, can’t be done in a novel. You put the audience in the mind of a particular character.

I think it can be done in a novel. At least, it can be described. What my fellow Londoner/Angeleno Hitchcock is pointing to though is the experiential nature of our engagement with with some characters in movies.

With the master’s method, the screen offers, through the experience of a character,  a mimesis of our universal perception, questioning, and grasp of the world before us and what lies in it.

Here is what we might see on the screen:

1.     A character changes from not noticing to noticing and looking at something.

2.     Cut to the something they see.

3.     Cut back to their change of expression as they react. (We must see this change. No good simply seeing a smile or grimace already in place. Then, if only for an instant, we’d have been severed from the journey of the character’s thoughts and emotions.)

4.     A further moment as they question or reflect. (A look down, or to the side.)

5.     A change of their expression as they take a decision. (A blink, a look up.)

6.     (Possibly) They move, about to act…

7.     Cut! Perhaps to a wider shot or to the next scene…

During this sequence, shots showing the something the character sees may be repeated one or more times, intercut with repeated shots of the character, the sizes of both tightening as the beholder’s interest grows.

The contrast of proximity to distance comes into play too. We might find ourselves closer to the character and further away from what they are looking at.

Here’s the paradox: we see not only what the character sees but we see the character seeing it—so how can we be in the character’s ‘point of view’?

We are. We are in their Narrative Point of View, and that NPOV is the screen’s equivalent of the page’s third person intimate. They are not an I (the single POV shot) but a he, she, or they. Even so, we experience a substantially subjective sense of their story of perception.

This third person intimate mode renders a character the viewer’s conduit into the story, and this character also prompts the means of it telling in terms of camera and editing… (On the page, meanwhile a character might prompt idiom, rhythm, sentence construction, tone.)

Such a character’s looks and actions might motivate angles, shot sizes, and cuts. They can also motivate camera placement. Say our fictional being points to something or calls out to someone, there might be a cut to their subjective view, yes, but there might equally be a cut to a shot in which the camera is placed opposite them so that we see them past the object of their attention—which is situated in mid- or foreground while they are placed in the background.

So instead of a POV shot, we see both beholder and what they behold in the same frame. We grasp their inner process and their understanding of their outer world. An example of third person intimate within a single frame.

The articulation of NPOV can also work in a simple scene of dialogue between two characters, whether static or mobile. Each might be shot on matching sizes and angles. When it comes to the edit though, one character will be given prominence over the other. They’ll be given more screentime, especially in relation to listening and reaction shots, plus tighter sizes and longer lenses with narrower focal planes—in contrast to the presentation of their interlocutor, with whom the viewer is not so connected.

There’s another factor. The character in whose NPOV we find ourselves may motivate both the sizes of shot used for the other person in the scene as well as the timing of the cuts from one character to the other.

In this way we experience the scene as our character experiences it. We are ‘with’ them in mind and heart. Their subjective perception is our perception. Our thoughts and emotions are taken from theirs.

In a scene where characters are mobile, one character might motivate not only shot size and cut (perhaps to keep them in the frame as they move) but camera movement too. A dolly, a counter-dolly, a boom up or down might take its energy and direction from those of the character in question (but not from those of other characters).

(At the end of Fellini’s I Vitelloni, a protagonist’s gaze from a moving train even motivates a camera to dolly over vignettes that occur in his imagination—or if they’re ‘real’, they have to be happening in rooms far from anything he’s able to witness.)

With this technique, the looks, movements, and actions of other characters will not motivate anything apart from reaction shots of our central character that keep us in their perception of, and with their reactions to what is going on. This contrast serves to emphasize the filmmaker’s chosen Narrative Point of View.

Sound and score can be integral also. A sound of significance to a character in one way or another might be emphasized in the mix, a reflection of their subjective auditory perception. It might even prompt an image in their mind that we share on the interior ‘screen’ of ours.

A melody, musical motif, a sting, notes from a particular instrument meanwhile, might serve to draw us into a character’s experience, might bring us into the memory of some moment when we last heard it.  

While I’m on the seminal topic of soundscape, a voice-over can take us directly into the mind of a character, their emotions, denials, disturbances, world view, secret thoughts. It may contradict what we see of them, what we’ve understood of them, or may reveal how they imagine themselves to be.  

How does it feel though when, after rigorously following the NPOV of a character for any length of time, we find a sudden switch to those of others? How might this come across if the director has deliberately designed the shift?

I’m indebted to Martin Scorsese and a conversation I was lucky enough to have with him when I was putting together a class on Narrative POV in film. The great director suggested I watch Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man…

Early in the movie, protagonist Manny Balestrero visits an insurance office to make a claim on a policy. The point of view moves to the teller when she begins to think she recognizes Manny as the robber who recently held up the office at gunpoint.

As the POV spreads from her to one colleague after another—none of whom we yet know—we ourselves experience the contagious paranoia in an unsettling manner that seeds our own misgivings that Hitchcock’s unsuspecting protagonist could indeed have been the culprit. (Even if the title of the movie is The Wrong Man!)

These are no rules however. Although third person intimate is to me an intrinsically cinematic approach, great films can lack any subjective POV, be largely objective, or (rarely) may to the contrary be shot entirely on a POV shot or shots.

Narrative POV might be opportunistic, changing from moment to moment, perhaps to communicate suspense, or a gag in a comedy.

Hyper POV is a term I use to describe a violent event, for example in an action movie, covered from many angles, each offering the most dynamic impact, second by second, frame by frame. Third person objective barely measures up to such visceral presentation of mayhem.

The complications of dramatic irony, of unreliable narrators might also be brought to bear. We shouldn’t forget, meanwhile, that we may feel closer to a character and want to go along with them simply because we like them! Or identify with them. Or wish we could be them. Or the star playing them has a compelling charisma. Or a performance draws us in.

Let’s end with a look at that screenshot from the top of this article:

The moment occurs in Kieślowski’s Three Colors Blue, in the seconds before Juliette Binoche’s Julie—in whose eye we see the reflection of a physician—asks him about the condition of her daughter after the family’s car crash. No moment could be more dramatic; the only character we’ve seem thus far is the child…

As Julie asks that question, and receives its answer,  the film gives us our first view of her—and it’s in a close-up.

Here, the narrative point of view of the character is introduced in the very same moments as the character herself—a devastating display of the director’s mastery of this powerful concept.

Peter Markham

In no particular order…

Photo by Joe Roberts, Unsplash

1. Learn not what to know, learn how to think.

2. Don’t conform, dissent.

3. Magic. Mystery. Mischief.

4. Feel. Consider. Challenge.

5. American dramatic narrative = adversarial individualism.

6. Reject the club, seek loneliness.

7. Ambition is is the death of thought. (Wittgenstein)

8. Film is not theatre on camera.

9. Watch films to make films.

10. Make a movie to save your soul.

11. Know it never will.

12. No need to save your soul? No need to make the movie.

13. Read! Read! Read! (Werner Herzog)

14. Story. Screen. Audience.

15. Image. Sound. Film.

16. Dance to the pain.

17. When I’m making a film, I’m the audience. (Martin Scorsese)

18. Emotion.

19. Tone.

20. Language of film.

21. Style comes from the soul.

22. Your vulnerability forms your strength.

23. Not preparation but formulation.

24. Screenplay. Casting. Editing. (From Kieslowski)

25. Connective tissue, the path to simplicity.

26. Image. Shot. Camera.

27. Think passage of time.

28. Montage. (Eisenstein). Time. (Tarkovsky).

29. The agency of emptiness.

30. The potency of silence.

31. Contrast.

32. Dissonance.

33. Interfunctionality of filmmaking crafts.

34. Never “unpack” unless it’s a delivery.

35. Suspect current idiom.

36. Forget careers guidance.

37. Filmmaking an artistic process. Production an industrial.

38. Flow of images, not coverage.

39. Flow of energy.

40. Territory—the primal human currency.

41. Dialogue as multifunctional resource.

42. Looks as wordless dialogue.

43. Image as subtext.

44. Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. (Nabokov).

45. Elegance as eloquence, not embellishment.

46. Rhythm not pace.

47. Let characters not rise above circumstance.

48. Listen to yourself.

49. Listen to the film.

50. Conflict. Friction. Tension. Vibe.

Peter Markham

Disclaimer, I’ve done one.

Photo by wuz on Unsplash

In following a number of BluRay commentaries recently, I’ve realized why, for quite a while, I hadn’t bothered to pay them much attention. The experience of revisiting these “extras” prompted me to ask what we might expect from them, what we might reasonably hope for, and what, in general, we get.

I’ll start with that last thought by applauding the erudition of the best contributors. Film history, background of the movie in question, other movies by the same filmmaker, facts about the director — there are some highly informed scholars and commentators out there whose enlightening discourse might serve to carry us along as the movie plays. (I’m coming to the problem this invariably leads to.) There are other folk of more moderate resources. Over this inconsistent spectrum, some can be engaging, some indifferent, some downright boring.

But most — of whatever calibre — rarely seem to mention is what is actually happening on the screen.

If they do, this will be largely a reference to actors, not so much in terms of performance, for example in relation to camera, but more a matter of which stars might have been considered for the part or any previously attached. There are notable occasions however when an actor’s preparation is discussed, especially when this has been of a singular nature, and this can be intriguing.

Often what we find are details of a film’s industry background — not so much the behind the scenes production circumstances that can be of interest but more the meetings, hesitations, maneuvering and machinations of the corporate high-ups. The perfect way to ruin one’s engagement with the screen.

Contributors seem to want to display familiarity with the business, their vicarious way of saying “I belong”. They seem to want to cleave to orthodoxy, to groupthink as though that reveals their authority. They are insiders, they imply, never outsiders.

The screen might be portraying traumatic mayhem or sublime wonder while the commentary drones on about which bigwig had lunch with which bigwig, as though the speaker is paying no attention to the events we are witnessing or the emotions they are conveying — perhaps because they’re not looking at the film or perhaps because, if they are, they don’t experience cinema in the manner most of us experience it.

But even if the commentary is related more to the movie itself, shouldn’t the commentator refer — at lease from time to time — to what we are seeing? Fundamentally, mightn’t they offer insights into the filmmaker’s cinematic language? Shots, camera, framing, angle, movement, editing, imagery, soundscape, score? Wouldn’t it be an idea to talk about emotion, information, story and storytelling? Then there are those moments that can’t be explained or reduced in any meaningful way yet come across to the viewer with profound effect. Let’s hear them noted, celebrated, marveled at.

There’s complex, inventive narrative and visual connective tissue in a good film. The revisiting of shots, compositions, angles, stagings — let’s have the architectural glue of these memes revealed.

And passage of time — how does the filmmaker modulate this? Through editing. Through transitions. Through ellipses. Even within a single shot — what changes out of frame before a moving camera returns to show the same space (see the end of The Taste of Things).

And how is sound used? For subliminal effect, for tonal dissonance, to heighten emotion, to orchestrate eye trace, as an element in the articulation of narrative point of view, to heighten suspense, to narrow or broaden the “focus”of a scene. A commentary might reveal specific examples of these aspects .

Commentaries that fail to relate to the progression of images on the screen are surely more easily digested, and indeed enjoyed as audio essays elsewhere in the “extras” rather than as a talk that arbitrarily accompanies a movie Watching image, action, drama while listening to largely unrelated narration tends to result in cognitive overload — at least if a film means anything to the viewer.

The image and text correlation I find so helpful and so natural is, it has to be admitted, rare in book form also. Indeed, production of my latest book was agony as I struggled to get the production company to mesh screenshots with sentences and paragraphs in the precise configuration set out in the copyedited manuscript. (One or two instances excepted, we finally got there).

I’m by no means arguing for dry, dispassionate analysis. Commentaries can be dry and dispassionate even without the analysis. I’m asking for the excitement of informed appreciation, nothing too technical or esoteric but an articulate, tonally welcoming, clearly communicative exploration of the filmmaker’s navigation of their medium throughout a movie that might appeal to fellow filmmakers, to film scholars, and to film lovers also — most of whom probably never having set foot anywhere near a film set.

A film is not a novel, not a play, not a poem (although it might be the latter visually), it’s a film — and just as novels and plays and poems can most usefully be appreciated as novels and plays and poems, so films can surely best be appreciated as films.

Those who offer commentaries (and critics too) — please don’t take the film as a film for granted, as if it’s no different from any other narrative form.

Why not discuss it as a film?

Peter Markham

August 2024

A screen of power or a screen of the soul?

From The Teacher’s Lounge. Writer-Director Ilker Çatak. Cinematography Judith Kaufmann. (Image Sony Pictures Classics)

The cinema of vulnerability? What do I mean? Don’t there have to be stakes in any dramatic narrative? Threats, peril, casualties — whether physical or emotional, mortal or psychological? Isn’t all of cinema an arena for vulnerability in one way or another?

I think it was Ari Aster who I heard in an interview say that if he’s to engage fully with a movie, he needs a sense of the filmmaker’s vulnerability. This was a revelation. Not because it was unfamiliar—I realized it’s the case for me too. I’d just never accepted I had the same requirement. Why? Because it made me feel vulnerable? Unable to tough out the action movies, the cold noirs, the macho thrillers?

Or perhaps it’s more that I’m not so interested in watching a movie when I might as well be staring at insects fighting it out in a jar. Being a voyeur gazing at conflict for adrenalin kicks, for ‘the ride’ is not only something that to me seems vacuous, it tends to leave me somewhat nauseous. I can’t help but feel the pain inflicted on characters, whatever their position in any spectrum of good to bad.

Instead, I generally need the filmmaker to bring me into the emotions, visceral and neural sensations, and the cognitive activity of at least one character. If that character isn’t vulnerable in some way, what’s more, I’m unlikely to be able to empathize, not merely sympathize, and certainly not identify with them. (Note: empathy = in the feeling; sympathy = with the feeling; identification = being the character.)

Even Tom Ripley, at least in his novel and movie manifestations — Purple Noon, Ripley’s Game, Talented Mr Ripley has his moments of paranoia verging on panic. Even a Joker, in Joaquin Phoenix’s versatile hands at least, has his complex PTSD, poor murderous guy, and so I go with him.

So that’s one way a filmmaker’s vulnerability might come across — not only in the nature of their characters but in the ways they have the viewer connect with them. (With Whiplash the audience around me in the movie theater were howling with laughter at the suffering of the victims of bullying — something the filmmaker himself, apparently incapable of modulating his film’s tone, seemed to me to be encouraging. No vulnerability there.)

How else might vulnerability in a filmmaker be manifested?

In a sense of fragility perhaps. In the characters, as discussed, but also in their world, their customs and culture. In Ilker Çatak’s 2023 The Teacher’s Lounge the faculty world of protagonist Carla Nowak is stricken with conflicting obligations, loyalties, and resentments. At the same time the teacher-pupil relationship at the center of the story reverberates with an ambiguity of power dynamic familiar to those of us who have worked in such an environment. The authority of the educator vs. the tyranny of the student. The delinquent student as victim, the teacher as bully — although who might be the true bully?

Guilt meanwhile, is transferred so seismically from one to the other that even Hitchcock at his best might feel left behind. The Wrong Man, I Confess, and North By Northwest by the master of vulnerability barely match the interchangeable culpability of perpetrator and perpetrated upon in Teacher’s Lounge. In such a morally shifting cosmos, the tissue of meaning appears fragile. There’s no center that holds and Carla’s world, and our sense of it, falls apart — triumph, defeat, hurt, defiance are rendered the contradictory vibes of the movie’s scintillating, perplexing, paradoxical ending.

Which brings me to uncertainty, as companion of fragility a similarly fertile domain for vulnerability. Moral uncertainty. Cognitive uncertainty. Narrative uncertainty. Uncertain uncertainty.

When we don’t know where we are with a movie, where we’re going with it, whether a character might choose the right path or the wrong, the safe or the perilous, when we are unsure of what our protagonist knows and what they don’t, when a story seems to be going in one direction but we find it going in the opposite or suspect it might, or when we sense traces of a hidden story that might rise up to eclipse the ostensible one, we become uncertain of the film we are watching and how of how we are to relate to it — and with that uncertainty comes a sense of vulnerability, both in the film and in ourselves.

Another approach to understanding this cinema of vulnerability might be to look at its opposite: the cinema of power.

There’s precious little vulnerability in what might be thought of as cinemachismo. In this category we might include the predilection for torture in the movies of Villeneuve from Incendie to Prisoners and on, or the beloved festive screen mayhem of Miller, or a Bond industrial slaughter, or Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty in which the filmmaker invites the viewer to smile with the torturer — or in the filmically consummate soullessness of a Fincher.

This is far from suggesting though that violent movies and thrillers necessarily fit into the cinema of power. If Wenders’ Perfect Days, Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves, the new Cottontail by writer-director Patrick Dickinson, eschewing screen ‘action’ as they do, are quintessential exemplars of vulnerability, then so are Haneke’s brutal films — Funny Gamesamong them — critiques as they are of our love of festive cruelty, of what the filmmaker refers to as America’s ‘barrel-down cinema’ — an alternative term for the cinema of power perhaps? Scorsese’s canon overflows with vulnerability, from the final lonely damnation of Goodfellas’ Henry Hill to the epochal precarity of Kundun’s Dalai Lama. Kubrick’s characters are forever at the mercy of the contradictions and confusions of the human and the mechanical. The criminally underrated master Agnieszka Holland’s most recent film Green Border is awash with brutality melted out to migrants but like much of her body of work aches with vulnerability. The shocking Titanefrom Julie Ducornau descends into terrifying visceral violence yet at its end to sings from the heart in what is surely one of the strangest, most unlikely yet fiercely emotional denouements the screen has ever offered.

These movies, however savage, don’t desensitize us. We aren’t invited to embrace their violence. To the contrary — they tear us apart. Indeed, it isn’t violence or its absence that gets in the way of or gives us a film of vulnerability. It’s where the filmmaker places us in relation to the characters and their story. Yes, violence, cruelty, combat are the stuff of myth, of drama, of story, of spectacle — all potent elements in great cinema. How we engage with all of this is however what determines how this fiction comes to life in us. Does it hurt or does it titillate? Reveal human truth or divert us from it? Do we feel the pain of others or enjoy witnessing it?

Of course, I’m dismissing some highly accomplished directors here while I can so often get things badly wrong. For example, I used to think Steve McQueen couldn’t convey empathy. A brilliant filmmaker but Hunger I found icy, while in Twelve Years a Slave his racking of focus at one point from emotional to physical pain struck me as revealing an instinct for sadism rather than empathy. But when I saw his Small Axe series of films, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. These movies could be compared with Kieslowski’s Decalogue for their luminous humanity. Then there came this versatile filmmaker’s documentary Occupied City! Four-and-a-half-hours of emotion obliquely but painfully conveyed, the soul that seemed almost comprehensively extinguished somehow surviving the hell it has been put through…

It’s the concept though, a cinema of vulnerability that to me resonates. If I’ve left it nebulous at times, I’d argue that the screen of the soul and the movie-audience connection it prompts could never be reduced to easy conclusions…

Peter Markham
June 2024