Note: The analytical projects in the next chapters are important because they ask you to investigate how screen language is actually used. You will connect ideas about screen language from this chapter with the actual handling of it in a film you respect. Even if you decide not to do the projects, do read through them carefully because they contain much useful information that you will come to need when you direct.
SOUL
Screen language is routinely misunderstood as some kind of professional pack-aging. Used as routine wrapping for events that an audience will consume, it can easily lack soul. But whenever, as viewers, we sense the integrity of a questing human intelligence at work, life onscreen becomes human and potent instead of mechanical and banal.
Imagine you go to your high school reunion and afterward see what another ex-student filmed with his little video camera. It is his eyes and ears, recording whatever he cared to notice. When you see what he shot, you are struck because his version of the events gives such a characteristic idea of his personality. You see not only who he looked at and talked to, but also how he spent time and how his mind worked. From his actions and reactions, you can see into his mind and heart, even though he mostly says nothing from behind the camera.
Likewise, a good fiction film’s handling of its events and personalities creates an overarching heart and mind doing the perceiving.
ENTER THE STORYTELLER
Under the auteur theory of filmmaking, the perceiving intelligence behind the making of a fiction film is the director’s vision. However, controlling how a whole film crew and actors create the perceptual stream is simply beyond any one person’s control, so I prefer to personify the intelligence behind the film’s point
of view as that of the Storyteller. This is more than the simple “I” of the direc-tor or camera operadirec-tor and more than the reactive passivity of the Observer. It is a fictional entity that is as proactive, complex, and dependent on artistic serendipity as any created by an actor or novelist.
This is also evident in documentary and, to a lesser extent, in other nonfic-tion forms. All are constructs, even though they may take their materials directly from life. At its most compelling, screen language implies the course of a partic-ular intelligence at work as it grapples with the events in which it participates.
People who work successfully in the medium seem to understand this instinc-tively, but if you happen to lack this instinct, simply pattern your work around the natural, observable processes of human perception, human action, and human reaction. You can’t go far wrong if you are true to life. As you begin doing this, your film will somehow take on a narrative persona all its own, and this you should encourage.
To prepare yourself adequately for this responsibility, you could either read all of Proust and Henry James, or, if you don’t have the time, simply adopt the habit of monitoring your own processes of physical and emotional observation, especially under duress. You will constantly forget to do this homework because we are imprisoned to the point of forgetfulness within our own subjectivity. In ordinary living we see, think, feel, and react automatically and notice so very little. Now compare this with what you are used to seeing on the screen. The camera’s verisimilitude makes events unfold with seeming objectivity. Well used, it gives events the force of inevitability, like perfectly judged music.
Students often assume that the cinema process itself is an alchemy that will aggrandize and ennoble whatever they put before the camera. But the cinema process is primarily a framer and magnifier: it makes truth look more true and artifice more artificial. Small is big, and big is enormous. Every step by the cinema’s makers relentlessly exposes their fallibilities along with their true insights.
Far from automatically delivering objective and inevitable cinema, the process delivers a metamorphosis of scale. Anyone present when something was filmed who later sees the film version has experienced how different it is from on-the-spot impressions. Not only has content been inescapably chosen and medi-ated by a string of human judgments, it has been transformed by the lenses, light-ing, film stock, or video medium used, and even by the context in which one saw the movie (crowded cinema, motel TV, with your family, etc.).
To use the medium successfully you must become a masterly student of the human psyche. You need to know what your audience will make of what you give it. This is rooted not in audience studies or film theory, but in shared instincts about human truth and human judgments.
Let’s say it again: a film delivers not just a filtered version of events but also, by mimicking the flow of a human consciousness at work, implies a human heart and mind observing and considering. Screen the world’s first filming and the Lumières brothers are palpably present behind their wooden box camera, winding away excitedly at the handle until their handmade film stock runs out.
It is through their minds as well as their cameras that we see workers leaving the factory or the train disgorging those passengers at La Ciotat, so unaware of the history they are making.
Film conventions mimic the dialectical flow of our consciousness as we follow something of importance to us. Our emotional responses play a huge part in this by literally directing our sight and hearing. You can test this out. Try noting down what you remember from a striking event you experienced. What most people recall of an accident, say, is highly visual, abbreviated, selective, and emotionally loaded. Just like a film!