Week Beginning 25/1

The Week began with a look at British social realism. I've just read a quote from Francois Truffaut who says "There is something about England that's anti-cinematic... To put it bluntly, isn't there a certain incompatibility between the terms 'cinema' and 'Britain'?... Considering the high intellectual level in England, and in the light of her great writers and poets, isn't it rather curious that in the seventy years since cinema came into being, the only two British film-makers whose works have stood the test of time are Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock?"

Certainly I feel he's being a little French about the whole thing, but he maybe has a point. Since then, you could arguably add Richard Attenborough, Ridley Scott and David Lean but the key thing about all these directors is that they made their name during their career in America. It seems as though trying to make movies outside America, and certainly trying to produce a film in the UK seems to lend itself to failure. Perhaps downbeat, and there are excpetions of course, but to me it seems that if you want to be a prolific film-maker, you have to live and work in the US. Ken Loach would be the counter-example, but in my opinion, his films don't stand in the same league as those made by the other directors above.

Tuesday was a tutorial with Adam looking at developing my TV series idea a bit further. I am happy with the way it is going, and am looking forward to taking it further, and writing part of the first episode.

In the afternoon we were given out the briefs for documentaries which we are going to be engaged in. I think the idea of doing a documentary freaks me out a bit as they are so much harder to do well than drama. Its a different kind of film-making, and frankly I don't think its what I'm going to prove to be very good at. The documentaries I prefer are those educational ones which are unashamedly trying to teach you something scientific, historical or philosophical. These rely on talking heads, with illustrations, dramatic reconstructions, anecdotal relief and usually a bit of foreign travel to spice it up. Telling a story by visual language sound to me like it will end up either being sledge-hammer style metaphor or ridiculously subtle, pretentious twaddle.

Wednesday was a class with Zam, exploring some of the locations we had discovered around Glasgow. We looked at the practicalities of filming in various places and how a different look could be got simply by filming round the corner.

Thursday was a tutorial with Richard - for which I was 10 minutes late. I got some very detailed notes and hope to make another redraft tomorrow. Very pleased with the way my script has turned out so far, though if it ever is commissioned, the producers will try to shoot me.

Friday was a screening of The Seventh Seal. I have seen this movie before and I think blogged on it, so I won't make a separate posting for it again. Suffice to say it remains one of the most insightful, thought-provoking films I have seen. There is a lot of dialogue, which Richard wouldn't like, but which I think you need when you are dealing with such philosophical ideas. The metaphors come piled one on top of another, and it would be fascinating to analyse a scene from it. All done with beautiful photography and moments of great humour, this is one of my favourite films.

The afternoon was a class with Abigail, where we all got a row for not taking our assignment seriously enough. Personally I thought the script we were working from was the most boring script I've read since the last one she gave us out. I feel it would be vastly more enjoyable and engaging for us if we were doing production breakdowns of some of the scripts we had written last year. Rather, we have been handed out a script which has been written out very poorly. It is little wonder we are less than enthused for our task when it is clear that whoever transcribed the script from which we are working was equally un-enthused. They didn't even take the time to proof read it or attempt to format it.

Week Beginning 18/1

Monday was a class on the French New Wave. It seems to me I have less of an understanding of exactly what this is than I do of, say, Italian Neo-Realism or British Social Realism. I have decided to add a couple of Jean Luc Godard's films to my list, as the only New Wave film I have seen is the 400 blows, and bearing in mind how influential it has been it is difficult to actually isolate these characteristics which were new in this New Wave.

Tuesday was a look at documentary again, with this time a practical exercise: taking the story of a teacher's suicide and trying to find the story that resonates with us all. I found that it was something none of us considered at the first pass, and that much time was spent considering the details of the event itself before we realised that the key story here was about dis-satisfaction with life and a search for something more. Or, as the Bible might say "What profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?"

Wednesday was a day off, so spent on our essays and on pre-production for "Communication Breakdown": Dionysios upcoming film.

Thursday was supposedly a day of technical, but it was cancelled due to editshare being down. We spent the day working on essays.

Friday was a viewing of This is England, followed by a massive assignment given out by Abigail...

Cultural Horizons

So my cultural horizons have been expanded in two significant directions this last week. First I have seen an opera for the first time. Secondly I have read cover to cover "Men's Fashion in the Twentieth Century" and discovered a whole new topic I have never considered before.

The opera was three and a quarter hours long, and was vast in scope. I lost track of who was who and what was going on somewhere about a third into the first act and never regained it until the very end where there was a huge choral piece about how Russia would never be conquered.

It was a form of music I was completely unfamiliar with. The bar structure appeared to change frequently (2 beats, 3, beats, 4 beats in the bar). There were no repeated phrases and the vocals did not seem to work on a clear meter: rather it felt like prose squashed up and extended to fit in with the current bar structure. It was certainly an experience, and recognising several students helped to pass the time when I didn't have a clue what was going on.

I was reading the fashion book in an attempt to discover what men were wearing in Mussolini's Italy as part of my assignment for Andy. But as it happens, the author of the book did not consider the fascist style to be worthy of bringing to our attention. Nevertheless, I found myself drawn in very quickly into the book, reading about the styles, from the top hat and tails "uniform" at the turn of the century, down to the fragmented nature of post-modern society. There have been fashions - particular cuts, shapes and sillhouette's popular down through the decades - but the thing I find most interesting is how much more difficult the authors were finding it to capture the mood of clothing fashion in the 80s and 90s than they did in the earlier years. It seems that with the seasonal changes in fashion and the in built obsolescence that the fashion industry perpetuates have made us all far less stable in our choices of clothes. We will now experiment and try out different styles, each trying to find our own look. The key thing seems to be individuality, while before the key concept was conformity to a norm. This is something I quite like, for clothes can reveal so much about a persons character, or at least the character they imagine themselves to be. Of course, the more unusual images are only available to the more affluent member of society, but even the poorer of us have a tendancy to create our own identity with accessories and styles.

It's always intriguing to come across something which I've never looked into before, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

Week Beginning 11th January

First week back at the academy and we are promised that our feet will not hit the ground. We've heard that every term so far, but given the three assignments handed out this week (the "quiet" week) it might possibly turn out to be true!

Monday was a class on Neo Realism. In fact the whole week has been Realist themed. I never considered myself a fan of realism, seeing them as largely dull, slow moving, and above all utterly depressing. But when Andy was telling us how even Avatar has been influenced by Realism, I began to understand what an impact the movement has had. We do look for believability in films, even in fantasy films. One of the key things I like in Lord of the Rings is their attempt to create a "real" fantasy world. The Art Direction is, in that sense, very "realist". Certainly in comparison to Ray Harryhausen pictures I can see the development in the fantasy genre. The same applies with special effects. We are looking for something that looks real, not something that merely is a symbol for the thing represented. That is why the stop-motion animation monsters of the aforementioned Harryhausen flicks look so underwhelming, and why people complain about the poor SFX in a film if they are anything but state-of-the-art. It also goes partly towards explaining the ubiquitous aversion to over-use of CGI.

Tuesday was looking at documentaries, and how they are every bit as much of a construct as a drama. They need a beginning, a middle and an end. In this sense, they are very close to realism, and ultimately they are a "lie for the greater understanding of truth". I'm not sure I'm very happy with that use of the word "lie". It reminds me of once hearing a panel of respectable gentlemen telling their audience that fiction is dangerous to read. It is, they claimed, all lies. Well, it is only lies if someone is deceived into thinking it is truth. The novel is not a lie for the writer and the reader both make the assumption right at the beginning that the work is a fiction. There is no deceit involved if the novel is approached as a novel. It is when a novel claims to be factual (e.g. Da Vinci Code) or when a film claims to be found footage (e.g. Paranormal Activity) that they have entered murky territory. Personally I don't understand how people can be stupid enough to think that a novel is a factual book, or that a feature film has been recovered from a police vault, but apparently people are more stupid than I imagine!

Anyway - I've gone off on another rant, and not sure I've come to any definite conclusions. Suffice to say, I don't think documentary will ever be my "thing". It sounds vastly difficult to accomplish and I've rarely enjoyed factual programmes. The exceptions would be wildlife documentaries, the odd scientific investigation and I also enjoyed the one episode of "Stephen Fry in America" that I watched. Had it been a different host I probably wouldn't have liked it.

Wednesday was a full day. Our Wednesday morning of self-directed study / sleeping was gone, but the class was intriguing enough that I wasn't upset to have lost out on the extra couple of hours in bed. Directing class with Zam. We finished the work we had done before Christmas on action films by storyboarding an action sequence. Storyboarding is probably a very useful tool for would-be directors. It is like making the movie, but without all the production hassle! I wish I could draw a bit better!

From this, we quickly moved onto Social Realism, my least favourite genre after Rom-Coms. Looking at everything from Bicycle Thieves to Kes, the most intriguing in my opinion was "F is for Fake", being semi-documentary in style. Probably worth a watch. We were looking at the directing methods for realist films. It seems to rely largely on holding information about the scene back from actors, to make their reactions as natural as possible. It also relies on using non-professionals as actors, preferably natural "performers" who can just "be" rather than "act". The importance of casting was emphasised. In the past I have tended to cast with whoever was available, rather than having a wide range of options open to me. I suppose more and more options become available with more money.

Thursday was a screening of two episodes of The Street, followed by the handing out of a rather ambiguous essay question from Ray. The Street I found to be one of the most depressing things I have ever seen. I had been a bit depressed before arriving, having had far too little sleep the night before, but watching these characters making bad decision after bad decision for an hour until they were utterly ruined and broken was emotional torture. If I had had any control over what I was watching I would have turned it off 20 times over. The fact that it was perfectly acted and engagingly shot only made it all the more horrific. Such a bleak view of life is, as far as I am concerned, as far removed from reality as the glossiest Hollywood movie. These things happen occasionally, but not often. Admittedly more often than people bursting into song in the style of Singing in the Rain, but the point still stand. The vast majority of people experience ups and downs, good years and bad years, times of joy, sorrow and contentment. I do not think there is anything "worthy" in telling people life is worse than it actually is. It is not realism, it is pessimism. It is probably a more accurate depiction of the unregenerate human soul than the naive idea that we are "all good people deep down", but there has to be some balance. I can't understand why anyone would watch this show.

Friday was a screening of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Another realist film, coupled with a watch of Ae Fond Kiss in my flat on Thursday night. Time for a Hollywood fantasy, I think!

Twin Peaks

Over Christmas I set myself to watch the first season of Twin Peaks, a 7 x 45 minute American TV series directed and created by David Lynch.

Lynch seems to be one of these mythical directors that every film student loves. Personally I haven't seen that much of his work and this was the first of them I enjoyed. The Elephant Man was just so-so and Dune was so bad it was good: which isn't the standard anyone should be aspiring to!

But with Twin Peaks, Lynch seems to have created something rather special. When the beautiful student Laura Palmer is found dead, wrapped in plastic, in the sleepy town of Twin Peaks in the state of Washington, a chain of event is set in motion which carries us through the whole first series and apparently right into the second.

The town is host to a vast number of bizzare and quirky characters, ranging from eyepath-wearing Nadine, desperate to patent her inventions; to the sultry student Audrey Horne, the classic femme fatale; via the Log Lady, who never goes anywhere without carrying her baby log.

The character who is our link: the one who, like us, is a stranger getting to know these people, is one of the most engaging characters I've seen on screen. An FBI agent sent in to take over the investigation, we automatically assume he will be the grim, hyper-efficient bully we are familiar with from so many other shows, who will rub everyone up the wrong way. In contrary, he immediately makes good friends with the Sherrif and there is barely the smallest wrankle of tension between them all the way through. Our expectations are further shattered when Agent Cooper turns out to be one of the most upbeat, cheerful and essentially happy characters in the show. We are so used to hard-bitten, grim, gruff detectives, suffering from depression, unable to hold down a relationship, respected but unloved, that to see a "happy detective" is so unusual as to draw us in totally.

The murder of Laura Palmer, so crucial at the beginning, proves to only be one story among several. With several different individuals in the community taking it upon themselves to investigate privately, and with everyone in the town keeping at least one secret and double crossing someone somewhere along the lines, this becomes hugely complex very quickly and for that, it is gripping.

The quirky view of reality, with nothing quite being as it seems, reminds me almost of Alice in Wonderland. "We're all a little bit mad here" says the Mad Hatter, and certainly that is true of Twin Peaks. Apparently in the second season, which the library does not stock, things get even wierder, with demon possession, people rising from the dead, doppelgangers and soul-suckers. But in season one, the supernatural element is only hinted at. One character receives visions, and Agent Cooper claims some dubious skills he picked up from Tibet.

Hugely entertaining, both funny, intriguing, tragic, gripping and insightful, I consdier Twin Peaks to be probably the best TV show I have seen. The message of the series is easily summed up in one line, a paraphrase of something one of the characters says. "The secrets we keep destroy all our hopes of happiness"