Making the Transformational Moment in Film Read online

  PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

  “There is something on every page of this book to make film lovers jump for joy. Brilliantly evoking the essence of Arthur Koestler's chance crossing of two unlikes, Making the Transformational Moment in Film packs film techniques and film theory into one seminal mashup. With Vincent Ward as his Virgil, Dan Fleming ventures below the surface of form, and guides us back to the highest function of art.”

  – Barnet Bain, Emmy-nominated television and film producer; producer and writer (The Celestine Prophecy), executive producer (Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story), director (The Lost and Found Family), producer (What Dreams May Come)

  “Truly helps you see film in a new and different light.”

  – Matthew Terry, teacher, filmmaker, screenwriter, columnist www.hollywoodlitsales.com

  “Like something a film school class might revolve around in its presentation of ideas, Making the Transformational Moment in Film gives another perspective on the art of filmmaking.”

  – Erin Corrado, film columnist, musician, independent filmmaker www.onemoviefiveviews.com

  “Dan Fleming does what few do successfully; he masterfully blends theory with practical instruction. This is what we need: more theory books that aren't just theory for theory's sake, but actually help filmmakers think in new ways to make BETTER FILMS.”

  – Chad Gervich, writer/producer (After Lately, Cupcake Wars, Wipeout), author of Small Screen, Big Picture: A Writer's Guide to the TV Business

  PRAISE FOR VINCENT WARD'S FILMS

  “His images overwhelm with the power of an elusive dream we always wished was our own. As an

  international director he has redefined visual story telling”

  (Phillip Noyce, director Salt, The Bone Collector, Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games)

  “A filmmaker who combines great visuals with memorable performances”

  (Fred Roos, producer Tetro, The Godfather Part III)

  “One of film's great image-makers”

  (Jay Carr, film critic New England Cable News, and past-member National Film Preservation Board)

  “A true visionary”

  (Roger Ebert, film critic)

  “His images have a power and strength that goes way beyond the context of the film they belong to”

  (Sir Peter Jackson, director Lord of the Rings trilogy)

  Making the Transformational Moment In Film

  Dan Fleming

  Unleashing the Power of the Image

  (with the films of Vincent Ward)

  MICHAEL WIESE PRODUCTIONS

  Published by Michael Wiese Productions

  12400 Ventura Blvd. #1111

  Studio City, CA 91604

  (818) 379-8799, (818) 986-3408 (FAX)

  [email protected]

  www.mwp.com

  Cover design by John Brenner

  Cover photograph by Dan Fleming

  Interior design by William Morosi and Dan Fleming

  Edited by Paul Norlen

  Printed by SC International

  Set in Formata Condensed, a font by Bernd Möllenstädt

  Contributing illustrator Thaw Naing

  Copyright 2011 by Dan Fleming

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fleming, Dan.

  Making the transformational moment in film : unleashing the power of the image (with the films of Vincent Ward) / Dan Fleming,

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-61593-060-9

  1. Motion pictures. 2. Cinematography. I. Title.

  PN1995.F557 2011

  791.43--dc23

  2011017959

  In memory of

  The absent children of the Landschulheim Caputh 1931-1938, a lost paradise, and the school's founder Gertrud feiertag.

  Dedication

  To Judy Ward

  (née Edith Rosenbacher)

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  Two Styles of Imagining

  INTRODUCTION

  How to Read This Book

  Why Read This Book?

  A Crisis in “How To” Film Books?

  The Model

  PART 1 STAGING THE MOMENT

  Identifying the Transformational Moment

  What the Spectator Brings to the Moment

  What the Transformational Moment Connects With

  Looking for Vincent Ward

  The Perkins Cobb Theory

  Auteurs and Coppola's Prediction

  What Filmmaking Is – From Movement to Knowability

  Staging Rooms

  Staging the Gaze

  Transforming the Gaze

  Staging the “Elsewhen”?

  The Vogler Memo

  Stories and Loglines

  Exercise #1

  PART 2 COMPOSING THE MOMENT

  The Meta-Compositional Moment Ill

  The “Universal Human Being”

  Summary #1

  Exercise #2

  Narrative and the Moment

  The Transformation Rule in Narrative

  Light, Color, Music and the Moment

  The Dream Work of Character (or the Sheets of Time)

  Exercise #3

  PART 3 WHAT IT IS LIKE

  Exercise #4

  The Manifest and the Latent

  CONCLUSION

  Summary #2

  Afterword: A Conversation

  Filmography

  Bibliography

  About the Author and Illustrator

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The first acknowledgment has to go to Michael Wiese. On an azure-skied June day, I attended a forum of fifty MWP authors at the Judith Weston Studio in Los Angeles where we heard Michael describe what he wants to publish: “A lot of the books have been how-to books…but they're starting to ask the question, why are we making what we're making?” That “why” set me on a course to what you now hold in your hands. This book is about an emerging “post-classical” attitude that asks why classical Hollywood narrative film has been so resistant to transformation as the world changes around it. The moment is right to be asking this.

  The second kind of moment referred to in the book's title is a particular kind of cinematic moment, so I need to acknowledge the filmmakers whose creation of these moments has taught me about the possibilities: their names will emerge from the book itself. But in particular, filmmaker and artist Vincent Ward opened his life and his work to the most intimate of scrutiny, for which I am hugely grateful. The ideas expressed in the following pages are, however, my own and it should not be assumed that Vincent endorses any of them. In researching the book, I interviewed people on three continents; too many to list here but I thank them all, and again most of their names will emerge as the book proceeds. But Vincent Ward's family deserves a special mention, for generously letting me trample all over their privacy.

  Michael's “why” was one seed for this book. The other was a moment of my own, when I happened to have on my desk W. G. Sebald's book On the Natural History of Destruction. I had just set it down in some distress after reading his account of what was found in the suitcases of women coming off a train from Hamburg in 1943.1 happened to set the book down beside an old item of film memorabilia, a German magazine called Film-Kurier, open at a film still that you'll be seeing in the Preface. Whom do I thank for that sort of juxtaposition? It will have to suffice if I thank the late Max Sebald himself, whose w
ritings have taught so many of us to see these juxtapositions in new ways. A couple of days later I went to hear Christopher Bollas lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and most of this book's deep structure just fell into place, so I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Bollas for the dream-work.

  Thanking the people who taught me filmmaking in the early years would take too long, so I will limit it to the late Barry Callaghan, subsequently course leader at Britain's Northern Film School, at whose elbow thirty years ago I spent unforgettable days on a Steenbeck editing table, before going AWOL into the nascent community video movement.

  This book was a project of Mediarena, a teaching and research facility at the University of Waikato (Aotearoa/New Zealand) that supports innovative approaches to studying and imagining the cultural impact of today's media. I am grateful to the University of Waikato for the period of leave during which the book was finished, and to the university's Research Ethics Committee for approving the interview arrangements through which so much material for it was gathered. I am grateful to the staff at the Australian National Library in Canberra where an important portion of the early work was done. Editor Paul Norlen and designer Bill Morosi turned manuscript into book with extraordinary imagination and flair. It has been my good fortune to work with such an accomplished team. Thank you gentlemen.

  The alert reader will soon detect my debt to David Thomson who, indirectly, introduced me to Perkins Cobb. And so it is to Cobb that the final heartfelt “thank you” must go. As somebody says later in the book, “What the hell, I believe in ghosts.”

  PREFACE

  You may leave the roads, or paths of high probability, and strike out over the hills of possible time, cutting through the roads as you come to them, following them for a little way, even following them backwards, with the past ahead of you, and the future behind you.

  (Robert A. Heinlein, Elsewhen, 1941)

  Robert Bresson (1967), in Au hasard Bresson (aka Zum Beispiel Bresson), documentary short directed by Theodor Kotulla. Iduna Film Produktiongesellschaft.

  Made a hundred years ago, D.W. Griffith's The Massacre includes this early moment. A young woman is introduced to a frontiersman who brings tales of western opportunity. But she realizes she has run into the house from the river without her stockings and shoes. So she hurries back to put them on. We watch as she does so. Then she returns to the interrupted conversation and, in effect, to the interrupted narrative (she will shortly marry and go west). Apart from suggesting something of her decorum, there is not much reason for this moment to have existed. Yet it does, and the image hangs on her gestural presence while suggesting layers of time that are not all harnessed to the forward movement of plot. As we watch we become briefly aware of ourselves watching…and the very nature of the cinematic moment is glimpsed. On the other hand, it may take another two hundred pages to explore.

  TWO STYLES OF IMAGINING

  There are three particular moments in films that I love seeing time and time again. Actually there are many of these, but three come to mind as I begin writing. In the days before domestic videotape and DVD, I would sit in the cinema and hold my breath as moments like these approached, then wish I could go up and knock on the projectionist's window and ask him to play them back. The first is in Touch of Evil (1958), directed by Orson Welles. Welles plays a has-been detective in a seedy border town. Charlton Heston plays his Mexican opposite number. Heston is coming after Welles for corruption. We see Heston reflected in a small mirror on a wall full of faded matador pictures. The camera tilts down to find Welles seated below, then back up as he rises, a bull's head looming above. Then we see Heston at the doorway, as if waiting for his final entrance into the bull ring. Writing that this turns Welles into the old bull making his last stand is to render the moment too literal and misses the extraordinary feeling derived from its to and fro movement of looks and reflections – layers of the past confronting each other.

  The second moment is from Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967). The girl (Nadine Nortier) who is the subject of the film is making coffee and heating milk for her bedridden mother and baby sister. It's a morning routine. At this point she flips the lid onto the coffee pot in one fluid, automatic movement. She just tosses it from several inches away, without pausing in the overall flow of her movements at the stove. She is barely looking at it. The lid seems to hover for an instant before dropping neatly into place. There is a lightness in the gesture which is all that her routine young life has going for it at this point, before things close in and tumble her in the end towards the riverbank.

  The third moment is from Andrei Tarkovsky's semi-autobiographical film Mirror (1975). This scene is set on a re-creation of the house in the country outside Moscow where the director spent his childhood summers. A young woman (Margarita Terekhova, playing in part a memory of Tarkovsky's mother) exchanges a few words inconsequentially with a passing stranger. As he leaves through the field of white-flowering buckwheat he turns for a few seconds and the wind suddenly blows twice in strong gusts over the field between them, rippling the crop and the foliage, an effect impossible to capture of course in a still frame. At the start of a book about film it is perhaps foolhardy to note that there are things about film which a book can only hint at.

  We can begin by setting ourselves a creative exercise about film, a warm-up exercise for the book if you will. An exercise about imagining. Take a look at the image opposite – the people on the steps – and ask yourself what film you would make that contained this moment. You will tend to think about the image opposite in one of two ways, or rather perhaps more in one way than the other.

  To explain, we have to imagine somebody else looking at this picture. Let us imagine a man called Eric Auerbach in a cafe in the old university town of Marburg, Germany in the mid-1930s. He is leafing with distracted interest through some copies of the illustrated magazine Film-Kurier. Having just been forced out of his university post by the Nazis, he is contemplating a move to Istanbul. He glances momentarily at this striking fullpage still from the film Savoy-Hotel 217. A routine piece of entertainment in its day, the film is now long forgotten. But the image we are looking at is peculiarly arresting. Why?

  As war soon roiled across Europe, the exiled fifty-year-old German Jewish intellectual was to be found dividing his time between the dusty libraries and smoky nightclubs of Istanbul. Eric Auerbach was writing Mimesis (1946), one of the most enduringly important books about the Western imagination's ways of representing reality (the word “mimesis” means imitation of life). Auerbach argued for a distinction between two styles: for convenience here we can term them the Homeric and the Pentateuchal. You will inevitably have adopted one style more than the other in how you thought about – how your imagination responded to – the image on the left (unless you come from elsewhere than the West and even then the cognitive styles are far-reaching).

  Auerbach was, of course, referring on the one hand to the semi-legendary ancient Greek oral poet supposed to have authored the Odyssey and, on the other, to the anonymous writing of the first five books of the Bible in what we now know as Israel. Auerbach was subsequently criticized for implying two radically different “minds” at work, a distinction that might have been tempting from the perspective of a Jewish refugee trying to understand the deep roots of the hostility he was witnessing. But such a hard-and-fast distinction was not his intention. Auerbach saw reconciliation around the “separation of styles” as an ongoing challenge permeating the subsequent history of the Western imagination. Indeed what we mean by the otherwise rather suspect generalization “the Western imagination” may be deeply defined by the sometimes troubled, sometimes energizing consequences of this interconnection of styles.

  The Homeric style is characterized by “uniform illumination,” “uninterrupted connection,” “all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings.”

  The Pentateuchal style is characterized by “certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure,
abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, ‘background’ quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation.”

  Now we can already see in those descriptions something that Auerbach himself never directly intended: a delineation of two cinematic styles. Without being too literal here, it is nonetheless possible to find in Auerbach's vocabulary some suggestion of lighting (uniform versus chiaroscuro), editing (smoothly connected versus abrupt), and staging (foreground versus background). If Auerbach was right in his larger explanation, then of course it is unsurprising that these stylistic distinctions have played out in all sorts of specific ways. But it is not just about style in that sense.

  Both the Homeric and the Pentateuchal styles were interested in the transformational, or more specifically in locating the transformational in relation to the everyday. The Homeric hero found the transformational on an elevated plane, where the heroes became that special class who walked with the Gods, leaving the everyday far behind. But the Pentateuchal found the transformational in the very midst of the everyday, “in the house, in the fields, and among the flocks” as Auerbach puts it, and rarely in heroic battles (unless those became inner battles of conscience, responsibility or selfdoubt). Now consider a cinematic depiction of a Homeric hero on the way to war, striding purposefully through the house, into the fields, through the flocks, his gaze fixed on the horizon or on a mountaintop. Where epic poetry could ignore, or rather not trouble itself with imagining, the very particular expressions on the women's faces as they watched him go, or the peeling fresco on the wall, could ignore the swaying of the grass in the field, or the specific tint of the sky, could ignore the visual rhythm of the flock as it split in two to let him pass, cinema has no easy way to ignore such things other than being careless with them. For it is, of course, in the very nature of cinema's photographic basis that “background” in this particular sense will be present anyway, planned or unplanned, and with all its potential for suggestive influence.