Othello

It's not a film so it doesn't get on the film review blog. But it's not a week-post, so it doesn't get that "week beginning..." heading. It is unique. How exciting!

As Andy was telling us to blog about our artistic and cultural lives, I thought I'd post my thought on the Citizens Theatre production of Othello which I was ushering last night.

Shakespeare is obsolete. The language is obscure to the point of incomprehensibility, the attitudes the characters display are quintessentially Elizabethan and the humour goes entirely over the audience's head. In particular the racism and sexism demonstrated throughout the play (not by just some characters, but by all) made me think that unless Shakespeare had acheived some sort of mythical status in our country's heritage, such a script would never be permitted to be performed without protestors besieging the building.

Othello is a black man. He is therefore derided by everyone else, who is white. Possibly worse, he himself laments his base nature as an "Indian". When the characters praise him, they say he is almost behaving like a white man; when he does something wrong, they abuse his ckin colour, his parentage, his place of birth, anything except the obvious: his lack of moral judgement.

Iago's wife is an independant thinker. So he abuses her constantly for talking in the street, for speaking her own mind and for not obeying him in everything. There is a minor fluster when Othello hits his wife in public, but it's quickly passed over. Equally when Iago stabs his wife publicly, and she is bleeding to death in a corner of the stage, nobody pays her the slightest heed. They do send a constable after the fleeing Iago, but they don't care tuppence for the dying woman.

So why do people still revere Shakespeare? A great playwright in his day, no doubt. A bard who understood some of the great issues of human nature - true. But also a man strongly rooted in the prejudices, the values and the language of his own day. His stories have dated almost as quickly as his language. If they were being retold today, they woud have to be stripped down to their essential story and built up again from scratch, with new characters, settings, themes, values and plot twists.

As a piece of theatre, I would say this production was average, helped on its way by an intriguing set design and a very strong performance from Andy Clark as Iago.

Week Beginning 19/10

With the constant background pressure of the Golden Rule mounting fast, I have not had a moment of relaxation this week.

Monday was a class looking at Sound Design. Having arrived back from a crazy weekend in Arbroath at 3am that morning, I was struggling to stay awake, but I fully appreciate how vital Sound Design is to a movie in producing realism and a sense of immersion. It seems so natural to include it that earlier films which placed less importance on it now seem slightly odd and flat.

Monday afternoon was a class with Richard, looking at non-3-act structures. For myself, I find the concepts outwith the three act structure to be rather wacky - not territory I'd be keen to venture into except perhaps for a non-chronological story or a story with multiple protagonists.

Tuesday was a location recce for Golden Rule, followed by some auditions. I begin to realise just how much preparation must go into an audition from our point of view. When that organisation isn't there, the audition becomes either just a blether, or full of awkward silences.

Wednesday was a day which I had set aside for editing Dust. (It's so close to being finished, but I have no time to just get in there and finish it off.) This time, I had just got myself set up after some nasty incidents with the Editshare, the network, old files, my external Hard Disc and every other thing conceivable. And then I got chucked out of the DTU to make room for the first years... Typical!

Thursday was a full editing class all day. I still feel that our total editing classtime has been rather vestigial in first year, so I'm hoping we'll get a lot more chance this time round to really get to grips with the software. I have to say, however, that Avid is not for me. It seems to be designed in a deliberately obscure fashion to continue to preserve the myths surrounding the arcane art of professional editing. I have no doubt that for professional editors who are using editing software daily, such a program is very suitable, but for a mere dabbler, such as myself, it is far less intuitive than Final Cut.

Friday was a TV content class, where we watched Life on Mars (always a favourite of mine) and discussed themes prevalent in Shameless, Teachers and Life on Mars. I find it strange that we can attempt to condense the themes of these programs to one word cliches like "family". Surely the purest annotation of the theme would be a statement about family to show how that concept is dealt with in the program. It seemed that we talked about how Sex was used in different ways in different programs, but still just lumped Sex as an identical theme in both Teachers and Shameless.

The afternoon was a screening of "12 Angry Men" which I will post about in my other blog.

Week Beginning 12th September

I thought I had posted up this week previously, but obviously I was mistaken and now shall seek to rectify that unfortunate lapse!

We started off with a look at Editing in Andy's class. We looked at the relationship between a cut and a blink, and saw that a cut must replicate the same psychological effect in the mind of the audience that a blink does in the mind of an individual. One info-bite is over, another is coming.

The afternoon was a tutorial with Richard, looking at the two outlines I'd provided him with. One is getting scrapped. The other is getting shunted sideways for the Enter the Pitch competition coming up very soon. This means I'm back to square one and am hunting around for premises.

Tuesday was a full day looking at directing. This was quite intense, but very helpful at the same time. We each read out our neighbours treatment, which highlighted especially the difference in language styles that there are from person to person in the class. Altogether I found that a particularly helpful assignment to work on. I had been looking again and again at the same scene from "Hero" by Zhang Yimou, looking at different aspects each time: the sound design, the camera movements and angles, the composition of the shots, the colours used and the special effects. Each time I watched it I discovered new stuff about it - this has only increased my love of the film. We continued with some work on storytelling, a lot of which was previously covered by Richard, but it was helpful to hear it again from another point of view.

Wednesday was a different kettle of fish, where I was called in to be an extra on low budget feature Day of the Flowers. There was a lot of good banter amongst the extras, but it was altogether a lesson in what not to do. The whole system was chaotic. We were filming just off Buchanan Street along a wide section of road. However, the road was not blocked off, and the two runners were utterly swamped with crowd control, cueing the extras and traffic control plus the usual duties of tea and coffee, etc. The problem were not helped by the fact that the 1st AD seemed very ineffective. Certainly he was not running the set with a rod of iron, leaving the main drive of the day coming from the 3rd AD. This left the 3rd unable to work with the extras more closely. So lesson: always have enough runners to cope with the extras and the public!

Thursday was a full day on Sound. Again, it was a very intense day. I took reams of notes. Cammy has a completely different - I might say better - style of teaching to Simon (and has the added bonus that he has not taken my flat keys home in his pocket. Not yet anyway...) I have yet to work through all my notes and type them up, but generally I found this day very helpful. In contradistinction to many in my class, I quite like Sound Recording.

Friday was a screening of the Conversation. Having already seen this film - it got a three star review in my blog last year - I will not blog on it specifically again. Suffice to say I was very glad when it was finished, and I hope not to have to watch it again. An influential film is not the same as a good film, as Strike demonstrated rather more clearly.

The Weekend was a crazy weekend away in Arbroath, returning at 3am on Monday morning, ready for another round of classes. Great fun though.

Week Beginning 5th October 2009

I managed to squeeze some preproduction for The Golden Rule into Monday morning before class. While this felt like a great achievement at the time, the major redraft that is continuing as I write this blog means that most of the work could potentially have been pointless.
Our class was on Production Design and the importance of that in making good films. While we spent some time looking at Metropolis and the influence that has had, we also looked at more modern movies. In particular, I noticed that when we were looking at the contenders for Oscar for Art Direction in one particular year, I had seen all the films mentioned except The Aviator, about which I have heard a lot. It’s a fluke, of course, but it makes me feel a little more confident about my film knowledge.

The afternoon was Screenwriting: a recap of what had being done last year, with a few extra little exercises thrown in to keep us amused. It all seemed to go OK.

Tuesday morning was our first TV content class, which I have to say was quite disappointing. Our brief for the term is to come up with two outlines for comedy soaps in the line of Teachers and Shameless. However, I fear it will be like Jane Austen trying to write a sequel to Trainspotting. The “lowest common denominator” humour of these programs and the obsession with sex as a punctuation to the narrative are both huge turn offs for me. Is it possible to write a comedy soap where the story points are not found from the characters getting drunk and having sex? It has been done many times and the only way to go (as the playwright Berthold Brecht pointed out a century ago) is to get more and more outrageous. But once we have kidnapped a goat and kept it in the cellar as a sex slave, once we have force-fed a toddler LSD and laughed ourselves silly at the tripping toddler, once we have caught the red-faced vicars wife handcuffed to the confession box, then we are back to the same problem. The same thing is no longer any use. We need to get more extreme. And then some. But then shows like Dad’s Army, Yes Minister and Father Ted are still just as funny today as when they first went out. Their humour doesn’t rely on being taboo-busting - it is based on character, dialogue and situations. I wait with caution to see how this pans out, but I am not expecting great things from my attempts.

Tuesday afternoon was a look at the internet as a research resource. I’m not sure I learnt anything in this class I didn’t know before, though it was the first time I had heard Wikipedia being (partially) ratified by an academic institution!

Wednesday was our second class with Zam and again was quite good. We watched the remaining scenes the class had brought in, and despite the lack of co-operation one expects from AV technology, we struggled through and it was very interesting to discuss all the films. We also watched Mashed, one of Zam’s shorts, and dissected it from the original material upwards to the finished cut. This was very helpful, as was getting a template treatment that a director would write to explain his vision to the HoDs.

Thursday was a Technical day. We had an exam in the morning. (Don’t call it a quiz… we know what it really is!) This was obviously intended to stretch us, but I’m fairly certain we were never taught some of that stuff. Other stuff I remember Ray mentioning casually, and me immediately thinking “Well there’s no possible need for me to know that!” and immediately discarding the information. Such as the length in mm of the CCD chip within the DSR570. The afternoon was a look at new tripods: much the same as the old ones but a bit more hard core. One has a little light on the spirit level which I liked. We also looked at changing bulbs. That will be a very useful thing to be able to do.

Friday was a screening of Strike (see other blog)

Also generally this week: “Dust” remains in limbo until Editshare is back up and running. “The Golden Rule” has been put in limbo until the script is redrafted. This is now taking Phil five times longer than I expected and I am getting increasingly worried about the rapidly approaching shooting dates. Meanwhile Phil is singing in the Mod…

Week Beginning 28th Sept

The craziness of Freshers Week was far more intense this time round than it ever was when I was a Fresher. In fact, last year, I seemed to miss out on it entirely. I never even found Freshers Fayre.

So I started off on the previous Saturday, helping the Christian Union carrying boxes and bags into Halls for the newly arrived Freshers. It’s a vast amount some people are packing: a spare toaster in case the one in the kitchen breaks…

On Monday I was disappointed to discover Editshare has been taken off the network. This means I am not able to finish editing Dust this week.

On Tuesday, we had a formal introduction to the School of Drama by Maggie Kinloch. This was not exactly rivetingly exciting, but I suppose it helps to think of us all working together. This led on to a Department meeting. I’m still trying to memorise names and faces of the new first years. Again, nothing revolutionary was mentioned, except that Adam wants to stop us making films... at least for the moment.

After a free lunch, courtesy of the Christian Union, the afternoon was our first proper class, looking at Factual Content. Researching Andy was an intriguing task, and it shows that a narrative thread to the information is more important than the sheer volume of information.

Wednesday was our first class with Zam, where we looked at several clips from favourite films and tried to say what we found particularly gripping about these scenes. While I don’t think I learnt anything specific from that class, it was a good start, and I am confident that it will prove to be a very helpful class in the next few weeks.

Thursday was a day off. (Sorry, Richard, a writing day...)

Friday was a screening of Metropolis. (See other blog)

It’s great to be back at the Academy, and into some sort of routine after the long days of Summer. I would have liked to have Dust finished before we started back, and we are very close to it, but hopefully we will get that finished without long delay. And I am looking ahead to production of The Golden Rule, our entry for FilmG, assuming we get the green light from Adam.