ysbreker

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Okay, so one thing I've always wondered is how much of a film's "look", by which I mean readily apparent visual things like camera movement, colors, types of shots, etc., can usually be attributed to the director, as opposed to some other person in the credits?

In most cases, assume that the editing, cinematography and so on are works of their respective credited artisans. The ideas behind many of those decisions can come from the script, the producer, the director - any number of sources. But the individual credited people are very important.

Woody Allen is a great example. While there are some distinct characteristics in his work, they are mostly textual - they exist in the characters, the upper middle class New York setting, the humour, this philosophical or literary influences of the film, and so on.

When it comes to the technical aspects, he works with some of the best people in the film business, often picking them out and working with them for a while. This creates distinct periods in his filmography, where the looks of the films are linked to their cinematographers (or directors of photography). So even though he might have come up with some ideas for the looks of the film (Manhattan being in black and white, for example), a lot of the work and practical decisions will fall with the cinematographer. So from Annie Hall to Stardust Memories, you have Gordon Willis; or in the 1980s and 1990s he would work with Carlo di Palma or Sven Nykvist.

These cinematographers have a whole history of diverse work to pick through, and you can see their own approaches to lighting, film stock, camera work and so on. They can also surprise you and do something completely different.

This is an issue that is connected with auteur theory, which is a manner of thinking with many permutations. The original, French variation was to do with pushing forward the auteur - which is a sort of writer-director artist whose films make up an ouvre that reflect their own personal aesthetics and worldviews. It was very much stimulated by the desire to have film elevated to the level of literature, art and music, with a pantheon of Filmmakers, mostly at the expense of giving due respect to other people working on the films.

I personally don't think that auteur theory works in most cases. There are some where it can be enlightening (or hilarious: see any discussion of Michael Bay as the auteur of our times), but I think that, critically, it's a bit of a dead end, as you spend more of your time looking for patterns and making assumptions than engaging with other texts and contexts.

It's good shorthand, though, and very helpful for getting a handle on films, because if you were to think about everyone involved in the making of the picture, then you wouldn't get anywhere.

[i say this, but I recently handed in a pretty damn auteurist essay for my MA. Hm.]

--

I would recommend that you check out some basic technical aspects on Wikipedia (like shots and long takes and so on), and maybe peruse the blog of film academic David Bordwell. Then it's just a case of recognising basic artistic decisions, and ascribing them with meaning. It's a con. Smoke and mirrors.

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Thanks for the great reply! Obviously you know a thing or two. I always try to pay attention to the camera, and I'm I'm a big fan in particular of long takes, as they often impress me in so many ways, and I'm often surprised by other people not noticing them at all.

edit: Ooh, I found this! I was preparing to read a treatise on the evolution of scene transitions in high-brow cinema, and then he opens with National Treasure. This is going to be sweet!

edit 2: Son of Edit: And a case study of Mission: Impossible III!

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No Lost finale discussion?

I haven't seen it yet, but I am so very glad it's over.

Toblix, you should watch Stalker and Solaris by Tarkovsky. Hell, actually I now remember mentioning Solaris before, and (possibly) you insisting on spelling in Solyaris... So I guess you might have seen it. Beautiful long takes, in any case. There's this bit in Stalker with a short shower of rain...

Damn, I guess those movies are unlikely to ever get proper Bluray releases :(

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To quote some guy from /.:

Nothing of value was Lost

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Toblix, you should watch Stalker and Solaris by Tarkovsky. Hell, actually I now remember mentioning Solaris before, and (possibly) you insisting on spelling in Solyaris...

What? You must be thinking of another toblix. I would never write Солярис using Latin characters. не, как вы говорите, миллион лет!

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The sinister dude in the espresso spitting scene is actually Angelo Badalamenti, the dude who worked with Lynch on every soundtrack since Blue Velvet, including the iconic and the extremely awesome Twin Peaks music.

I know how you feel about movie knowledge, Toblix. I find it is really important to watch a lot and with people who like to dissect movies and observe weird things in them. The more you watch, the more you will see unified lines between styles and movies within someone's portfolio, eventually noticing particularly impressive cinematographers and directors of photography, etc. It is close to impossible to just be told what to look for by an expert. You just can't pick these details up without a working knowledge of a lot of different people's bodies of work.

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The sinister dude in the espresso spitting scene is actually Angelo Badalamenti, the dude who worked with Lynch on every soundtrack since Blue Velvet, including the iconic and the extremely awesome Twin Peaks music.
Sweet! I'm a huge fan of his music. Didn't know that was him.

I know how you feel about oblahblahblah bodies of work.

Yeah, obviously one of the keys is just watching a lot of movies. I was really looking for a place to look for discussions and comments on various films to get some different views from people with more knowledge than myself, hopefully in more detail than the usual "I liked this movie" post. I try to force myself to watch films that don't immediately appeal to my basest of film desires, and I'm having moderate success with that, even though I always enjoy what I end up watching. I'd sort of like to see Metropolis or M, but then I feel like I'm trying to become a pretentious dude, so instead I end up watching Saw IV. Oh wait, I saw Dr. Parnassus today, which should at least count somewhat towards my connoisseur credit. Oh, and Antichrist the other day. I meant to post about the opening act (LOOK I'M USING THE LANGUAGE OF FILM AND THEATRE) being awesome to the max, but then I got sidetracked by looking for a torrent of Human Centipede. Not out yet.

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I'd sort of like to see Metropolis or M, but then I feel like I'm trying to become a pretentious dude, so instead I end up watching Saw IV.

I enjoyed those two Fritz Lang films and bought like 10 DVDs of his other works on blind buys since I had no idea what to buy and realized he kind of sucks at making movies besides those two. I instead bought a bunch of Chaplin DVDs to replace the "black and white" section and now I have more fun.

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Metropolis is kind of clumsy from today's perspective in the same way games released now will look after the Citizen Kane of Games is discovered. M is still pure gold, you don't get very many pretentiousness points from watching it.

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By the way, what is this new take on Metropolis that I saw in apple.com's movie trailer pages?

Some kind of "The Complete Metropolis" with some 25 minutes of "previously lost footage".

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By the way, what is this new take on Metropolis that I saw in apple.com's movie trailer pages?

Some kind of "The Complete Metropolis" with some 25 minutes of "previously lost footage".

I think they discovered another bunch of lost reels.

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No Lost finale discussion?

I shed a tear at the very end (as I tend to do with long-running series I've watched in full), but the whole thing disappointed me as much as I had feared.

What annoys me is that they went so far as "assuring" the audience early on that things would be explained in a logical, "scientific" way, but then they went ahead and did the pseudo-religious thing with bright lights anyway.

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I have not yet watched the finale, but I'm supposed to watch it maybe today if I have the time.

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I shed a tear at the very end (as I tend to do with long-running series I've watched in full), but the whole thing disappointed me as much as I had feared.

I never watched the show, as I strongly suspected it would fail to deliver and end that way (also because I expected the three-year forced extension would lead to lots of filler). But I've always kept an eye to the blogs, looking for something to draw me in perhaps.

From what I can tell of the reviews and synopses, the whole thing boiled down to: "A wizard did it".

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I enjoyed those two Fritz Lang films and bought like 10 DVDs of his other works on blind buys since I had no idea what to buy and realized he kind of sucks at making movies besides those two. I instead bought a bunch of Chaplin DVDs to replace the "black and white" section and now I have more fun.

Fritz Lang single-handedly made American film noir awesome.

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Sweet! I'm a huge fan of his music. Didn't know that was him.
It is really extra funny, because I saw some interview with him about Twin Peaks or Inland Empire or something like that and he is the huggy teddy bear of a man, soft spoken and calm and easygoing, and he played this sinister mysterious espresso-spitting monster in this completely random scene.

And STOP USING THE WORD PRETENTIOUS. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! Why is it pretentious to know a lot about movies and movie history?

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And STOP USING THE WORD PRETENTIOUS. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! Why is it pretentious to know a lot about movies and movie history?

RAGE EXPLOSION!

I know, it may seem stupid, but I use the term as an ironic statement on anti-intellectualism. Think of it as performance art.

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RAGE EXPLOSION!

I know, it may seem stupid, but I use the term as an ironic statement on anti-intellectualism. Think of it as performance art.

I've heard it used often earnestly and damningly for all kinds of un-Sarah-Palin-like behavior, it makes my blood boil. :(

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Fritz Lang single-handedly made American film noir awesome.

Which ones did he direct that I missed that were awesome? Blue Gardenia was one of the ones that was okay, but that was a later one. It wasn't very interesting to me either way. I found Fury, which people say is great, to be boring and ugly with weird acting. Or do you just mean his film and camera techniques and copious uses of shadow and spotlights were awesome? I can agree with that if so.

Metropolis is kind of clumsy from today's perspective in the same way games released now will look after the Citizen Kane of Games is discovered. M is still pure gold, you don't get very many pretentiousness points from watching it.

I liked Metropolis much more without all of the added lost footage, honestly. The movie really didn't need to be longer than the 90 minute version from the 80s that I first saw as later viewings of new DVDs on top of new DVDs with new footage only became more disappointing. The visuals of the city, robot, and action were more important to me than than a bunch of extended overacting scenes that just drag on and on. It seems to me that when theatre projectionists were butchering the film in 30s, they actually weren't doing that bad of a job.

This probably makes me lose all credibility, but the cheesy 80s synth/rock version of Metropolis is my preferred version.

Edited by syntheticgerbil

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And STOP USING THE WORD PRETENTIOUS. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! Why is it pretentious to know a lot about movies and movie history?

The way I was using "pretentious" was: my point contained a lot of vague sentences and I thought it might seem like I was being pretentious by pretending to have some kind of deep ideas about film when really just spouting a bunch of nonsense.

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Okay, so one thing I've always wondered is how much of a film's "look", by which I mean readily apparent visual things like camera movement, colors, types of shots, etc., can usually be attributed to the director, as opposed to some other person in the credits? And if the answer to that is "a lot", are there clear characteristics that lets a person who knows what to look for distinguish between the various directors? I guess some directors like Woody Allen, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Tim Burton are more easily identifiable, but are there other, less obvious stuff as well? Maybe I'm thinking of directors too much like painters, in that there's a very definite style to their work. Maybe film directors tend to experiment more between each film.

Since I'm a turtle or something, Nevsky explained this mostly. Basically, the visuals of a film will be a collaboration between the director and the Director of Photography (DP). In some cases, the director wants to decide precisely how to light, frame and shoot every single shot, while others give more freedoms to their DP. And yeah, directors famous for their look usually have a favourite DP that they refuse to work without.

There are also some technical decisions that have a HUGE impact on the film's look, but that people rarely notice. For example, the aspect ratio:

-Shooting in 4:3 makes things a little more cramped, and look more like TV; especially pre-2000s:

Jenny%28buffy%29.jpg

-16:9 is, luckily, the TV standard now, and the standard for HD video:

loststub-blogSpan.jpg

-1.85:1 is what you usually see in cinema (a DVD will often have this too, which is why you will see the black bars even if you have and HD, 16:9 TV):

ironman-downey-jr-2.jpg

-2.39:1 is what they commonly use in cinema if they want an even more extreme width, like in Leone's spaghetti westerns:

good-bad-ugly.jpg

There are more, but these are the most common ones. Knowing this, I've become really anal about watching stuff in the wrong aspect. I was also sad to find out that pre-2000s, movies that were shown on TV or on VHS were subject to a so called

, where they would just slap a 4:3 box on whatever was the most important part of the full, wide frame, and zoom in on it. I had seen Ben Hur on VHS as a kid, and never quite understood the big deal about it, but just seeing one frame from the "real" movie made me realize what I've missed:

6%20ben%20hur%20ben-hur%20william%20wyler%20dvd%20review.jpg

Similarly, with the advent of digital store, there has been a new choice for directors and DPs to make.

Film photography:

Indiana-Jones-Raiders-02.jpg

vs. Digital photography

(Spielberg is an avid film fan, while Michael Mann loves him some digital.)

The difference isn't as apparent in this comparison, but basically film gives you fuzzier colors and more motion blur, while digital is crisper and clearer, allowing you to see more detail, and it captures movement much more accurately. Film will also usually have focus on one layer of the frame, while digital is able to have everything in focus.

But because film has been the standard for almost 100 years, a lot of people, especially classical directors, don't like the way digital looks, because it doesn't look the way a movie is "supposed" to. To complicate it further, most films are printed to both a digital AND a film copy, because some theaters project digitally, some old school, but I guess Miffy could tell you more about that.

I could go on, but this post is long enough. Sorry in advance if I stretch the forum with images. ><

Edited by Hermie

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Since I'm a turtle or something, Nevsky explained this mostly. Basically, the visuals of a film will be a collaboration between the director and the Director of Photography (DP). In some cases, the director wants to decide precisely how to light, frame and shoot every single shot, while others give more freedoms to their DP. And yeah, directors famous for their look usually have a favourite DP that they refuse to work without.

Wow, now that you mention it, you're right, I have noticed in making of features for some of my favorite director's, when they mention the DP, they usually go down the list of all the past films they worked on together. It would make sense to me now that a consistent look is probably created through a stable partnership. Neat.

Everyone else spew info in the thread. It never hurts! I have none to share unless we start talking about animation directors and crap, and even then I still have so much to learn.

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Orson Welles shared his title card with Gregg Toland on Citizen Kane. The former really appreciated the later's input and let him go crazy with cool things he wanted to do but never had the chance.

On the other hand, there is Spartacus. A young, straping Kubrick, fresh-faced and hand-picked by Kirk Douglas (after a couple of other directors fell through, Douglas insisted on Kubrick because he thought he could push him around and have him do his bidding) proceeded to effectively fire Russell Metty, the cinematographer the studio selected for him. He didn't actually fire him, they say it was bureaucratically simpler to just tell him to go sit somewhere out of the way during the whole production. Dude came to work every day, did nothing for a few months of production, and then won an Oscar for cinematography for a movie he didn't even touch.

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Wow, now that you mention it, you're right, I have noticed in making of features for some of my favorite director's, when they mention the DP, they usually go down the list of all the past films they worked on together. It would make sense to me now that a consistent look is probably created through a stable partnership. Neat.

Everyone else spew info in the thread. It never hurts! I have none to share unless we start talking about animation directors and crap, and even then I still have so much to learn.

Yeah, the same seems to be true for writers and producers to a point. I used to think "Pff, producers are just the guys that organize things, it can be anyone, since they don't have an impact on the artistic part of the film". But after being a part of even the smallest shoots, I have a much bigger appreciation for a guy that can keep stuff tight. Not only can a good producer get all peripheral shit out of the way so you can make stuff, but they can also get you more money for better stuff to make WITH, and make sure you're working with the best people, so in the end, they do have an impact on the creative half of making a film. I suspect if I was a director who had a producer that can keep the circus that is a film shoot running smoothly, I would go through hell for him too.

Famous Director/Writer pair: Christopher Nolan usually works with his brother Jonathan on scripts, in addition to David Goyer.

Famous Director/Producer pair: Having met in film school, Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier made Clerks together, and have done every film up to Zak & Miri together.

Oh yeah, and speaking of that, I forgot to mention that my largest influx on how films are made before I went into the field at school was definitely DVDs. Even if I didn't like the movie, I would always check out the behind-the-scenes extras. And if I did like it, chances are I would watch it with commentary. The best for this was without a doubt the LotR special edition, hours and hours about how every aspect of the film was made.

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