Found footage losing its way

Actor moves hand, stagehands crush car.  Movie magic!

One might analogize the "found footage" genre in film to the use of Pirandellian effects in theater.  Pirandello was a writer obsessed with the dividing line between artifice and reality, and who liked to use the immediacy of theater to blur the line between the agreed-upon artifice and the uncontrollable aspect of live performance to create a confusion within the audience.  Scenes appear to be spontaneously created or interrupted by the actors or by the characters.  The form is lent an air of verisimilitude and should (if it is working properly) reduce the sensation that the creators are manipulating the story for their own convenience.

But like any convention, you have to set rules and stick to them.  And that's where Chronicle (2012) goes a bit off the rails.  In Cloverfield, for example, the creators are fairly scrupulous about adhering to the geography of the camera's travels and makes ingenious use of the idea that camcorders can over previous recordings in order, which can survive in snippets in order to simulate flashbacks.  (Digital media, by the way, destroy that narrative device, since data is simply wiped without prior artifacts surviving.)

Chronicle sets up the convention that different people can pick up the camera, or even that there are multiple cameras.  But there are a number of shots (I'm thinking especially of the party sequence) in which the camera perspective is completely unexplained and unidentified.  It just was too inconvenient to stick to the rules, so the filmmakers cheat and start presenting third-person points of view -- a complete violation of the genre, and a confession of a lack of faith in the format.

Which goes to the heart of the problem with Chronicle -- the story has no reason to be told in the found footage format, except that is all the rage with the youngsters, most recently in the atrocious Paranormal Activity franchise.  (One notes that something called Chernobyl Diaries didn't even open this year, but sank like a stone within hours of beginning its run.)  The problem is compounded when the more complex effects shots begin, because they start looking slicker and slicker (presumably there wasn't time and money to make them look as fuzzy and funky as they should have) and weaken the illusion that we are looking at home video.

Then the film completely collapses its own premise in the final 20 minutes, when it turns into a garden-variety telekenesis destructo-fest, with transparently effect-y effects going on and on and we are stuck with three repellant characters competing to see who can be least repellant, although no actual heroism or courage is ever displayed.

It's a shame, because the first hour of the film addressed some really interesting moral and ethical issues raised by the entire superhero genre; specifically, how should superpowers be used?  What if we're not as good and pure as Superman, or as driven as Batman?  What if a superhero was just a regular person before (Peter Parker, anyone?)  How do you establish the rules about when to use your powers and when to refrain?  How do you define "using your powers only for good?"  Especially when the powers are in the hands of teenagers, whose heads are filled with a roiling stew of impulses, hormones, idealism, half-digested cynicism, media influences and family history?  That could have been a fine film, but the makers of Chronicle seem to have become intimidated by the Pandora's Box they opened up and reverted to genre slam-bam.

Too bad.

Throwbacks

Water for Elephants (2011) and The Way Back (2010) are not only about earlier historical eras, they seem to have been made at some earlier time and sent through a wormhole to our time. What is it about these films, other than the obvious physical trappings that make them seem like cinematic throwbacks?

Theorist David Bordwell has posited that the entire manner of storytelling on film has entirely altered in the last 30 years or so, in a syndrome he calls "intensified continuity." We have seen so many stories, have absorbed so many images that we can and do take in visual narrative in a more rapid and complex way than previous generations. But classical continuity still has its attractions, and not only can we still enjoy old films, we can enjoy new films made in the old way. What is that way?

1. Straightforward chronology - Something happens, and then something else happens because of that, and that leads to the next thing and so on and so on. This stems from a deep cultural bias toward the concept of cause and effect in life, that choices have consequences, that life moves toward purposes and ends. Post-modernism looks at life as random, irrational, even accidental. Garp's plane crashes into a house the very moment he is considering buying it. No foreshadowing, no "planting" of that plane -- just - wham! - plane! - hole in house! Nothing like that ever happens in a Spencer Tracy movie.

Yes, classic films have flashbacks, even flashbacks within flashbacks. But they are always announced and punctuated with rippling dissolves or some other device. The actual chronology is never disturbed and never unclear. We have no such certainty in the cinema today.

Water for Elephants starts at A, goes to B, then on to C. There are a few moments when so information between scenes is omitted briefly, but that is so it can be revealed strategically a few moments later. We're never in doubt that is 1931 and that a cause will be followed by an effect.

The Way Back is even simpler, because once the preliminaries (which take too long) are out of the way, we are in a road movie, going from Point A to Point B. (Russia to India in 1945, to be specific.) The film is picaresque, so the events do not necessarily have the strong causal links of a three-act story, but there is no question that chronology is proceeding in a straight line.

2. Long shots and long takes - Both films eschew the modern "cutty" style of editing which is intended to immerse the viewer in the "sense" of the event, but actually just distances and alienates the audience because the information cannot be decoded or placed into a narrative frame. Both films use fairly conventional styles, prefer to frame two or three characters together at a minimum (to emphasize their relationships), and a relative minimum of camera movement, used only to set scenes, follow characters or show the relationship between things, as opposed to the camera movement which is used to show that the producer let you have a Louma crane and a Steadicam operator.

3. Theatrical acting - Christoph Waltz and Ed Harris, the respective "leaders" of each film operate in a text-based style, using voice and full body gesture to execute their ideas. Christoph Waltz is explicitly theatrical, with a grand and rolling style of voice and hyperbolic physical expression. But if Marlon Brando developed his technique in the theater (and he did), then Ed Harris's performance, in classical American realistic style, pared down in the manner of Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood to a burnished simplicity, is theatrical. It is, at the very least, simple in an epic way which indicates great forethought and craft, a world away from Mumblecore.

4. Relaxed and minimal use of effects - Digital effects come in two broad categories today -- those which are showpieces in and of themselves, as in the Transformers series, in which the principal actors are machines which have themselves been created by machines; and films which are only possible because of "seamless" effects, such as historical backgrounds, vast panoramas and location and automobile shots which are made practicable and efficient by use of the digital domain. Both of the films under discussion fall under the latter category. Water for Elephants creates a fairly convincing 1931 world, and is able to offer some long shots of that vanished universe that would be otherwise impossible. I'm not positive when and where effects were used in The Way Back, but I suspect they were used to simplify and burnish the image, which for a good deal of the running time consists of a burned-out landscape. In any case, whatever was done is fairly invisible to the average audience, which is the Classical approach to using any new expressive tool.

Plus Water for Elephants has wonderful scenes of people walking around and sitting on moving train cars. Don't you love people walking around on top of moving trains? Isn't that just the essence of a certain type of Classical-era movie? Maybe it's not elemental, but it's sure evocative.

Reluctant heroes

I don't have much to the add to the thousands of barrels of pixels which have been and will doubtless continue to be spilled about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010), so I will limit myself to a few probably very non-unique observations. (The rule of the blog is to write about every film I see.)

When I lived in Scotland in the mid-late 1970s, it was widely deplored that it was too difficult to make a feature film in the beautiful Scottish countryside because (a) the sky was often too dark for good images on a full-size screen and (b) the weather changed so rapidly that over the course of a shooting day it would be too hard to make shots within a single scene or sequence to match. It is my understanding that good chunks of HP7 was shot in Scotland, and those sequences too justice to the gloomy grandeur of the landscape. The problem is that so much digital manipulation is possible in post-production, it is impossible to know if the palette of green-grays that dominate the film are natural or man-made. Nonetheless, one must note that this is the greyest Harry Potter film made, which makes sense as Harry and friends have left Hogwarts to find and destroy the horcruxes (magic thingies that have to be destroyed--that's all you need to know).

This is the first of the series to penetrate Central London to any extent, and I am sorry the sequence is as short as it is. I can imagine all sorts of zany hijinks with Ron Weasley being introduced to the Muggles world, but the film doesn't have much time or space for comedy.

I understand that the film could not be expected to recap the previous films -- who would think of watching a film with "7" in the title without seeing the previous installments? -- but it would have been good to review the bidding and remind the audience what the stakes are, i.e. what exactly will happen if Voldemort succeeds. (I'm pretty sure things would be...bad.)

One of the benefits of splitting the book's story into two films is that there is time for scenes, for acting, for the characters to react to the events, rather than rushing from one situation to another. One of the appeals of the book series is that it is packed. Packed with incident, packed with details of this invented world and connections between the people and the incidents found there. Each book was at least a 7-layer cake of invention, which is rare in any kind of literature today, which so often feels attenuated, where the Potter series is robust.

The challenge for a filmmaker is to get all that story and texture in without making the film feel cramped. By spreading the story over five hours and two films, there is more air in the events, and for the first time (for me) I got the sense that Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson in particular could actually act and not just speak lines with conviction, which is the reasonable minimum for childhood actors. And sending the characters across a barren landscape put them in a cinematic environment akin to that of a Western, a sci-fi film or a samurai film; those movie environments in which the characters must create or re-create society where there is none.

What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that, even though it feels lighter on the special effects than previous installments, HP7 feels more like a "movie-movie" than its predecessors. It's a welcome respite, as grim and dark as it is, before what is undoubtedly going to be a loud, operatic and effect-ridden finale this summer.

Central to the peculiar charm of the series, both book and film, is Harry Potter's reluctance and diffidence to the role of hero which history has thrust upon him. From the moment the he re-entered the wizarding world he was celebrated and feted -- which must have felt good -- for something he had done involuntarily -- not so good -- and for what he is bound to do in the future -- total bummer. To be made the future savior of your race is to live under the shadow of potential failure and disappointment your whole life.

That whole conundrum is neatly side-stepped by the hero (and I use the word advisedly) of When The Last Sword is Drawn (2003) a deliciously existential samurai epic which was inadequately distributed in this country, but which I urge you to seek out.

I must plead a shocking ignorance of the samurai genre, other than classics such as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo (both remade as American Westerns). Both are directed by Kurosawa, who was criticized in Japan for being too Western in approach. Reversing the situation, it would be possible to develop an appreciation for the Western by seeing only Stagecoach and The Searchers, but one could not claim to be knowledgeable about the form, nor could one understand a great deal of the context. Genre gains both depth and texture by the accumulation of the prior examples of the genre. And great genres develop sub-genres within themselves, e.g., Westerns can be "sheriff cleaning up the town", "farmers vs. cattlemen", "cattle drive", "Indian fighting" and "good-bad man", "US Cavalry" and many many other variations. A film about recent Civil War veterans is going to be vastly different from, say a "closing of the west" film set at the turn of the 20th century, a generation and a half later. The same is evidently true of samurai films. Last Sword is an example of the Shinsengumi genre, about the samurai organized to defend the Shogun against the Emperor at the close of the Edo period.

But, although it is helpful to have some historical context, which one can pick up from a site such as Asian Media Wiki, like films of other genres, one can enjoy Lost Sword as pure film. And the pleasures are many and varied. There is some wonderful samurai action, both individual and in massed battle, and one of the most stunning special effects I've ever seen in the execution scene near the beginning of the film. There is a wonderful sense of design and color one would expect from a film which is an expression of Japanese culture. There are amusing and complex acting performances. But most of all there is the near-Brechtian character of Yoshimura, played brilliantly by Kiichi Nakai, an actor whose work I am going to seek out.

Yoshimura is like a talented Mother Courage, although possessed of a sense of honor which would be foreign to any Brecht character. Nonetheless, he has built his own value system parallel to that of the society around him, one in which loyalty to wife and children trumps that of the clan and the samurai code. Perversely, both values are extremely Japanese. An older Korean gentleman who was fluent in English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese (he was of the generation in which all those languages were required of students) told me that he preferred to write and speak of family relationships in Japanese, because it had the greatest complexity and subtlety in that area.

Much to the consternation of the warrior culture of which he is part, Yoshimura puts his first priority on the survival of his family, and it makes him very modern, very Western and very Japaneses all at once. In Nakai's performance, Yoshimura is one of the most relatable figures in any Asian film, let alone a samurai film. He is like the early James Stewart, likely to be underestimated because he is humble, self-effacing and almost shy in comparison with the proud men around him, notwithstanding the fact that he may be the best swordsmen of them all.

Accordingly, with all the action and spectacle of the film, the highlight for me is pictured above, when Yoshimura has what turns out to be his final parting with his family, especially his tiny daughter, who bleats out "Papa" (in Japanese) as though she could have known what was happening to them. As a father, I can't be objective at all. Every parent knows the terror of the final parting with a child, and the existential terror of never knowing when that will be.

I know I haven't done much film analysis in this reflection. I'm afraid I found the film to affecting and emotional on first viewing to do so, but I do expect to revisit this movie, whether or not I write about it again.

The best thing is that you don't have to take my word for it. You can watch the entire film here. I envy you seeing it for the first time. (Allow 2-1/4 hours--it will be time well spent. Additional caveat -- there is some advertising.):

Lies like truth

The name of this blog comes from a remark attributed to Jean-Luc Godard that film is "truth twenty-four times per second." With digital technology, this is becoming less and less true. We think we are sensitized to the presence of effect shots, but how many of the scenes in this demo reel would you have identified as an effect? I mean really--Ugly Betty crashing into a bus shelter? This development, as wonderful as it is for the budgets and the aesthetic expressiveness of film (and filmed television), is starting to throw one of its basic premises--its basis in perceptible physical reality--into doubt. Or does it? What do you think?

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