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Cat People (1942) // It Follows (2014)

Filmmaking Intent v. Film Theory

This is in response to several comments I’ve been seeing in tags and responses to the my film theory: discussion posts. I finally had to make a followup when I saw this:

#I wonder if anyone will ever ask Miller if he did this on purpose#I know he’s said elsewhere that he hates how visually confusing modern action movies are#(and apparently he really hates shaky-cam stuff)#and I know the framerate was played with to ensure that the viewer could always see what was going on#but IDK if the center framing choice was part of that#whether it was intentionally to avoid male gaze or not#it succeeded in doing that#but I feel like that carries more weight if it was deliberate (cortibah)

While I can see where a person might come from this idea that “I feel like that carries more weight if it was deliberate”, this… Okay, Yes it was deliberate and No it’s completely not deliberate, simultaneously. I don’t know that I necessarily have the words to describe this to someone not in an arts field.

You HAVE to understand that the farther you go down the rabbit-hole of tv/movie, the more there’s simultaneously both a mystifying of an ‘artist’s vision’ and more of a pressure to succeed because of how much fucking money is being thrown at a project and how many jobs are hanging on the line. Certain talents are allowed creative leeway and to go with their gut and if you’re not trusted and if you can’t debate your viewpoint you have to follow the guildlines.

I have spoken in my other posts about how the Male Gaze actually impedes creative compositions because of the lock on at least one female body part and the face, or in worst case scenarios both tits and ass. And yet male creators are sometimes so very very resistant.

Imagine the types conversations you go through if a director or cinematographer is just ‘going with their gut’ and framing women the way ‘their gut’ tell them?

“It just feels right.” “It just looks good.” “It’s my artistic vision.”

Let me tell you, it’s hideous and frustrating, and you can only go so far with arguing because you need to keep getting paid.

Even if you’re a lay person, reading/watching all the behind the scenes, something that comes up is George Miller spends so much time playing with framerate and zoom and color to make sure the audience can always focus what’s going on—

And yet never focuses our attention on women’s bodies in a way that’s not directly tied in with storytelling (Angharad’s belly, the chastity belt, Valkyrie being used as bait).

Think about that for a moment. Just really think about what it means that when his cinematographers fought with him on the framing, Miller insisted it be “on the nose.” I can pretty much guarantee that he probably had to fight with them repeatedly on it, there are several of the shots by the Salts and with naked Valkyrie that I will screencap when I get my hands on the movie and literally crop it in five different ways to show ya’ll how easy it would have been.

Miller’s purpose was to tell an honest story, and he let nothing else get in the way of that. Not even the male gaze.

I’m just going to drop this quote from him in, because it relates to the same thing, “it couldn’t be a man taking five wives from another man. That’s an entirely different story.”

There’s words and there’s action; Miller may not label himself a feminist, may not have set out to make a feminist movie, but he put his ideas and dreams and heart and soul into this impossible movie. And that heart and soul says he respects women deeply; he respects them enough to understand that a man taking wives away makes it a different story. The movie is so consistently insistently precise that even if he says he didn’t mean to, I can see it.

If someone says they respect me as a person but cannot stop staring at my ass, I can see it. Does it matter if they “deliberately” look at my ass?

Actions matter.

redshoesnblueskies

[Very Much looking forward to your screen-caps for alternate framing post! Really enjoying those!]

Completely agreed that it’s very very tough to convey just how deliberate the choices are that artists make to (the awesome & fannish!) lay-folk. There is not a single decision you make about what the audience sees or hears, that doesn’t start with, “How does this serve the plot and/or characters - what am I TELLING THE AUDIENCE.”

100% of art is manipulation (of the funnest kind) of what the audience receives. We choose where to draw your eye in visual art, where to draw your ear in musical art, where to draw your curiosity in written art, where to draw your emotional response in all of them. It is ALL part of a plan - every bit of it. The better the clarity of purpose, the better the impact of the art.

So George Miller, being a visual artist, has chosen every aspect of his movie to tell us exactly the story he intended. And we can judge just *how* clear his intention was, by how tight the movie was - story telling, character development, arcs on both, framing, depth of field, focus, editing, pacing, color timing, humor….the works. In my humble evaluation, this is about the tightest movie I’ve seen in years. That’s not an accident - any place a director/painter/story teller/musician has fuzzy vision about The Story She/He Is Telling…is a place the art loses focus, loses its interest, loses its quality. The best artists are the ones who have clarity on The Story.

The cast and crew may be self deprecating (and unwilling to teach a course on cinema to every questioner LOL), but they didn’t arrive at this movie by being unaware of what story they were telling. George Miller & Margaret Sixel most of all.

bonehandledknife

Yes this, it’s been I think at least a decade if not more that I’ve seen a movie this cohesive. Or at least feels like it since my eye’s had to get sharper; which sadly makes it all the more obvious when something is fuzzy.

This movie’s clarity is all the more incredible knowing, basically, there is SO MUCH working against you at every point in the process to tell a cohesive story. That ‘fuzziness’ is oftentimes a workaround for a mishap during shooting, or someone’s brainfart to not cover a certain shot or they forgot an angle, or sometimes on-set drama between castmates. Sometimes it’s a storybeat or a thematic element you realize is missing only once all the footage is assembled together. And yes, sometimes it’s the writer/director going, “I’m not sure how this part looks or what it’s supposed to represent, we’re just gonna wing it.”

And of course the biggest thing working against you is the trifecta of: Good, On Time, Under Budget.

The saddest part is that you can only ever get two of three on the best of days, and you KNOW that studios tend towards trying to hit On Time and Under Budget; I don’t know what miracle of miracles and what souls Miller had to sell to be both Late and Over Budget, but oh god does it result in a transcendent film.

I mean there’s a saying, “You’re never done with a project, you’ve just ran up against the deadline.”

For some strange reason Warner Brothers allowed Miller to keep shoving back the deadline. I just— wow.

superhumandisasters

When I say “it’s a miracle Fury Road got made,” (to friends, coworkers, strangers – god, if they didn’t already think I was nuts, they do now) I don’t think I can convey how much this is not a hyperbole. This may be the most improbable movie ever. For real.

And it tears me up a little, because I’ve written a bit about Age of Ultron and Fury Road and clarity of theme – then I thought and read about them far more, because ya’ll are wonderful and have so many interesting things to say – BUT! Even acknowledging this, it’s still so difficult to herd the hugely collaborative work that is cinema into something with a unified purpose. It’s a miracle that it ever happens at all. But it’s vital. We’re so used to seeing what films look like when cohesion is imperfect (:cough: aou), that it’s a bit shocking when a movie actually follows through on its thesis instead of paying lip-service.

“Just really think about what it means that when his cinematographers fought with him on the framing, Miller insisted it be “on the nose.” I can pretty much guarantee that he probably had to fight with them repeatedly on it,”

The 2 hour making-of video with cinematographer John Seale beyond confirms this. Seale is obviously a true artist, but he repeatedly mentioned his frustration with the “on the nose” rule, because it undercut his instinct for rule-of-third framing and more focus on the beautiful women in the back of the cab. Not because he was intentionally trying to be sexist, but because that’s how he’d been trained, both as a filmmaker and a man.

And he got. Shot. Down. He got shot down until he made the shots Miller wanted. Holy shit??

And then 480 hours of those shots were pored over by Miller and editor Margaret Sixel until they were cut down to 120 minutes. That any of what we see in the theater is “on purpose” is beyond an understatement.

Look. I’ve been in love with this series since forever, and I’m even more in love with it now, but it’s never been perfect and it’s not perfect now. No piece of art is. Yet, it’s also an illustration of how genre and films in general can change for the better, but it’s not just a matter of recognizing how many taken-for-granted tropes are harmful. This stuff is so intrinsic in film-making culture that it has to be actively challenged to be overcome. But it can be done, and we have proof.

tldr; these dialogues are important, because when you make art you make culture.

unicornempire

I know this is long but this is a really great discussion and a good read. It can be tough to convey why we make artistic choices sometimes, hard to put into words or even hard for us as artists to know why we’re doing what we’re doing; but every artistic choice comes from somewhere, concious or subconscious, and the fact that women are often T&A in the backgrounds of shots for even things like Age of Ultron, where we’re supposed to be ‘respected’- shows how even the subconscious training of Directors and people who shoot these films. They may not even realize it, but having Black Widow’s dialogue scene be a full body shot to show her hips without enough room for her head- that just ‘Feels Right’ to them.