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Let's go downtown and talk to the modern kids
I went to my rehearsal. I ran my two duets. Then apparently I looked enough like I had a fever that they sent me home, which was probably for the best. I am seriously considering going to bed.
From Alexander Mackendrick's On Film-making (2004), ed. Paul Cronin:
The key to the Film Grammar class is the common-sense notion that if we are living in the era in which children—before they can spell or read—are exposed to the moving-picture image on television, then what we should be doing is teaching people about the images they are reading and instruct them how to speak back in this visual language that is the literacy of today. In short, it is important that citizens become consciously aware of cinema's conditioning influences. It is not, however, enough to be merely receptive to its codes of communication. To be literate in a medium is to be able to write as well as read. To know how film and video communicate (and, in turn, manipulate), one should also be able to speak the 'language' and have some idea of how a film is made.
The book is a selection of Mackendrick's handouts and notes from the twenty-five years he taught at the California Institute of the Arts until his death in 1993; I don't know when this paragraph was written, but I'm guessing his students weren't in the habit of recording events around them with their cellphones, or uploading their own music videos to YouTube, or recutting footage of their favorite shows and movies in order to retell or critique them (or subtitling Hitler). All of which are activities that no longer require access to specialized equipment or even necessarily an investment in film as a field and are proliferating, which certainly sounds like an increase in writing as well as reading; I don't know if it means that we have become a more film-literate society, or if most of us are just speaking the cinematic equivalent of tweet-speak, but let's assume it's not the latter, because I'd love to know whether mainstream film grammar (which Mackendrick admits is an imprecise and probably misleading term: "The semiotics professors use terms like 'syntactic articulations' to describe the way shots and camera angles can be organised to represent a coherent, though imaginary space/time continuum, but it's rather a mouthful") is altering in response to being so casually and frequently spoken back to. Or maybe that all happened in the '80's and we're onto a different dialect now.
From Alexander Mackendrick's On Film-making (2004), ed. Paul Cronin:
The key to the Film Grammar class is the common-sense notion that if we are living in the era in which children—before they can spell or read—are exposed to the moving-picture image on television, then what we should be doing is teaching people about the images they are reading and instruct them how to speak back in this visual language that is the literacy of today. In short, it is important that citizens become consciously aware of cinema's conditioning influences. It is not, however, enough to be merely receptive to its codes of communication. To be literate in a medium is to be able to write as well as read. To know how film and video communicate (and, in turn, manipulate), one should also be able to speak the 'language' and have some idea of how a film is made.
The book is a selection of Mackendrick's handouts and notes from the twenty-five years he taught at the California Institute of the Arts until his death in 1993; I don't know when this paragraph was written, but I'm guessing his students weren't in the habit of recording events around them with their cellphones, or uploading their own music videos to YouTube, or recutting footage of their favorite shows and movies in order to retell or critique them (or subtitling Hitler). All of which are activities that no longer require access to specialized equipment or even necessarily an investment in film as a field and are proliferating, which certainly sounds like an increase in writing as well as reading; I don't know if it means that we have become a more film-literate society, or if most of us are just speaking the cinematic equivalent of tweet-speak, but let's assume it's not the latter, because I'd love to know whether mainstream film grammar (which Mackendrick admits is an imprecise and probably misleading term: "The semiotics professors use terms like 'syntactic articulations' to describe the way shots and camera angles can be organised to represent a coherent, though imaginary space/time continuum, but it's rather a mouthful") is altering in response to being so casually and frequently spoken back to. Or maybe that all happened in the '80's and we're onto a different dialect now.
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Nine
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I was thinking about that earlier today, looking at a couple of sequences from Gangs of New York on our new Blu-Ray (yes, we broke down), like the "Fighting Over Fires" one in which Scorsese intercuts two things which possibly cannot be happening in parallel time and links them mainly through music and narration/dialogue: Yes, Bill went to see Boss Tweed and agreed to a sort of alliance, but was it on the same night when "the Irish Brigade marched through the streets" and fireworks were being let off to mark the abolition of slavery, therefore starting a fire in the Five Points that led to a muss between the Black Joke and Americus Fire Brigades? And was that the evening of the same day Amsterdam met Johnny Sirocco, or was that later on?
The sequence totally works for me, mainly because its energy is plot point- and character revelation-driven, but my students used to glitch on it something hard, just like they always used to complain about Scorsese dubbing in dialogue from off-camera to supposedly cover Leonardo DiCaprio's and Cameron Diaz's "bad" acting. The idea that he might've done this stuff deliberately was alien to their Spot the Gaffe mindset.
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I'm going to have to think about the quote from On Film-making, and your thoughts. I'm not a very visual person, but I think there's something interesting there. Thank you for sharing.
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Cold's mostly gone. Definite improvement.
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Thank you.
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Interesting. So they could tell you that they thought a scene or a character worked, but not the particular mechanics that made it convincing as opposed to broke the illusion?
. . . I really don't have the time to figure out what my favorite scenes are in whichever movies I own, re-watch them, and attempt to pinpoint why they work for me, but now I want to. Argh.
Yes, Bill went to see Boss Tweed and agreed to a sort of alliance, but was it on the same night when "the Irish Brigade marched through the streets" and fireworks were being let off to mark the abolition of slavery, therefore starting a fire in the Five Points that led to a muss between the Black Joke and Americus Fire Brigades? And was that the evening of the same day Amsterdam met Johnny Sirocco, or was that later on?
All right, I know, I need to see this movie!
just like they always used to complain about Scorsese dubbing in dialogue from off-camera to supposedly cover Leonardo DiCaprio's and Cameron Diaz's "bad" acting. The idea that he might've done this stuff deliberately was alien to their Spot the Gaffe mindset.
. . . How did they react to things like the entire period of Italian film where nobody recorded sound on-set and it was all post-synched, including sometimes with other people's voices?
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Ah yes, the dubbing references Rossellini et al! I should have realized. All part of the "make it simultaneously artificial and neo-realist, to plunge you head-first into a different world" vibe...
As for "how did they deal with X"?, with my students, the answer was usually "they didn't". These are people who told me they hadn't seen Silence of the Lambs because "it was really old"...the idea of having to see anything that was in black and white or had back-projection, let alone stuff made before synch-sound, was one that the bulk of them found simply staggering.
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I'm not even sure why I haven't. I know I didn't see it when it came out because (a) I was still getting into the habit of seeing more than the occasional movie in theaters (b) I think that was the month I was doing so much work and sleeping/eating so little that I lost over ten pounds, my body freaked out and stopped menstruating, and I had the fun of a pregnancy scare on top of everything else, but Mike did see it and he loved Leonardo DiCaprio, hence our making sure to watch Catch Me If You Can and The Aviator—I'm sort of surprised he never tried to show it to me. Possibly at the time it had prohibitive levels of violence. (That's somehow ceased to matter. I have no idea when.)
the idea of having to see anything that was in black and white or had back-projection, let alone stuff made before synch-sound, was one that the bulk of them found simply staggering.
I just find that incredibly weird. I was in college—at the earliest—before the total of contemporary movies I'd seen outnumbered the classic, or at least the pre-1970's. And it's probably balanced back since.
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What about as a gift for someone who _is_ literate in film and enjoys watching and analyzing, and would like to learn more?
Thanks!
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Keep in mind that I am not a filmmaker, but I would recommend it for both audiences—it's very good on technical details like the way the eye interprets a sudden cut to close-up or the necessary artificiality of sound mixing, but he illustrates his lectures throughout with analysis and discussion of numerous films, including his own. I found it tremendously fun and valuable. There are lectures mentioned in the foreword that weren't included for reasons of space or layout (a side-by-side comparison of Sophokles' Oidipous Tyrannos with Pasolini's Edipo re, for example, or a detailed run-down of the differences between Graham Greene's script for The Third Man and the novella he wrote as a preparatory exercise and later published) that I really want to track down now.