“Personally, I loathe tricky effects, photographing through the fireplace from the viewpoint of a piece of coal, or traveling with an actor through a hotel lobby as though escorting him on a bicycle; to me they are facile and obvious. As long as an audience is familiar with the set, it does not want the tedium of a traveling smear across the screen to see an actor move from one place to another. Some pompous effects slow up action, are boring and unpleasant, and have been mistaken for that tiresome word “art.” “
- Charlie Chaplin from his essay ‘Directing My First Film’
In hopes of achieving inspiration – in coming to know what I like and I don’t like – I ventured to read a book on filmmaking written by filmmakers. I have always been the type to value a story. Beautiful images and wonderful composition have only amused me for so long, and though these things should be appreciated I find that they are more readily available to viewers than a good story. I know for instance, that the films of Jean Luc Godard are quite beautiful, but his films do not move me. I stare at his films for quite awhile, trying to endure them till the end, but never have I successfully done so.
I have no idea what Chaplin thought of Godard, or any particular filmmaker for that matter. What I do know is that the cultural obsession with such films has had an affect on my own my direction and my knowledge of what I want. Obscurity is a necessary part of life, this we accept. I’d go as far to say that that is the point of many of these image based films, but I think that they miss something very important. If it is a necessary part of life we should relate to it. A certain level of obscurity is fine, but not so much that we cannot relate to it at all. There is a balance. Woody Allen has that balance, even politicians who come at the right time bringing a little bit of something different in a otherwise normal package have that balance. Hello Barack Obama.
What so often drives us to continue watching, though, is emotion. As someone who is not so in touch with her own emotions it’s very interesting to me when an artist is able to isolate one or two of them and make me reconsider them, seeing them clearly outside of myself. Usually when the artist is successful in gathering my interest in this department he’s made said emotions seem both new and familiar at the same time.
My ultimate purpose in the future is to do such a thing. At the moment I have this particular vision in mind:
I imagine a girl ridding her bike in the dark, the latter part of the evening. She has just left her day to day lover who finds her frigid and bored with him. She is riding through the Panhandle – a park that has a long strip of pavement but is surrounded by Eucalptuses, the sprinklers are on. The camera goes back and forth between the look of excitement on her face, the passing trees in the park, the sounds of the tires flying across the recently wet pavement all heading in one direction. She turns off from the park to a more secluded road where she eventually parks her bike and walks up a set of stone stairs leading to a Victorian apartment. She rings the bell, and a man comes out grabbing her immediately. She is no longer the person she was when she left her day to day boyfriend. Ideally you – the audience – can feel the sinking feeling of the person she was, and the possibilities of what wanting someone else so much means.
You might think this is typical. You might say that this has been done a thousand times before. Furthermore you might say that the way that I have portrayed this scene is drab and evokes nothing. But it is just one example of an attempt to capture and bring back a certain feeling that I think that anyone anyone at all would like to relive in her own life. In fact I’d go as far to say that nothing is more memorable, more talked about, or more feared than that sinking feeling.
I’m fascinated with the sinking feeling, not just because I haven’t felt it in awhile, but because I think that making anyone feel that feeling without the experience that would cause such a thing would be an act of magic. I suppose my goal in life then is to be a magician. Directors, I think, become obsessed with becoming magicians of a certain type of emotion – whether it be fear or love or something else. I hope to perfect at least one of these things.
It is difficult to say how this is done. It is a symphony of things, and music and image are never to be ignored though to rely too much on one or the other doesn’t seem to yield the best results – at least in my opinion. Even working with the basic things – a basic love story, a basic feeling such as sinking – there is so much to say. The movies I’ve liked best have seemed the easiest to make. What they had was a compelling story and a way of focusing on a moment in such a way that the ultimate feeling of a character or the scene was literally chilling. When this is accomplished it is quite magical, though when images are continually altered it seems more mechanical – though a good mechanic is still an admirable figure nonetheless.
Soon I will have the experience to explain the vast symmetry of how these things work, at least to me, but that of course is more than I am expected to explain. I look forward to the occasion.
