Recently I’ve been watching some of my favorite movies again, or I should say, “listening” to them, for I find it very soothing to engage my auditory sense while standing in front of the easel, toiling away on a painting. Usually I listen to various lecture series on CD – The History of the Middle Ages (Early, High, Late), for instance – but occasionally, I have the urge to revisit a much-loved movie, so I slip in a DVD. Needless to say, this only works because the images in these movies are so familiar to me that there’s no need to look at the TV screen. But precisely because this is the case, I often add a soupçon of variety to the experience by choosing the French language option, say, or by turning on the commentary.
Now commentary provided by a critic or film scholar can be tremendously insightful, but nothing takes the place of hearing the words of those directly involved in making a movie, especially when they give us a window onto their creative process. For example, Anthony Minghella, who both directed The Talented Mr. Ripley & adapted its screenplay from Patricia Highsmith’s novel, reveals that he wanted to use the music in this film as a narrative device, not simply as “mascara,” by which he means, something superimposed over a finished movie in order to “decorate” it. To that end, Minghella got the composer involved even before the first draft, “so that the music is growing, the whole film is growing…I think of the process of film-making as growing the movie, planting the movie & seeing how it grows, draft after draft…”
Of course, movies are first & foremost visual & Minghella exploits the camera as a narrative device as well. In the pivotal moment of Ripley, Dickie (Jude Law) & Tom (Matt Damon) are in a small boat off the coast of San Remo, Italy. Emotions spill over. Rather than cutting between their increasingly unhappy faces, ie., showing first one, then the other, Minghella swings the camera from one to the other. By letting the camera describe the physical space between these characters, we intuit the ever-widening emotional gap as well.
This is just one example of how master filmmakers use the camera to buttress their movies’ storyline. And none was better at this than Alfred Hitchcock. Jan de Bont, director of photography, points out one of the many “Hitchcockian” shots he utilized in Basic Instinct: An overhead shot showing Nick (Michael Douglas) driving to Catherine’s (Sharon Stone) beach house along a narrow road hugging the California coastline is clearly reminiscent of the scene where Melanie (Tippi Hedren) speeds her way into Bodega Bay in her Aston Martin DB2/4 Drophead Coupé in Hitchcock’s The Birds. Overhead shots like these give us a big dose of visual information at a glance & serve to introduce us to what follows. But by literally keeping us at a distance, they also allow us a brief respite from the action, a chance to catch our breath emotionally, as it were. (Not to mention, they often favor us with a few moments’ worth of spectacular scenery.)
Other camera angles evoke different emotional responses from us. De Bont & Paul Verhoeven, director of Basic Instinct, discuss how low-angled shots can seem dramatic, mysterious, even “creepy.” On the other hand, scenes done all in one shot, without any cutting, give us the feeling of continuous, real time. Point-of-view shots, where we see what a character sees, create empathy in us. And if the camera then shows us the character’s reaction to what has been seen, that’s our cue to react in a similar way. Think of wheelchair-bound Jeff (James Stewart) in Hitchcock’s Rear Window: During the wee hours of a rainy night, he watches Thorwald (Raymond Burr) repeatedly leave his apartment & return, carrying his sample case. Because we watch these events through Jeff’s eyes, when the camera shows us Jeff’s perplexed expression, we share in his puzzlement.
So…What does all of this suggest to us as artists? It suggests that we, also, are directors – the directors of our artwork. We choose the storyline, or subject, of our paintings & drawings, then we select those narrative devices, or elements of design & composition, that will buttress this plot. In the next blog, we’ll examine this process more closely.
Minghella, Anthony. Audio commentary. The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999. Paramount, 2000. DVD.
Verhoeven, Paul & Jan de Bont. Audio commentary. Basic Instinct, 1992. Artisan, Special Edition, 2001. DVD.