What’s Right for You?

From a storyboard by the eleven year-old Martin Scorsese

You don’t want to go to film school? You can breathe a sigh of relief. You’ve saved yourself as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. But how do you go about learning your craft?

You have many ways—more than ever before…

1. Just make movies. Find your story. Write a scene, storyboard it—if you can draw—or at least have a strong sense of what shots you need, convince friends to act and crew, pick up your smartphone, go out, shoot, cut on a laptop. Don’t expect a masterpiece. See where you went wrong. Do it again. Make new mistakes. Recognize them. Acknowledge them. Write a better scene. List better shots. Convince your ever-patient friends to join you one more time. Shoot/cut again. See what works and what doesn’t. Do it again. And again. Longer scenes. More scenes. Are you telling the story? Show your film to others who don’t know the story and ask them to tell it to you. Find out what they understand and what they don’t. See where you could have told your story more successfully. Repeat the exercise. Show it to other others. Did the story come across more clearly? Now ask your audience whether they felt anything. Did the emotions you intended to communicate come across? Did unintended emotions somehow work their way in? Did your audience feel anything at all? Why any of these outcomes? Performances? Energy? Rhythm? Shot selection? Lensing? Lighting? Camera placement and/or movement. Cutting? Sound? Music? STORY? STORYTELLING? What went wrong and how might it be out right?

In other swords, learn by doing.

2. Just watch movies. Ones you love, find compelling, are fascinated by. Watch a second time, and a third. Watch scene by scene, shot by shot, staging by staging, image by image, cut by cut, transition by transition. What’s working? How does it work? Can you draw universal conclusions from these examples? Think of the world and story within the film. Think of the planarity of the screen that depicts that world and story, of framing, composition, mise-en-scène, color, contrast, depth of field, depiction of space (deep, flat, ambigiuous), of line, shape, and geometry. Think of the nature of the events depicted and how they’re depicted. How does this modulate tone? How convey EMOTION? Is the emotion authentic? What is the story of each scene? How have the filmmakers ensured that you understand that story? How is information conveyed? What in dialogue? What in image? What in sound? What in staging, camera, cutting? What is the subtext? How is that communicated to the audience? What questions does the scene raise? How do they engage the audience? Look at the ‘units of narrative’, as I call them—the scenes, sequences, maybe ‘chapters’, the acts or ‘movements’, and think of how they work both within themselves and within the movie’s connective tissue, how they form structure, and what that structure might be—three acts, five acts, many acts, something else perhaps. Think of energy, pace, rhythm. Fast forward to get a stronger sense of this. Then speed backwards. Listen to the sound design. The music. Watch without sound. Listen without picture. Think how all these elements relate to your own filmmaking. Which of these approaches might you yourself emulate? Which do differently? What do you understand that you didn’t before? What had you not even thought about before?

In other words, learn by watching.

3. Listen to/read the masters. Plenty of ‘masterclasses’ online, Q&As, podcasts, documentaries, books, articles. Be hungry! Listen! Absorb! Think!

In other words, learn from the best.

4. Take individual classes, courses, workshops. In-person. Online. From practitioners (who can teach). From teachers (who understand practice). Go to acting classes, to understand where actors are coming from.

In other words, be hungry to learn.

5. Read books. Filmmaking books, about filmmakers, by filmmakers, about story, dramatic narrative, visual language, visual storytelling, working with actors, everything you can get your hands on…

In other words, learn by being voracious.

6. ‘Read, read, read!’ as Werner Herzog instructed, in a Q&A at AFI Conservatory. And he wasn’t talking about books on filmmaking either. Read novels, short stories, meta-fiction, auto-fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, writers such as James Baldwin, Susan Sontag. Educate yourself! Find original thinkers and writers, the ones who challenge ‘common thinking.’ Consider what the language of the moving image can do that written language can’t. Consider what the latter can do that the former can’t. Consider what they can both do.

In other words, learn by learning.

7. If you can, visit a set but don’t be seduced by the processes of production. Look at what is happening in front of the camera and with it. Everything else is there only to make that work.

In other words, learn by observing.

8. Work in production where you can find an opening, but don’t get sidetracked. Know where you want to go.

In other words, learn the crucial difference between filmmaking and film production.

9. Embrace your loneliness. Make sure you don’t need the club but the club needs you. As the great Yazujiro Ozu said: An artist without an air of loneliness is very boring.

In other swords, learn by listening to yourself as well as to others.

10. Do all of this AND go to film school too?

In other words, learn by all the above means…

In short, not going to film school is as much a commitment as going to one. It’s not an avoidance of a decision—it’s a decision. In many ways it’s the harder option. You don’t have a structure in which to learn. You have to maintain focus, application, a sense of direction without instructors or curriculum to guide you. On the other hand, you are free to discover by yourself. You won’t be given hard and fast rules of dubious, even erroneous wisdom. No instructor will look down on you. But then teachers can be very good indeed, but you’ll never get to be mentored by one of these. You won’t have a support system either unless you set up one yourself—which you can if you find like-minded aspiring filmmaker contemporaries with mutual commitment to learning.

Remember though—the best masters are the best students. These are the filmmakers who never cease to learn. So whether you choose film school or no film school, you are only beginning a journey that is just that— not a destination but a journey…

Peter Markham May 2021

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Which is Right for You?

 From The Ronin Student (Director Angela Chen, Cinematographer Andy Hoffman).

“It’s not wha’ yer know, it’s ‘oo yer know!” my mother told me, when, as a callow youth, I yearned to get into the world of film and TV in my native England. To an extent, given the English class system at the time and our place in it, she was right. Even so, by whatever means you find to progress, knowing someone or simply being around someone at the right time, don’t you have to know, at some ,point something? If you can’t write, simply acquainting yourself with a screenwriter isn’t going to teach you how to construct the screenplay for the next Parasite. Nor is hanging out with a director going to transform you into Chloe Zhao! If you know a producer,  even if they give you a gig, it doesn't mean you’ll do a competent job. 

So it is “Wha’ yer know!’… But where and how do you best learn it?

There’s little doubt in general expressed in social media about the value of film school. “Not worth the cost!” is the consensus—from those who have never been, but also maybe from some who have. (Very many been feel they’ve rewarded by the experience.) The cost can indeed be considerable, frequently amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unless you’re blessed with private wealth then, and lots of it, the debt you’re inviting is not a factor to be ignored. It’s not the only one to consider however…

Say you are entertaining the notion of attending film school, ask yourself first of all, what it is you’re looking to learn and become? Perhaps you want to work in production? As an AD, a location scout, a production manager? So find an opportunity in the industry at ‘entry level’ and work your way up. Or win a place on the DGA program. The skills you are looking to learn can be fairly easily defined. They’re not in debate, and their practitioners don’t practice them in vastly different ways. Not so much skillsets, as set skills. You want to learn from ‘industry professionals’, those who know their stuff, which to them affords validation and status, and aren’t so concerned with the art of filmmaking as the machinery and processes of production. 

Perhaps you want to learn a creative craft that involves technical skills? Cinematography? Editing? Sound? You could go to a film school that is essentially a technical school and have access to equipment—hardware and software—to teachers adept at their operation, and to practical experience. The equipment element is less of a factor now though, or certainly for cinematographers. In the past, access to 16 mm, even 35 mm cameras, and later to high-quality digital cameras was a major factor in attracting the aspiring cinematographer. With the advent of smartphones and their flourishing use however, albeit with the assistance of sophisticated lensing, this becomes not so much of a consideration. Today you don’t need an expensive  camera—film or digital—to go out and make your own movies. See this: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/may/09/films-shot-on-smartphones-herald-new-age-for-cinema-say-directors?

It’s not only a matter of equipment though. You don’t became an editor simply by learning how to use an avid. You become an editor by learning the rich complexities of storytelling through the language and address of the moving image, by understanding rhythm, narrative point of view, dramatic tension, the flow of energy, the flow of emotion, and above all—the flow of the human soul. You won’t learn any of this merely by becoming adept at a piece of machinery, which is all you’re likely to get at those film schools that are little more than a technical/trade/vocational training schools. You need more. You need a true mentor or two, the kind of mentor you might find at a reputable film school—although you can find poor examples there too.

Returning to the needs of cinematographers—you would benefit from an education in the physics or light and lenses, which you can find in books, yes, but more so at a school that offers a specific program in cinematography.

The predominant reason for going to film school however is the aspiration to become a director. If that’s your need, you should consider the differences in structure and approach between the various institutions. 

There are the schools that accept all applicants and there are those that are selective—often highly so. In the case of the former, be careful. They may cost less but even so, your money may not in the end prove well-spent. Courses in these schools invariably conflate directing with production, technology, and the industry, while in accepting everyone, they create a general, across-the-board, contemporary mindset and sensibility. They may spend little time on any rigorous exploration of dramatic narrative and its representation on the screen. They may see the director’s work as happening only on the set, directing the actors (yet offer less than adequate classes in the ways of approaching this). On the other hand, you may find excellent mentors—some the alumni of selective schools who pass on the mentoring they themselves have experienced. But remember: the main purpose of the non-selective film school is to make money, not to advance the art of directing, or indeed the art of anything else.

Such schools may not be accredited by a reputable body or may have the imprimatur of organizations with less heft than those which approve the curriculum of a selective school. 

Selective film schools are invariably tough to enter. They are also more expensive, although some will offer scholarships. If you are lucky enough to get accepted into one, you are likely to find yourself among a high-calibre class—that’s if the selection process has been effective, which may not always be the case. 

These schools may be further divided into those that offer general filmmaking classes, those that,  focus on screenwriting and directing, perhaps producing, and those that offer discipline-specific classes—for directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, production designers, and producers. The disadvantage of the first and second is that in actually making movies, students will take turns to direct, produce, dp, edit, while there will often be no production designer. This results in most of the crew doing jobs they are not motivated to do and in which they have had minimal training.

At the discipline-specific school by contrast, every member of the creative team will be (or should be) committed to their craft. The process of production will therefore be closer to that of the ‘real world’, the sets more efficiently organized, the nature of the collaboration more productive, more mature. There is also the added bonus afforded by the possibility of forging working relationships with practitioners of other crafts to take onward into post-school filmmaking, even to entire careers.

There may be disadvantages though. The faculties of the different disciplines may hold to varying approaches, even contrasting core beliefs, which can lead to combative postures on the part of the students. Some teachers will even project grudges accumulated from their professional experience onto their classes, setting them up in opposition to one or other craft. Then again, team members will be paying the same fees for tuition so may expect an equal say in how a film should be directed, which can render the director’s work subservient to a committee, and make the process less like that of the ‘real world.’

A huge advantage of the selective, non-specific discipline school for the director, and especially the writer-director is that voice may be more encouraged and nurtured. The filmmaker won’t be expected to make compromises demanded by other members of a team. The drawback is they may experience very little filmmaking at all, a short or two of five minutes or so, followed by a thesis on leaving the program. Some schools do not demand a thesis at all. Also, because students are set on individual paths, and because the films they make are not utilized as teaching tools in the classroom, they are less likely to learn from peers whose contrasting approaches and insights can yield an education as valuable as any provided by faculty—very often more so.

One precious benefit of many film schools, selective or not, discipline-specific or not, is the increasing diversity of the intake. Make shorts by yourself, with your friends, and you are less likely to interact with others not from the same background. Studying alongside, and working with students from other parts of the world, other states, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations is a gift to any aspiring filmmaker, to any person open to learning. The riches of different histories, experiences, philosophies, and consequent insights, are as enabling as any outcome of lessons in an accredited curriculum.  

Another benefit: the sense of community offered by some film schools is a resource that the individual, setting out alone or with friends, fails to get. At certain schools this can lead to a community for life, to collaborators for life, some of whom won’t even have been in class with you at the same time. It can be a support system in the face of a fiercely competitive, rapidly changing filmmaking world, one that all too often fails to recognize talent, commitment, and voice, and has little hesitation in knocking you down at every step. In that sense then, as in others I’ve mentioned, film school can prove an investment in more than the foundation of craft.

Then come teachers, some outstanding, many good, others mediocre, some even damaging. Some teach to justify themselves, to hand down rules and regulations they feel themselves privileged in knowing. Some want to create clones, mini-me’s of themselves. These talk down to the student. The best teachers learn from those they teach. The best teach the student how to become a student for life. They don’t teach, they mentor—in other words they facilitate. And as regards directing—perhaps it cannot be taught so much as enabled. Beware in particular, those educators who want to “give back”. Sounds as though they themselves have stopped learning, as if they conceive of wisdom as some tablet of stone, never-changing, to which they have access and alone can read from. 

Where is such a sage monolith? What could it possible say?

Then there are the notable practitioners a film school may bring in for a class, workshop, or Q&A. Such visits may prove life-changing for a student, who gets the chance to asks questions directly to those who inspire them, and to listen to an informed discourse rare in the haphazard nature of most talks for laymen. Even so, teaching from celebrities may not always prove beneficial, since those who can do are not necessarily those who can teach. (You might argue the reverse in some cases.)

Yet whatever the approach and effectiveness of the teacher, there will be filmmakers in the past, or just arriving on the scene who made or make movies that work in a completely different way to the tenets the student has been taught. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the insights of the educator so long as the student has been encouraged to challenge them, to continue the process of learning in later years, and so long as they have been motivated to search out the iconoclasts, rebels, and savants who subvert convention… Teachers may be opinionated, which is fine and may prove stimulating—just as long as they don’t try to imprint their tastes onto their classes and as long as they hold the sensibility of the student with respect equal to that they accord their own.   

A final note when it comes to considering film school—don’t narrow your education, don’t restrict yourself to filmmaking, don’t be insular. The human universe is too huge. Study other subjects: theatre, literature, music, philosophy, visual art, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and so much more… 

Above all be hungry to learn!

The title of this article is Film School or No Film School. What then of the No Film School option? That’s what I’ll be looking at in Part Two…

Peter Markham June 2021

 (Citizen Kane, Director: Orson Welles, Screenplay: Herman J. Mankiewicz, Welles, Cinematography: Gregg Toland / Vertigo, Director: Alfred Hitchcock, Screenplay Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor, Cinematography Robert Burks.)

A friend recently introduced me to a book that claims profound insights into how artists set about their work. Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David W. Galenson https://bookshop.org/books/old-masters-and-young-geniuses-the-two-life-cycles-of-artistic-creativity/9780691133805 posits the notion that there are polarities of creative process, the conceptual and the experimental. 

The conceptual approach, Galenson writes, is the M.O. of the artist, writer, director who first gets an idea, plans their work meticulously, then once ready, paints, writes, or shoots and cuts it to its pre-planned perfection. No hesitation, no stumbling, little sweat—100 per cent inspiration, zero per cent perspiration. That achieved, maybe a few times over, they move on to a new concept, nail that, then again move on to a fresh domain. Galenson gives Picasso as an example, his work marked by distinct conceptual shifts that each changed the nature of his canvases, changing perceptions of painting itself. Others follow in the wake of such a figure, adopting their assumptions, techniques, aesthetic tenets, and manifestos. 

Conceptualists tend to do their best work early in their careers. Later efforts tend to be less sought after, less significant. Their reputations are as early bloomers. 

A filmmaker he cites in this respect is Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane follows the life of a driven, less than attractive protagonist through the wide lenses, deep focus, and low angles of Gregg Toland’s famed cinematography. Like Picasso, Welles’ produced his most highly regarded work, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons in his case, in his twenties. The terms ‘boy wonder’ and ‘enfant terrible’ come to mind. (Qualification: Touch of Evil came later.)

The conceptualists are the finders.

The experimental approach is the M.O. of the artist, writer, director who looks for their idea through the process and agony of creating the work itself, who lack any template to be faithfully followed. A term used at the film school in which I taught was NATO—not attached to outcome, which I always thought supportive of the dedicated student striving to create successful work but unsure of its precise eventual nature. Such an artist will have a limited sense of exactly where their work is going but will beaver away through successive versions, drafts, cuts until they have something they must finally step away from. Galenson gives the example of painter Paul Cezanne, who admitted he was never sure how any of his paintings would finish up. 

In contrast to the conceptualists, the experimentalists tend to create their best work later in their careers. They are the late bloomers. It’s their ‘work ethic’ that yields their achievement. (What in the world has work to do with ethics? Work describes activity, not morality.)

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving, said Lao Tzu. The experimentalist is perhaps such a traveler, with no fixed plans—with little idea even of their eventual destination.

A filmmaker Galenson posits in this respect is Alfred Hitchcock, whose greatest films, unlike those of Welles, are generally considered to be those of his later career (if not the ones of his final years). Hitchcock’s preoccupations can be traced throughout his canon of course—transference of guilt, son-mother relationships, icy blondes, oneiric ventures into the psyche, heights and acrophobia as sublimated dread of sexual impotence—but somehow in Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, Marnie they appear most organically encapsulated into story, character, and visual language than in his earlier films, impressive as many may be.

This is Hitchcock as ‘old master’, the opposite to Welles as ‘young genius’.

The experimentalists are the searchers.

Here I find myself wondering what a clear, obvious example from human history of the conceptual approach in terms of creativity and inventiveness might be. Perhaps the wheel. The wheel has to have been invented in one fell swoop. You wouldn’t come up with a single segment, see it not work, add a second segment, witness the failure of that, add a third and a fourth and so on until you ended up with the first ever complete wheel, one that finally worked. No. The wheel had to have come about in one conceptual leap (or revolution more like).

What, I ponder, might have proved a contrasting example of experimentalism? Think about Italian writer Italo Calvino’s insight into the folk tale—Calvino said that anonymously written folk tales took shape over generations. They achieved their perfection through the collective, generational mind of storytellers over the centuries, each adding, subtracting, shifted, re-working the drafts of their predecessors. Were it not for the tales being committed to the page and so finally, as it were, frozen in time, maybe the process would be continuing, never to stop perhaps, each generation imbuing such narratives with its own take.

But is Galenson being overly schematic? Is his reductivist, statistics-based approach adequate in revealing the process of the artist? Doesn’t the creative act require both a degree of conceptualism and a measure of experimentalism? Doesn’t the conceptualist undergo more than a few drops of perspiration as they set out their templates? And don’t they sweat the odd bead in finally executing their work? Doesn’t the experimentalist require the odd moment of inspiration, those instances when some insight strikes, when an answer mysteriously reveals itself as the artist is making a coffee, taking a shower, out for a walk after hours upon hours at their desk when the solution eluded them?   

When the solution came, it came, as always, through the back door of the mind, hesitating shyly, an announcing angel dazed by the immensity of its journey, wrote John Banville in his novel Kepler. Is that how these pearls of progress arrive, delivered by some dazed ‘angel’ from some distant, unfathomable place, the domain of wisdom whose messages to most of us are intermittent at best?

Galenson believes that a conceptualist can become an experimentalist, but an experimentalist can never become a conceptualist. The former may at some point forego their blueprints and move straight to the canvas—the literal one or its metaphorical counterpart—there to make the adjustments necessary to finalize the work, in the process discovering changes that blueprints could never have prompted. The experimentalists on the other hand need the ordeal of constant revision, the re-writing—which is where the actual writing happens. They will never change into a conceptualist because they cannot overcome their hard-wiring. This doesn’t matter, Galenson argues, because art is achievable through either approach.

While I agree that the polarities can indeed be found in particular young geniuses and old masters, and that one movement, Impressionism say, or Abstract Expressionism, may have been driven by experimentalism while the schools that followed were founded on the opposite, for most artists—and I would argue, filmmakers included—there exists more a shifting spectrum. Hitchcock, for example, in contrast to Galenson’s evaluation, did show the traits of a conceptualist throughout his career. He was especially prepared before setting foot on the set, leaving little to chance: Many people think a film director does all his work in the studio, drilling the actors, making them do what he wants. That is not at all true of my own methods… And indeed, it wasn’t. For Hitchcock, “prep” was as much process as the shoot and the cut, even more so.

As an experimentalist on the other hand, he also developed as a filmmaker, honing the exploration and articulation of his obsessions over the course of his career. From The Lodger (1926) through films such as Notorious (1946) to Psycho (1960), and on to Marnie (1964), his movies bring the power of the mother figure to the screen with ever increasing potency, not to mention psychic disturbance.   

So… what are you yourself? Conceptualist or experimentalist? Or are we all, should fortune smile on us, to greater or lesser extent something of both? 

Peter Markham May 2021

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

From Bringing Up Baby, 1938. Dir. Howard Hawkes. Cinematography Russell Metty

How do we think of function in the context of a story? As it pertains to a scene, a shot, a beat? What purpose they serve perhaps. How they work. The result they lead to. How they relate to something else. Their part in the connective tissue of the story. Maybe their place in the structure. Some point of no return. The end of an act or movement. The start of another. What they set up, pay off, invite, answer, challenge. How they move the story on. How—if they don’t—they merit inclusion in the storytelling. The emotion conveyed. The cognitive engagement of the audience. The bonding of reader/audience to character. An injection of energy. A reversal in the journey of a character, a change in the direction of the story, or the introduction of a new element. A moment of wonder, horror, spectacle, mystery. A contrast to what is to follow, which will render that next step all the more powerful. A seed of suspense. Another, perhaps contradictory layer of character. A new angle, new understanding…

Many possibilities. So much to consider. But common across the board lies the imperative of order, of organization, coherence, meaning.

What—by contrast—do we understand by the word mischief? Troublemaking perhaps. Transgression. Stepping beyond the bounds of decorum. Defacing the fabric of the status quo. Ripping it up. Heresy. The seeds of discord. There’s the currency of populist idiom of course: kicking ass, killing it, crushing it, badassery—cruelty-as-fun the thread, it seems to me (not mischief but conformism to contemporary taste). Accepted morality upended though—there’s mischief for you. There’s mischief as wit too. An amusement. A joke. A comedic flourish. A sly comment or turn of events. An unexpected juxtaposition, funny, jarring, ironic, startling, wrenching. An image blatantly incongruous. Tonal dissonance maybe, warm/cold, joyful/painful, celebratory/sobering. A surprise. A shock. A spirit of disorder, irresponsibility, craziness, freedom from constraint, anarchy. Maybe the narrative takes a surprising step from which we fear it can never recover. A defiance of expectations. Contrarianism. Wild inventiveness. Game-playing—with the story, with a character, with the reader/audience. A misdirection. A trap laid for that hapless reader/audience. A trick. 

The concept of mischief is itself mercurial. Does it suggest harmless fun, or something devilish—something innocent, childish, or something fiendishly contrived, something naughty or something malevolent? The mischief of mischief we might call this—the more you think about it, the harder it is to pin down its meaning.

The common thread though? Rebellion. Subversion. Troublemaking…

Totally unsuited bedfellows, one might assume, these dueling concepts…

Take a look at the ending to Howard Hawks’ 1938 Bringing up Baby. In this classic of the screwball comedy genre, Cary Grant’s paleontologist David Huxley has spent four years attempting to complete a fossilized Brontosaurus skeleton but has been lacking one single bone—the "intercostal clavicle." Katharine Hepburn’s Susan Vance, having found the missing item, brings it to Huxley, who, perched atop a platform next to the almost complete skeleton, tries but fails to prevent her from climbing a ladder to give him the bone. As she reaches the top, and the two at last profess their love for each other, the ladder sways wildly from side to side, prompting Vance to clamber onto the skeleton, which brings about the collapse of the entire Brontosaurus, leaving her swinging from her romantic partner’s grasp… 

Surely, in all the function-meeting-mischief episodes in movies can there be few other examples so perfect. The romance we’ve been desperate to see succeed throughout the movie is finally affirmed. The skeleton and its absent "intercostal clavicle" are finally re-united. But with what astonishing invention! No sooner is all this achieved, than the hapless Brontosaurus falls to pieces. Huxley’s goal of completing the fossil is snatched from him in a second—you can’t achieve your true goal without losing your false goal, the film seems to tell us.

With entropy comes new harmony, with collapse consolidation, with the disintegration of the old the birth of the new, with the break-up of fossilized bone the flesh-and-blood joy of love, with the demise of the insentient beast the triumph of the sentient characters, with the descent of the skeleton the ascent of Vance, with the peril afforded by gravity the rescue afforded by love, with loss, touch—in short, a symbiosis of opposites, expressed with comedic mastery through the language of the moving image… 

Mischief and function in one and the same event—story coming to life on the screen…

Peter Markham April 2021

 https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

How You Show What You Show

From The Man with the Movie Camera: Director Dziga Vertov, Cinematography Mikhail Kaufman.

Most social media posts, when discussing camera, refer to the physical entity, a device for capturing an image. Such posts are usually concerned with models of camera. Alexas, Reds — what have you. Filmmakers like to post pictures of themselves alongside a camera — una macchina fotografica, as an Italian would say, a machine, an object, a thing. Just as a guitarist might be pictured with their Fender Strat, a violinist with their precious Stradivarius, so cinematographers like to be seen with the tool of their trade. And why not? Theirs is a dignified craft, the camera its instrument and symbol.

Next meaning: camera as gizmo for navigating the physics of light. How it works in terms of lensing for example, whether tight, neutral, wide, fish-eye, macro, diopter, prime (of differing vintages), zoom; the relative depths of field and the compression or expansion of perspective each afford; how the stop controls the amount of light let in and how this affects the image. All of this is complex, fascinating, illuminating (literally as well as figuratively) stuff. The camera, for all its technical complexity however, is a tool for artists — cinematographers and directors — and it is that aspect which is the topic of this article.

There’s the action, the event, the place or object seen, and there’s the camera, the apparatus that sees it, capturing it as as an image. Obvious! you might say! Simple — what more is there to talk about? Actually, a great deal if we were to ask what the relationship of the camera to what it sees might be, and what possibilities exist for this precious bond.

When a camera is static, when it simply observes the action, the place, space, or object in an uninflected manner, perhaps in their entirety in terms of framing, with the lens at eye height, we might think to call that camera an observing camera. We might also call it a passive camera, a minimal camera maybe. It doesn’t do anything but look, doesn’t pass comment, doesn’t interact with what it shows, doesn’t reflect in any way the energy or emotion of what it sees. This camera stands back, remains neutral, dispassionate, does not impose. (The lighting of a scene is a separate consideration and may not on be passive of course, even while the camera might be — a topic I’m leaving to one side here.) This doesn’t mean the filmmaker is necessarily passive too — theirs may be a deliberate choice, perhaps to avoid passing judgment, perhaps to offer a neutral, objective view, or to allow for a cumulative engagement with story and characters on the part of the audience: you watch, you wait, but before long you find yourself drawn in, held for the rest of the movie…

When the framing is more deliberate however, perhaps not showing an entire event, perhaps seeing it from a particular angle, raking maybe, or as in the case of an overhead shot, god-like perhaps, or maybe even looking away from the event, or concealing it behind some foreground obstruction, obscuring it so that the audience has to do the work of imagining it — then the camera is doing something more than observing. This camera has become an active camera — not merely capturing the event so that it can be passed along by way of the screen to the audience but putting itself between the event and the audience by presenting what’s going on in a selective manner.

Such an active camera might at times also be a critical camera. What do I mean by that? Take a look at the final moments of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, say. Frank Sheeran, by now toward the end of his life and holed up in a rest home, is seen through a partially open door. Earlier in the film Jimmy Hoffa has explained to him that he cannot sleep with the door closed. The door must always be ajar, maybe as a means to escape or perhaps so that any malefactor lurking beyond might be spotted. By this point, Sheeran himself has become subject to the same paranoia, trapped by the need always to have a means of escape. Here the camera is a critical camera, I might also describe it as a moral camera — not one that moralizes but offers a moral perspective. The critical camera makes some comment on the film, its world, its character, perhaps counter to that held in or by one or other, maybe moral, maybe ironic, maybe both. It’s a camera that inflects — perhaps the framing is “precise to the millimeter” (Godard’s words) and thus makes its comment, or the juxtaposition of elements in the mise-en-scène is designed with a critical agenda in mind, and/or maybe it’s the camera’s placement (as in the case of that Irishman shot, outside the partially-closed door and peering in) that does the work of commenting.

The terms motivated camera and unmotivated camera are well known.In the case of the former, the camera takes the cue for its move from what it shows. A seated character rises and the camera dollies back to contain them in the frame. Someone walks down a corridor, and the camera follows. Where a character moves in one direction, perhaps toward the lens, while at the same time the camera moves towards them, perhaps meeting them, then panning to hold them in the frame as they now move away, this is referred to as a counter move. The camera is motivated by the energy of what it shows but chooses to move in a different, even opposing direction. In the case of the unmotivated camera, it moves of its own accord, independent of what it shows, its energy, its movement or stasis.

In either case, one might describe this camera as active or dynamic, as opposed to the passive camera mentioned earlier. It’s a camera that appears conscious, has an energy, an agency, whether of the movie or its own, motivated or unmotivated, is visible — unlike the invisible passive camera (although the judiciously motivated camera may indeed be rendered invisible) — and either collaborates with, runs counter to the material it shoots, or decides on its own journey.

An active camera, when entering the world of the film and its characters, when it’s motivated by or reflects its energy in some way, and when it connects with the emotion or visceral sensation of an event, we might call it a complicit camera. This camera might be going along with some game the film is playing, by angle, lensing. movement, framing, by mise-en-scène. In some instances, it might be adopting what I call hyper POV — placing itself in the most dynamic position, the most kinetic, the location of the most intense action, the greatest, most extreme physical drama. It might thrust itself forward to reflect the vector of a projectile for example or be situated smack in the path of an oncoming explosion. Less sensationally, it might relate to the narrative POV of one particular character, its progression of placement and/or movement the foundation for the cutting that will connect the audience to that character above any other, perceptually, in terms of action, viscerally, or/and most importantly — emotionally.

Ari Aster, the most literature-literate as well as film-literate student I’ve worked with, once reminded me of Nabokov’s term “ecstatic prose.” Might we not also talk of the ecstatic camera? The camera that weaves and swoops and soars. Might we also call this a flamboyant camera,the resource of flamboyant style? This is the very opposite of the aforementioned observing camera. It takes us on a journey rather than simply showing it. It has us tighten our seatbelts. We travel with it at our own risk, as if on a fairground ride. Even so, we cannot resist its heady voyaging.

And yet the observing camera, by patience and stealth can bring us also to a place of emotional peril. Observing/passive/minimal camera, critical/moral camera, complicit camera, dynamic camera, ecstatic/flamboyant camera — no particular kind is necessarily better than any other but when the camera knows what it is doing, when it knows what it is, just as when a film knows what it is, then that camera functions to the best effect. How the camera chooses to capture the image by means of relating to it, renders it not so much a gizmo for the nerd or the fetishist but an instrument of storytelling, potent as the painter’s brush, the eye of the soul and at the same time the eye into it.

Camera! Treasure it! Revere it! Make mischief with it! Hide with it! Reveal with it! Dance with it! Watch with it! Spy with it! Fly through the heavens with it! But know your camera at all times.

Peter Markham April 2021

What Matters, and What Doesn’t

With New Filmmakers (Photo: Meiyi Art Education)

Why do so few posts in social media filmmaking groups ask questions about story, about world, about character, about their representation on the screen, the forms this can take and the ways in which these can work? About the emotions a movie conveys, the thoughts, fears, wants, questions, suspense, conflict, joy and pain? Why should there be a preponderance of inquiries about this model of camera or that, this microphone or that? Why only the most naïve assumptions about ideas and story development? (I have an idea. Hey! Where can I find a proper writer?—Better to find an improper writer, yourself perhaps, or do you have only an idea but no story?) Why do these groups tend to devolve into mere jobs and crewing boards, into technology boards rather than forums for the creative exchange of questions and explorations as to what lies at the heart of film and tv: namely story, emotion, the human soul among other human souls, with itself, in the community, out in the world, then the means of conveying this—the language of the moving image in its multiple permutations?

Do novelists discuss their keyboards or computer screens? Are the best guitarists obsessed only with their Fender Strats and amps or do they care more about the notes they play, and how they play them? Picasso said that critics discuss theory while artists discuss turpentine but went on to talk about so much more than paint thinner. Anyway, isn’t this contrast false? Are theory and production the sole alternatives, courses in film studies and classes in film production polarities to exclude all else?

Doesn’t art have to work in some way before it can be distributed? And shouldn’t we discuss the different ways in which this can be achieved?—not a matter of going about theoretical analysis but pursuing the thoughts that inform the practice. Are we theorizing when we think about what the filmmaker needs to focus on as they create their film or are we dutifully exploring our art and craft? Shouldn't we be keenly aware of the domains in which a film comes to life, for example, and of how we might undertake to make each of those realms work to the best effect? Shouldn’t we reveal the nexus between dramatic narrative and its manifestation on the screen?

Let’s put aside the platitude about “overthinking” (ever the caution from the populist)… Let’s at last start to think!

My approach contrasts with filmmaking pedagogy in general, which I see as insular, limiting, and too all-embracing—a one-size fits all affair. I developed it during my time teaching in a graduate directing program that I came to head for eight years, and in the period since, working as an independent educator. Testament to its effectiveness might be measured by the success of some of my alumni, also taught by my estimable faculty colleagues of course: Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), Duke Johnson (co-director Anomalisa—Venice Film Festival Golden Lion), Asaph Polonsky (Gan Foundation Award—Cannes Critics Week), Zal Batmanglij (The OA), Eva Husson (Nominee, Palm D’Or—Cannes), Sam Esmail (Mr Robot), Drake Doremus (Sundance Grand Jury Prize), Amy Wang and Asher Jelinsky (both Gold Awards—Cannes Lions), Mattson Tomlin (Mother/Android), and the top three places in the Student Academy Awards won by students under my supervision TWICE—something never achieved by any other film school. I could go on…

How then does my approach differ from the norm? Here are some of the ways:

1. It distinguishes creative filmmaking from film production, procedure, workflow, manufacture, industry, and distribution.

2. It focuses on story, storytelling, and the language and what I call the practical aesthetics of the moving image. (Forget the style vs substance cliché! Time to integrate!)

3. It explores the language of the moving image, not the grammar.

4. It sees a movie as coming to life in FOUR PRIMARY PLACES:

a. The world of the story.

b. The planarity of the screen.

c. The hearts/minds/guts of the audience.

d. Its resonance in memory.

5. It incorporates references to the arts, literature, and philosophy, as well as to film and tv.

6. It seeks the crucial questions, not dispensing the ready answers.

7. It promotes creative Voice over prospective membership of any moviemaking club, over training the filmmaker to talk, think, assume, be like everyone else.

8. It understands story, screenplay, casting, preparation, shooting, editing and post-production as one organic, integral process.

9. It sees preparation as formulation and progression, not simply time spent readying for the shoot.

10. It teaches the effectiveness of the contradictory alliance and interdependence of function and mischief.

The following represents my approach well:

I had a professor at AFI named Peter Markham, who I really loved, and he said that filmmaking at its best is really mischief-making. That really stayed with me. That is exactly how I feel. Ari Aster. Toronto Sun. June 2018

I take inspiration from these two quotations:

1. The only interesting ideas are heresies. Susan Sontag.

2. The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers. James Baldwin.

I remember, how on Gangs of New York, on Stage 5 of Cinecittà in Rome, Martin Scorsese would walk from the video village to the set to give notes to the actors, and then back again—with eyes down, seeing no one, following in the footsteps of his assistant who would clear his path. For him it was as if the machinery of production, the camera, lights, dollies, tracks, ADs, set PAs, the entire crew, the cavernous stage itself did not exist. There was the film only, in his mind, in front of the lens, in the cutting room ahead, and finally on the screen before an audience and within their emotional and cognitive engagement. With every step he took, the “Fellini Stage”, its walls, its accoutrements, and its population melted into thin air as the fiction he was creating—increment by fastidious increment—came to life. I recall also his chuckles, his joy in the sheer mischief of it all. The invention, the wit, the freedom from common thinking. And I remember too his unremitting rigor, even if once, when an extra was injured, he was the first to stop the shooting, raise the alarm and ensure that help was on the way—dedication to one’s art need not preclude kindness or humanity.

For me, coming up as an AD provided a different experience. As a 1st AD and production manager I could schedule a film, lock down a location, run a set, anticipate a scene’s coverage, know the framing of a shot simply by knowing the chosen lens, direct the background action, anticipate and solve problems, and generally facilitate the process of physical production—but I was a million miles away from the film, its story, characters, and world, and from their representation on the screen. Only when I came to direct, and still later to teach, could I begin to pierce the membrane of the filming process to engage fully with the nature of filmmaking itself.

It is through this contrast in my career and what it revealed to me, together with what I came to see as the creative needs of so many of my remarkable directing students, that my approach to teaching filmmaking came about. Perhaps it’s not even so much teaching as working with—I don’t pass down tablets of rules or wisdom but together with the student, search for and dig out the questions and challenges that inform the effective vision, articulation, and execution of the story and the film.

It’s not about the set, the crew, the gear, the paraphernalia, about technical know-how, the culture of production, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging, the professions, the careers, the daily grind or the yearned-for glamour.

It’s about the film and the thinking that goes into it…

Peter Markham March 2021

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Sometimes I wish it would stay. Sometimes I wish it would go away. (Paul McCartney: McCartney III)

Sakuro Ando as Nobuyo Shibata in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters. (Cinematography by Kondo Ryuto.)

On the screen, in the hearts of the audience, in the course of a story, at its denouement, emotion is Cinema’s most precious gift. In tandem with existential vision (Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland), orchestrated by trenchant intellect (Michael Haneke’s Amour), unleashed through the stealth of patient narrative (Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire), conveyed achingly in each and every frame (Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu), emotion is both the punishment and the reward we take from the films that count.

Why do I say punishment? Because emotion can hurt. It can hold us in its ruthless grip. Can render us desperate for release. Can keep us awake during the night long after a film has finished. Can return to us unannounced. Why do I say reward? Because the word suggests a recompense for a task carried out, for work that’s been completed, a pleasurable bounty but also perhaps one more problematic—the just desserts maybe, for our complicity in a journey of dubious moral complexion (Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here). Emotion is the deepest experience of the characters we watch, and of ourselves as we watch them. They may perceive, they may think, they may know, they may act, but it’s when they feel that the screen delivers its coup de cinema, us at its receiving end.

And when a character suppresses or hides an emotion too painful for them to bear, when they hold back a tear so that it is we who shed it for them, that blow is intensified. When, as Krzysztof Kieślowski commented, a director also partly conceals emotional pain, perhaps shooting a character from behind or in conjunction with the cinematographer, cloaking them in shadow, the resonance somehow hits harder—not Show, don’t tell! but Obscure, don’t show! There will be times too, when a character is unaware of the danger they are in, or they fail to make a connection we have made so we fear for them, or we anticipate their joy on the discovery we understand they are themself soon to make. Here the emotion arises from situation and storytelling, the interplay of world within the film and world within the audience.

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible, Alfred Hitchcock, my fellow Londoner—true to the city’s perennially roguish spirit—observed. And this he did, yet audiences loved his movies, still do, many of them—while even some of those falling short upon their release proved later to be masterpieces. Hitchcock knew that the more he made an audience suffer, the more grateful it would grow. The Safdie Brothers could have been bearing this in mind as they made Uncut Gems—look at how many of us thrill to that film. He knew that we come to a movie as we come to a novel or a short story, in order to suffer. But why? Usually we go out of our way to avoid pain. Why then should we spend time and money to experience it?

Author Anaïs Nin wrote …nothing that we do not discover emotionally will have the power to alter our vision.

When locked into a mindset, maybe bounded by a story, a myth, a culture, and the sense of identity and belonging they foster, or when we have succumbed to common thinking and someone comes along to argue the contrary, we are unlikely to shift our position. We tend to strengthen our views in fact. Driven to defend ourselves, we grow even more convinced of our perspective.

How different that outcome is from when we follow the journey of a protagonist in a novel or film—eventually, at least in the best of cases, finding the character has some moment of realization we come to share. We adhere to a voyage of rage for example, a path to righteous justice, only to discover our protagonist becoming much the same manner of violator as the perpetrator they and we wish to see punished. (The Limey.) Or after the protagonist has become deaf and like him we long to find a cure, we both learn that it is silence that perhaps offers the most profound sense of being alive. (The Sound of Metal.) Reading those sentences, we might understand their point intellectually, but watching those films and following their narratives, we grasp their truths through the voyage of emotion, especially that we feel as the movies arrive at their end.

Is this what Aristotle, polymath among the ancients, was describing, when he talked of catharsis? Usually this concept is thought of as the “purging” of emotions, as though emotions were—in and of themselves—toxic. Emotions can throw us off balance, yes. They can lead us to act unwisely and commit actions we later come to regret. They can make us feel ill, deliriously happy, desperately needy, confused, compassionate, hostile—the litany never ends. One way or another, they can disturb some supposed equilibrium. Is that the complete picture though?

I like to keep in mind another meaning of the word katharsis contemporary to Aristotle—namely understanding. Bear with me, because I don’t believe that emotions need to be swept away at all. It seems to me that true revelation comes with and through emotion. Indeed, it cannot come without it. At the end of Chung Mong-hong’s A Sun, for example, I feel intense emotion, and this remains with me in the wake of the movie—in the ensuing minutes, in the night after, the next day, and even during the following weeks. The emotions the characters have experienced have been deeply unsettling. Those the viewer has endured, have been similarly rough—the instances of dark comedy complicating and contradicting this relationship—even if our actual emotions are of course generally less traumatic than the characters’ fictional feelings. (These latter exist only in a world of make-believe, remember, although they may have been conjured by the actors on the set—take a look, for example, at Sakuro Ando in her scene towards the end of Shoplifters, when her flow of emotion possesses the frame—or they may not, story and storytelling alone the originators.) Have our feelings been expelled when A Sun is over? The main characters are in a better place while I am deeply moved—to tears, if I’m honest. So what has been purged?

This final rush of emotion follows from realization, what I believe Aristotle called the anagnorisis, on a character’s part and on our own. Surely this represents an acceptance of all we have felt, which we can now see through a fresh perspective—the understanding that only a journey of emotion can bring. Emotion regarded in this way is not merely a bio-chemical drug, an imbalance of the metabolism, even a disturbance, but a form of profound intelligence, a cognition, a resonance that continues once the plot, and the story it supported, is over.

There are films throughout which we can remain very profoundly engaged emotionally, that deliver this final gift, perhaps in accord with their journey thus far, perhaps through some unexpected twist. There are films that render us listless, even bored, but then take us by surprise, leaving us shaking with feeling as the credits roll, as if we’ve been ambushed by the filmmakers. There are films that by contrast peek our emotions throughout, often through the layering of conflict, through performance, lighting, cutting, and score, but at their end fall short—consumerist confections of feeling that calculate themselves into emptiness. How robbed we feel at the end of those latter follies! How empty! It’s the sense of fulness, the fulness of our human selves, our souls, that true Cinema gives, the transmuting of our emotions from burdens and manipulators into the entities that make us what in total we are, which draws us to film.

This is the reward, the awareness of ourselves, for better or worse, that we seek. It can awaken us. It can trouble us. It can surprise. It can affirm. Whichever, it leaves us feeling alive—and accepting of our being in the world, for all the fathomless uncertainty of our predicament.

New filmmakers take note! Take care not to protect your audience—or yourselves—from the emotions inherent in your story. Embrace the pain! Drown in the joy! Feel it! Write it! Shoot it! Put it up on the screen, whether obliquely or directly but make sure it’s there. We need it…

It’s the essence.

Peter Markham March 2021

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

My experience as a teacher in graduate film school.

Sadie Palmer: Photo by Nick Palmer

My grandfather used to advise, gruff and guttural in his Paddington patois, “Yer go’’uh ge’ uhn edificayeeshun!” How though (always assuming Grandad had a point), does the aspiring filmmaker get their “edificayeeshun”—sorry…education. From teachers? What kind of teachers? From classes? What kind of classes? Do they consult filmmaking friends? Head for social media? Books? “Masterclasses?” Workshops? Do they learn by watching—movie upon movie? Do they watch and simply allow the chops of the filmmakers to seep lazily in or do they attempt to put themselves in their heads, mining the riches of process beneath the contours of the finished movie? Or do they simply step out, and jumping in at the deep end pray for flotation and go ahead and just do it? The school of hard knocks, so to speak, some concussive perhaps. Or does ability have to be there from the get-go, undeniable, irrepressible, nothing to be added? Talent—you either have it or you don't. It can't be taught, can't be learned. 

I never went to film school so I can't speak from the student’s perspective. I can from my own though, from the teacher’s side of the equation, so that's what I'm going to attempt here, hoping to cast light without, in the process, justifying too much my own position. 

I've stood on location directing stuntmen dropping on parachutes, explosions blasting one after the other in the deep background. I’ve directed tanks, planes, I've directed a three-year old child, capricious even at their most accommodating, worked with a dog or two, with a bird, jabbing of beak, independent of (bird) brain. I've directed above water and I've directed under water, on land and in the sky. There's little more terrifying to my mind though than facing a class of hungry, brilliant young filmmakers. Like the dream you wish you weren't having that offers no escape. To see their looks as they anticipate pearls of wisdom from their teacher, and to consider the responsibility one has for their development—all too aware of one's shortcomings and the dearth of the sage omniscience they expect—is petrifying. What if I can't come up with the goods? What if what I have to say is wrong? What if it’s banal? What if they already know it? Can I even think of anything? How to begin? How to continue? What’s the destination of this session and does it amount to anything worthwhile? The doubts would creep insidiously in. Do my colleagues feel like this, I’d wonder? Do they doubt what they know or are they certain of it? I’d once read that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations pillars of 20th century thought, would barf generously before each of the classes he taught because he felt he didn't know anything. I would remind myself of this, the notion being that I was in good company. On the other hand, I’d reflect, if Ludwig felt so challenged, what hope was there for Peter? 

It took a while to understand that this was not a problem at all. To the contrary, it was a gift. No matter how conscientiously I’d prepared—and prepare I did, meticulously—I found that insecurity and doubt could give me something: the foundation no less, for a path of exploration shared with my students. Not that I was planning a free for all. No, it wasn't as though I was resorting to chaos but to a Socratic approach, founded in questions, in searching for the ones to ask while inviting others from the students, ones I myself hadn't considered or had papered over as being too simplistic, too inconvenient and consequently too demanding... I realized that teaching is no mere matter of doling out answers or rules. I shouldn't be presenting tablets of wisdom, which anyway I'd left behind long ago, if I’d ever had them, but offering a mutual process of exploration and discovery. This could be dangerous—it entails an embrace of uncertainty because often the questions would lead to answers that might prove contradictory, might reveal a paradox—and why should any student pay good money for that?  

I wasn't dealing—at least on the whole—with the processes of pre-production, physical production, set procedure, the functions and structure of the crew, with the stages of post-production, with “workflow”, with the hardware, the software, with business, financing, or distribution, and I wasn’t providing career advice. There are tablets of certainty that come in handy on these fronts, which at some point it becomes necessary to be familiar with, but that is what I call “the conveyor belt”. It’s not “the candy”, and it’s the candy that has always interested me, the arena that excites. For me it’s story and storytelling, the domains of dramatic narrative—character, conflict, tension, stakes, structure, theme, tone, emotion—and staging, camera, editing, the language of the moving image and its auditory companion—that motivate, compel, and captivate me. In short, it’s the art. 

“You can't teach creativity,” I recently saw stated in social media, in comments on the question as to whether film school is worth the cost. The artist not so much enfant terrible as enfant savant. Not auto-didact so much as no didact at all. Scorsese didn’t need to watch every film he could feast his eyes on then? PT Anderson didn’t benefit from having Turner Classic Movies playing in every room in his home. Ari Aster didn’t thrive on being the most film literate student of the 450 or so I taught (read: worked with) at AFI Conservatory? Creativity cannot be taught perhaps, but it has to be developed. The tabula rasa of the mewling babe is rasa, blank, and not a screen replete with images and stories. The mind of the growing child, youth, young adult can, however, be assisted, facilitated, encouraged, enabled in its striving for cinematic prowess. 

Where then to do the enabling? At film school?

There are notable filmmakers who went to film school just as there are those who didn't. These institutions of varying pedagogies and merits didn't exist until 1929, when the program at USC was initiated, and it wasn't until 1947 that UCLA’s School of Film and Television opened. NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts opened in 1965, AFI’s program a few years after that, although with few students (I’m lucky to have known Gil Dennis and Tom Rickman, contemporaries of Lynch, Schrader, and Malick in an early intake). By the time of the inception of USC’s program, the history of cinema was already sated with masterpieces, with many good films, together with a whole host of the indifferent, the mediocre, the execrable (as ever). So, with no filmmaking pedagogues how did early directors learn their craft? How did they garner their skills when the first moving image hadn’t been captured until 1888 (the Roundhay Garden Scene)? Did they, in the years around the turn of the century, simply block the scene, set up the camera and shoot—pretty much what the neophyte armed with no more than an iPhone might do today? Maybe they did and maybe the next short involved much the same simple course of action, the next also—but at some point before too long perhaps, they would do something differently, more effectively, that new approach subsequently incorporated into later shoots. Expertise evolved so that before long there came about a language. Put untrained directors on sets today indeed, and over the months, the years, some will learn proficiency by doing, by trial and error. Art is not about doing whatever we fancy, it’s about doing what works. Stick with that, jettison the rest, and—soul and voice thrown into the mix (see my previous article)—the newly enlightened filmmaker is on their way…

No need for film school then? No need for the teacher? If the pioneers could work it out for themselves, why not Generation Z? Sure—if it’s content to go back to ground zero and spend the years it takes to get up to speed. But that couldn’t happen anyway—today's new filmmakers have grown up watching movies, consuming TV, following YouTube etc. so couldn't possibly start from square one. They’re pre-educated. (While some of the presumptions picked up along the way will have to be challenged and ditched—the beginning filmmaker often needs to be de-educated.) The question becomes one not of how education starts but how it continues and develops. It’s here that the pitfalls become evident. It doesn't help to have a teacher who wants to make the student into a simulacrum of themselves. It doesn't help to have a teacher insisting on hard and fast rules. Doesn't help to have one enslaved to common thinking. Doesn't help to have those who instill in the student the notion they’re unlikely to succeed because few do—a self-fulfilling prophecy. No. The teacher—more precisely the mentor—must permit the student their autonomy, seeing themself as the guide to the student’s agency, not the preacher of their own. The good mentor learns from the student so that the student can learn from the mentor. The good mentor does not attack the student, battling to break through their defenses, the good mentor invites, excites, challenges, questions, taking down those barricades of misconception and insecurity not by assault but by guidance in order to construct the sturdy houses of insight. The good mentor is as vulnerable as the good student. The good mentor shows the student how vulnerability, not infallibility, is the key to growth. The good mentor passes on the baton of the teacher to the student, rendering the student mentor to themself. 

Akira Kurosawa, on winning the Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the age of 80, said “I don't think I understand cinema yet”. That's what the teacher, the student must admit to themselves. It's never going to make either of us into Kurosawa, but it will keep us on the journey of question and discovery. Because filmmaking can never be entirely learned, so it can never be entirely taught, but that doesn’t mean that effective mentorship isn’t invaluable… and when the mentor teaches the student to become their own mentor, that’s effective mentorship. 

You can’t teach creativity. No. But you can learn it. It’s how you learn it, how you can be enabled to learn it,  that’s the question. 

Peter Markham January 2021

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Well-known decade, band, singer, voice.

A student came with a question. The question. Not “How do I work with actors?” (important, yes), not “How do I block a scene?” (depends), not “What do I need to know about lenses?” (let the physics serve the storytelling, the emotion), not “How much rehearsal do I need per page?” (maybe you have the wrong idea here?), not “How many scenes should there be in a movie?” (you’ve definitely got the wrong end of the stick), nor “Should I storyboard or not storyboard?” (pre-visualization, on-set flexibility the bigger considerations), but “How do you find your voice?” 

“How do I find my answer?” I mused. If only I knew, I could pen a best-seller, rest up into my dotage. Impulse, too often my muse, instructed me to offer a few pithy references. Susan Sontag on how limitations form voice. (Know them, embrace them, and there you have it.) T S Eliot on how “immature writers imitate, and mature writers steal.” (It’s not what you pilfer but how you use what you’ve the pilfered.) Hilary Mantel on the creative act—coming from the gut, she posits, reflecting from her head. (Nabokov said that the act of writing a story begins with a throb.) Offer half a dozen such maxims, I hoped, and that way I’d disguise my inability to come up with an answer. But no, I realized—it was high time I thought this inquiry through, providing the student with more helpful considerations even if a definitive answer might prove elusive.

First things first: what do we mean by the concept of voice? It's a word everyone uses, a notion we all affect to understand—but do we? Where to start? Always a challenge when common usage has long since buried meaning. Back to basics then—what’s in the dictionary? As a Brit my go-to is the Shorter Oxford. Open the app… enter voice, a nano-pause and… the literal meaning heads the list: Sound produced by the vocal organs of humans or animals…  A moment to consider. What are we looking for? Voice, in our sense, is used metaphorically, thus that sound correlates with… what? Address? Style? Tone? Choice of subject matter, genre, dramatic register, world? Which? Then: produced by the vocal organs. How might this work figuratively? What might vocal organs represent? The psyche of the filmmaker? Their persona? Their background, personal history, circumstances? Their traumas, complex PTSD, general screwed-upness? Or something more mysterious? Their soul? Their creative soul? (How do you define that?) Or are the processes of filmmaking themselves, the story-making, story understanding and articulation, the processes of pre-production, collaboration, the shoot, the cut and post-production, are these, metaphorically speaking, those vocal organs, aquiver at the delivery of story? Or is the filmmakers choice of material—the story and characters, their milieu, conflict, theme, drama not the aforementioned sound itself but the vocal organs, the means of its dissemination? 

Then follow the figurative definitions. (A word can be like a tree—a trunk of original meaning, branches its usage in varying contexts, twigs and leaves its figurative resonances.) The right to have a part or share in the control or deciding of something; an opportunity to express an opinion etc.; a say. This helps. Decisions. Selection. Chosen mode of expression. Opinion. A say in what we know as “the conversation”. All are aspects of a filmmaker’s vision. Then, again: The expressed opinion or will of the people, a group, etc. Stop there… a filmmaker can speak for a community, a culture, can give “voice” to the oppressed, the under-represented, the marginalized, the disrespected, the abused, those blocked from opportunity, participation, and fulfillment by the structures of society and politics and the people these serve. Black filmmakers, Latinx, female, LGBTQ, working class directors, writers, cinematographers can voice (note the use of the word as a verb) the soul, agendas, sensibility, humanity, the dignity of where they come from—the paradox here being that in doing so they render the particular universal. Add to this the individual voice of the artist and we have a voice within a voice, a double resonance for double amplitude. And there’s another word here to help: Will. Voice as the will of the filmmaker. Their inclination, determination, assertion, their sense of purpose—in telling their story, in posing its insoluble questions, in finding and showing its poetry, its mystery, its mischief. Soon after comes this: an expression of a person's opinion or preference. Preference. Voice as the sum of the filmmakers’ preferences maybe, for genre, mood, character configuration, single or multiple narrative point of view, for tenor, scope and scale, for showing or suggesting, seducing or provoking, whispering or shouting. Later and we find this: Utterance or expression of feeling, opinion. Utterance. This I like. A movie as the utterance of the filmmaker. Later still, and even better: The agency or means by which something specified is expressed, represented, or revealed. Voice as agency, the agency of the filmmaker in communicating their vision to the world, the power, the act of doing what they do, the practice, the capability, the talent. Next up: General or common talk; (a) rumour, (a) report. Not sure the first helps us, the general, the common (unless these haven’t been voiced before) but I like (a) rumour very much. More than (a) report, although the distance inherent in a report might yield voice—the dispassionate stance, unsugared, unbeguiling, frank and honest no matter what the image, the action shown. I favor rumour (American rumor), because a rumor can be unreliable, manipulative, mischievous, can exaggerate, sensationalize, hone in on our desires, our fears, can circulate and resonate—the filmmaker not as clinical witness but as conspirator, as winder-up, stirrer-up, rogue chemist of emotion, desire, dread. There’s usually something irresponsible about about a rumor. It comes with the territory. That sounds like the voice of a filmmaker, of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Ramsay, Martel, Barry Jenkins, Lynch, Arnold, Park Chan-wook, except that these directors aren irresponsible in order to be responsible—they spread a rumor to reveal a truth, subverting apparent reality to unearth the questions beneath its veneer. 

I missed this, earlier in the dictionary: the quality of a verb as indicated by a particular voice. active voice, middle voice, passive voice. Can a filmmaker’s voice be active or passive? Active as in interacting with/participating in the energy and emotion of the story and characters—by lighting, lensing, camera angle and movement, by editing—the interplay of story and storytelling. Like Scorsese, Aster, The Safdie Bros. Can voice be passive on the other hand, the filmmaker patiently observing, their camera often static, framing broadly perhaps, and usually “invisible”. Like Edward Yang, like Chloe Zhou maybe, like Ozu himself, master of tension simmering under equanimity, his Tokyo Story yielding a single brief tracking shot in 135 minutes of exquisite stillness. And what about middle voice? As in “the window broke”, rather than “the stone broke the window”? Maybe sometimes for the filmmaker yes, as and when they vest inanimate objects with agency—it’s not the stone that breaks the glass but the glass itself that takes the decision to fragment. Not voice entirely perhaps, but an element of it—cause before effect—a fundamental resource for the storyteller. 

There follow the musical definitions: A person's capacity for singing. Good. The filmmaker’s voice as their capacity for the song their film sings. Then: Also, a constituent part of a fugue. True of a filmmaker’s voice if they revisit themes, questions, worlds, characters, tones, each of their movies both echo and reinvention of previous ones. Like 2 minutes of a J. S. Bach fugue lasting a lifetime. (The longer the career, the richer the voice?). Also we have: Each of the lines or notes able to be played simultaneously on a musical instrument. A sense here of voice as a combination of tones, the sweet and the sour, the violent and the lyrical, the majestic and the satirical, the sad and the funny. The filmmaker as prestidigitator of tonality—their juggling of attitude towards their material in order to create anticipation, uncertainty, and suspense. 

One other brief reference—in my book What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay I say that voice suggests a perspective on material, a vision of life and humanity particular to the filmmaker. This suggests a conscious engagement, but there’s more to it than that, I might have added…

Time to return to the student’s question: how do I find my voice? As an audience we may know voice when we see it. A director may know it when they perceive it in the work of another director but can they spot it—should they be blessed with it—in their own work? Is it better that they don’t? Might they become too self-aware, too self-serving should they do so? And if it's better they don’t see it, how could they ever consciously find it, or know when they had? Shouldn’t finding it be an unconscious process then? Perhaps, to go on from that thought, it’s not the filmmaker who finds their voice but the voice that finds their filmmaker? Let the filmmaker meet their tasks, forming and understanding their story, designing how it’s to be told, telling it—in the casting, shooting, editing and post—from one project to the next while trying to think not “Where and what is my voice,” but “Does this work?”, “Does this excite me”, or “Do I have to do it this way—what other ways are there?”or “Is this a question I cannot put out of my mind?” or “Is this the film I want to watch, that I have to make so I can watch it because no one else has made it?” Yes, make the film that—were you not the filmmaker—you would want to see. Recall Nabokov’s throb, the charge you felt when you first engaged with the idea, the story, the screenplay. Keep seeing if you feel it again—maybe not each and every day but often enough to keep you on the rails of authenticity and truth, truth to what excites you about the project, to yourself, to life. 

My AFI alum Zal Batmanglij made a feature The Sound of My Voice. Maybe it’s when you hear the sound of yours as you make your film even though you might not entirely understand it, as indeed you should not—because who can understand their subconscious completely—that you get the inkling you’ve found your voice, or it’s found you. Was it always there perhaps, waiting for the opportunity to speak? Or has it been it born with your filmmaking, the pearl of art from the grit of process? And how might it compare with your everyday persona? Is it louder than you? Quieter? More flamboyant? More restrained? You yourself probably can’t tell because you’ve sensed rather than found it. And maybe sensing is better than finding, because if you’ve found it you know it too well. It’s no longer a mystery, no longer works subconsciously but, out in the open of familiarity, loses its potency, loses its connection with heart and guts.

So I’ve arrived at my answer to the student’s question: It’s not a matter of “How do you find your voice.” but “How do you sense your voice?” 

You don’t search, you listen.

Peter Markham January 2021

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Moral equilibrium as audience wish, truth as story’s need.

Lady Justice stands over London’s Old Bailey (from Wikicommons).

As in life, we crave justice in a movie—unless we happen to be a sociopath or are so politically or egotistically driven that our moral compass is overshadowed by alternative considerations. Justice bestows a sense of ethical architecture, of meaning therefore. With justice in the world we feel safer. Without it we are prey to laissez-faire malevolence. The courtroom drama, the whodunit, the courageous mission to take out the evil mastermind all come with perennial appeal. The western, as it used to be (not so much in its seventies reincarnation and on), saw the sheriff defeat the outlaw, restoring the rule of law amidst the inchoate moral landscape of freshly timbered townships, and of the vistas of desert and plains in which they stood. Justice enshrines fairness. Justice betokens deserved outcomes. With justice the living can sleep easy, the dead too, their misfortunes redressed. With justice we find equilibrium, without it, disorder, or worse…

Yet at times, justice in a film gets out of hand—seeing Spotlight with an audience was like finding oneself in the midst of a mob baying for punishment. Abuse? So first nail, then penalize the perpetrators! And celebrate the restoration of moral order as their sordid conspiracy comes crashing down! No moral ambiguity. No uncertainty. No epiphany. Reassurance all round as the ancient festive spirit of the execution of those found guilty yet again finds its followers. Watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, those around me went wild when the just desserts were dished out lavishly to the Mansonian wannabe perps. When all else fails, Tarantino seems to imply, fiction is the go-to for capital punishment even before the capital crime can be committed. But capital punishment of the malefactors it is, which is what that audience wanted. It’s what it got too, and on steroids.

Everything has a price, actions as well as goods, Nietzsche tells us in his Genealogy of Morals—those who commit bad deeds might be likened to debtors, so it’s only the credit that punishment affords that can restore moral liquidity. The greater the debt, the more extreme the payback required to return the debtor to Square One. Tough, should it get them only so far as Square Zero and out for the eternal count—since those who forfeit the lives of others must have their debt wiped out by forfeiting their own. Such a penalty its said to be condign—appropriate to the measure of the crime. Then the balance sheet is clear: “Let the punishment fit the crime!” sings the Mikado, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s eponymous, orientalist comic opera, one-upping any merely condign sentencing. “And make each prisoner pent/Unwillingly represent/A source of innocent merriment!” he warbles on, moving from justice as an eye for an eye to justice as spectacle. Isn’t that what Tarantino chants too, over 130 years later? Like librettist Gilbert though, he’s being satirical, isn’t he? But whereas Gilbert’s targets were contemporary politicians, QT, crafty as ever, aims his wit at his own audiences, hankerers for ultra-violence, especially when they see it as the callous Mikado does, as “innocent merriment”. What a filmmaker like Michael Haneke delivers with a stiletto (to draw upon violence as metaphor), Tarantino delivers with all the trimmings (to draw, figuratively too, upon the less tumultuous realm of cuisine). The audiences of both are hoist by their own petard (more metaphor—a petard was a bomb) although it rarely seems to get what’s going on with Tarantino’s sly digs. There’s another difference too: the Californian cloaks bloodshed in justice, while in his Funny Games, the Austrian goes in the opposite direction. There’s no subsequent “entitlement to cruelty”, as W. G. Sebald puts it in his collection of essays The Natural History of Destruction. Haneke offers no justice, only punishment—and of the victims too, not the criminals. Not only is there no catharsis, at least in the usual purging-of-offensive-emotions sense of the concept—but there’s consequently no justification for the mayhem witnessed throughout the movie. Things do not work out to be OK by the end, the thrills and spills of the film’s journey earning themselves no excuse in the ultimate moral rectitude of a tautly calculated Tarantino extravaganza. The audience walks out of the Haneke movie theatre not feeling pure as the driven snow, or elated, as might be the case after Tarantino’s grand guignol, but vaguely disgusted with itself. 

I digress. I was talking about justice, not cruelty and its pleasures for those so inclined—even if these ingredients often go together: what would any revenge thriller be without its ultimate retribution, the twofer of justice and violence hand in glove? Revenge, I was told by my Eng. Lit. teacher at grammar school in Southern England some time ago now—revenge is a concept we find unpalatable today. Presumably she never went to the movies, because we didn’t and we don’t. Whereas the Elizabethans had their Hamlet, the topic of that year’s study, we had our Point Blank and The Killers. After John Boorman and Don Siegel have come many more filmmakers on the trail of the assailant, the betrayer, the kidnapper, the murderer—revenge as maybe the most dramatically compelling form of justice never gives up the ghost. The genre offers the screenwriter’s protagonist an objective, and obstacles forcing them to take action in order to overcome them—the ready-made dynamics of dramatic narrative. Revenge offers its own twofer of desired opposites also: transgression and decorum. In order to vanquish the bad guy and exact justice, the good guy has to behave like a bad guy, so audiences get to enjoy rooting for heroes rendered anti-heroes. “He may be a killer, but he’s our killer,” so to speak. That’s okay then… But take a look at Soderberg’s The Limey—the protagonist in that Brit-ophile movie, in arriving at the moment of his revenge, sees deep into the darkness of his own soul—the film’s moral corrective to the moral corrective of violence the character has been seeking throughout the story. Or revisit Klimov’s Come and See to discover vengeance against Nazi brutality rendered impossible to administer without the new crime of infanticide being committed by the central character. It’s as if the journalists of Spotlight, in chasing down the guilty, had in their pursuit learned something of their own shadow—as subterranean as that of the priestly predators.

Justice need not necessarily be coupled with violence of course. Humiliation can do the job just as well. Or the truth can. Scorsese exacts justice by having the Henry Hill of Goodfellas condemned to a life of humdrum suburban dailiness. Even a pardon can work wonders—Bob Woodward says that when he met Gerald Ford to discuss the pardon he granted Richard Nixon, Ford showed him a yellowed and torn newspaper article—the former president had evidently yanked it out of his wallet on many occasions—reminding its reader that in accepting a pardon, one admits to a crime. Ford had thus led Nixon to condemn himself to his legacy of guilt. 

The poetic justice of the west, now economically rendered as its eastern counterpart karma, is another narrative device for restoring moral order. Here it is as if the universe steps in to impose moral propriety on a story. (It may also derive from a character trait, but again that seems linked to broader truths of the human condition). At the end of René Clément’s 1960 Purple Noon, Tom Ripley’s final expedient homicide is revealed when Philippe’s corpse, swathed in canvas and wrapped in an anchor chain, is found attached by a cable to a propeller when the victim’s yacht is pulled from the water. Ripley, unaware of the failure of his murderee’s disposal, will now be arrested, his crimes undeniable. He will “get what’s coming to him”, courtesy of happenstance, that most mercurial character of all patient schemers. Poetic justice might result equally in a reward for the virtuous, but it is from seeing the villain get their comeuppance that we perhaps derive our most satisfying gratification. Another aspect of poetic justice, fate, also comes into play here. “We meet our destiny on the path we take to avoid it,” Carl Jung said. Fate is the cosmic leveler, and when we find Ripley helpless in the face of its merciless sway, we feel reassured. Justice lies at the heart of the universe, we discover, a universe that actively imposes it—in story if not in life, though not of course in all stories…

Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley, made thirty-nine years later, ends less unhappily for its anti-hero. Like the Clément movie, Minghella’s is adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel, the first in a pentalogy of psychopathic sagas, but unlike its predecessor holds to Highsmith’s less reassuring denouement. Ripley’s killing of Philippe is not uncovered. Like Haneke’s lethal young home-invaders in Funny Games, Tom gets away with his culling but while cinema’s moralist implicates us in the sadism of his characters, Highsmith and Minghella seem to be suggesting that our fascination for Ripley’s machinations—and his survival by the skin of his teeth by means of his tactical agility and cunning—is ample purpose for the telling of the story in itself. Let’s just enjoy—if that’s where story takes us, so be it. Reading about, or watching a Ripley narrative is like following a drama of intrigue, except that there’s just the one plotter and we can't but help want them to succeed. That’s another instinct, similar to the desire for transgression—and in Tom Ripley we have the arch-transgressor (Tom rather than Thomas, sets him upon as our pal)—one by which when a character endeavors to make something work, no matter how dark their doings, some undeniable part of us wants them to succeed. The job well done appeals. Easy to accept when the detective is hunting the criminal, or when Spotlight’s righteous journalists are exposing a corrupt cleric. Not so soothing when Ripley sets about his internecine business.

Another vehicle for the battle between our admiration for operational skill and our hope for morality is the monster-as-mentor canon. From Dr Mabuse to Hannibal Lecter, the bad-guy-as-genius has brought about the defeat of other bad guys by means of the manipulation of some subservient good guy. Clarice Starling would be nothing without Lecter, serial killers free to perpetuate their carnage. So what’s she supposed to do? Tell the devil to behave himself? Have him sent into solitary, there to languish in silence while she falters in her attempts to apprehend the culprit out there somewhere (but where?)? Because we accept that’s not an option, we get to have our cake (if not our liver) and eat it too. Transgression, wit, shocking cleverness, justice—a cake of layers too sate the filmic appetite. Lecter takes us on to noir, or neo-noir, its current manifestation—now that the endearing innocence of the forties and fifties has been vaporized by successive disillusionment over the decades. Neo-noir—a murky ocean in the plummeting fathoms of which justice swims, or drowns, alongside the sharks of moral ambiguity and cynicism. Too many injustices to mention. Too many unhappy endings. What would a neo-noir be without one? With justice imposed? If justice arrives, it must come at considerable cost. With horror, justice tends to be even more elusive. In Rosemary’s Baby, in The Wicker Man and its progeny, Ari Aster’s elegantly terrifying Hereditary, as with countless other examples of this quintessentially cinematic genre, it is evil that ultimately triumphs. Our fears win out over our hopes as order is restored after our descent into nightmare—not the order we’ve been counting on though, but the orchestrated theatre of atavistic ritual, an arena perhaps deeper in all of us than its urbane courtroom counterpart. 

King Paimon reigns supreme at the end of Ari Aster’s Hereditary (cinematography Pawel Pogorzelski).

Suspense is crucial to storytelling. The storyteller teases the listener, the reader, the audience, with their wants, fears, curiosity, emotions, empathy, longings, expectations, their respectable social selves and their stubborn interior selves. Our desire to see justice finally played out is gold for the storyteller. Along with “what is going to happen next”, moral uncertainty is one of around seven main categories of suspense. We can’t leave a movie until we know justice has prevailed. With Aster, or with the sobering… no, unsparing critiques of Andrey Zvyagintsev—Leviathan and Loveless—we may find that by the time we discover our hopes dashed, it is too late. We have stayed with the movie only to learn it is the movie that will be staying with us…

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Barack Obama quoted Martin Luther King Jr when he repeated the words of abolitionist Theodore Parker. Does the universe have an arc though, moral or otherwise? Is it indeed shored up by any teleological buttressing? Easier, maybe, to restrict our questions to cinema. Movies have arcs, we are told, character arcs, story arcs, arcs of visual language maybe, of imagery, of shot design. They may also make telling use of a moral arc, although in articulating one they might do better to avoid moralizing. Does that moral arc need to bend toward justice though? Or should that be left to the inclination we bring to the film, whether satisfied or not in the end? “A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children than writing novels,” said Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps the same applies to filmmakers. That does not mean that a writer should impose justice on a story—if the story refuses it, the writer, if they are honest, is left powerless. Story must win over worthy intention, yet the writer’s sense of justice and of injustice can survive. It’s the friction between the two, story and storyteller, that gives the story, the film, its power.

Justice yields closure but if a good story requires completion in some sense, it also requires an afterlife. When that afterlife, that resonance, is sacrificed to the cause of justice in the narrative, an injustice is done. Justice, indeed, has another meaning, and it is in that other sense we recognize the stories that do themselves justice. That’s the justice, we discover, we wanted all along.

Peter Markham  December 2020

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay (Focal Press/Routledge).

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass