These quotes come from the book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje.
"O: How sound represents a point of view is fascinating in the way it can complicate the narrative stance. It's the way the tone of voice or a point of view in a novel represents the state of mind of a character, without authorial intrusion. It infuriates me when lines from a book are quoted to show the style of the writer, when they really represent the personality or voice of the character. In Anthony Minghella's film Ripley you have the scene where Freddie comes into Ripley's apartment and starts playing the piano, perversely, boorishly, and we witness it totally with Ripley's sensitive hearing. In a scene in a book, the moment quoted may not represent the author's style at all. It represents simply the state of mind of whoever holds the narrative ball at that moment." P. 251
"O: Foreshadowing is such a central device in literature to build up the worth or the danger of a character who hasn't even arrived yet. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, of course. Or even Othello in the first act of the play, before we see him.
M: In film characters can be introduced later in a story, but it's unusual to give them their own point of view-scenes that feature them separate from the established main characters. Hyman Roth, for instance, does not have a separate scene with his wife, talking about Michael Corleone after Michael has left. The one scene Roth has to himself is when he's killed at the airport.
When I talk about divergence and convergence as being rules, they are really rules of approximation. You can change them or break them, but it's good to know the rules you're breaking. And breaking them is always some-what problematic. It can be interesting-like Caravaggio's thumbs scene-but it throws the audience a curve, and to pull it off successfully you have to be fully aware of what you're doing. Probably the most extreme, and the most successful, film to shift points of view unexpectedly is Hitchcock's Psycho. Janet Leigh, the heroine, is killed dramatically and unexpectedly twenty-five minutes into the story, and then the point of view switches-for the rest of the film-to a new character, the detective, played by Martin Balsam." P. 256-257
"M: My rule of thumb is that there are two ways to deal with multiple points of view in a film: divergent or convergent.
O: Can you explain?
M: What I call the divergent method is when you start with all the characters in the same time and space-an Aristotelian structure. After that you can follow them individually wherever they go-as long as you've seen them all together at one point, right at the beginning. That allows you to pungently characterize these people in relationship to one another in time and space: physically, we get to see them standing next to each other and judge how they carry themselves, but also emotionally, how they relate to one another. Once the audience has that imprint, if it's well done, then the film is free to have different points of view.
The overall aim of my portfolio is to have the same story but with a different point of view to allow the story to be given a new genre." P. 251-252
"M: The opposite approach is convergent: two or three stories that start seprately and then flow together. The English Patient is a good example. It starts out with two mysterious figures in a plane, flying across the desert. The plane gets shot down by the Germans and then-cut-you're on a train, with a young woman, a nurse, in a completely different situation: bantering with wounded soldiers. The two stories appear to have nothing to do with each other, but the audience trusts that these two rivers are going to come together. You follow Hana and her story, then you cut back to the Patient, going through the desert on the back of a camel; then you cut to Hana again. And you reach a point where almost accidentally these two stories fuse-it just happens that whenthe Patient is being interrogated as a possible spy, Hana is the nurse who gives him a glass of water. Later their stories merge even more closely: she tkes him out of the convoy into the monastery, and they spend the rest of the film together." P. 253-254
"The laws of perspective, which were first elaborated in mid-fifteenth-century Florence by Brunelleschi and Alberti, came to govern the language of visual representation for over four centuries, until transcended by modernism. This language, by conceiving the world from the point of view of an individual eye, promoted the individualism also assumed by the rational subject of Descartes' famous Cargio ergo sum. The result was a new kind of individual artistic subjectivity, which radically re-educated the sensibilities of the new generations." P. 50
"There are two basic ways in which a narrative situates the information it provides about the narrated world. Either the narrative presents (the narrator reports) what some (one or more) of the entities in that world are perceiving of the situations and events narrated ("She heard people speaking a strange language") or it does not ("As the weather was very fine, the people on the farm had dined more quickly than usual, and had returned to the fields"). P. 44
"Note also that the entities can but need not be characters: everything may be presented in terms of a nonanthropomorphic instrument - say, a camera - located in the narrated world (the narrated diegesis). Of course, the same or different situations and events can be presented according to the "perceptions" of the same or different entities (giving rise to cases which, following Genette, we might differentiate as fixed, variable, and multiple focalization)." P. 44
"Not only can one focalizer (reflector, centerof consciousness, or holder of a point of view) yield to another one within the space of a few words (as in "John watched Mary, whostared back at him, wishing he would stop") but focalization itself may obtain and then vanish from one sentence to the next or even within a single sentence ("Jane saw Robert and thought that he looked tired: she did not know that he was faking")." P.45
Els Andringa, Petra van Horssen, Astrid Jacobs, and Ed Tan
Ok, there was an extremely interesting chapter in the book where an investigation was put in place where one film was changed slightly. Ugh, it's going to be so hard to explain.
The film is called Emma Zunz and the premise behind it is Emma's father, who had fled to South America after being accused of stealing money from the company that Emma works at, has committed suicide. She begins reading through newspaper clippings and old letter he had sent her in the past. One of these letters is her father claiming that the person who actually took the money was her boss. A whole plan is set in motion, she calls her boss to meet to discuss a strike that is being planned by her fellow workers, she then goes to a bar and sells herself to a sailor. Afterwards, she goes to meet her boss at the factory and they begin discussing the strike. Emma then fakes a collapse and her boss rushes to get her water. While he is out of the office, Emma searches around the desk quickly and pulls a gun out from one of the draws. As the boss returns with a glass of water, Emma shoots him and tells him that this is revenge for her father. She then calls the police, telling them that she had shot her boss after he had attempted to sexually abuse her.
It's a good premise but from what i've just read, the film isn't that impressive. The test that the three contributors conducted was this:
"It is our aim here to investigate how different modes of focalization influence the way in which viewers perceive and empathize with a character. In an experiment , focalization was systematically varied from external to internal by means of a VO, while the cinematic narrator was kept constant. The VO-versions implied the addition of an overt, in one version extradiegetic, in the other version intradiegetic narrator...We expect that internal focalization (with viewers having maximal access to what and how a character sees, feels, and thinks) will produce in the audience a clearer image of that character's personality and state of mind, as well as a higher sensitivity to the character's emotions. As a consequence, it will be easier for spectators to infer what a character does or plans to do." P. 136
The majority of this chapter is just their investigation that reads like a science experiment with graphs and conclusions and numbers...bleh! Anyway, the results were not what they expected. Anyway, I think i'm just going to start typing up quotes and if I feel an urge to explain and talk like I did with Unheard Melodies then i'll do that at a later point.
"The category of point-of-view is one of the most important means of structuring narrative discourse and one of the most powerful mechanisms for audience manipulation" (Stam, Burgoyne, Flitterman-Lewis, 1992: P.84)P.133
"Though the "point of view" originally refers to the point in space from where a spectator perceives (Bordwell 1985), it also means the observational attitudes (Tan 1996) that people bring to look upon states of things, events, or other people." P.134
"An assumption often taken for granted is that the degree to which viewers sympathize with a character. However, such intuitions that are often vaguely expressed in analyses and interpretations, lack empirical evidence." P. 135
"First, there are modes of narration based on the position of the narrating agent. Narrators can be invisible respectively inaudible, in terms of Chatman (1978) "covert," in language or images. However, they become manifest in all devices of presentation that select, construct, or organize information. Such is mostly the case in conventional third-person stories and films. The narrator can also be audibly present without participating in the story. Such an "overt" narrator may, for example, comment on what is told or shown. Because overt narrators are not an element of the story or "diegesis" they are telling , they are called "extradiegetic." There are, however, also narrators who are characters in the story that is told as well. Such is the case in an embedded narrative, where a character presented by the extradiegetic narrator tells a story. This narrator is called "intradiegetic.
A second aspect, called "focalization," is the more literal "point-of-seeing"; it concerns the question who is the subject who does the seeing, feeling, and thinking. In case of external focalization it is the narrator's observation that is mediated: characters are shown through the gaze and interpretation of the narrator. In case of internal focalization things and events are presented from the consciousness of a character within the story. In former case readers-viewers seem to look at the characters from the outside, in the latter to loo with them from the inside.
Most of these concepts have originally been developed for literary texts. Gradually, they have been modified for and extended to film. Recently, Chatman (1990, chap. 8) has suggested that one must distinguish for the medium of film the cinematic narrator, the agent who actually shows a film in its visual (and audio) arrangement by all filmic devices used, like, for example, mise-en-scéne, editing, lighting, and camera-angle and -movement and sound. The cinematic narrator can be distinguished from a narrator who verbally tells the story by means of voice-over (VO). This distinction clearly shows that film has various "channels" for presenting information and also various devices for implying points of view. Points of view can even be doubled. The "cinematic narrator" may show a piece of scenery from a certain angle, eventually focalize a character, while an off-screen extra- or intra-diegetic overt narrator relates or comments by means of a VO." P.134-135
"In film research, empirical evidence of the effects of narrative devices is practically nonexistent. We know of only one study in which a film's narration was manipulated : Böhm (1990) reports the results of an experiment in which four different versions of the exposition phase were presented, followed by an identical middle part and ending. The expositions varied as to the relative prominence of the film's two protagonists, a man and a woman. Pronounced effects were found on the perceived importance of the protagonists in the film's middle part.
Psychologists studying empathy have successfully manipulated viewers' perspective and emotion by giving different instructions before showing them a film (e.g., Davis et al. 1987 and Zillmann & Cantor 1977). None of these studies, however, manipulated or even identified a well-defined narrative device." P. 133
OK, I think I quite possibly may be quoted out on this chapter, the whole book too actually. I still need to update my TLA but i'll do that tomorrow after I look at some rushes worth importing.
Right, at the suggestion of Maike, I have halted my film reviews and have returned to the books. At present I am reading sections of Claudia Gorbman's Unheard Melodies and it has some interesting aspects to do with the marriage of sound of film. It touches upon the idea I got from watching 11:14 about how sound can determine how the audience reacts to a scene in a film.
So, this is my initial thoughts and what i've learnt from reading this book and what I can take away from it to apply to my essay that I'll begin writing when Christine goes on holiday.
- Music can be attributed to a character to explain feelings without words, and these can take on all 3 styles of diegesis:
> Diegetic (Where the sound or music is taking place in the narrative)
> Non-diegetic (Where the sound or music is only heard by the audience)
> Meta-diegetic (Where the sound or music is only heard by the one character, e.g. Alan is on a first date with long-time crush Greta. In the restaurant, a band plays romantic music. The date ends up being disastrous. Later in the film, Alan's best friend Paul brings up Gretta's name and the music heard in the restaurant begins to play as Alan recognises her name.
"Gérard Genette defines the diegesis as "the spatiotemporal universe referred to by the primary narration.[Gérard Genette, "D'un récit baroque," in Figures, v. II (Paris: Seuil, 1969)] Etienne Souriau, a filmologue, elaborated upon this definition in terms of cinema specifically:
Diegesis, diegetic: all that belongs, "by inference," to the narrated story, to the world supposed or proposed by the film's fiction. Ex: (a) Two sequences projected consecutively can represent two scenes separated in the diegesis by a long interval (several hours or years of diegetic time). (b) Two adjoining studio sets can represent locations supposedly hundreds of feet apart in diegetic space. (c) Sometimes there are two actors (e.g. a child and an adult, or a start and a stuntman or double) to successively depict the same diegetic character. [Etienne Souriau, ed., L'Univers filmique (Paris 1953)]
Genette's and Souriau's definitions would agree that the diegesis means the space-time universe and it's inhabitants referred to by the principal filmic narration. Sauriau's application to cinema brings out some important details. First, he takes care to furnish examples of both spatial and temporal diegetization of filmic elements. Second, he includes the phrase "by inference" ("dans l'intelligibilité), whose importance will presently become clear. At this point, then, we may summarize and define "diegesis" as being the narratively implied spatiotemporal world of the actions and characters." Gorbman, P21
"On which narrative level do we read this music? It is certainly not diegetic, for the forty-piece orchestra that plays is no where to be seen, or inferred, in the filmic space of the cafe. In a certain sense, we may hear it as both nondiegetic-for it's lack of a narrative source-and metadiegetic- since the scene's conversation seems to trigger X's memory of the romance and the song that went with it; wordlessly, he 'takes over' part of the film's narration and we are privileged to read his musical thoughts." Gorbman, P. 23
A similar but more extreme example is the 1975 Steven Spielberg film, Jaws. From the introduction where the shark makes it's first attack, we are aware of the music that is to be attributed to the shark when it is about to attack. Anytime the shark is in the water, we hear the iconic music, we know that the shark is about to attack. Except on two occasions. The first occasion is when a group of kids are playing around by swimming underwater with a shark fin attached to their back. The lack of the music in the audience's first clue that it is a hoax. Soon after it's discovered as a hoax, the music kicks in on another part of the beach and this time we KNOW that it's the real shark.
The second occasion is as Officer Brody is throwing bait in to the water to lure the shark out. No music is played for a very obvious reason and that is to scare the audience. The fact that we haven't heard that iconic music playing means we are in a more relaxed position and we aren't expecting to see the shark anytime soon but out of no where, the shark jumps out of the water and almost takes Officer Brody's hand off. I think that leads nicely on to the next point...
"A structural silence occurs where sound previously present in a film is later absent at structurally corresponding points. The film thus encourages us to expect the (musical) sound as before, so that when in fact there is no music, we are aware of it's absence." Gorbman, P. 19
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- Never underestimate the power of silence. Silence can be used just as effectively as music and can be used to show a lack of communication between characters that punctuates a previous scene, where an argument happened for instance. That's not complete lack of sound by the way, there still needs to be diegetic sound in the scene to get across the tension between characters. Let me give a quick example:
Bob and Jill had an argument the night before. Bob wakes up the next morning and goes in to the kitchen to see Jill sitting at the breakfast bar waiting for the toast to pop up. Bob switches on the kettle and sits at the far end of the breakfast bar. Neither of them say a word. All that can be heard is the kettle going and toaster ready to pop up.
I suppose you could play somber music here also to show that their relationship is falling apart but if non-diegetic music has been played in other scenes, the total lack of music will pack more of a punch to the scene, rather than adding the music. The audience will connect that there is no music because of their blazing row the scene prior.
"For example, Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) begins with a title shot, "1909," accompanied by busy, cheery music in a major key. The first sequence follows, introducing the two protagonists as young boys, playing boys' games - depicted as harmless - which involve various degrees of trickery and petty theft. The next sequence takes place six years later, when they have graduated into "real"crime. Its corresponding introductory title shot, "1915," is not accompanied by music. The silence suggests a loss of frivolity, a fall from the childhood games of innocence that had initiated the two into their lives as criminals." Gorbman, P. 19
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- I just got a good quote that isn't from any academic and it won't be used to prove a point as it comes from my girlfriend. Although if I do find a scholoarly quote that says near enough the same thing, I may use that instead.
"cause we were all saying how dificult it is to communicate with people when its not face to face.. like through calls or emails and how not seeing the expression on sombodys face allows you to interpret a sentance in a completely different way to its intention" Christine Phillips
So basically, even in real life, sound without image can lead to puzzlement, much like in films. If there is a highly charged chase scene with no sound, it would not have the same effect as it would with diegetic or non-diegetic sound added to it. Interesting to think, isn't it?
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- Music can resemble the action on screen also and therefore compliment the scene to help deliver the mood to the audience. For example, high energetic non-diegetic music could be played over a fight scene or a car chase scene to get the audiences adrenaline up so that we feel the same sort of emotion as our characters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTFv8zaoFdI
Diegetic music can also be used to get the audience's emotion going as well, more commonly found in romantic films but can also be applied to other genre's as well...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFzFj7Mlit4
Diegetic sound can also be used to make an audience feel the desired emotion for the scene. In this example it uses non-diegetic music to get the emotions started and then it thrusts in the diegetic sound of the car engines roaring as soon as the car chase begins.
"In standard narrative filmmaking, the rhythm and mood of diegetic music that "coincidentally" plays with a scene has been made to match the scene's mood and pace with an uncanny consistency. This practice in fact implies a departure of diegetic music from it's naturalistic independence and a movement towards the action-imitating roles we might more readily expect of nondiegetic music." Gorbman, P. 24
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- Music can also be used to counteract actions taking place in a scene. The example used in the book, I know, lazy but i'm bloody hungry, is upbeat diegetic music being played at a party as the protagonist receives a letter saying her lover had died. The upbeat music shows no respect to the information that we have just been told and continues to be upbeat and happy. One example that I have come across before that has used this technique beofre was in my favourite episode of Skins where Sid's dad has died and he tells his best mate and breaks down in the middle of a concert. The music isn't really, well, super upbeat but it slightly contradicts the emotion we are witnessing but at the same time, it sort of makes the music "fit" the emotion some how.
That leads me on to my next lesson, that whatever music you put to a scene will cause some sort of emotional response to resonate with your audience. Of course, it's a case of finding the music to give the audience the response you want them to have. It's no good having a masked murderer chase a teenager around a house if you put benny hill music over it, as it's not going to scare your audience, it'll more than likely have them laughing. Now obviously in this example i'm referring to non-diegetic, compared to the diegetic sound of the Skins example which also applies to any music working with a scene.
"What we may indeed remark about the special expressive effect of diegetic music is its capacity to create irony, in a more 'natural' way than nondiegetic music. Imagine, for instance, that the heroine is enjoying herself at a party; people dance and shout to a lively jitterbug. Suddenly a message arrives for her saying her fiance has just been killed. As a close-up shows us the note, the gay music continues to to revel on the soundtrack, 'unaware' of its ironic commentary on her lover's death. Now imagine the scene conceived differently. Instead of being at a party, the heroine sits at home chatting with a neighbour. The unfortunate telegram arrives, and a nondiegetic rendition of the jitterbug accompanies the close-up. Now this seems a shocking exercise in sheer style and narrative self-consciousness. Even though we know that the narrator has been equally responsible for the music/image irony in the party scene, "his" creative effrontery strikes us with greater force in the second case-even puzzlement. By taking music meant as extranarrative comment and rendering it diegetic in the first example, the narration motivates, naturalizes the music, makes its disparity with the filmed events acceptable." Gorbman, P. 23
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- Finally, confirmation of something I realised before. Sound has the ability to cover edits, or as Gorbman puts it, "it provides temporal continuity to two spatially discontinuous shots..." in reference to two characters entering a saloon in Public Enemy (1931). In that scene, it is diegetic music that provides the bridge between the cuts. You hear a piano playing from inside and then it cuts to them walking through the doors and the music bridges the gap to make it look seamless and all taking place at the same time.
"What in a film makes it possible for us to infer that characters and space exist even when they do not appear on screen, to infer a logically continuous universe, when the film presents only a series of two-dimensional compositions - discrete and discontinuous shots? In other words, how do the perceived sounds and images, all editied and spliced together, give usthe impression of some 'real' world they are supposedly extracted from? We seem to have the capacity to impose continuity on filmed images and sounds before us - a capacity to take Kuleshov's mini-sequence composed of of a shot of a man's face followed by a shot of a bowl of soup followed by a shot of the man again, and to say that the man stands near the table and is looking at the food (even before jumping to the connotative level on which we perceive him expressing hunger). From three fragments of a supposed reality, we infer, reconstruct, the diegesis; all narrative representation presents us the subject from which we derive the fable." Gorbman. P. 21
Disscussing a segment from François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1961):
"Let us now perform a commutation on the bicycling segment by changing the music on the soundtrack. First, if we put the music into a minor mode, a sadder, darker, more remote feeling comes upon the scene. Later in the film the melody does in fact appear in minor; and, especially by contrast to its previous statement in major, it gives all the more poignancy to the mood of its scene. Or we might change the tempo of the music. If played much faster, allegro staccato, this music will add an energy, an allégresse to the three character's bicycling, and perhaps even an optimism not previously suggested in Delerue's score." Gorbman, P. 17
"What would a musical silence do to the bicyclers' promenade? Interestingly, this depends on what kind of silence is imposed. A diegetic musical silence might consist of the characters wending their way along the road to the sole sound of pedals and gears creaking. In this sort of scene, which conventionally demands background music, diegetic sound with no music can function effectively to make the diegetic space more immediate, more palpable, in the absence of that Muzak-like overlay so often thrust on the spectator's consciousness. (It also emphasizes that the characters are not speaking, where there is no music to mitigate this verbal silence.) Conventional practice has made an anchor of background music, such that it dictates what the viewer's response to the images ought to be. Remove it from a scene whose emotional content is not explicit and you risk confronting the audience with an image they might fail to interpret." Gorbman, P.18
That's a quote-riffic post there and all the decent quotes I think from what I have read from it. I'll take a break now, may make some food and then get cracking on the next book about sound. Balls, there's one more quote for this book:
"For French critic-musician Michel Chion, struck by narrative cinema's frequent use of diegetic music for ironic effects, such music is not only "unaware" of the dramatic situation, but "indifferent" - or, as he puts it, "anempathetic." Gorbman, P. 24
OK, that's it now, i'm taking an hour 1/2 break from work....
An Inspector Calls stars Alastair Sim as Inspector Poole who comes to visit the Burling Family to investigate the suicide of a woman that each member has had an encounter with and even played a role in her suicide. I've loved this film, well story, ever since I read it at school, it's a great mystery that comes with an interesting twist at the end.
Whilst watching it though, I realised that the way that perspective is used is a little bit different to previous examples that i've watched and even contemplated. It revolves around the Burling family's perspective of the one character, but for extra measure and story telling purposes, it altered the timeline of events slightly in how the life of Eva Smith was told. It was an interesting concept of story telling but it didn't offer much in varying the character of the woman. The woman had different alias' but i'll just call her the main one, Eva Smith. Now for a quick run down, each member's interaction with Eva Smith had a big implication on her life making life more difficult for her.
- Arthur Burling sacked her at his factory because she questioned why she was not allowed a raise
- Sheila Burling had a store manager fire her because she was jealous that she looked better in a hat she was trying on and for smirking at her
- Gerald Croft had an affair with her over a previous summer until it came to an end
- Mrs Burling refused to give her money from her charity due to the fact she lied about having a husband and saying her name was Mrs Burling, despite the fact she was pregnant
- Eric Burling had met up with her on a few occasions and got her pregnant
Now in this timeline, it adds a twist, even if it became slightly obvious seeing as Eric was the last member to be asked questions by the inspector.
From watching this, I didn't feel like I learned anything that would aid my masters project sadly, maybe because I had already seen it before and it affected my initial idea of perspective or because it doesn't really fit very well with my idea of dealing with perspective for The Wardrobe.
In other news, I did get a brain wave earlier when I saw a cable that I bought to import tapes last year. I could take a look through the rushes available in the Editing base room and see if there's anything that I could use to show editing can change a perspective. Now an initial idea is to return to the Bournemouth Nightclubbers footage and try applying perspectives roles in documentary as well. I will have a discussion with Maike tomorrow at our tutorial, but that would give me something fresh to add to my portfolio rather than over stretching The Wardrobe. I should also probably choose how i'm going to do the perspective of Mike's film, probably limit it to three films, including Mike's final edit. Initial thoughts for me have it looking something like this:
- Director's Edit
- Editor's Edit
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- Parent's POV
- Sam's POV
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- Rushes POV 1
- Rushes POV 2
That looks like a nice healthy amount to be honest, especially as Maike says the films I add don't all have to be the same running time. So the first two will be around the same running time, the second batch would a bit shorter depending on the material I get, Sam's I think I would have to limit to a 5 minute film so cut some scenes out. The final section of films can be anything really, just the same rushes that give off a different message. I'll be intrigued for tomorrow, I gotta say! Also, I need to find a student composer that can knock up some different music for the two smaller perspectives for The Wardrobe, either that or just rob it from somewhere, which to be honest would be a lot easier. Another thing to ask Maike tomorrow.
Ok, well I part chose to watch this in order to reassess it and try to understand WTF everyone bangs on about this and why it's hailed as a classic piece of cinema. To be honest, I still don't get it but the main reason I chose it is because it deals somewhat with story telling from different perspectives. Sort of.
We have three stories:
- Vincent Vega & Marsellus Wallace's Wife
- The Gold Watch
- The Bonnie Situation
And the film flows like so:
1. The beginning of the end of The Bonnie Situation from Pumpkin & Honey Bunny's POV
2. The beginning of The Bonnie Situation
3. Vincent Vega & Marsellus Wallace's Wife
4. The Gold Watch
5. The middle of The Bonnie Situation linking to the scene with Pumpkin & Honey Bunny but this time from Vincent and Jules' POV
But if it was told in the correct timeline, it may have a different feel altogether, in fact, it might not even flow at all! Anyway, it'd go like this:
1. The Bonnie Situation
2. Vincent Vega & Marsellus Wallace's Wife
3. The Gold Watch
A bit shorter than the Theatrical version and thinking about it, i'm not sure if it'd work. I may edit it in that order and get Christine to watch it in order to see how she felt about the film, seeing as she's more than likely forgotten seeing it the first time. I'm not sure that I understand the purpose of altering the structure of The Bonnie Situation in that manner. I've seen it before, in fact, the whole 3 separate story telling method. Sin City told 3 separate stories that kind of linked all the characters together with the first story being split in to two and placed at the start and at the end of the film. Although with that, it acted as a passage of time as that story jumped a good 20 years or so. With Pulp Fiction, there was no reason to do this.
If I apply this style of editing for The Wardrobe, the film might run interestingly:
1. Parents eneter bedroom to discover Sam after the fight with the monsters
2. Mother takes Sam to bathroom to clean Sam up (Cut before Monster tooth reveal)
3. Sam sitting in the living room reading his book.
4. All the rest all the way back to where we cut at the start of film
5. Continue from start of film to show monster tooth reveal
That might not be a great way to show editing to change perspectives but might be a nice way to create my edit of the film that I have come to based on my research. So from watching this, my thinking for my portfolio hand in is:
- Director's Cut
- Editor's Cut
-------------------
- Sam's POV
- Parent's POV
- Joint POV (a.k.a. Parent's POV and then Sam's POV to Explain the Parents)
Now that seems like a lot of the same film to be honest and I think I see Maike's point of considering editing other films to add to the portfolio. As I said last time, Steve is a potential addition but also looking for other films to edit is a more appealing aspect. It's finding something that might cause a problem...
Anyway, will get round to watching other films over the next few days and analyse again :)
Just finished watching 11:14 which deals with essentially one big story that converges around 11:14pm, told from different perspectives. Each new perspective tells a new part to the story and in the end you feel that you've learnt the answer to all your questions. This is where I start to analyse the way that they used perspectives to tell the story...
I'll just jump in to what I noticed the most out of the entire film. From looking at the DVD case, you get the complete wrong genre of what this film is about. To me, I thought it would be some sort of drama thriller of some sort. Turns out it's a dark comedy which essentially means drama with a comedy approach.
The comedy of the whole film comes across mainly from the music, for example there is a scene where Patrick Swayze is dragging a dead body to his car boot and the fact there is comedic, light music playing means that you find it reasonably funny. It was this scene in fact where I first thought about the role that sound could play. I was thinking that if this scene was kept exactly the same way but played with more sinister music, you would have a completely different emotional connection to the scene. Now, I know sound is extremely vital to film and one without the other will give you something, well, kind of lame. But I never considered fully the possibility of it changing the whole genre. So there is definitely some research that can be conducted there that will help me in separating the genres of both Sam's and the parents perspectives.
In total, there are five different perspectives given with the final perspective being the one character that links everyone together and in turn explains most of the story. I have been thinking ever since I found a list of films that deal with telling different perspectives of the same story, what if I could do the same with The Wardrobe? Starting with the Parent's POV and mix it in with the odd shot of Sam to make the audience wonder what he is up to and then BAM, Sam's POV kicks in for the fight scene with the actual monster and the audience is left in the same position as the Parents. Now the issue is that it could be too close to the separate Parent's POV but just with bits of Sam thrown in. I prefer this idea at the moment because it's a little bit more meatier and is essentially the same story but with the main character being the parents. So with what i've been considering regarding sound, my current thought pattern is exploring ways to tell the same story in as many different styles as possible. Hmmm, sounds shit to be honest saying that and feels more like here's a few different edits I made but couldn't make my mind up which was best. If I just keep coming up with ideas, I can then hone on one. So the ideas are:
- Sam's POV
- Parent's POV
- Mike's Edit
- My Edit (which is the parent's as the main character)
Hmmmm, that may not be that bad but it definitely needs some consideration of some sort. Maike said is there any other films that I could add to it and i'm pretty sure that'd be difficult, so I may turn to the films i've worked on previously to see if I could play with perspective there. The easiest one is probably going to be Steve but i'd have to think quite a bit about it.
What I aim to do is watch a film everyday that deals with perspective, write about what I thought about the film and what it made me think about my project. That's probably what is defined as theoretical underpinning in the last blog, comparing examples to my current work and showing research. Maybe. I dunno. Tomorrow I will watch either An Inspector Calls or Pulp Fiction. I'm feeling Pulp Fiction. I'll watch an Inspector Calls on Wednesday and then Vantage Point on Thursday. By which point I should have a few other films like Melinda & Melinda to watch. This has actually been good help!
As I was reminded in my last tutorial appointment, I should really take advantage of the current situation I find myself in where I have literally bugger all to do until Mike shoots his film next month by conducting all my research for my essay now so that i'm fully prepared for my essay. Makes total and utter logical sense but getting the motivation has been a little difficult. What with me living with undergrads, they are all finishing exams and moving out so realising I won't be living with these guys while celebrating leaving is sort of acting as a distraction. Today though, I had a bit of a brain melt down so I ended up going to bed stupidly early and that didn't last long but suddenly, I found myself willing to do work to act as a distraction. It was amazing, I somehow googled an extremely simple phrase and got all the answers I needed. I found films that dealt with stories telling different perspectives, books too and even reminded myself of one of my favourite plays that I read as a kid at school that told the story of one woman through different peoples encounters with her.
An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestly was also made in to a film starring Alastair Simm which I also loved so I have now set out to find a copy of it. An other film I found is called Vantage Point which tells the same story about 6 or 7 times, each time from a different characters point of view. By watching these films, hopefully I'll have an idea about how to go about what i'm aiming to do and maybe even think about merging my characters viewpoints in to one film like Vantage point. There is still a lot of thinking that is required regarding my project though, so I'll watch these films and update the blog. Tomorrow I think I will also attempt at finding books about telling stories in this sort of style. Anyway, the fact I managed to finish three blog posts shows my current dedication level. I should have breakdowns more often! :D
The next day after my meeting, I attended a post production meeting that really I didn't need to attend but it gave me an opportunity to meet the producer that is working with Mike on his film and the chance to go to the library. I had a list of books that, in retrospect, I should have read at the start of the year, one in particular that quite frankly I need to scan a LOT of pages from. So in essence, I started at the very beginning of editing.
I read a very very VERY basic book that has opened my eyes to WHY I make an editing decision and WHEN I should make a cut. This book I really should have read earlier as it's now made me look at films and TV shows in a whole new light. To save myself a ball ache in the future, i'm just going to Harvard Reference all the books I read now so I can just copy and paste. Wait! I lie, i'll start another a post that has them in and i'll just add to it as I read more books or watch more films. This book was Grammar of the Edit by Roy Thompson.
The other books I took a gander at didn't really help me out as much as I thought. One especially I thought it may be helpful as there was a chapter on perspective. Well, although it was on perspective, it was also a history book on film and dealt with the cameras perspective amongst the action and how it adheres to the 180 degree rule. So over all it didn't help me that much. There was some interesting bits of information on the history of film but nothing overly helpful. That book was Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice by Don Fairservice.
The other book I read I only really looked at one chapter because it was intriguing to me and kinda had nothing to do with this project. It was how Alfred Hitchcock experimented with editing in his films and I will agree that he was a smart director and editor. From a young age after visiting Universal Studios where they had a Hitchcock attraction inside a replica Bate's Mansion, which funnily enough was used in Psycho 3 I think, not that I've seen it though, only ever seen the original. Wait, i've gone off here. Yeah, they showed us how they filmed the famous shower scene and it left me amazed. The fact that if you watched it again, you'll notice that you never see the knife touch the skin. The fact that the shots were cut so quickly to reaction shots or result shots as i'll call them (e.g. the blood trickling down the plug hole) allowed the audience to draw the only obvious conclusion without showing too much. Anyway, this has bugger all to do with perspectives so let's move on, yeah?
Ok, I don't feel as big an urge to post on here as I did for the XPP module. It may have something to do with the fact that this blog is for me and not for marks. Hopefully being bored at 00:15 and doing this first post means i'll get back in to the flow of typing out posts.
Ok, now it's 00:49. Damn.
Right, so I went in to my meeting with Maike with a few raw ideas and hoped that this would be a eye opener and I'd come out high with confidence knowing what I was going to do for my Masters project. Well, it turns out I should have done a lot of research over the Easter break. To be honest, the kick up the ass I got was much needed but I still feel it could have come before Easter like the Directors and Producers got. It kinda put weight to my argument that the Editors course is getting a little shunned.
Anyway, I went in with my idea of making film trailers out of my rushes from the films I worked on over the past 9 months. I suggested it and then we talked about Mike's film The Wardrobe. Maike then suggested editing Mike's film from different perspectives. Now that had been something i've been interested in for quite a while.
Last year at Glastonbury 2010, I watched the Chris Morris film, Four Lions. The film is about 5 extreme muslim terrorists who attempt to commit a terrorist attack. At the end of the film, despite some humorous moments, all terrorists set off bombs. Strangely, it's only when the last person explodes in Boots, I, and pretty much everyone i've spoke to about it, felt a sense of shock. Not at the mindless lack of humanity of the terrorists but the stark realisation that for the past 90 minutes or so, we as an audience have been rooting for terrorists, all for the reason that we were seeing it from only their point of view. That was the first time I fully understood the power of cinema. It showed me that the audience will invest in whatever main character that is given to them and will root for them no matter what their task is, be it world peace or world terror.
So mentioning looking at perspectives set excitement bells off in my head. I came out the meeting feeling pretty optimistic and felt like I knew what my project would be. I also kept the film trailers on the back burner as a back up plan.
Ok, so this is a personal blog for you and no one else. It's aim is to help you think things through and also help as a reference for your final critical analysis essay in August.
