Form and Content

A blog about film My Website : bjasamuel.com A short film i have made : https://vimeo.com/340180216 https://twitter.com/bja_samuel

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There Will Be Blood and Character as Metaphor

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Dir - Paul Thomas Anderson

“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone. I see the worst in people. I don’t need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I’ve built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry… to have you here gives me a second breath. I can’t keep doing this on my own with these… people.”

There Will Be Blood is a period film set during the rise of the oil industry.  Daniel Day Lewis plays Henry Plainview an oil baron on the rise.  The film is a modern masterpiece, original, majestic and thrilling.  Johnny Greenwood’s score is one of best of the modern era.  Daniel Day Lewis’s performance ranks amongst the greatest in film history.

Starting in 1898 we see Plainview alone and poor, working long hours in a silver mine.  He strikes the rock with his axe sending sparks flying. He sharpens his axe implying that he has worked long enough to blunt it.  He dynamites the rock and falls into the shaft breaking his leg.  This is a workingman working at a hard and thankless task, penurious and alone.  He is literally hacking at the earth in an attempt to force it to yield to his will. After finding silver he drags himself across the countless miles to stake his claim.  After this stunning, dialogue free opening sequence we are shown that Henry Plainview takes on a child, the son of an employee, killed in the mine shaft.  We see Plainview take on this child as if it is his own, seemingly never revealing that he is not the boys father.  

“...So ladies and gentlemen if I say I'm an oil man, you will agree”

We hard cut to Plainview introducing himself to an unseen crowd.  Paul Thomas Anderson likes cutting to scenes without establishing shots, he likes to introduce us into a scene and then reveal the rooms layout with long slow camera movements and character placement.  This unsettles the audience.  We are half blind in a scene.  Actors are placed out of view and then suddenly appear as though they have always been there.  This happens numerous times in There Will Be Blood.  

In the first scene with dialogue Plainview says, “If I say I am an oilman then you will agree”.  He uses his young ward to appear as a family man with good intentions for the oil they have struck.  

Henry Plainview is a complex character.  He is essentially a metaphor for the rise of capitalism in the last century.  We see him as a character and yet he is also metaphor for human avarice.  He reveals later in the narrative that he only took the boy to present a human face to the people he wished to dupe out of their oil claims.  He is an inhuman monster an extreme misanthrope capable of murder and seemingly not driven by any sexual desire.  He is driven by greed, misanthropy, envy and a desire to destroy his competitors.  His one foil is the local preacher.  The preacher played by Paul Dano is weak, stupid and greedy.  He is a false prophet who wants the wealth that Plainview brings in order to serve himself, to repair the church to improve his own standing. The preacher is always depicted as weak and ineffectual.  Plainview never takes him seriously and overpowers and humiliates him on numerous occasions.

Towards the end of the film Henry Plainview, now viewing his adopted son as a “competitor” renounces him and tells him of his lineage and that he used him to present himself as a trustworthy family man. His son renounces him in return and Plainview calls him a “bastard son in a basket”.  At this point Plainview has achieved his goals.  He is human avarice.  Around a fire whilst drinking he tells a man pretending to be his brother that he “I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone”.  This is a subversion of the norms of character arcs.  Towards the end of the film the main character should have come to see the error of his ways, that his greed has isolated him and made him unhappy or insane.  But Plainview has stated that he wishes to be isolated, he has deliberately isolated himself, this has been his goal and he has achieved it.  His money has got him where he wants to be.  

“I Drink your Milkshake”

The climax of the film sees the return of Eli Sunday.  He has fallen on bad times and begs Plainview to help him.  He has been a backslider and has no money left.  This simpering fool renounces his faith and calls himself a false profit.  This is the key seen to the film.  Plainview says to Eli “Did you think your song and dance and your superstition would help you, Eli?! I am the Third Revelation. I am whom the Lord has chosen.” Here the film makes clear that Plainview is a metaphor Plainview states that he is third revelation.  He is greed. He is mans downfall.  He is the third revelation, the apocalypse.  This is capitalism and religion going head to head and greed wins. He renounces god dismisses Eli by murdering him and then shouts, “I’m finished”.

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Solaris and Ambiguity. Irrational and Rational.

Solaris – (1972)

Andrei Tarkovsky

Solaris is a 1972 science fiction film and a personal favourite film. A sentient liquid planet has been discovered capable of manifesting anything from our subconscious. The planet is indifferent to human emotion. Scientists have been sent to orbit the planet and apply the scientific methods to it to understand the planet. It is perhaps attempting to communicate with the scientists?  The planet pulsates and releases sonic reverberations. The face of the planet contains no recognisable forms or shapes simply a swirling vortex of coloured liquid constantly in motion. The scientists orbiting the planet are visited by manifestations or “visitors”.  People from their past they have possibly wronged? One scientist has a violent small person living in his quarters. My interpretation of this is that Solaris is not very good yet at manifesting the visitors and the scientist’s visitor is a poor rendering of a child, but it is never fully revealed. The visitors are possible manifestations of their guilt?

Solaris’s strength is in its ambiguity. Nothing is ever fully explained. This is because we are unable to fully interpret the planet. We attempt to understand the manifestations in human terms. The planet though is not human. The planet is alien and does not understand our emotional response to its manifestation. It is not even fully aware of or emotional responses to it.  We are conflicted and confused by the manifestations because we are emotional beings and not rational beings. We are simply unable to understand the planet. The scientists are understandably upset by the manifestations. They are drawn from deep emotions, possibly ones the scientists have tried and supress? But the planet keeps manifesting them even if they try and kill them. One scientist has committed suicide as a result of his visitor (a young girl) and his visitor has gone.

One of the visitors, a young girl.

Another of the visitors a small person, possibly a poor manifestation of a child.

The deep sadness of the film comes from the guilt and shame the lead character (Kelvin) feels for the suicide of his wife Hari. At first when she appears to him he seems almost unsurprised, as though to see her is perfectly natural. He is shocked but his body slips naturally into being with her. She is a living being in his mind, such is the level of his grief, his grief is real and so she is real. The memory of her is so vital that to see her at the end of his bed is almost natural. His muscle memory takes over and the two embrace. His wife is alive again. He attempts to kill his visitor but she materialises again. She is only a copy of the original Hari. She cannot be real. Is she human? Can she ever be human? Or is she merely the manifestation of his memory of Hari. She appears as she appears in a photo Kelvin has of her. In the photo her back is to the camera and so the manifestation of Hari wears the same dress but the back is sewn shut as Solaris had to imagine the rest without knowledge of her clothing.  

Hari appearing to Kelvin in his quarters. 

In the book by Stanislaw Lem the planet is capable of creating enormous forms on its surface. The liquid swirls and pullulates with form and shape, solid and liquid totally without meaning. We study the formations but cannot understand that the forms have no meaning. A speculation is made that if there is a God perhaps he created us without purpose or meaning. We were simply a manifestation of his creative desire and nothing else.

 Solaris is ambiguous because the subject is ambiguity, the ambiguity irrationality of our emotional lives. We attempt to understand the manifestations just as the scientists do. We try to accept Hari as real as Kelvin does because despite knowing she is not real we attempt to empathise with her because we can do nothing else. We view the world through emotional terms because we are emotional beings. I paraphrase Isaiah Berlin*, paraphrasing Giambattaista Vico when I say the central idea is this, that man only truly understand that which he has made. They can understand best what they have made themselves, but they can understand also what others have made, because creation is collective. To understand that which is outside of human emotional thought is impossible and that is the ambiguity of Solaris. The planet cannot be fully understood because it is not human. As one scientist puts it "We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want a mirror."

What is Hari? Is she real? As real as the original Hari? Or is she simply a manifestation of Kelvins guilt?

Hari attempts to commit suicide by drinking liquid oxygen, but each time she tries Solaris brings her back. Are we doomed to repeat our mistakes?

In the end it is revealed that Kelvin has returned to earth. He watches his father in his home through a window. But something is wrong. It is raining inside the house. Kelvin drops to his knees and embraces his father. His guilt is overwhelming. He shouldn’t have left his father. It is revealed that the house and father are manifestations on the surface of Solaris. We understand that Kelvin knowing that the manifestations are not real prefers to live in the fantasy than face his guilt. This is not rational; it is an emotional human response to his grief and pain whether or not Solaris knows this Kelvin has decided to embrace it.

[bjasamuel-blog]

The Big Lebowski - The Art of Scriptwriting and the Callback

Scriptwriting is an art that isn’t given the respect it deserves in the film industry. Scripts are the foundation of a good film, a blueprint for the filmmaking process.  Mainstream filmmaking in particular benefits from a solid script with a solid structure.  Scripts take skill an effort to fashion. But they are only the beginning of the process. Filmmaking is a business as well as an art form.  It is also collaborative.  After the script is finished other creative voices join the clamor and as a film is drawn together that structure (if it existed at all) can be refashioned or thrown out entirely, as market research is completed different elements can be plugged in without consulting the screenwriter and the film can loose all form.  The finished product might completely lack the basic form of a screenplay present in earlier drafts.  One-way to avoid this, is to be in a position to write and direct the film.  This way the clamor is reduced, it’s your script and you are bringing it to the screen, this might not protect the finished film from meddling but it might help? The Coen Brothers reduce this risk again by writing and directing, being superb at both and being brothers.  It’s harder to argue with two creative voices that back each other up.

The Coen Brothers write brilliant scripts with great characters, great dialogue, great plotting and great structure.  One of their best scripts is ‘The Big Lebowski’.  ‘The Big Lebowski’ has one of the best-structured scripts for any film I have seen.  Now, every film does not need a solid structure, some films play with form and structure but in a comedy/crime movie the plot/structure is all-important, or everything begins to feel sloppy and scenes become flabby.  One thing a well-structured script needs is set ups and pay offs.  Scripts need to set things up that later pay off so that our minds can concentrate on the action and aren’t constantly asking questions about why something is happening.  This is also important in a comedy as a basic set up and punch line structure works best for delivering jokes.  

The plot of ‘The Big Lebowski’ is complicated and the dialogue comes at us fast, multi strand subplots will be alluded to in scenes with overlapping dialogue. In a film as sophisticated as ‘The Big Lebowski’ it helps if moments are set up in advance.  We are not asking ourselves questions as the plot progresses because subconsciously we have taken in the set up.  Jokes are set up and the payoff comes much later.  

In ‘The Big Lebowski’ the complexity of the plot is juxtaposed against the indolent Jeffery Lebowski.  He is entirely passive within the plot.  He is less a protagonist and more the tumbleweed blown about by the events of the film, so he needs a catalyst to get the plot moving.  His friend ‘Walter’ is that catalyst.  Without Walter the plot wouldn’t even start.  He is the one that suggests to The Dude that he should retrieve the rug. He accompanies The Dude to the hand off and throws the laundry to the “kidnappers”.  He does the “police” work to find the car thief.  The only thing that Lebowski does to try and affect the plot is when he rubs Jackie Treehorn’s note pad, which turns out to be pointless.

The trick of a well structures script is to not make it feel self consciously or unrealistically structured, the Coens pull this trick of deftly by littering their films with red herrings and false leads, the joyrider, the toe, the private detective looking for “Fawn Knutsen”, the faked kidnapping by the nihilists, in fact the entire plot is an mistake made by the bumbling henchmen of Jackie Treehorn. The film is a wonderful tour de force of scriptwriting, direction and performances.  The characters are wonderful, the dialogue is stunning, the plotting is brilliant and the jokes are incredibly funny.  

One thing the script for ‘The Big Lebowski’ does better than most films is the ‘set up and payoffs’.  For fun I have listed some of the many set ups and payoff in the film, some are obvious, other are subtle enough to be missed on one viewing. These are not all the set ups and payoffs but an incomplete list.

“This aggression will not stand” is repeated in a later scene.

Bunny’s green nail varnish is set up before the kidnapping. 

The Dude’s landlord asks him to attend his recital early in the film and then later The Dude attends before confronting the joyrider.

Maude says “Vagina” and later as she refers to a “beaver picture” The Dude replies “You mean Vagina?”

Maude says “Johnson” to describe a mans penis. The Dude repeats this. IT is then repeated at least three times.

After visiting the landlords review. Donnie mentions that the joyriders house is near the ‘In and Out Burger’ after confronting the joyrider they eat burgers..  

Earlier in the film The Dude nails a piece of wood to the floor. Much later in the film he trips over it. 

In Maudes studio a giant pair of scissors are painted on the wall, later The Dude dreams that he is being chased by the nihilist who wish to castrate him.

When interrogated by the chief of police, The Dudes ‘Ralph’s’ value club card is given as The Dudes only form of id. Later upon learning that they require a receptacle to carry away Donnie’s ashes, Walter asks if “..there’s a Ralphs around here?” 

There are many more but this post would be too long if i highlighted them all.

[bjasamuel-blog]

Robert Altman and Jazz Filmmaking

Robert Altman was an American filmmaker who made films from the 70’s through to the 2000’s. He had a very idiosyncratic style almost unique in American films.  His films also have a subversive anti-establishment streak.

Robert Altman grew up in Kansas City Missouri.  He went to school there and he lived in Missouri for many years before being shipped off to war in his 20’s. He returned to Kansas City after the war to become a filmmaker.  In his youth Altman was obsessed with Jazz.  Kansas City Jazz is a form of Jazz most famous for improvisational elements and a loose spontaneous sound, bands play from memory rather than sheet music and often break out into elaborate riffing between different sections of the band.  

Altman’s filmmaking is reminiscent of this form of jazz.  His films are unconventionally structured and have extremely unconventional use of dialogue and sound.  His films often feel as though they are created out of many different elements clamoring for attention and in that sense they reflect the auteurs word view.

The camera will often film a set up with a deep field of view and many layers within a frame.  The dialogue will emerge from different characters within the frame and sometimes hidden from view, then emerging suddenly as the camera picks them out.  Important dialogue is hardly ever flagged up merely remaining a part of the texture of the films soundscape. There is a tension as you watch his films that the entire narrative might collapse at any min, that Altman has pushed the limit of coherence. The dialogue comes at you in snatches sometimes over-layered with sound effects or competing dialogue.  A strange sort of controlled chaos occurs where the plot emerges through the disorder, where structure is a frame on which to hang the chaos.  Altman reused actors who were accustomed to his working methods allowing improvisation and a certain creative control over character elements.  He referred to the script as a “blueprint” much as bandleaders in Kansas City Jazz preferred memory and riffing to reading the sheet music.

The actor Tim Robbins described Altman’s working methods like this:

“He created a unique and wonderful world on his sets, . . . where the mischievous dad unleashed the "children actors" to play. Where your imagination was encouraged, nurtured, laughed at, embraced and Altman-ized. A sweet anarchy that many of us hadn't felt since the schoolyard, unleashed by Bob's wild heart”.

Geraldine Chaplin describes the first day of rehearsals:

“He said, "Have you brought your scripts?" We said yes. He said, "Well, throw them away. You don't need them. You need to know who you are and where you are and who you're with." . . . It was like being onstage with a full house every second. All the circus acts you had inside your body you'd do just for him”.

Altman clearly enjoyed the chaos and unpredictability of his working methods. His films often collapsed under the weight of the lack of structure and coherence, but more often than not they succeed. My own personal favorite films of his are ‘McCabe and Mrs Miller’ and ‘Short Cuts’.

In ‘Short Cuts’ form and content are in perfect alignment.  The filmmaking is extremely ambitious.  Seemingly disparate elements are fine-tuned into beautiful harmony. Often in multi-strand style films the structure expresses a world view of the interconnectedness of individuals and the many ways in which we are all connected to one another.  By the end of the film the structure allows a sense of meaning to emerge a comforting sense that we are all connected.  ‘Short Cuts’ expresses the opposite.  Although the stories are interconnected, the connections are slight or meaningless and the ways in which the characters connect with each other highlight the ways in which we affect each other without really knowing it.  That we can negatively affect others never knowing that our actions created a particular outcome.  The consequences of our actions are often something we never witness or could never have conceived of.

The party clown character played by Anne Archer chastises her husband for leaving a corpse in a river whilst fishing.  She is unaware that earlier in the film she killed a young boy by hitting him with her car.  She is disgusted by her husband’s actions yet indifferent when at a party the news plays in the background telling of the deaths caused in a recent earthquake. The connections are played out as mere coincidence and the morality of the characters is framed by disconnection and myopia.  We are unable to view the unforeseen consequences of our actions and therefore are unable to formulate moral or emotional responses to that which we are unable to connect with personally.

Robert Altman creates tension out of the chaos and contingency, the accident and the unforeseen.  He creates a loose structure out of the chaos and mess of life.  The editing brings the film to us in different rhythms and beats never adhering to a traditions structure, character placement or meaning invested in incident.  To the unlearned eye the lack of obvious structure seems so chaotic it could almost be an accident, the films a mess.  But no other filmmaker has applied such unobtrusive skill and masterful technique into creating beautiful music out of the disharmony and chaos of everyday lives.  In that sense his films are a true reflection of the Kansas style Jazz that he grew up with in his hometown.

[bjasamuel-blog]

Paul Verhoeven and the Form of Satire

Paul Verhoeven is a Dutch filmmaker who made films in America during the 80’s and 90’s.

I will be discussing his best films of his Hollywood period.

Robocop (1987) – Showgirls (1995) – Starship Troopers (1997)

Paul Verhoeven’s films are almost unique in Hollywood in that they satirise American culture by imitating the form of American culture. He uses form and genre to satirise American culture from within.

In ‘Robocop’ the satire hits the hardest and arguably the most successfully. Paul Verhoeven takes the view that the best form of satire is imitation and he makes what is ostensibly a very good action film. The city of Detroit has had its public services privatised. The police now work for the shadowy corporation called OCP. The satire is not exactly caricature, but the corporate greed and lack of humanity are presented almost dispassionately. We are simply shown a world where corporate America has run rampant. By presenting it to us straight the humour is heightened. We see a young executive brutally murdered in the boardroom by ED-209 (a ridiculous deep voiced, chicken legged robot unable to walk down stairs). The scene is presented to us completely deadpan. The satire is given space to breath; we are allowed to consider the layers of irony on display.

We are shown a spectacularly violent murder and then the complete lack of concern for the murder by the CEO of OCP. The lack of concern is a counterpoint to the graphic violence of the murder and the satire is clear. Bob Morton tells the CEO of his Robocop program, he needs a dead police officer and so has placed suitable officers in the more violent precincts so that they might have a candidate sooner. This is a throw away line that shows the filmmakers intention. Murphy has been deliberately put in harms way so that they can claim his body as property. Later in the film we see Murphy brutally murdered and the scene is played very differently. There is no humorous counterpoint or deadpan jokes, the murder is violent sadistic and brutal.

Executive Kenny is brutally murdered by ED-209 in the boardroom. The violence is comically excessive.

Murphy’s murder is vicious and sadistic.

We see Murphy become Robocop, loose his humanity and regain it. By the end of the film he is no longer property, he is no longer Robocop but “Murphy” again. Paul Verhoven gives us an gleefully violent action film and seems to almost be asking us “is this what you want”? When we see Robocop shoot a rapist in the groin, we as an audience are being asked, “is this what you want”? The same can be said of other scenes where Robocop uses extreme violence in relatively mundane police incidents. We are being asked to cheer and then think to ourselves, are we culpable? By enjoying action films and violence are we culpable in creating a culture like this and is it the natural progression of the attitudes this culture embodies? Elements of the film are more overtly satirical such as the adverts and the news segments, all presented with deadpan panache and cartoonish humour.

‘Showgirls’ (1995)

Nomi confronts a robber.

Nomi as a dancer later in the film.

‘Showgirls’ is a misunderstood film. Pure camp schlock at it finest, the film sets out to subvert the ‘girl comes to town wanting to make it big in show business’ trope of Hollywood films. To me the film is the anti ‘Pretty Woman’- (1990). ‘Pretty Woman’ is a vulgar, pandering corporate product that never seeks to satirise the world of wealth and privilege but instead to celebrate it and indeed to fetishize it. The lead character is a street hooker who awaits a “white knight, to climb up a tower to rescue her”. This dangerous and immature fantasy permeates the film. In “Showgirls’ Nomi Malone comes to town with big dreams and a dark past. Nomi is offered work straight away by a man who picks her up as a hitchhiker. He offers her help only to robs her and leave her stranded.

Throughout the film Nomi is confronted by different characters (usually men) who offer her redemption, a form of redemption not dissimilar to the one offered to Vivian in ‘Pretty Woman’. She naively thinks that a man will save her, either the songwriter who sees her potential, or the executive of the company she dances for. She is offered her dream but must pay a price for it, sexual exploitation. In one scene a friend of hers is brutally raped by a famous musician. This scene is unpleasant and unnecessary. But the point is clear. The entertainment industry, exploits women. Then entire industry is depicted as exploitative and vulgar. Vegas never looked more foul and sleazy.

In the end Nomi realises that she cannot ‘make it’ without losing her integrity. She pushes a rival down a flight of stairs and is offered a big role in the show.  The rival admits later that she got her big break by pushing another rival down some stairs. She admits that she is an aging and embittered and her career is finished. Nomi realises that the entertainment industry is exploitative and misogynistic. She takes revenge on the rapist and the man who robbed her at the start of the film and leaves town. The film revels in its own camp vulgarity. But again Verhoven is satirising from within. He makes a vulgar exploitative film that satirises the vulgarity and exploitation of the entertainment industry. The lives depicted on screen are not presented as aspirational, instead the homes and lifestyles are depicted as ugly and vapid, hollow and distasteful.

‘Starship Troopers’ (1997)

A progaganda film from Starship Troopers (1997) - Dir Paul Verhoeven

The characters wear overtly fascistic uniforms.

Talking about ‘Starship Troopers’ Verhoeven stated in an interview with Phil Hoad in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper, “So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism”.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl

‘Starship Troopers’ takes the form of a Nazi Propaganda reel. Verhoven has stated that he explicitly  “borrowed from Triumph of the Will in the parody propaganda reel that opens the film”. The film depicts a society that worships violence. It takes the form of a propaganda film and presents in its place an exciting, violent action spectacle; this use of irony expresses the idea that perhaps action films are propaganda films? ‘Starship Troopers’ blatantly presents a society that believes in the cleansing power of violence. In the opening scenes a teacher states that, “Violence is the supreme authority”.

But how are we to know that Paul Verhoeven and his screenwriter are not also making fascist propaganda? Well, the humour of the militaristic world is presented as a joke. The propaganda reels and news segments are overtly comical. The older generation of citizens are shown with missing limbs. The training sequences are overtly comic. The lust for violence creates a cycle of never ending murder and warfare. The bugs are never depicted as having any goals other than survival of their species. We are shown through ironic newsreels their motivation for attacking Earth. They are violent insects, yet they are presented almost sympathetically. By the end of the film the protagonist ‘Jonny Rico’ is a violent psychopath, roaring maniacally at his troops. As Paul Verhoven has stated in interviews, he said to the audience “Here are your heroes and your heroines, but by the way – they’re fascists”. Unfortunately audiences did not understand the layers of satire and irony and took the film on face value.

There is no other filmmaker working today who uses the form and genre of American cinema to satirise the very culture it is a part of. This is a great shame, because Paul Verhoeven films prove that you can have your cake and eat it, as long as you understand what it is you are consuming.

[bjasamuel-blog]

Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonamaker and protagonist morality.

Martin Scorsese and Thelma Shoonmaker have edited films together since Raging Bull (1980). They have a unique working relationship and have a very particular way of editing films.

Martin Scorsese makes a few different styles of films.  

The fast flowing life story:

‘Goodfellas’, ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, ‘Casino’, ‘The Departed’.  

The more serious narratively straight story:

‘Taxi Driver’ or ‘The King of Comedy’, ‘Raging Bull’ or ‘Bringing out the Dead’.

He also makes more prestigious, less ambitious mainstream films:

‘Hugo’, ‘The Aviator’, ‘Kundun’ or ‘The Gangs of New York’.  

He makes other films that are sloppier yet never-the-less successful exercises in genre:

‘New York, New York’, ‘Cape Fear’ or ‘Shutter Island’.  I am going to discuss the ‘fast flowing life story’.

‘The fast flowing life’ story usually attempts to make us sympathize with a protagonist whose life is very different to our own.  We are introduced to a character that is living a life that might seem shocking to us.  In ‘Goodfellas’ it’s Henry Hill.  He is driving along a road, a thumping in the car forces him to pull over.  We then discover that a man is trapped in the trunk. Henry’s companions violently murder him. In ‘Casino’, Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein sits in his car and is apparently killed in an explosion.  In ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ Jordan Belford is throwing a little person against a dartboard as he screams in an animalistic fashion, he then goes on to boast in an extremely distasteful way about his lavish lifestyle and habits.  How did these people end up here living such different lives to our own?

We are immediately thrown into a stream of memories narrated by the protagonist usually without remorse.  The editing jumps straight into the earlier days of the characters lives, when they were young and ambitious.  The editing throws us straight into the deep end. We are introduced very quickly to the characters and their situations.  The scenes are chaotic, realistically shot and snappily edited. We are shown minor details and before we can figure out the location we move on to the next scene. The scenes do not begin and end in a traditional manner but flow like a montage.  We are not given establishing shots in the traditional sense, we are given snap shots of the characters lives in incidents and are asked to interpret the meaning ourselves.  This creates a flow of images and incidents that reveal the manner in which the characters were slowly seduced by the glamour and excitement of the lifestyles they wished to be part of.  Usually this happens in a moral vacuum where the characters were sealed off in an amoral world. This is where form and content meet.  The characters are usually morally ambiguous yet by starting at the start and then moving us quickly through their lives we are made to travel with them, never overly questioning the choices they made, we are made to identify with them and become seduced by the excitement of their lives, the filmmaking is so slick and fluid we are made to feel excitement through the films fast pace and energy.  These films don’t have traditional scenes with a begining and end, they flow one to the other overlapping at times, almost like memories.  This could be almost abstract, like a Tarkovsky film, but instead you are always grounded by the use of music and voiceover.  

 The films seem informal and fluid but in fact they adhere to a strict structure. We don’t know what moments in our lives will be informative and neither do the characters in the film.  They remember the incidents narrating them as they happen. Martin Scorsese is so sure handed that he even introduces multiple narrators without it feeling overstuffed or confusing. Usually the films carry us along so quickly we have jumped years without even noticing, scenes overlapping one another music playing from one time jump to the next without stopping to catch breath. All the while music is played, diegetic music will become incidental and vice versa and carry from one scene to the next, carrying us from one era to the next without us really noticing.  The music is the lubricant carrying us from one sequence to the next. The films are like a river carrying us in its current from one point to the next.

The characters are living the dream.  They usually display enormous greed and hubris, arrogantly showing their wealth and power to us and we enjoy the excitement of their lives vicariously. We are not asked to sympathize with them but we are shown how exciting their lives are and how they got to this point, we can relate to them easily.  This is done with power of editing bringing us to this point without giving us a chance to really overly question the actions of the characters. We are shown the beginning scene again this time with an understanding of how they got to this point and then we move beyond it.  Then towards the end of the films an unforeseen detail seeded earlier in the film (usually a the stupidity of a minor character) ends the reign of the protagonist.

We see a montage sequence of the house of cards collapsing, usually to one piece of music overlaid over the entire montage.  We are carried through the film with fluid editing to the excitement of the protagonists life all the way to his downfall. We are then shown the downfall and then the consequence.  This is usually the protagonist looking pathetic, in a normal life trying to exist like the rest of us or like a “snook” as Henry says in ‘Goodfellas’.  

‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ ends on a slightly different note.  Although the days of cocaine and prostitutes are behind him Jordan Belford had found a new way to dupe the public.  He has realized that in some small way most people want the excitement of money and fame and he asks us to sell him a pen. The films ends with the audience reflected back on themselves as though to say, we are all the same we are all greedy, that’s why he was able to exploit the system because we are all greedy. This editing flow carries us through the lives of an undesirable protagonist it allows us to empathies with that character and wonder, if I had had their life would I have ended up where they are?  The chances are that if you were excited by the lifestyle the film has depicted then the answer is maybe?

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Alien and Cosmic Fear

Alien – (1979) - Dir Ridley Scott

“…children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars…”  H.P Lovecraft

Alien (1979) is an effective horror film.  Despite its age the film still sends a shiver of fear down the spine of anyone with “a mind sensitive enough to the hereditary fear” at its core. Written by Dan O’Bannon (a self confessed Lovecraft fan) the film communicates a deep-seated fear rarely expressed in film, ‘cosmic fear’.  Lovecraft’s stock in trade was the fear of the enormous scope and breadth of the cosmos and mankind’s insignificance within it. He coined the phrase ‘Cosmicism’ to describe his fiction.  Alien is one of the few films to exploit and successfully express this fear.  

Until Dark Star (1974) and then Alien (1979), Science Fiction protagonists were usually scientists or the ‘brightest and best’, special individuals with the mental strength, agility and training to face the particular stresses of space exploration.  Apollo 11 was only 10 years previous to the release of Alien.  It also makes sense that if we are to explore the vast realms of space that we will require men and women of strength and ability to push the boundaries of human endeavor, to pit their ingenuity and skill against the frontiers of human experience.  

Smartly dressed in colourful uniforms the crew are ready for the challenges of space travel. 

Films such as The Forbidden Planet (1956) and television shows like Star Trek (first broadcast in 1966) express a humanist philosophy where humankind has transcended Earths confines using the power of technology and now explores the cosmos.  Humans travel through space in wondrous ships that move at great speeds, foreshortening the vast spaces that lie between planets.  These men and women overcome any obstacles they face using their rigorous training and by applying scientific method to these obsticles.  This view of space exploration ignores the scale of what faces us in the infinity of space and the precarious nature of our existence in a universe entirely indifferent to our existence.  The fiction of Star Trek does not imagine a real universe of which we are an infinitesimal part, but instead it shows us an extension of the Earth.  Alien races are stand-ins for different races and cultures found on Earth, metaphors for weird cultures and races, intrinsically human despite their outward appearance and moreover they envision a future where humanity is one coherent entity.  This implies that all cultures will move in one direction, towards homogeny, cohered by common goals.  Alien presents a universe very different to that, one in which we remain essentially human despite technological advances.

The crew of The Nostromo shocked and frightened wearing dishevelled clothing.

The Enterprise, large in the frame orbiting a planet.

The Nostromo orbiting the unknown planet. Very small in the frame against the planets.

In Alien, blue-collar workers maintain a haulage ship through the vast depths of space. These people are not the ‘brightest and best’, their ship is dirty, lumbering, industrial and liable to breakdown, two of the crew are mechanics.  They sleep in pods as the ship slowly hauls its payload through the expanse. They are awakened from their sleep believing that they have returned to Earth and to a payday.  They work for a corporate entity simply called ‘The Company’.  

Everything in the film from the production design to the music, to the performances expresses the fear and fragility of their position.  The Nostromo is essentially an industrial factory, dripping with oil and throbbing like a steel foundry (Ridley Scott grew up in Sheffield, a major industrial town).  The scale of the ship dwarfs the crew.  The crew is tasked with travelling to an unknown planet to locate and decipher the meaning of a distress signal that their computer has picked up.  The landing sequence expresses the difficulty and danger involved in landing the ship.  The ship is laborious rather than slick and agile.  Though the ship dwarfs the crew, the planet they must land on dwarfs the ship.  The crew are not trained or equipped to face the challenges ahead, they are frightened and inexperienced and they bicker with one another.  Captain ‘Dallas’ is not up to the task.  This is cosmic fear.  This is man dwarfed by the infinity of space, his technology faulty and inadequate and his relations with others fraught and fissiparous.  

The production design by ‘H R Giger’ is truly bizarre and unfathomable, the planet howls with wind and the surface is littered with strange rock formations releasing gases, everything surrounding the crew is ‘alien’, form and content in perfect alignment.  When the crew stumbles through the alien vista of the planet they bicker and gripe.  Eventually they find the ship where the signal is emanating from.  The derelict spacecraft is a marvel of production design.  The crew explores the craft for an opening.  We see the scale of the derelict ship against the crew.  We have been shown the crew as small against the Nostromo, then the Nostromo as tiny against the alien planet.  We have been given a true sense of scale and now as we enter the ship we are shown the bizarre and unsettling set design and props, dimly lit and almost organic looking.  

As the terrified crew explore the ship they discover what has become known as ‘The Space Jockey’.  The set design is simply stunning, totally alien and utterly baffling.  The ambiguity (later undermined in prequel films) is the films greatest strength.  

We have been given a sense of the scale of space, now ‘the space jockey’ gives us a sense of the scale of time.  ‘The Space Jockey’ has been fossilized in its moment of death.  It’s death occurred so long ago that it perhaps predates human existence.  This element is a truly Lovecraftian idea.  The space jockey was killed by an unknown entity long before the crew of the Nostromo even existed. Much has occurred in the universe without our knowledge or understanding, our characters have no idea what they are looking at and the fear is ratcheted up yet another notch. Cosmic fear.  The moment of ‘The Space Jockey’s’ discovery is the peak moment in the films expression of cosmic fear the ambiguity of its origin and meaning compounds the sense of isolation and insignificance and sets the stage for the horrors of the Alien’s reproductive cycle to be unleashed.  The strange sexual and body horror elements of the next two acts expands on the cosmic fear, expressing the fear internally as well as externally.  Something truly Alien has taken over not only the characters surroundings but also their bodies, taking what it needs and leaving the carcass behind.  Alien explores these concepts through its editing, production design and direction.  Form and content together, eliciting the fear of an infinite and incomprehensible universe.  

The film is the antithesis of the humanist philosophy of Star Trek and the notion that man can transcend the confines of the Earth and transcend himself. Alien shows a universe where man has entered the void but essentially remains human. Alien expresses the profound fear of a universe, indifferent to man’s existence a vast abyss of nothing bridged by hostile planets and life forms more ancient than man and more hostile than our worst fears can imagine.  The film expresses this hostility more profoundly than almost any other film. The only exception might be  2001 : A Space Odyssey.

40 years on audiences still “tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars…”  

[bjasamuel-blog]

The Crew of the Nostromo discover the derelict spaceship on the surface of the planet.  The crew’s lights can be seen left of the middle of frame.

The ‘Space Jockey’ fossilised to his chair for several millennia.

The crew search the derelict ship, the production design is bizarre and ambiguous.  The lighting is dim and the characters are small in the frame. 

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Form and Content

Hard To Be A God – (2013) - Dir Aleksei German

Hard to be a God is a modern masterpiece.  The film is an immersive and visceral experience unlike any other in the history of film.  The film bombards the viewer with a grotesque phantasmagoria.  Images of filth, violence, depravity and gore burst from the screen, characters eject phlegm from their noses, shit through windows, look at the camera and grin inanely, show their bottoms and scoop excrement the anus of a dead body. What the film represents is an evocation of an amoral world.  This is a medieval world, very much like our own a world where the renaissance has been halted in its tracks and a mindless barbarity, the ‘leviathan’ of Hobbes seminal work has been unleashed and runs rampant over the planet of Arkanar. Could this have happened on Earth?  Is it possible that here on Earth at a time when we feel science is respected, human life is precious and art is appreciated that Earth might have been ruled by barbarians.  Well in truth Earth is not ruled by reason.  Most of the world does not respect human life, art or science.  Hard to be a God says to us that Arkanar IS our world past and present.  

 A dazzling technical achievement the film hums with creativity and skill.  The plot is revealed to us through the filth and gore, we glimpse at it through the hedgehogs, shit, chickens legs and excrement and snatches of dialogue and slowly we understand what is happening.  As we peer through the images thrown at us we glimpse at the narrative.  To convey his message Aleksei German forgoes the trapping of any formal staging and blocking and instead creates a true sense of chaos, exquisite in its skill and energy.  Traditionally films invest meaning in movement and blocking, camera placement and lighting, but Aleksei German throws that out the window and coveys a pure sense of chaos and disorder, so many objects, incidents, props and sounds are thrown at us so randomly that we are unable to interpret their meaning, therefore the lack of meaning becomes meaning.  This is not staged chaos, or organised chaos but real chaos.  Chaos becomes the films form.  Therein lies the meaning.  Arkanar IS our world or may as well be.  Our lives lack structure.  The incidents of our lives are not staged or perfectly framed and we are helpless in the chaos of incident and contingency.  Hard to be a God shows us a true simulacrum of our world as does Khrustalyov, My Car! Alexsei German’s only other film to have been noticed internationally. There, the allusion to the “Leviathan” of Stalinist Russia is more explicit.  Khrustalyov, My Car! is also a masterpiece.

  German’s films are rich with detail, intense in imagery, beguiling in their technique and skill and a thumb in the nose to prestige cinema and to formal ideas of staging and framing.  Though disgusting, Hard To Be A God is also one of the most beautiful films ever made, the lighting and staging is so magnificently chaotic that it can appear to the undiscerning viewer as an accident.  The films lack of formal structure and evocation of chaos extends to the camera even breaking the forth wall.  Frequently the extras stare mesmerised at the lens or the camera bumps objects and jars against tables or actors.  The lengthy takes, camera movements and the use of foreground and background character and prop placement imply an expansive world beyond the frame in a way that few films ever have. Aleksei German is the lesser-known genius of Russian cinema and one of the greatest directors of all time.

[bjasamuel-blog]

Don Rumata opens a door and an owl flies out, he does not react.

The massacre of Arkanar is about to begin.

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Max and Furiosa work together against the Rock Riders

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Action and Consequence

Mad Max : Fury Road – (2015) - DIr: George Miller

Mad Max : Fury Road is the greatest action film ever made.  But what is action?  Action can be described as anything a character does in a film to drive the narrative forward, the narrative is the consequence of the action.  Action is also the release of tension, without the tension there is no release, the tension usually comes from our empathy with and understanding of the characters goals and our desire to see them overcome obstacles and achieve those goals.  In an action film those goals should be achieved through character action.  Without consequences, emotion, motivation or goals then action is meaningless.  

Mad Max : Fury Road is a master-class in action film making, every action drives the narrative forward, every action has a consequence and every characters actions drive them towards achieving their personal goals and the films thematic goals. Put simply when a character does something, something else happens as a consequence.  As the film progresses the consequences of each characters actions propel us forwards building tension as each character invests more in the drama and we as an audience invest more as a consequence.  

Mad Max : Fury Road’s theme is redemption.  Can the characters redeem themselves in a world without morality?  Can they regain their humanity through their actions?  There is no greater motivation for a character in an action film.  The filmmaker’s goals and the characters goals are in perfect alignment.  Form and content are in perfect alignment.  At first each character attempts to survive alone.  Max is “a man driven by a single instinct, survive…” Furiosa is attempting to free Immortan Joe’s sex slaves in order to find her own redemption.  Furiosa frees the sex slaves and her actions kick starts the narrative.  Everything the characters do leads to more consequences and more action.  The momentum of action and consequence adds weight to the set pieces so that nothing feels as though it is happening in isolation and this constantly raises the stakes as the group are pulled further into the drama and action.  

At first the characters are thrown together and simply try and survive.  Furiosa asks Max his name and he replies, “Does it matter?”.  Then shortly after this the characters begin to work together as they are attacked by the Rock Riders.  We are shown this through their actions alone; there is barely a word of expository dialogue. Each character finds his or her place in the set piece as they attempt to survive and they begin to regain a glimmer of their humanity by working together.  The filmmaking complements this; ‘form and content’ are in perfect synergy. The set piece is slick and fluid, the editing it tight, the stunt work, special effects and music all working together to build the tension and as we feel our adrenaline pulse we too feel the excitement of the characters working against the hostile world, we feel the release as they overcome the Rock Riders and leave Immortan Joe behind.  This mid point action sequence gives us hope that the characters can re-find their humanity this in turn raises the tension, as they and we as an audience have more to loose by our emotional investment in them.  We cheer as they fight against their adversaries and we hope that they can prevail against the odds.  

Redemption can never be found through running away and so towards the final act the characters turn and face the men who seek to take away their humanity. They achieve their spiritual and narrative goals and they become human again.  Max tells Furiosa that his name is “Max”, he is human again.  The narratives and themes are delivered to us via action and consequence.  We understand character motivation almost entirely through their actions and not through their words.  Exposition is at a minimum.  The film could be played silently and we would understand what is happening, what motivates the characters and the themes, there can be no greater compliment to an action film.