As author and educator, what do I offer?

Picture by Sebastian Dumitru on Unsplash

Irecently gave a class on filmmaking to people seated in front of me.

Nothing remarkable in that, you might think, but this was only the second time since the pandemic, when I shifted my work online, that I’d found myself teaching in a physical environment. (The first — much enjoyed also — was in moderating a Q&A with a filmmaker after a screening of their documentary.)

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Zoom classes with folks from around the world, love the spectrum of perspective and sensibility I encounter, but the immediate sense of connection I felt, facing a hundred people, seeing them listen, hearing and answering their questions, reminded me of what life was like before covid and even long before that, in the analogue and internet-free years of my earlier days .

What was it that my audience, at this recent event, were responding to?

To what I had to say, maybe? Yes, I hope they were. But along with that — for which I was grateful and excited by — those people, I could feel, were responding to me. To my flawed, faulty, vulnerable, far from perfect but I hope occasionally adequate self. A self that gets stuff wrong. A self with so much to learn, most of which it never will. A self that may not completelty understand, even if it wants to. A self that has ever more questions than answers.

And yet…

The common humanity in us all sparked and the session came to life.

Now I realize this can happen in my online sessions too. It’s not the same, perhaps. We’re not breathing the same air. Not blinking in the same light. Not bordered by the same walls, entering and leaving through the same doors, sitting under the same lights, hearing the same, hopefully muted sounds from the world outside…

What can work in the cyber world though — and my recent real space experience has shown me this—even without the sharing of common physical boundaries, is not simply the validity of what I’m teaching, which by and large I believe holds up, but the personal nature of my approach.

By not simply regurgitating assumptions, as some educators in my field of filmmaking might tend to do, but by looking for questions that have been forgotten, ignored, or never considered, and by embracing challenges never posed or hard to resolve, in my own way, taken from my own voyage of exploration and discovery, I try to bring class members to see the nature of film and filmmaking through fresh perspectives.

In order to do this, I have to be myself, at least what I feel is myself. Not all-knowing, not definitive, still learning, vulnerable, fallible, but me. Thinking in the way I do, feeling in the way I know doesn’t always accord with the modes of others.

This isn’t a case of ignoring the insights and wisdom of filmmakers across the world gleaned throughout the history of cinema. I bring in comments and observations from this sphere too. But also from beyond it, from novelists, philosophers, artists, cultural commentators of one viewpoint or another. But my selection of that discourse is personal, rooted in my own encounters with it, and presented through my personal take.

Anchors, inspirations, constant refreshers come as books and films of metafiction, auto-fiction, the hybrids of documentary and fiction, and sometimes just an autobiography I get lost in. Works in which the human voice, the human connection of disparate elements, subject matter, worlds and times, the defiance of genre boundaries, in which the medium’s awareness of itself constitute questions and paradoxes.

Films and books, in other words, that defy not only tired conventions and assumptions, but avoid anything that might fall within the arid, machine regurgitation of AI.

Some examples of movies:

Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters, in which the filmmaker uses both real people and actors playing them, to explore events in the traumatic lives of a mother and her daughters.

Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds, in which past and present lives, in and around Naples, are juxtaposed. Humanity as stone relic. Humanity as daily crisis and compassion.

Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland. Non-fiction chronicle and fictional road movie.

Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives: the elegance of people in a working class universe revealed through sublime cinema.

And book examples:

The works of W. G. Sebald. Like much of what is sui generis, imitated by others. Chronicle, anecdote, oblique stills — what is fiction, what is not?

Didier Erebon’s Returning to Reims — a journey into France’s class system by way of autobiography, history, and insight into the homophobia suffered by the author.

Martin Amis’ Inside Story, Julian Barnes’ Departure(s), Geoff Dyer’s Homework: A Memoir. All of which tap into my English sensibility, both the mischief of the culturally privileged Amis and Barnes, who mingle painful memoir with lashings of what I can’t help but see as posh soap, and the working class insolence of Dyer, his eloquent, irreverent voice never destined to reach the page but there nevertheless.

Matthew Specktor’s The Golden Hour, which interweaves personal memoir, LA history, and fictionalized encounters between Hollywood grandees, fit to rile any by-the-book documentarian.

Plus classics: Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet — no book, film, course of class can amount to anything without disquiet.

And Nabokov’s Speak, Memory — the juxtaposition and connection of the disparate evoked through recall.

And the work that blew open the intellectual laziness I’d allowed to shut down my awareness, such as it might have been. Language. Consciousness. Meaning. Analytical philosophy as wake-up call. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

No machines behind these films and books. No slop. But human voices finding paths through their uncertainties, self-doubts, transgressions, through their not-knowing… Filmmakers and writers who not only address their viewers and readers in their own manner but who reflect on that address, who seek to understand what it is, how it works. Not to do as others do and be as good or better, but to be theirselves…

It’s what I try to do, am told I do, as writer, educator, as interlocutor to those I work with, exploring not only what to think, perhaps, but possible ways of thinking.

Not the repetition, distortion, misunderstanding, outright misrepresentation of what has been, what is out there, not the AI ready recipes, but myself finding my way through what I love and obsess over, so that I might understand it better but still need to understand it more, and as I do that, prepare my students so that they may go on to take their voyages for themselves.

The best teachers make some of the best students. They learn by teaching. Just as the best filmmakers become the students of the films they make, learning by making them.

Strange, maybe, to say it then, but that evening speaking to, and listening to those filmmakers and film watchers*, some young, others older, not only reminded me of both the delight and effectiveness of educational interaction in real space, but revealed what is central to educational activity in any context, physical or cyber:

Our shared humanity.

Peter Markham

February 2026

*The event was at the CineSol Film Festival in Brownsville, Texas.

Or am I imagining it?

James Mason in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Cinematography Robert Burks

Among the movies I watch each and every year, North by Northwest from 1959 never fails to delight me with its wit and elegance. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner — as the song used to go, I guess still does (if anyone sings it now) — maybe it’s because I’m Londoner, or was, that I love the cinema of Londoner Alfred Hitchcock. Vertigo, is my favorite film, Notorious, Marnie, Shadow of a Doubt, some of many others by the maestro that I revere…

Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are, of course, key elements in NBNW’s charm and glamour — but there is someone else there who renders this such a great movie, someone who chills the arteries of the picture’s otherwise agreeable romance…

James Mason is one of three fellow Englishmen at the heart of this film, Grant and Hitchcock the other two comprising the triptych.

Mason is momentous in Ophuls’ 1949 Reckless Moment too, and in that master’s Caught, released the same year. And as Humbert Humbert in Kubrick’s 1969 Lolita, bringing to life Nabokov’s reprehensible protagonist with a panache only the suave Yorkshireman could vest in the role.

In something over 120 films, over half a century of cinema, Mason’s enigmatic persona — ever a compelling mystery, whatever the nature of the character he brought to the screen — captivated, and continues to captivate viewers fortunate enough to witness his icy but all too flawed human magnetism.

An unlikely connection to James Mason prompted me to conceive of this article, for without doubt, he would have had occasion to walk into the very room in which I’m writing these words. You see, he once owned this apartment, this building and its few units. As its landlord, he would surely have studied the moldings I study, looked up at the high tray ceiling, surveyed the long living and dining area, and the arches dividing it. He would have peered out from the same high window at the plain I observe today, a prospect punctuated by palms and criss-crossed by neighborhood streets — less in his time maybe, more now—as it advances to hills hazy beyond.

But when was this? Was it during the months Dorothy Dandridge lived in the apartment that I see, behind a central leafy enclave, in the building down the hill below? Dandridge, whose nomination for Best Actress at the Academy Awards was the first for an African American. Singer, actor, boundary-breaker, she died, I think, in that apartment, tragically at the age of 42.

Was James Mason here when someone else graced that apartment’s Hollywood feng shui? Someone before Dandridge? Someone called Marilyn Monroe. Did he visit her there, Monroe? Or visit Dandridge after? Did he ever go into that apartment as I have? Or am I conjuring meetings and greetings that never happened? Or perhaps they did, given Hollywood’s social firmament — not there but elsewhere, away from these hallowed residences?

There’s other fanciful, previously celeb-inhabited architecture in this neighborhood. (This once James Mason-owned property being noticeably fanciful itself.) Director Joseph Von Sternberg (originally Jonas Sternberg, without the Von) lived down the road in one such old Hollywood edifice with his wife and Marlene Dietrich. Ménage a trois — or perhaps drei — on Fountain. F.Scott Fitzgerald lived and died just a few streets away, adjacent to a contemporary writer friend who keeps radiant the flame of the LA artist-intellectual.

The Garden of Allah, playground for the stars, stood up on Sunset — before its paradise was paved to put up a parking lot. (Maybe something came in between but I like the irony — and now the parking lot itself has been ripped up, leaving nothing but a legal mess plus the potential for a fresh chorus.)

But back to the room in which I sit. These apartments came into being in the silent era, as I understand, for actors employed by the studios. Who else might have sat where I’m sitting, I wonder? And how many ghosts might populate some multiple occupancy of shades around me? Or did James Mason, with his steely authority, evict the lot of them? Am I then left with the revenant of the great man calling in from time to time to inspect a property once his?

Why shouldn’t a soul as impenetrable as his have left a trace perhaps tantalizingly faint but ever present nevertheless? Not a ghost that comes and goes perhaps, or the wraith that drifts from one room to another but a breath to suffuse the light from the south incandescent through the panes of that high window—wintry in its SoCal warmth.

Then again, why should James Mason, in particular, leave behind such a penumbra? Why not Monroe, even if she took residence across the way. Surviving as an icon, though, she hardly requires spectral continuation. Mason not so. A star, a leading man or a leading villain rather than an idol — yet if anyone could cheat the gods to maintain a presence among the living, he maybe could.

Or is it simply that those eyes of his I see on the screen can never be entirely shaken off? They could be here now. Seeing into me as I write. As they saw into Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill or Eva Marie Saint’s Eve Kendall in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

Mason could do that, spear the heart of any he observed. Whether he was Hitchcock’s Phillip Vandamm or Ophuls’ Martin Donnelly or Dr. Larry Quinada, he could see into the very core of the characters he confronted. It was as if he could see elsewhere too, out from the screen before us and into our own souls as though to render us ourselves the uncertain, vulnerable characters foolhardy enough to inhabit his fictive universes.

For me, it is looks that linger rather than lines of dialogue — and the sound of speech rather than its words. It’s the looks that have the charge, the connection, the ineffable power. It’s the vocal timbre that resonates.

James Mason, with his pellucid, piercing gaze, with the music of his rich and burnished tenor, haunts my recall, and, I suspect with increasing conviction, this apartment in which I live, for as long as it endures — and, who can say? — haunts whatever it might be that comes to stand in its place…

Peter Markham

January 2026

The drama of stasis and “inserts”

From Nomadland. Writer-Director Chloe Zhao. Cinematography Joshua James Richards

The word movie suggests movement. The word novel might suggest newness.

The word film might conjure the stickiness of some grimy veneer.

Back to that first point. The moving movie — I’m talking of physical motion, not the evocation of emotion. Nice thought though. Movies called movies because they move us. I’ll mention one of my all time favorites: Kurosawa’s Ikiru. Now that’s what you might call a move-me.

Nor am I talking about the story always moving on, an old chestnut of screenwriting dogma — as though a film has to suffer from constant St. Vitus’ dance. It doesn’t. It can breathe, resonate, generate suspense, bask in a vibe, mesmerize, captivate.

And why can’t it be novel, and as new as a novel might be? Of course a film might seem new. Might actually be new. I’m not talking about new releases, which invariably include instances that seem far from new. I mean a movie that brings us fresh ways of engagement, of understanding, fresh natures of cinema itself.

If only we could do these films justice by calling them novels.

And are films covered by a smeary coating, or can they be luminous, in story, world, character, in cinematic language, in vision? Of course they can, even while some bear the coating of cliché.

Returning to the motion thing — before I digress too much — does a movie need movement all of the time? Is this a prerequisite?

Let’s take a minute to consider how the concept of the always moving movie can fall short, and when we might find stasis on the screen.

Eisenstein thought cinema is about montage — the juxtaposition of one image upon another.

Tarkovsky disagreed. He thought it’s about the passing of time within the shot.

Can one visionary of cinema be right and one wrong, or do we have here an antinomy — each assertion being correct but cannot be if the other also is right?

Setting aside the static emptiness of many an Ozu interior, or the montage of static spaces in a film such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (aren’t they actually stills?), unacceptable, presumably to Tarkovksy, or a “oner” movie such as Russian Ark, unacceptable, presumably, to Eisenstein — setting these aside, I want to focus, for the purposes of constraining what potentially might be a lifetime’s investigation, on the “insert shot” and what its nature or natures might be in ways that either defy or conform to any imperative of motion.

During my interview with Martin Scorsese — dependent upon which was whether I was to direct a second unit for him on Gangs of New York — one of many challenges came when the master asked me why he should give me insert shots to do—vignettes of objects and moments not involving actors—when shooting these is his favorite thing.

A light came on in the sluggish recesses of my tenebrous brain — one that was having trouble grasping it was in the same room and no more than a few feet away from the mind of such a great filmmaker: an intelligence of lightning speed and artistic bravura.

I did my best to respond. I would do my utmost to give him exactly want he wanted, I said — and that if I didn’t, I would be betraying not only him, his movie, and the task he would be granting me, if that’s what he might do, but I’d be turning my back on my own belief in cinema, which I see as devotional, which it is, as is his, (and his inspired mine). It gives me meaning, gives him meaning, probably more than it gives it to me, bearing in mind his epochal exploration of the medium.

Was it my response that got me the job, was it something else, or was it the giant’s kindness to one modest fan, something I was to experience and treasure going forward?

Whatever it was, his question — like others of his during those following precious months on the feature — was the catalyst for an exploration of mine over the ensuing years.

Why are inserts this great filmmaker’s favorite thing? He has, after all, as his editor Thelma Schoonmaker has remarked, an intuitive approach to working with actors. He has a consummate grasp of camera and cinematic language. He has a canon of work that spans the decades of my adult life.

He’s directed epic vistas of teeming humanity, brought to the screen the most wrenching dramas of violence and suffering, conjured the social interactions and conflicts of early and later gangs of New York, and Las Vegas, and of the monied classes of Edith Wharton’s literature. He’s ascended the Himalayas to journey with the Dalai Lama, sailed to Japan with a Jesuit missionary to see the man’s faith sorely tested.

And yet he obsesses over inserts?

These shots on sundry objects, small, large, man-made, from nature, perhaps including a hand or fingers passing over them but often lacking human presence, even movement, tend to be left for the end of the shooting day. (Unless there’s a second unit.) Why, after all, take up expensive time with the cast waiting around in order to capture some static, inanimate stuff of one kind or another?

And yet… they’re in the same film, aren’t they? The characters and the lifeless things of their world, its flotsam, jetsam, bric-a-brac, chotskies, artefacts, relics, and general bits and bobs of their lives — which can, despite their bloodless quiddity, carry the weight of emotion, of meaning, of mystery, and significance.

They may be comprised of the organic material of the natural world, carrying the resonance of life even when stationary, or they may be the inanimate, perhaps animated by the play of light, by passing shadows, sometimes by a camera moving over them (and thus Tarkovsky approved). Or they may be the inanimate rendered static, frozen in time, as if in a still photograph (and thus Eisenstein approved).

In the first case, the shot itself gives an energy. All part of the moving movie. In the second it tends to be its place in the montage that affords such propellant. Rhythm within the shot. Rhythm across the shots.

As for the latter, take some of the inserts in Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland: a blue mug, Happy Birthday from USG its inscription, untouched for who knows how long, in a deserted room in a deserted, closed-down gypsum plant — once sole engine of a town’s economy. (See the screenshot above.)

A still life. Or a life stilled, because this immobile receptacle reveals a backstory. A worker losing their job when the city of Empire’s main source of employment shut down. The stasis allows for the resonance. For the haunting. No movement, at least in the physical sense, if plenty in the emotional.

The shot is followed by a USG-inscribed grubby hard hat on a shelf. Like the mug, a visual synecdoche, perhaps. When we see that helmet on the screen, we may see, on the screen on the mind, a person wearing it, we see them making their living, laboring, grafting. Subliminally perhaps, fleetingly, subconsciously but surely for many of us: they appear.

From Nomadland. Writer-Director Chloe Zhao. Cinematography Joshua James Richards

And with the USG — United States Gypsum — insignia some of us might even see a map of the USA, and see Americans increasingly compromised, deprived, by economic adversity, by its forces and agents. Some synecdoche! Metaphor more like, symbols even: the mug and the hard hat.

What we get is so much more than what we see. Maybe it’s the same man, or woman, who drank from the mug. Perhaps another of their now unemployed co-workers. Whatever, the shot has one presence on the screen, and another in the mind.

Then comes a shot of an office. Still, static. No shift of light. No sound.

From Nomadland. Writer-Director Chloe Zhao. Cinematography Joshua James Richards

Protagonist Fern is paying a visit to her dead husband’s workplace, wandering through its spaces, its rooms, but we are not seeing her there. Is she present? Are we sharing her POV? Are we sharing her POV? Or are we privileged with our own journey and perception? We need no clarification. The reverberations of loss, of a vanished past are enough.

We see objects. We see emptiness. A disintegrated fabric of a society fallen foul of economic currents. (And all of this prompted by a comment from the actual caretaker of the plant to the effect that it was as if it were frozen in time — words that Zhao leaves in her screenplay but transforms into cinematic language for the screen).

How could these shots be included in a movie — a moving picture, to give the original term?

This movie has become a stillie.

(Chris Marker’s La Jeteé consists of a series of stills — how does this render it a movie?)

The discourse of film is not action alone then? Inserts can of course involve action, can be animated, as previously described. They can include a human presence. A hand reaching in. A foreground wipe. Some of what I was to do on Gangs were examples of such. Heirlooms on the floorboards of a burning house as flaming debris falls on them. A rolling pistol ball fresh from the shoulder of Bill the Butcher. A bloodied vest torn open. A spinning coin on a bloodied gambling table…

From Gangs of New York. Martin Scorsese. Cinematography Michael Bauhaus.

The unmoving frame though, can work on a grander scale altogether…

Here’s an example from Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt. Speakers lined up for a desert rave. A second of stasis only on the screen perhaps, before Laxe cuts in to dolly along the edifice, but all the more startling for that:

From Sirāt. Co-Writer-Director Oliver Laxe. Cinematography: Mauro Herce.)

The man-made and the natural. The present day and the primordial. Human and planet. The manufactured and the eroded. The transient, the permanent. Time and timelessness. The sound to come and no sound to come. Silence, and silence to be interrupted. The promise of dance, the backdrop of fixity. The lateral, the vertical. Land, sky. Rock, metal and wood. Two geometries — the designed, the random. Each antithesis the stronger for the stasis of what we see and the stasis of how we see it.

In this road movie, with restlessness, seeking, desert- and mountain-crossing to follow, and very much the fluid action of the movie, such a static image — echoed by “insert shots” of lone speakers solitary in the desert toward the end of the film — such a picture of the inert plants an anchor the ensuing movie is to rip from its mooring.

Energy, rhythm, flow, breath, punctuation, emotion, along with story and vision, these are the criteria of cinema. Not movement alone. Objects and things as fabric of a world, encapsulation of the human, of the non-human, the organic and inorganic, as declaration of indifference, of dissonance, as relic of what has been lost, as backstory, as critical comment, sometimes simply, simply as thingness…

The unmoving, set against the moving.

Yes. Let’s go to the unmovies!

Thank you for reading.

Peter Markham

January 2026

Academic exercise or invaluable filmmaking resource?

From DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (1988). Writer-Director Terence Davies, Cinematographers William Diver, Patrick Duval.

In my thesis presentation classes at AFI Conservatory a few years ago, with their screenplay close to the shooting script stage, I would have the director describe the “journey of the audience” through each scene of their movie. Its wants, its fears, what it knew, what it didn’t, what it understood, what it deduced, what it suspected, what it anticipated, what their flow of its emotions might be, what questions it was asking — of the story, of the characters, of the world.

Over the course of many years, as this exercise became increasingly refined, these encapsulations grew longer and more granular, invariably becoming longer than the relevant scene itself.

It became, to put no finer point on it, an articulation of a viewer’s stream of consciousness.

Because our minds work so rapidly, many of the responses anticipated were fleeting, subliminal, and perhaps barely afforded conscious realization in the mind of this putative viewer. But the directors intended that their film should give rise to them, not that they had started out with any such purpose, but that they had found it coming about in the course of developing their story and the means of its telling.

To be clear, these chronicles could never, of course, have been definitive. Moments may prompt different responses from the different viewers who make up the audience. Besides, emotions, visceral reactions too, can’t always be put into words — and can be all the more powerful for that. Often, the filmmakers themselves would be uncertain of the response they might be prompting. So, not only were expletives and buzzwords of the day encouraged, but a 'WTF!' was a perfectly legitimate expression of those moments in a movie that for some of us mark our most intense engagement — those instances we cannot define or explain, even to ourselves. The directors accepted this, even encouraged it. If we could nail every nanosecond of our experience in watching a movie, that movie would surely be dead in the water.

Some might nevertheless object that it is not for the director to manipulate the experience of the audience in any way, but that it should be free to engage actively with the movie it watches. The filmmaker as dictator, what’s more, they might justifiably add, robs the viewer of their agency in interpreting the film and taking from it what their individual sensibility and mindset prompts.

That might be true if the director were seeking to render their audience a purely passive entity. When cinema becomes merely consumerist, such can be the case. That was not the purpose of this exercise though. There was no all-knowing imperative demanded of the young filmmakers.

I think it was Syd Field who said the writer should know everything about the character. Abbas Kiarostami, to the contrary, said there should be something “impenetrable” about a character. I go with the Iranian master. Unanswerable questions, ambiguity, irreconcilable opposites, the mystery of the human soul—this is the stuff of story and cinema, not the arid certainty of what can be safely defined and detailed.

But there is, or I believe there should be, a shared experience for an audience watching a movie. The director designs that response, prompting, often indeed manipulating, but never entirely micromanaging the journey the audience makes.

In giving my “Deep Screenplay” course recently, based on my book The Director Meets Their Screenplay, I was reminded by the attendees of the significance of this concept of “The Journey of the Audience.” It wasn’t anything they had come across before. They saw it for what it is — an essential resource for the director in the formulation and making of a movie.

Others might agree:

When I make a movie, I’m the audience. — Martin Scorsese.

The film doesn’t exist without a viewer. And the viewer is most important. — Krźystof Kieslowśki.

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. — Alfred Hitchcock (my fellow screwed-up Londoner exiled, like myself, in LA.)

Francis Ford Coppola remarked that a film is nothing but shadows on a screen and that the real drama, the real emotion takes place in the hearts and minds of the audience.

When I ask students what they think is a movie’s final destination, they usually reply that it’s the movie theater or the streaming service, as though its existence as an artifact alone suffices. They are wrong. The final place for a film is in the soul of the viewer.

We tend to think of a movie as the capturing of a fiction, of the events of a story. The director stages the action, the actors perform, the camera points at the action, or some part of it, or at something else while events take place offscreen, the results are cut together, and along with sound, a vital partner to image, we have the film.

But there’s another vector…

Wittgenstein asked whether a language spoken by one person and understood by nobody else could really be described as a language. That might prompt the question: could a film seen by no one ever be a film?

The film doesn’t only look inwards into its world, it looks outwards, speaking to its audience. Storytelling isn’t only about story, it’s about the telling of that story too, about its showing, about its revealing, about the fulfillment of these tasks and its intentions in doing so.

Forget “grammar”, forget “coverage”, think, feel, see, and hear as though you were the viewer of your film as you make your film, as you block, lens, light, place and move your camera, as you make the cut or do not make the cut, as you layer your soundscape, your score and source music, as you hone the texture of your image…

You look into the fictional world, and you look out to the viewer as they watch, hear, and experience that world. Your screen is the conduit between the two, the route to the viewer’s heart.

The “journey of the audience” is not some meta concept to be confined to the classroom, I believe that its recognition is central to the act of making a film.

Peter Markham

October 2025

The “Duck Mantra” and how it plays out

From PERFECT DAYS. 2023. Director: Wim Wenders. Screenwriters: Wenders, Takuma Takasaki. Cinematography: Franz Lustig.

Initial disclaimer: Like most of us, I can find screen action (i.e. violence) gripping, even intoxicating. Kurosawa’s samurai assaults, Spielberg’s D-Day landings, the antics of Kubrick’s clockwork droogs, and more recently Aster’s studiously articulated decapitations and “western” shoot-outs leave me breathless at every shot, angle, framing, and cut.

However, when I came across a comment from Michael Caine on advice that he received as a boy from his mother, it prompted me to reflect on opposite manifestations of what drama is:

Be like a duck, she said, Remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath.

Quite apart from the relevance of this tenet to Caine’s acting and its understated nuances of expression in the most turbulent of moments, this “Duck Mantra” — as I like to call it — might further be applied to the simmer of what on the surface might appear a model of controlled character interaction but in its subterranean arteries roils with uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

It seems to me that this dichotomy can work in the following contexts (and surely there are others):

A seemingly quiet moment or scene in a narrative of gathering histrionics.

A scene that begins quietly but, as the audience knows, will culminate in pandemonium.

A quiet scene among many others in a seemingly “quiet” narrative.

In my book The Art of the Filmmaker, I break down the dinner scene in Hereditary, a largely static episode of almost unbearable tension. The guilt that both mother and son feel after the violent death of her daughter/his sister ricochets across the table as each attempts to project their own pain onto the other.

When Annie’s volcanic rage finally erupts, it settles for only the briefest hiatus before Peter, the son, takes a vicious verbal revenge on his mother who, beside herself with her consequent fury, storms out of the room to leave the movie’s 2:1 frame ringing with the gut-wrenching reverberations of the family tragedy and the conflict it has precipitated.

Ari Aster (once my student and as such also my teacher!) told me about how at a screening of The Irishman at the New York Film Festival, Martin Scorsese, in the Q&A began — to his disbelief and humility — to talk about this particular scene in his own film, praising the intensity of an episode in which, for so much of the time, the characters do little but eat supper, and not even that — pick absently at their meals as they trade barbs.

The viewer has already witnessed the visceral horror of daughter Charlie’s demise, a sequence so dynamically transfixing that it lives on in one’s mind throughout subsequent scenes, lacing them with dread. No need to pick up the fateful rumpus until later then. Meanwhile, this episode serves to — as Hitchcock once put it — make the audience suffer as much as possible.

It’s a while now since I watched The Godfather, but among movie scenes that start quietly but the audience knows will end in violence, the episode from The Godfather in which Michael Corleone meets with drug baron Solozzo and corrupt cop McCluskey with the intention of shooting both with a handgun hidden in the restaurant’s restroom, surely stands out.

The young Corleine ultimately carries out the plan with dispassionate precision but the excruciating anticipation latent in the deceptive stillness of the preliminaries to the double assassination comes back to me whenever I think of the film.

The greatest suspense demands inaction, perhaps. Or at least, little action, or everyday action, because when something extraordinarily dramatic happens it is often at its most powerful when it follows something ordinary.

Then there’s the apparently ordinary that follows the apparently ordinary…

The cinema of Yazujirō Ozu has had a profound effect on so many great filmmakers, Wim Wenders, with Perfect Days (2024) among them. Daily public toilet cleaning, hidden family tensions and severances, rudderless adolescent confusions, and cassette tapes and their value constitute the dramatic terrain of this movie. And yet… here is a film as deeply felt as any, a humanist film, a film that reveals the human soul in circumstances of the characters’ dailiness.

Someone commented to me that this was the worse film they had ever seen because “nothing happens.” For me, everything happens. It’s just that when it does, it isn’t in plain sight.

Charlotte Wells’ 2022 Aftersun is another movie that eschews the sensational. As a daughter and estranged father vacation with fellow Brits in a resort in Turkey, the film aches with humanity. Sophie’s need to connect with and understand Calum is set against his pain, powerfully evoked at one point as, with back to camera, he sobs his heart out. (A moment in a performance of masterly shading from Paul Mescal.) Blur, Chumbawambameanwhile, ring out over the holiday makers’ activities, lending a telling poignancy to this harrowing drama.

Andrew Haigh’s 2015 45 Years springs to mind too, its provincial inaction heartrending (despite the improbable contrivance of its English cross-class marriage). Pedro Almodóvar’s 2024 The Room Next Door also embodies a stealthy inaction that takes us to its snow falling faintly… upon all the living and the dead epiphany from James Joyce’s short story The Dead.

This is the cinema of the soul.

Action is in the mind once commented John Huston, adept at capturing both the shocking mafia hits of his Prizzi’s Honor and — coming back to that Joyce short story — the dramatic stillness of his adaptation of the author’s The Dead.

Action is in the heart too. And when it is, when it resonates there as we watch inaction on the screen, a film comes to life within us. While we may not be observers of “the ride” violent spectacle offers, we are rendered the participants in the under the surface paddling like hell drama of what, for so many of us, it is to be alive.

Peter Markham

August 2025

Key factors to consider in cinematic storytelling

From Anora (2024). Writer-Director Sean Baker. Cinematography Drew Daniels. (Main characters centre frame, in sharp focus, mid-deep.)

I used to give my directing students at AFI Conservatory an exercise. I would take the pages of a scene with two or three characters. I’d task each of two or three students to shoot and cut this same scene from the narrative POV of one or other of the characters. (Not in one subjective “POV” shot but through the connective tissue of shot selection, camera placement, angle, and editing.)

Finally, we would watch the two or three versions, noting the contrasts. (I could have asked for a change in the narrative POV from one character to another, which would have led to further permutations.)

One of the students, formidably talented, commented that she’d never realized there was no single correct way to shoot a scene and that there might be many different possibilities. For her at that moment, and for the class, the notion of correct grammar as the foundation of a filmmaker’s approach went out the window. And the very concept of directing a scene in some definitive, proper way went out with it.

It’s not about grammar, it’s about language — the communication of emotion, of information (or its concealment) directly or obliquely, and of visceral and neural sensation.

Great! I thought, reacting to my student’s epiphany. Now, she can start to reflect on other considerations there might be, apart from the articulation of narrative POV, to bring to bear on the shooting and cutting of a scene.

Let’s consider a few of these criteria…

First things first: INTUITION.

I recently came across this:

I make all my decisions on intuition. But I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send in an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.

Ingmar Bergman. Ingmar Bergman Confides in Students. New York Times, May 7, 1981.

No matter their method, without the director’s intuition, the conscious factors they make use of as they formulate their decisions would result in little but clinical work-throughs.

Different filmmakers will have their own intuition that might at times come close, but might more often be distinct from others. Try watching the movie versions of the appearance of Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s Macbeth by Kurosawa (Throne of Blood. 1955), Polanski (Macbeth. 1971), Joel Coen (The Tragedy of Macbeth. 2021). Each one, by each master, is completely different.

In contrast to intuition, and what is largely unknowable about it, are the practical constraints filmmakers face. Time, budget, location and what that latter reality offers in terms of space and light (not to mention accessibility and distance from other locations and the effect this might have on the time available to shoot) — all play a part in the construction of a scene.

Here, the director’s practical abilities and their experience come into play. What might have worked in pre-vis they come to realize may need tweaking or even radical reformulation when its comes to the shoot. That might not always be to the detriment of a scene, not always a compromise, indeed the nature of a location might suggest options the director has failed to consider, which might prove superior to their original intentions.

Available (and affordable) equipment will obviously play a part in how a scene might be shot, as will the level of the skill of the crew, the DP, operator, AC, grip, and steadicam operator.

The cast’s degree of experience and their abilities might also be taken into account. Non-actors or newbies might not be so adept at hitting their marks or following precise timing and staging as their professional counterparts. And actors may come up with options that haven’t struck the director, who might then incorporate them into their approach.

Even a filmmaker as rigorous and masterly as Stanley Kubrick acknowledged the benefits gained by working in rehearsal and on set with his actors:

I find that no matter how good it ever looks on paper, the minute you start in the actual set, with the actors, you’re terribly aware of not taking the fullest advantage of what’s possible if you actually stick to what you wrote.

Stanley Kubrick

Let’s return to other creative considerations:

No scene is an island entirely of itself. Just as shots within a scene relate to each other, so do shots within an act (what I call a movement), and indeed, within the whole movie, need to connect with each other.

Every shot should relate to every other shot.

Abbas Kiarostami. Lessons with Kiarostami. Sticking Place Books, May 29, 2020.

The filmmaker needs to consider the visual architecture and connective tissue of their complete film rather than approaching each scene piecemeal.When, at moments in the movie, might the protagonist be on the left of the frame, when on the right? When might they be closest to the camera? When furthest away? Which scenes could work from detail to context, which from context to detail? What does the viewer need to see and what is better not shown and perhaps just heard, or even implied?

Which scenes punctuate structure, perhaps providing breath, a pause in rhythm, and how might that be shown? Through a moment of rest, of emptiness? A new image? A vista? Some new place?

Which scenes are best working by montage and which as “oners”? And how does this play into the modulation of rhythm throughout the movie?

There’s genre to consider also. In an action movie, an explosion might be covered by multiple cameras, each capturing some dynamic composition, so that several shots are available to the editor who can subtly expand the duration of what in reality would be an event over in a split second, thus rendering it visually thrilling.

In a more intimate drama, for example, in which emotion within a character is more important than hyper action without, such an event might play out in a wide shot, far from camera or be heard rather than shown.

(I learned this from writer-director Anthony Minghella when I was directing the 2nd unit on The English Patient. At one point in the film, a jeep runs over a landmine. I wanted to shoot the instant up close, from several angles. Minghella said “No! It’s not that kind of a movie.” He went on to shoot it from the point of view of Juliette Binoche’s Hana, in a truck a couple of hundred yards away. Hana loses her close friend in that moment so the drama is not physical but emotional. Thus the camera placement. Lesson learned! And a proviso to my argument. This was the correct way to shoot the event! Although it depended on context.)

Another consideration. Classical comedy might invite a predominantly third person narrative point of view, and third person objective at that — as can be seen in much of silent cinema:

Comedy is merely tragedy happening to someone else. — W C Fields

Adopting a less formal approach, the comedic director might by contrast opt for what I call promiscuous NPOV — going opportunistically to wherever and whoever’s POV best serves the gag.

Can any general instruction, out of context, on “How to shoot a scene” be helpful then? What scene? What “how”? Surely there’s no one-size-fits-all. A scene is not a baseball cap — best worn on a director’s head rather than being imposed on their staging, shooting, and cutting.

Sorry! No easy answers here.

You’re on your own — and all the better for it…

Peter Markham

July 2025

Screen and audience. A director’s practicality. A master’s diligence.

Alan Bates in John Schlesinger’s “An Englishman Abroad” (1983). Screenplay: Alan Bennett | Production company: British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

John Schlesinger (1926–2003) was a British director of movies such as Midnight Cowboy (1969) (one of Francis Ford Coppola’s ten favorite films), for which he won an Academy Award, The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976), and many others, including his earlier works made as a leading light of the British New Wave.

I was fortunate enough to work with Schlesinger in a position called at the “Beeb” an “assistant floor manager” on his BBC film An Englishman Abroad (1983).

After a couple of weeks of rehearsal at the BBC Rehearsal Rooms in North Action, for which I marked out the sets, managed the props, and was “on the book” — following the dialogue in the screenplay as Schlesinger blocked each scene with his cast, Alan Bates and Coral Browne among them — the team left the Television Centre in White City for physical production on location.

My tasks were legion during the shoot — booking the extras, supervising the action props on the set, working with the 1st AD orchestrating the background action on the day, giving the actors their calls each evening, driving star Coral Browne from hotel to location, stopping passers-by from walking into shot, holding up traffic, plus various other menial tasks I’ve happily forgotten.

A ludicrous general factotum of a position that made no sense as regards responsible filmmaking, but taught me valuable insights into the complexity of physical production.

What I learned from John Schlesinger, though, was of a higher order altogether…

Lesson 1

The Scene: 1955. Moscow. Brit defector Guy Burgess walks across a footbridge over the Moskva river.

Location: 1983. The Clyde footbridge. Glasgow, Scotland, Alan Bates plays Burgess.

Problem: The teeming Glasgow rush hour traffic, crossing the Clyde road bridge further upriver, sluices across the back of shot behind Bates.

So… despite collective admiration for our distinguished director, we all throw up our hands in horror. He can’t shoot that! This is supposed to be Moscow! Supposed to be 1955! That’s when the events depicted took place. This gives the game away.

To which, our revered filmmaker, with laconic amusement, replies: SWK!

What? We cry, baffled.

SWK! Schlesinger repeats his sardonic response.

What’s SWK when it’s at home? We ask.

He casts a cursory glance around us, his assembled, clueless team.

Sillies won’t know! The master explains.

A brief hiatus, then we get it. The viewer is watching Alan Bates. It’s Burgess they care about, his story they are following. The background traffic, in soft focus, forms nothing but a blur of movement, a subliminal energy in the frame. No one is going to notice it for what it is. (Even sad individuals like myself, who might watch a movie fifty times will in all probability miss it — until the 51st perhaps.)

Lesson learned:

Sillies won’t know.

The director determines what the viewer looks at. Storytelling, character, eye trace, lensing inform the screen’s address to the viewer. The screen is no neutral canvas but a filmmaker’s designed utterance. The purposeful conduit between story and audience.

Lesson 2

The Scene: 1955, Moscow. A couple of KGB goons sit in their lumbering black car waiting for Burgess to emerge from the building opposite. Once he appears, they are to creep along behind in this cumbrous vehicle.

Location. 1983. Dundee. Scotland.

Problem: The car, a Soviet Zil, adapted for British roads, is no longer left- but now right-hand drive.

Appropriately annoyed, if not quite red-faced, Schlesinger ponders, searching for some unlikely solution. How is he to remedy this? Cancel the day’s shoot? No. Too expensive, and anyway, what’s the likelihood of a left-hand drive Zil being found readily available in Scotland, or anywhere else in the UK for the matter?

Rewrite the script, penned by the great Alan Bennett? And remove the offending tank of a thing so the secret police have to loiter on the sidewalk? Conspicuous for all to see?

No. The leviathan has to remain in the scene.

Schlesinger sighs, deliberates, and in the space of a few negligible minutes, comes up with the practical solution evident to none of the rest of us lesser mortals.

He sends the props buyer off to find another steering wheel. Which they do.

He has the new, dummy steering wheel mounted on the dashboard where it would it be on a right-hand drive vehicle.

He has me provide the man on the side of the functioning steering wheel with a copy of Pravda.

The man drapes the newspaper over the real steering wheel as if he’s reading it.

When the Zil pulls away, the man with the Pravda carefully steers the car with the wheel under his newspaper while the guy with the false wheel mimes the action of turning it.

Brilliant!

Lesson learned:

The director, an artist responsible for the creative aspects of a movie and blamed if they go wrong, must also be eminently practical, capable of thinking on their feet, in the spur of the moment, under pressure of budget and time, with no one to turn to, and with no additional resources on hand. The director must be a problem solver on an immediate, fundamentally practical level.

Lesson 3

When John Schlesinger asks the production manager Who runs rehearsals? The answer is Peter.

When he asks Who supervises the action props? The answer is Peter.

Who gives the daily calls to the actors? Answer: Peter.

Who will bring the leading lady to the set each morning? Answer: Peter.

Who books the extras? Answer: Peter.

Who polices the location? Answer: Peter.

Who stops the traffic from driving through shot? Answer: Peter.

(This last task I recall well, having once, in Troubles-torn Belfast, been told to halt a British army troop carrier, bristling with assault rifles and heading for the back of shot. Needless to say, I declined — and live to this day.)

With each of my additional duties, the seasoned Schlesinger grows increasingly bemused. Madness! He’s obviously thinking.

Lesson learned:

Yes, it was madness. The BBC gentleman-amateur attitude. (Where had it come from? Some bizarre colonialist mindset?) Filmmaking needs to be safe, responsible, and professional. The value of individual crew members and their jobs should be recognized. Props masters need to be competent. (I’ve always been intimidated by inanimate objects and was consequently hopeless at handling props.)

Wandering out into the middle of the road to stop traffic is downright dangerous. Proper policing is mandatory. Driving the star needs to be left to a driver, not any old AD. (I was, in effect, a combination of 2nd and 3rd AD, in addition to multiple other functions.)

More than this, what I should have been asking was why was I doing it all? It frustrated me. It involved no artistic or intellectual dimension whatsoever. Once the madness was over, though, I realized the actual lesson I had learned:

Being privileged to watch so closely a master director at work over many weeks, from pre-production when I was in the office with him, to rehearsal, to the shoot, and witnessing his inexhaustible engagement, commitment, and laser focus both on every detail and on the organic connectivity of all elements of a film was, in and of itself, one of the best film schools you could ever hope to attend.

Plus, Coral Browne presented me with a box of chocolates at the wrap.

Peter Markham

May 2025

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