Multi-faceted sensibilities

Cherish those who seek the truth, but beware of those who find it.

By now,  I think I can talk to a filmmaker for five minutes, and guess what kind of movies they make. I've met with many diverse filmmakers and been in-and-out of many cinematic worlds. Each world teaches me something new, but as a film student, I am extremely wary of eulogising a single filmmaking philosophy or finding a singular directing truth. There is none. 

Performance Priority, Occasional Cleverness and the New Hollywood Era

I had a class with Gil Bettman today - he's directed some direct-to-dvd family and Christmas movies (you know the kind) - and he's talking to us about Advanced Camera Directing Techniques. Pretty gimmicky class, telling us that we shouldn't pay more than 400$ to an animator to completely storyboard and pre-visualize a film for you (which leads me to the question - what is the role of a director then?). Of course, I know what he means -- growing up in an animation background, I now understand that most live-action feature directors (espectially the for-hire ones) don't really have the lateral thinking faculties to visualize a film, frame interesting shots or come up with creative angles. All they do -- from what I have been taught --- is oversee the performances, be a creative hub (not a source), manage egos and coordinate the production. In the case of Elia Kazan, when cinema had a stage-oriented proscenium, he really didn't know how to move the camera or where to place it. Those things were completely left to the cinematographer (yikes, I cannot imagine doing that!). In the case of Gil, it's slightly better, as he is a technologist from what I understand. He likes things that blow up, fast-paced action sequences, things to look COOL, clever, crafty...or push his team to do all kinds of shenanigans on screen. That shit sells and I understand that world pretty well. I'm working with this white director as a writer and his brief is literally for it to look corny, fun and anything-but-deep. He makes these B-grade heist short films which are slapstick and absolutely ridiculous at times, but it's sketchy and most importantly, it's content for the attention-deficit. All those conceptual jargons that intellectuals like me talk about like personal voice, theme, subtext, politics, larger ideas, emotion, character, visual metaphors, et al go out of the window. 

This was Spielberg as well. Strip him off his crew and he's really got a limited sense of staging a scene. Don't get me wrong, he might still be competent at blocking his actors or extracting competent performances. But take a look at his recent music video Cannibal by Mumford - it's one shockingly uninnovative moving master shot. Trace back to his childhood, and Spielberg repeatedly shot his toy train crashing into another, adding dramatic charge to it. It's no surprise that he, Scorsese, Tarantino and the likes were termed as the Cinema Brats. This is Hollywood for you -- it is weightless and it is unidimensional. As the Russian Proverb goes -- the marvel isn't that the bear can dance well, but that it can dance at all. American cinema is nothing more than dancing bear cinema. Production value is definitely superior to Indian productions, but let's face it, Americans really know how to have a good time and therefore theme park movies is mass-appeal. Existential pursuits and intellectual questioning isn't really on the radar, nor do they have life-or-death third-world problems that most of India goes through. Directors aren't expected to know much apart from handling the actors, and in some cases, how to move the camera. Direction here is nothing more than mastery over the dance between the blocking and the staging. Else how else would a Martha Coolidge have made it here!? To Gil's admission in class, "she's absolutely nuts...definitely on the spectrum. But when she speaks to actors, she is powerful and inspiring." Fair enough! If that's all it takes to be a filmmaker here, why the hell are you making a film - go direct theatre instead. What a waste of the medium and the cinematic techniques it offers. Besides, I often wonder why concept or story isn't most important here, but why there is a dispropotionate weightage being given to organic performances.

From what I understand, this wasn't always the case. Kowalski told us in class that once the studios came in, and with the advent of the New Hollywood Era, there was a shift from an auteur approach, to the studios having majority of the power in the making of a movie. This explains why we haven't had another subversive-yet-imaginative Charles Chaplin in Hollywood since. Directors were expected to become more of craftsmen than artists. Blocking and staging became formulaic, or as Asghar Farhadi said - "it seems like in most films even today, the blocking-staging has been done by an app." Final cut rights began to lie with studio executives, not with directors. Directors rarely even wrote their scripts. It became a completely impersonal approach, and the directors' primary role became to oversee performances. Directors were usually hired after the studio had already picked a script. The hierarchies on a film set became mostly a flat hierarchy, and even the American film schools began to train directors to understand production processes and performance. They became lesser so art schools and rather like trade schools to prepare kids to join the work force. Everything else -- screenwriting, storytelling and finding an inner voice or even understanding visual design -- became unimportant. As a director, you were no more than just another cog in a hyper-capitalistic system, serving a higher creative oligarch. 

Visualization Priority and Indian Advertising

Indian Advertising is more creatively challenging and reflective of a filmmaker's personality or visual signature. With advertising in India, directors are actively in charge of making the frame look aesthetically pleasing. That's priority. Then comes the sharpness in the edit, and since screen-time is key, every frame literally has to be at the blink-of-an-eye. Third, comes the graphics and product placement. Lastly, it becomes about the music and sound design. Advertising scripts are usually written by highly-creative copywriters, which are given to be interpreted by highly stylized and tasteful, imaginative production houses and directors. The key-operative-terms here are stylized, tasteful and imaginative. That's what it takes to be an advertising filmmaker. The requirement is quite the contrary from what it takes to be a Hollywood director. Here, performance doesn't matter as much -- in fact, casting a star who will walk on set for an hour and give you the same old library expressions, is more likely to bump up product sales. Take a look at the brilliant designer work of Suresh Eriyat/Studio Eekasaurus for example -- an animation graduate from India's National Institute of Design, he has forayed into live action in the past few years, but his work still retain that animator's touch. He has an exceptional understanding of colour, style, cinematography, technology, camera, mixed-media animation, and a lot more. The music of his films, too, is stylized and pushes cinematic boundaries. This is the kind of understanding that I do not think most Hollywood directors have. It's quite CalArts-ish, the students of whom become either animators or installation-artists, or in rare cases, sell their soul and get into mainstream television. Hollywood studios completely reject out-of-the-box directors. In the pitching process as well for advertising, production houses bag projects through the merit of their pitch which entails elaborate concept art, look books, referencing, storyboarding visual bibles and exquisite pre-visualization. With John Badham's dry personality and his uni-dimensional focus on mise-en-scene and performance craft, I just could not imagine him having the competence of faculties to direct for advertising, unless the requirement is such that the acting is key. No Hollywood director, in my opinion, is well-trained enough to be like any of the slew of creative/hyper-imaginative Indian advertising directos. In most cases, a designer, commercial artist or animator is likely more competent to direct an ad film -- and in that regard as well, India is at the fore-front of animators that are being hired by international studios for major Hollywood motion pictures. They just don't have the skill, or if they do, it's fewer and far between and highly expensive.

The question I wonder often is this: could it also be cultural since India is a country of music and colour, that we tend to infuse emotion through other means than through just the performance? I remember my writer for my last short film Wallpaper, Drew Semler, was completely opposed to the idea of putting any background score in the film. I however, cannot imagine the film holding together without that layer of emotion being added through the music. That's important for me. I don't personally believe solely in the power of an actor, that is overrated in my opinion. Speaking of Wallpaper, another factor less common in the US is the Kuleshov effect, montage-techniques or the post-classical approach. Most Hollywood filmmakers look for authenticity in the performance, and would not like technology come in the way of the audience and the truth in the performance. It's mastubatory and indulgent, almost always neglecting the power of the montage, the power of the cinematic medium and the juxtaposition of images in an edit to imply meaning or underscore an emotional charge. 

The Filmmaker's Voice and Indian Parallel Cinema

A few years ago, I was photographing for an Artyculate campaign, and an elderly man who was walking by, stopped by and he got pretty chatty. He introduced himself as Tanvir Ahmed, a filmmaker from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). That was my first insight into the FTII sensibilites. I started to spend more time with him, as till that point, I wanted to understand the processes of filmmakers apart from my father and Saeed (Mirza) uncle with whom I spent a lot of time. He told me that he wanted to work on a personal film that captured his journey of struggle as a filmmaker and the search of cinema as a pure art form. He thought himself as a reincarnation of Bergman, Resnais, Godard or Bresson. He was eccentric, but later I realised that he really hadn't grown out of the FTII mold -- or what I call the Ritwik Ghatak Ideologue --  and the inflexibility and intellectual arrogance of the freshly graduate. 

The Ritwik Ghatak Ideologue was simple. Unlike Hollywood film schools, craft wasn't priority, but in fact auteurship and the director's personal voice was encouraged. This voice and personality was nurtured and developed at film school, and the course became less about technique but more-so about gaining a worldview and understanding the human condition. In fact, Ghatak is known for saying: Read all the books on film, learn the techniques, but to be a storyteller of consequence, keep a bottle of whiskey in one pocket, and your childhood in another. I completely agree with this, but much like most ideologues - it's only half the truth. Thus emerged a breed of FTII filmmakers in the 70s especially who completely rejected Syd Field, McKee, Blake Snyder, or any three-act structure, hero's journey, or eight-sequence form. They were creating a form of their own, or so they thought. But what was more important to them was actually the controlling idea, theme and the socio-politics of the film, rather than the storytelling itself. And since they saw their filmmaking more as an academic exercise, the storytelling was weak and lacked engagement or dramatic potential. These cinema literates thought in the process of telling their personal stories and creating truly high-art, they could completely neglect the audience. Thus, they were the other extreme opposite of the Hollywood brats. Here, wisdom had more value than cleverness. The stories too chronicled the times, and weren't written in a vacuum. However, an over-indulgence of it's own kind reached it's peak, especially among students in film schools, who spent years of their lives in a journey of self-discovery or finding the perfect form. They simply took themselves too seriously lending itself towards cockiness.

Why am I writing this article? Mostly to rant about the tragedy of our times, but a little bit to make an important point: multi-facedness is important to be a filmmaker of consequence. My students at UPG college once told me what another of their teachers, the filmmaker Satyanshu Singh, had shared with them in a class -- learn about all the departments involved in making a film, but gain mastery over any two. To add to his suggestion, I recommend writing and editing, but if you understand animation and cinematography, perhaps you can be an advertising doyen, maybe even an E Suresh! 

To be continued...