The recent lovely work from @GreyLondon for The Sunday Times celebrates the "one take" style of film, and more often, frustration in the studio with numerous takes for "the one." In this case, Grey went with take #16 of 27 (see final result in the video below).
It is beautiful in content.
It also threw me back to the work of Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky shoots MINUTES of film without a cut. Film–not digital–and therefor not cheap. I wrote a previous blog post about "The Sacrifice" during my MFA film studies.
Under Tarkovsky's direction, acting must be perfect.
Lighting has to follow–a lot of natural light–time of day is limited.
Actors must walk in and out of frame with precision. Some actors will appear with their back to the camera, actively commanding the conversation. It's almost straining to watch. See the early indoor scene in "The Sacrifice for that example.
There's an in-depth video on his technique, with interviews at this link. Sorry Youtube won't let me embed that one. Here's an exceprt from a lecture:
"Cinema is the only art that operates with the concept of time.
Not because if its developing in time, because so does music - and theatre and ballet and other art forms.
I mean time in the literal sense.
After all, what is a take?
From when we say: “action!”
To when we end by saying “cut”, what is happening?
It is the fixing of reality, the fixing of time.
The conservation of time - for us to keep forever.
No other art can fix time except cinema.
So film is a mosaic of time." –Tarvoksky
Here's the ad for The Sunday Times:
"Newspaper Brilliantly Re-enacts Scenes From Art, Music and Film in One Take"
During its years as a Soviet satellite, East Germany created and maintained an organization called the Stasi. Their mission: "to know everything."
Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) is a German language film exploring the corrosive and tragic consequences of this type of government activity as it plays out in the lives of a dedicated Stasi officer and his latest targets.
Gerd Wiesler is a true believer in the Stasi motto. Despite his bland appearance, Wiesler is ruthlessly efficient in his job, a fact his Chief relies on, as he wants Wiesler to head up a surveillance operation on playwright Georg Dreyman, believing him to have anti-government views. Christa-Maria is Dreyman's favorite actress and live-in lover.
As he eavesdrops on the couple, Wiesler finds himself sympathizing with their plight. Dreyman is successful and acclaimed and he supports the East German government. However, he opposes the treatment of dissidents, especially his friend Jerska. Once the country's leading stage director, Jerska has been forbidden to work in the theater. At Dreyman's birthday party, Jerska gives him a musical score titled Sonata for a Good Man as a gift. Days later, Jerska commits suicide.
Wiesler listens in as Dreyman is notified of Jerska's suicide, and sits down to play Sonata for a Good Man. He is visibly moved by it. Afterward he meets a boy in an elevator who exclaims his father views the Stasi as bad men. Wiesler's instinct is to track down the father, yet he hesitates at this crucial turning point.
Meanwhile Jerska's suicide finally spurs Dreyman into speaking out against the regime. He arranges to anonymously publish an article on carefully concealed suicide rates in the GDR in a West German magazine.
The importance of this point in the movie is that while Dreyman is rebelling more and more, Wiesler is transforming into a compassionate person–compassion more for himself, to realize his own censorship he's been living with.He begins to protect Dreyman's situation from the Stasi. He lives his minutes, hours and days in fabrication, creating his own play of characters–with the characters being Dreyman, his colleagues and his lover.
I don't want to give away the goods to someone who may want to watch this recent Oscar winner. The beauty and frustration at the end, is that someone who is supposed to be an intellectual (Dreyman) is not seeing his life for what it was, until he's told by one of his former oppressors.
He comes to realize he's maintained a level of freedom literally due to the hands of Wiesler–someone who lived his whole life to this point for others.
Dreyman thanks the former Stasi in a way he best gets his message across – he publishes a novel. Of course it's titled Sonata for a Good Man.
Wiesler sees the book advertised in a bookstore, and finds that it is dedicated to him "with gratitude". He goes to buy the book and, when asked if he wants it gift wrapped, he responds "No, it's for me." The movie freezes on the face of a man who for the first time has something to claim for himself, not others.
Art and Oppression
In the scene Dreyman learns of Jerka's death, he quotes Lenin on Beethoven's Appassionata – "if I keep listening to it, I won't finish the revolution." Dreyman then asks aloud, "can anyone who has truly heard this music be a bad person?"
Inspired to do a little research - I compared interpretations of Beethoven's Appassionata. Myra Hess wins for style (but gets F minor for haircut). The story of Myra Hess well relates to The Lives of Others.
On September
3, 1939, England declared war on Germany. All theaters, cinemas, concert
halls, and museums in London were closed for the duration. Within weeks,
feeling that the British people were being deprived of music, Myra Hess,
one of the world's great pianists, convinced the government to allow her
to start a daily recital series at the National gallery in central London.
With all the paintings and sculptures removed from the galleries, Myra
Hess opened the first concert on October 10, 1939. She abandoned her international career, because she felt
it was more important to the war effort to have live concerts to help
boost the morale of the people.
Here she is. (I played it about five times in a row.)
It figures – A man saves the world by fucking a young woman. That's essentially how our professor summed up a sneered comment made to him after viewing Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (1986). He proceeded that with the question "so were any women here offended?"
No, but I felt a little dumber because I didn't see the film as concluding with that at all. But I did ruin the ending of the movie a wee bit by opening with that. I pitied the slow madness of Alexander – I wasn't expecting a fraternity high five for that move. In fact after his late night encounter with the "best kind of witch" (a servant that works in his house) he awakens on his couch, has previously blacked-out electric now restored, is fully dressed and tucked, therefor making me think it may have been a dream. The ending of the movie almost seems to be the previous day. But I can see the act determining the name of the film – a man can not be redeemed unless he's effaced himself.
Man turns 50, goes slowly mad, seduces a witch, then burns his house down. I guess in Sweden they don't solve a crisis by buying a red sports car. In this case he has a rickety bike to get to the witch–one that Tarkovsky makes sure we understand has broken parts, and one which he films for several minutes, making its uneven way through a muddy path, to prove the last minute struggles of Alexander's "sacrifice." In earlier scenes we hear the postman refer to a gift as a sacrifice–we must give up something we enjoy to give to others, or it's not truly a gift.
I hope Tarkovsky wasn't trying to say that Alexander himself was a gift to the young servant.
To get away from the content of the movie, the visuals were absolutely incredible. I was taken away by Tarkovsky's slow paced camera pan. The effect is captivating, narrative, honest, and above all, contemplative. His composition, in every frame of over a thousand feet of film is absolutely perfect. To me, it was so beautiful it often took away from the spoken word. And it didn't help it was subtitled.
Tarkovsky shoots minutes of film without a cut. Acting must be perfect. Lighting has to follow. Actors must walk in and out of frame with precision. Some actors will appear with their back to the camera, actively commanding the conversation. It's almost straining.
The first actor to directly speak to the camera, and hold a close up is the house servant, soon to be discovered as the witch.
There is a strong reference to paintings, explicitly often showing a reproduction Alexander has of Leonardo's The Adoration of the Magi.
I admit I didn't catch what my professor said to be another strong influence on Tarkovsky: Edvard Munch. So I looked up a few paintings of the great Norwegian symbolist painter and grabbed a screen shot from the film. Here's a taste.
Solás's Lucía (1968) has thematic concern with the decolonization process in Cuba in its approach to showing the processes that generate social problems while leaving the resolution open to the "active" viewer.
Let me attempt to get this right. The film is divided (sometimes very slowly) into three episodes in the lives of three Cuban women, each named Lucía, from three different historical periods: 1895 Cuban war of independence (with Spain), the 1930's (Machado's fall), and the 1960's (beginning of the Cuban Revolution).
Solás uses different sets of actors and distinct cinematic styles for the three historical stories. Each Lucía belongs to a different social class–aristocracy, middle to upper middle class, and what looks to be the rural peasant class before the revolution.
Each Lucía thus lives in a period of great political and social change which inevitably and profoundly affect her private life. A love story serves as the basic plot outline for the unfolding of the three parts, and each Lucía's circumstances and choices are related to a love affair and/or marriage with a man.
For me, when character studies are a strong combination of story and visual imagery, I'm intrigued. The style of each segment is distinctive and appropriate
both to the tale and to evoking the epoch.
The first has a phenomenal conversation scene in the woods, with a tree acting as the third ear. The secret lovers are each on one side of the tree, with Solás filming each actor with the tree as stand-in for the recipient of the words–see the pic above. Once Lucía is betrayed, the entire style turns to lighting with
harsh black and white contrasts. Overall the camera movement is dreamy, almost listless, and the acting
is melodramatic. It ends with a delirious camera spin as Lucía finds
a commonality with the despised madwoman of the streets.
The second has a tense
thriller rhythm and a bias toward interior shots that reflect the protagonist's
chafing at confining of her action; it ends in a stunned freeze frame that suspends
the action and her possibilities. Here's it's not the camera that's listless, it's the actress.
The third is sun-filled, coarse and rowdy. This tale too ends unresolved, with the camera circling the endlessly-fighting
couple from above. The film ends with a metaphorical shot, of a little girl
in a white shift running free toward the landscape.
While watching the film, I kept thinking Bruce Weber would have throroughly enjoyed shooting this.
Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962)
is a grim comedy–a view of human
nature that suggests we harbor savage
instincts and unspeakable secrets. Take a
group of prosperous dinner guests and pen
them up long enough, he suggests, and they’ll
turn on one another like rats.
An aristocrat appropriately named Nobilé has invited several society friends to his home after the opera. Buñuel begins
with small, alarming prophecies. The cook and
the servants suddenly escape, just as the
guests are arriving. The hostess is furious–she planned an after-dinner entertainment
involving a bear and two sheep. Now it will
have to be canceled.
These surrealistic touches are dropped in without
comment. The dinner party is a success. The
guests whisper slanders about each other,
their eyes playing across the faces of their
fellow guests with greed, lust and envy.
They migrate to an adjoining parlor to continue with their empty conversation.
Two men focus their attention on a beautiful girl,
rumored to be a virgin. Several familiar guests, including two lovers engaged
to be married go through
the pretense of introducing themselves to each other. A terminally ill pianist, passionately kisses her attending physician, and the doctor reveals to the other guests that she will
soon grow bald. A pregnant woman casually
alludes to the questionable paternity of her baby in front of her equally
dispassionate husband.
My kind of party.
The hours pass. The people yawn and stretch out in exhaustion, yet no one
leaves. And so the unusual charade continues, as the guests make their way
towards the open hallway of the entrance, hesitate, and find a reason or excuse
to stay. Despite their mutual realization that they have clearly overstayed
their welcome, no one wants to bear the distinction of being the first person
to leave the dinner party. The veneer of civility erodes as desperation and
distrust set in, and inevitably, the guests turn against their accommodating
host, blaming him for their absurd, self-induced captivity.
While attempting to break down the emotions of the guests in the days that ensued (imagine stuck in that room and running out of wine), I notice any perception of a positive emotion previously shown by the guests, Buñuel turns on its side to a negative: Humor, success, excitement, desire, pleasure, promise, abundance, intelligence, innocence.
The Exterminating Angel is a visually stunning, richly symbolic, and
subtly allegorical tale on the nature of human behavior. Through a claustrophobic
examination of masters without servants, Buñuel strips the facade
of all social pretense and exposes the fundamentally base, instinctual, and
primal behavior innate in the human soul.
What separates man from beast? According
to Buñuel, the answer perhaps lies in the freedom of the animals (and the children).
My professor opened this Modern Film class quoting "Fellini did good work, and great work." In case you're already a step behind that means he never did bad work. How can he, when his favorite hero is the sexy Marcello Mastroianni... at least in the 60's. This film doesn't quite show his machismo - it's filmed almost 25 years after 8 1/2.
Fellini cleverly takes a good 20 minutes to introduce his character "Pippo" and does so requiring of his audience a similar reaction to opening a jar of sauce and finding mold inside. I can't even spell the word for it, but "Ew!" is close enough.
For a quick overview of the lead roles – more than 40 years after the height of their fame, Amelia (Fellini's wife) and Pippo
(Marcello Mastroianni) are brought out of retirement to reprise their
ballroom dance act, ''Ginger and Fred,'' on a television variety show
called ''We Are Proud to Present.''
Their characters have taken separate paths since they've last performed together, Amelia is now the pragmatic, sprucely dressed widow who's agreed
to come out of retirement to please her grandchildren, and Pippo is a boozy, over-the-hill womanizer who needs the money.
The movie almost becomes 2 films – one highlighting the more "innocent" world of vaudeville and the relationship that was, and could have been, between two entertainers that are pitted against a circus-style modern medium of television. Herein lies the "second" film – a chaotic world of simply bad tv, tacky entertainers and 15-minute-famers who wander around backstage for quite a long period of the movie in an almost purgatory trance. Fellini makes sure their appearance on the variety show does not redeem them. Well maybe with the exception of the profound monk and the tango midget dancers.
I doubt this write-up is encouraging you to run out and watch this. I am a fan of Fellini. I even named one of my cats Fellini (couldn't resist). But with many of his works, it's almost more fun to talk about them. Dreams. Dreamscapes (in this case a motorcycle scene outside a club). Midgets. Circus sounds.
Ah the sounds. He was a master. In this movie I'd have to say my favorite sound design was the scene with no sound. He uses light (actually, lack thereof) to encapsulate a private whisper - Pippo begging Amelia to run away off stage in the course of a electrical black out.
He also uses repetition - Ameila saying the name "Pippo" over a hundred times - asking for him, calling him, talking about him. Reminded me of the repetition in 8 1/2 – people calling for the name "Guido! Guido!" So now I'm back to where I started, and I'll end with the lovely mental visual of the 1963 Marcello Mastroianni.
I watched 2 films by Luis Buñuel last week - Un Chien Andalou and Las Hurdes (Land without bread). Some would consider Buñuel the father of cinematic Surrealism, so with his films on my mind while surfing the independent channels on digital cable, I stumbled across a Czech surrealist film, Otesánek (Little Otik), by Jan Švankmajer.
Ok, here's where I admit I'm studying Surrealism for my MFA class this semester, so it's not always the norm for me to catch 1 silent and 2 subtitled movies with 48 hours... but I have to admit, I love this shit. And it keeps my roommates off the first floor. If they can't hear Joe Buck or John Madden, they stay away.
Milos Forman once said "Disney + Buñuel = Švankmajer." That's pretty dead-on. Švankmajer's trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating
a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses very sped-up
sequences when people walk and interact. His movies often involve
inanimate objects coming alive and being brought to life through his stop-motion technique.
Surrealism. Stop-motion with live action. Czech artist. An infertile couple in a poor apartment building who decide to raise a tree stump in the shape of a baby. Tree stump comes to life and eats people.
Who wouldn't give that at least a 5 minute chance?
Of course I was hooked. It's believable and yet totally outrageous. It's delightful. It's disturbing.
Another weekend being sick for me is another weekend to catch up on some movies. I was lucky to catch a film called The Cup on one of the Sundance channels. It's about a group of
monks obsessed with the World Cup soccer final.
The film, also known as Phörpa, brings a powerful look into the day to day lives of young,
energetic monks, and demonstrates the challenges a spiritual leader faces in a modern world. The main character, Orgyen, leads the soccer
enthusiasm as he rallies the monks to chip in and rent a TV for the
late night live broadcast.
It is a beautiful, semi-autobiographical tale from director Khyentse Norbu.
Shot in a Tibetan refugee colony
in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, The Cup was made with a
cast and crew of mostly monks and novices. The average scene
required only three takes, which Khyentse Norbu attributed to
their powers of meditation.
While digging for more info on the director, I came across this tidbit - Khyentse Norbu is also known as His Eminence Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Rinpoche, the reincarnation of a 19th century Tibetan saint and one of Himalayan Buddhism's most revered lamas. Besides being one of the most important incarnate lamas in the
Tibetan Buddhist tradition, he is a member of one of Bhutan’s most noble
families. Born in a remote area of eastern Bhutan in the Year of the
Metal Ox (1961), he is the son of contemporary Buddhist master Thinley
Norbu Rinpoche, and grandson of both tantric yogi Lama Sonam Zangpo and
H.H. Dudjom Rinpoche.
Khyentse Norbu consulted mo, an ancient divination system involving dice and
beads, to make decisions about casting and shooting schedules.
He was
also careful to assure his Tibetan actors that they wouldn't suffer
karmic retribution if the script called for them to rough up a monk for
making too much noise during France vs. Brazil.
Depth of Field is written by me, Joanne Borek, a creative and user experience director in a big NYC agency. All things creative. All things digital.
