Making the Transformational Moment in Film
Page 9
Now consider a possible logline for Francis Ford Coppola's off-Hollywood film Tetro (2009), a film written by Coppola himself.
Eighteen-year old Bennie arrives in Buenos Aires and finds his long-missing older brother Tetro, a once-promising writer who is now a remnant of his former self Bennie's discovery of his brother's near-finished play might hold the answer to understanding their shared past and renewing their bond. Against his brother's wishes, Bennie finishes the play.
There are several problems with this in terms of the now conventional “Hero's Journey” type logline we have been considering. First, who is the “hero” here? Is it Bennie or Tetro? Second, Bennie's literal journey (to Buenos Aires) is over right away – he has already found Tetro (and as he works on a cruise ship that has docked there he didn't really choose to make this journey in any straightforward sense). There is clearly the potential for another kind of journey – “finding” Tetro in a different sense, discovering what it is like to be Tetro – but this is not mapped onto an actual journey (in fact there is a journey, but late in the film instead). And where is the inciting incident, the call to action?
Now there are two key questions we should ask ourselves about these two loglines (for Gladiator and Tetro). First, do they make us want to watch the films? I would suggest that the answer is yes in both cases.
Stripped of his power and sent into slavery by his tyrannical arch rival, brave Roman general Commodus must fight to survive, etc. This sounds like an exciting film, promising much by way of interesting action (and if you have seen the film you will know that is what it delivers).
Eighteen year-old Bennie arrives in Buenos Aires and finds his long-missing older brother Tetro, a once-promising writer who is now a remnant of his former self, etc. This sounds deeply intriguing and poses more questions than it answers. Why has Tetro not finished the play? What is it about their
past that needs to be understood? Why has Tetro gone AWOL from the family in the first place? Why has the brothers’ bond broken down? What will happen to their relationship when Tetro discovers that Bennie has finished the play? And what is in the play?
So if a logline is intended to make us want to see the film (thus a producer to want to make it), then both of these are successful. But the one we have written for Tetro breaks the current rules in terms of the structure of myth. So the second important question is, from the loglines can you guess what the film is going to be like? In the case of Gladiator, the answer is very clearly yes. We fully expect the hero to survive, to avenge the wrongs done to him and bring justice to the Roman people. Even if we have not seen the film, we can imagine the sort of character that he is and the sorts of scene that will occur along the way. In a sense we have seen this film before precisely because it is another Hero's Journey.
In a letter to subscribers in Landmark Theaters’ e-newsletter, Francis Ford Coppola says that his own main criterion for enjoying a film is “that I never saw it before or anything quite like it.” And it is in fact utterly impossible to anticipate what will happen in Tetro - you have to see the film to find out.
The loglines for Gladiator and Tetro do have things in common. Both tell us who the story is about, what they strive for, and what stands in the way. So in a fundamental sense, this is all that a logline has to include if, at the same time, it succeeds in making us want to see the film. Of course, if a generation of production executives comes to expect one form rather than another – and a generation of audiences is trained to be reassured by the familiarity of that form -then alternatives to that form may have to bide their time.
Taking the image from the Preface (page 15), write the loglines for two different films based on it, but having the following in common. Imagine that all the people in the picture (reproduced again below) have just died in a bombing raid on a German city during World War Two (perhaps Hamburg or Dresden). They are now in some kind of “way station” on their way to an afterlife. This is the beginning of the imagined film. The three people in the foreground are the central characters.
Your first logline should reflect the principles of the Hero's Journey structure (structure of myth). Your second logline should do something else. (You may wish to review the preceding section of this book.)
Things to Think About
Is one of the three foreground characters going to be your main protagonist? What are their relationships with each other? Did they know each other in life or have they just met?
Now take your second logline and story concept. Script one page each for two scenes that follow on directly from the scene on the steps. One scene should be an exterior. The other should be an interior. Think of what you are producing as, broadly speaking, one minute of each scene. (There is an example of screenplay formatting on page 78.) The only “rule” for this part of the exercise is that both scenes should include the woman from the center foreground of our picture, even if she is not one of your main protagonists.
Finally, in visual form block out the actors’ and camera's positions and movement for your two pages of screenplay. If you have access to it, you can use the software FrameForge Previs Studio to produce the kinds of visualization used in this book. Otherwise, drawn sketches will do perfectly well. Here the only rule is that you should think about the gaze and try to include a moment of “gaze reversal” as we have described it. This should not be anything quite so literal as the use of mirrors (as in that moment from Touch of Evil at the start of this book). Instead you can try keeping these two ideas in mind.
(a) Stanley Cavell suggests that in general “our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen” (if we feel “seen,” except in certain situations of deliberate self-display, we begin to feel uncomfortable). Viewing a film then “makes this condition automatic” (so we can relax and accept that this is a “natural” way for us to perceive things). Cavell explains the distinctive feeling of relaxation and surrender that comes with settling down to watch a film as in large measure derived from film's automating of the unseen seer on our behalf.
(b) This condition of seeing without being seen is then physically attached to the staging of scenes via camera positioning and blocking, as we have been noting. There is a classical mode of achieving this that tends to attach it in particular to male characters looking at female characters, but the gaze is not at all limited to that tendency. We have examined other deployments of the gaze in previous sections as well as several suggestive reversals. (See also Slavoj Zizek on the gaze in the 1953 western Shane, referenced in the reading list overleaf).
Can you stage a moment that taps the transformational power inherent in a reversal of the “normal” situation just described?
Reading
Gulino, Paul Joseph (2004) Screenwriting: the Sequence Approach (New York: Continuum), “How a Screenplay Works,” pp. 4-12. Introduces four basic “tools” of screenwriting: telegraphing, dangling cause, dramatic irony, dramatic tension.
Seger, Linda (2003) Advanced Screenwriting (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press), chapter 4, “Making a Scene,” pp. 51-79. Sensible, undogmatic, practical advice on writing different types of scenes.
Geuens, Jean-Pierre (2000) Film Production Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press), chapter 5, “Staging,” pp. 111-147. Includes an excellent discussion of decoupage and very good practical advice.
Thinking about the “tools” described by Paul Joseph Gulino and applying them to a scene type identified by Linda Seger is basically all you need to draft two great scene extracts for this exercise. Then Jean-Pierre Geuens’ advice on staging will help you think about how to put your scenes in front of the camera.
Ruffles, Tom (2004) Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.). Mostly focused on “ghosts” on Earth, there is a short section on “Depictions of Heaven and Purgatory,” pp. 133-136, and a very useful discussion of the film A Matter of Life and Death (1946), pp. 151-159, plus an excellent filmography.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2006) Vis
ions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press), chapter 4, “The Uses of Heaven,” pp. 128-157. An excellent short history and discussion of cinematic depictions of a “heaven,” in a book concerned with various kinds of cinematic paradise.
Walters, James (2008) Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms (Bristol UK: Intellect). It is useful to think of “afterlife” films as variants of the “alternative world” that has long preoccupied filmmakers, as James Walters demonstrates.
Stam, Robert and Toby Miller (2000) Film and Theory: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing), Part IX, “The Nature of the Gaze,” pp. 475-538. This section of a hefty film theory textbook is the state-of-the-art introduction to the gaze (and includes Laura Mulvey's classic essay on the topic), but the gem for the present purpose is a two-page discussion by Slavoj Zizek of the gaze in the 1953 western Shane, pp. 528-530.
For the historical background, an excellent source is Friedrich, Jorg (2006) The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press). There is also W. G. Sebald (2004) On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: The Modern Library); pp. 88-89 of this edition includes an unsettling discussion of suitcases.
Viewing
Afterlife stories offer some of the most ambitious of “special world” settings complete with threshold crossings and fantasies of transcendence. So they provide a good context for an exercise of this kind, concerned as it is to pose some fundamental questions about our styles of imagining. These are perhaps the four most innovative and challenging afterlife films:
A Matter of Life and Death (1946) dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger (UK),
aka Stairway to Heaven
After Life (1998) dir. Hirokazu Koreeda (Japan)
What Dreams May Come (1998) dir. Vincent Ward (USA)
Wristcutters, a Love Story (2006) dir. Goran Dukic (USA)
Later in this book we will be looking in more detail at aspects of After Life, Wrist-cutters and What Dreams May Come.
PART 2
COMPOSING THE
MOMENT
Compositionally, the primary interest in a visual field often has a dynamic quality. In the sketch, the top element on its own has a distinctive force and a sense of moving towards us and to the left. On its own, this is unquestionably the primary interest. It draws all of our attention to the right of the visual field it occupies, while its orientation towards the left promises some secondary interest there. When, on the second row, we add a further element, do we now have two areas of primary interest in the composition? The answer is quite definitely “no.” What happens, even in this very simple example, is that the relationship between the two elements now becomes the primary interest, compositionally. We immediately start to feel the space between the elements taking on an energy and interest of its own. This is the dynamic nature of the primary interest in compositional terms.
In this scene from Map of the Human Heart, the Inuit boy Avik (Robert Joamie) is being bounced by his friends on a trampoline of walrus skins. As he takes to the air he sees an aircraft approaching. It is 1931. We are in the far north of Canada.
(In this and the following sequence of pages a key image from a scene appears first, then a compositional sketch referring to the images on the opposite page.)
The biplane aircraft, with its slow, steady motion towards us and slightly to our left, dominates the frame entirely.
But Avik's bouncing into the frame sets up a second area of interest. As he appears, disappears, reappears, and the aircraft comes closer, it is the space between them that takes on the primary interest in this moment.
This intrusion into Avik's world is set up compositionally before it takes on any narrative or thematic significance. This dynamic space between two compositional elements within the frame constitutes one basis on which the entire film then builds its story of two worlds.
The planar structure of a composition can, for convenience, be summarized as foreground, midground and background, but of course there are many possible planes between these convenient segmentations of the represented space. In sectional perspective the planes sit parallel to each other, like a series of surfaces through which the eye moves as it travels into the space. Compositionally, a powerful device is the altering of the distances between planes (e.g. with different lenses). If we imagine reducing all of these planes to only one then we have imagined the core of the volume being spatially projected by a composition's spatial structure. This imagined core – a central plane through the represented volume – is itself seldom represented directly. Instead, depth is created in front of and behind it by the compositional arrangement of other planes.
Walter has arrived by aircraft in (from his point of view) the remote lands of the Inuit. A surveyor, he sets out with his assistant to map the area with his instruments for measuring space. Avik is intrigued.
Sometimes the most powerful deployment of planar structure in a composition is its deliberate collapsing onto the core of the represented volume. Here the use of an extraordinarily long lens completely collapses foreground, midground and background onto a single plane. When Walter is distracted, Avik clambers over his surveyor's theodolite, to see what it does. Walter explains how it captures the dimensions of a space. Looking through the theodolite Avik, to Walter's amusement, exclaims “Holy Boy!” which will become Walter's nickname for him.
Meanwhile, the ice, instead of being “background,” takes on a material presence in the composition – bulbous, cold, overpowering, dwarfing the human figures. The suggestion of lives played out against the presence of greater, impersonal forces is compositionally expressed when nothing in the story, dialogue or characterizations yet suggests this.
The degree of lightness or darkness across areas of a composition – its range of values – gives a compositional organization to the surface of the image even where that surface is representing considerable depth in planar terms. For example, the physical contrast of dark figures against a light background provides strong compositional areas of interest. The values of the three “figures” in the sketch will not change even if they are reduced in size to suggest they are receding away from us in space.
Walter is now obtaining information and assistance for his surveying from Avik's extended family group and hunting band.
In a busy foreground scene, Avik, his grandmother (left of frame) and other members of the Inuit band play music, dance and carve up a seal. But the figure of Walter in the background is an insistent presence, overshadowing even from a distance the feeling of community and of an unchanging way of life being expressed in the foreground.
The feeling of an intrusion is muted but palpable. The question of what Walter's presence will mean for Avik is already in the air even though nothing has yet been said or done to suggest what this might be or that Avik's simple life might not continue unaltered.
The convergent lines of the Inuks, their tupiks (hide tents), boat, etc. tend to draw our eyes back towards the figures on the skyline, despite all the activity going on in front.
A visual composition can be thought of in terms of areas. In the sketch there are three areas – the two dark areas and the V-shaped area between them. Once representational detail is added – once the two dark shapes become something recognizable – we tend to be less conscious of the third area. But compositionally it retains just as much potential as the other two areas and that potential can be re-activated.
Avik is playing ball with his friends when he coughs up blood into his glove. He takes off determinedly with the ball – almost an act of physical defiance against the momentary sign of illness – but Walter realizes something is wrong and runs after him.
As Avik collapses on the snow, coughing up more blood, Walter grabs him. Blood splatters Walter's face. He wipes it off and stares at Avik, realization dawning that the boy has tuberculosis.
Re-framing the moment in close-up and against a blank background charges
the space between white man and indigenous boy with a sense of now unsettling proximity and connectedness, its implications physically manifested in Avik's spume of blood.
The air-borne bacterial lung disease tuberculosis, or “consumption,” was introduced to the Inuit by contact with whites, eventually leading to thousands of Inuit children being shipped south for treatment, many never seeing their families again.
A framed composition becomes a field of forces once elements are introduced into it. Cultural and psychological predispositions lead to these forces being perceived in particular ways. In the first sketch the object feels as if it is tending to slip out of the frame to the bottom left. To a Western eye this quadrant of a frame always tends to harbor this sort of feeling. But the second sketch shows an object that seems suspended energetically in the space. The top right quadrant of any such field always tends to feel more like a place where the forces are energized, where the object is floating within the compositional field rather than moving out of it. In other words, the bottom and left edges of the frame seem to have more power of attraction, pulling at objects. The right and top edges of the frame do not “pull” in the same way so the object seems freer.