Things You Learn in an Essay Film Class

1. You really, really want Morgan Freeman to play a daddy penguin. You just don’t know it until you’ve seen the original French March of the Penguins (La marche de l’empereur in French).

2. There are emus on the Isle de France.

3. Agnès Varda is a badass little old lady. And a badass film director.

4.  If you don’t like cats, you’re wrong.

5. Going behind the scenes at a museum is about 20 times more interesting than catching a whale, no matter what Captain Ahab might say.

6. There will be emus in the zone.

7. We will all be emus in the zone.

There will be emus in the zone.

So What? Or How Documentaries Got a Bad Rap

As a child, I was convinced that documentaries were all boring – just the two-hour ramblings of 50-plus-year-olds. It took years before this notion was dispelled, and I am not entirely sure when I discovered that documentaries could be interesting. There is one thing I am sure of, though: I wasn’t the only one. I have heard complaints left and right that documentaries are dull, or, in a few instances, that “nobody else” seems to like them. Perhaps the public’s view of documentaries would be different if every moviegoer’s first documentary was as suspenseful as Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard’s Les arrivants (2009), with its first-hand look at immigrants’ trials to become French citizens; or as daring as Patric Jean’s La domination masculine (2009), which plunges into a real life penis enlargement surgery at the beginning of the film. Sadly, a large number of documentaries fail to stir up sympathy and caring the way these two films do. A documentary, even more so than films of other genres, needs to answer one question above all: “So what?” or “Why do I care?” And many documentaries fail to do so not because their subject matter is unimportant or lacks potential, but because they fail to maintain a sense of importance from scene to scene, or even from shot to shot.

There are several factors that contribute to this problem, many of which manifest themselves in two very different documentaries: Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, a 1927 silent film directed by Walter Ruttman, and Pour la suite du monde, a quite chatty film from 1963, directed by Michel Brault, Marcel Carrière, and Pierre Perrault. One may be silent while the other relies heavily on sound; and one may be set in a huge city while the other is set on a backwoods-y island off the coast of Canada. But they have several commonalities, all the same. Both of these films have incredible potential. The filmmakers for each managed to capture bucketfuls of gorgeous footage. Each film captures and preserves a culture and lifestyle that might otherwise be lost over time. And yet each one feels more like a bedtime story for an insomniac than a fascinating document of an old culture.

‘Berlin, Symphony of a [Sometimes Kinda Boring] City’

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City shows off the beautiful buildings, people, and animals that inhabit Germany’s lively capital city – a feat that should surely leave audience members wide-eyed with amazement at the visuals that the film presents. Pour la suite du monde documents a small community on the island Ile-aux-Coudres as they struggle to revive a whaling tradition that died out when the town’s elders were but strapping lads in their teens and twenties. A promising premise indeed. Alas, the films fall far short of expectations. A large part of the films’ problems rest in their editors’ choices of how to arrange the footage. Shots that the editors would have quickly cut out or shortened if they had looked back and asked themselves a few simple questions.

First, a very important pair of questions: “Have I already shown this information in a previous shot?” If so, “Does this new shot add any insight that the previous shot didn’t?” The editors of Berlin, Symphony of a Great City clearly didn’t ask themselves these questions. They seemed fond of horses, for example, which is fair enough – horses are pretty great animals. But the film would every so often cut to a shot of horses simply standing there. Doing what? Oh, nothing much. With the horses doing nothing new or different, the audience has no reason to care about them anymore, even though they are pretty animals. Being pretty, unfortunately, cannot be their only saving grace in a film.

Pour la suite du monde has a similar problem with some of its footage. After much waiting, and then some more waiting, the members of the town finally catch a whale. As if the waiting wasn’t long and repetitive enough, the film now cuts between shots of the sea and shots of the old men saying how excited they are that they finally caught a whale – again – and again – and again. This leaves the audience asking, “Okay, you caught the whale. I understand that. So what now?”

It’s so exciting that we caught the whale! We mustn’t stop rambling now!

A related issue – which Pour la suite du monde particularly struggles with – is length of shots. As nice as it often is to have a long, uninterrupted take of a particular shot or scene, it is important for an editor to ask him or herself, “Why does this shot need to be the length it is? Does the extra length add any meaning? Or can the exact same message be conveyed if I spent less time on this shot?” It would seem that the editors of Pour la suite du monde couldn’t be bothered with this question. One shot in particular sticks out in my mind.

A group of the men are boating down the coast of the island, and the camera cuts to a point of view shot of the water as they travel across it. The shot continues… and continues… and continues… As I watched the film, I began to wonder if there was any point to the shot. It had only taken me a couple of seconds to take in and admire the seascape, as there was little to no change throughout the shot, save the motion of the camera. The scenery itself was uniform. No whales appeared to interrupt the monotony, and at that point nobody was really expecting that to happen. Nor were there were any apparent disasters with the traps that the townspeople had set. Finally, some of the townspeople began to talk about the traps. “Hey, a fish in the water, a fish in the sea! We only have about 3 miles of fishery to watch over. But we set the weir up here, miraculously!” At last, I understood why we stayed on this shot so long. It was a nice way to transition into the dialogue, which provided insights into how the island’s residents thought about the traps. But the editors could have easily lopped off a sizeable chunk from the beginning of that shot.

Footage of this trap takes up virtually half of ‘Pour la suite du monde’. Actually catching whales takes up about one eighth of it.

Some people might easily claim that this kind of technique – the long take that does not appear to give its audience any new information – is often used to build up suspense. Watch, for example, pretty much any episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and you have at least a 50-50 chance of seeing that tactic used effectively. And that may have worked for Pour la suite du monde – if there was any expectation that something surprising or exciting might happen.

Others may argue that staying on one image longer can effectively build a slower pace. This is true to an extent. I like to think of this tactic the way one might think of music. It’s all about timing. If you compose a piece of music, it’s perfectly acceptable to every so often have, say, a tuba play a whole note (a single note that lasts an entire measure, or four beats) instead of your more common, shorter half notes and quarter notes. But if you decided that the tuba should just keep playing that same note for several measures, without taking a breath and without any other instruments chiming in, your audience is likely going to get bored and, quite possibly, become slightly confused by this monotonous solo. In short, if a take is long and unvarying enough that the audience has time to question its importance, it’s probably too long.

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, on the other hand, does not have an unreasonable number of ridiculously long takes, for which it deserves credit. However, some of its shots still feel too long despite the fact that they last only a few seconds each. Why? These shots, while pretty, contributed little to, and gained nothing from, being part of a film. Which leads us to our next question that editors must ask when putting a shot in a film: “What does this image gain from being in a motion picture? Would it loose any of its power or meaning if it were a still photograph?” Everybody who works on a film, especially its editors, must remind themselves that, in a way, their film will be holding its audience captive. Unlike in a photo gallery or museum, the viewers cannot simply look at an image for the amount of time they wish, and then move on when they are satisfied. Berlin has many images that are pretty or fun to look at – buildings, animals, a small car wedged goofily between two vehicles twice its size. But if viewers are simply watching pictures of horses doing nothing, or a cars standing still and silent next to each other, why are we sitting on our bums for over an hour in front of a screen? We could instead be walking around a gallery, stretching our legs, and enjoying equally pretty still photographs at our own leisure.

Images from one of the more exciting scenes in Berlin.

As gorgeous as it is, the 105-minute Symphony of a Great City could probably be whittled down to 15 minutes. Keep in the fast-paced montages and the small anecdotes that help the audience wake up and get excited – telephone operators struggling to answer masses of phones ringing off the hook; a police officer having to break up a street squabble; a speeding train, intercut with the exhilaratingly quick-paced shots of scenery zooming by and train wheels chugging. Keep some of the pretty shots to create more slowly paced moments – one or two shots of horses, a handful shots of Berlin’s beautiful buildings, some interesting shop windows, a few shots of the street traffic – but pick and choose only the best.

A print journalist must weed out even some of their favorite sentences from an article to meet word count, so that readers can enjoy the entire article and still have appetite, so to speak, for the rest of the day’s news. Similarly, filmmakers must let go of even some of their most precious shots to avoid making viewers feel like hostages to their film. A filmmaker, like a writer, must remember that, while his overall message may be important, his opinions on the smaller pieces that should make up the bigger picture can be strongly biased due to sentimentality and to his personal experiences while finding and capturing the information he wants. There are many questions a film editor can ask to help decide what to weed out, but they all boil down to one idea: will this capture the audience’s interest, and not just mine? Why would outsiders care about this moment? In other words, “So what?”

Would You Like a Side of a White British Guy With That?

Certain new movies this year have managed to royally piss me off. I don’t even have to watch some of them to come yea close to bashing my head against a movie screen. Now, you might well tell me, “You could be going apeshit over poverty or crappy education or corrupt politicians. Why get so flustered over movies?” The answer: sheer lack of shit-giving when it comes to casting, not only in a field that I am planning on working in, but in a field that has a lot of influence over a mind-boggling number of people. (Just think how many people must see these big Hollywood movies. And think of the messages that even the subtlest artistic choices can send to all of these people.)

Now, this is not to say that the movie stars are necessarily bad at what they do. Whether or not that is the case is an issue for another time. Where our concern lies is the sheer whitewashing of very explicitly non-white characters.

Most recently, of course, The Lone Ranger came out, starring the very, very caucasian Johnny Depp as the very, very Native American Tonto. Excuse me? What? Where did that come from? Evidently he has barely enough Native American blood to count as, er… something. (Seriously, when I say barely, I mean barely. Y’know, his great grandma was very something-or-other, ’cause, y’know, she grew up, like, very something-or-other.) Sorry, sonny. You’re white, and it shows.

Yeah, bud… are you even trying to be racially/ethnically sensitive? (source)

But you know what? I can almost tolerate Lone Ranger, if only because shortly after its release, it was panned as an overly-polished piece of crap.

It’s another movie – one that has plenty of people drooling lakes over it, despite its whitewashing of one of sci-fi’s most classic characters – that really disturbs me. Star Trek Into Darkness. Benedict Cumberbatch, who ranks high on the “very, very caucasian” scale, plays one of Star Trek’s most popular – and least white – villains: Khan Noonien Singh, an explicitly Indian man, who is supposed to be one of a select bunch of genetically perfect (or near perfect) human beings.

Cumberbatch is lauded by many for an incredible performance, but to be honest, it would have been just as easy for director J.J. Abrams to find an equally good actor who has a little more color to him than a sheet of printer paper. I’m ashamed to say that the original series of Star Trek – an extremely low-budget television show made during the 1960s – did a much better casting job for Khan with Ricardo Montalban, who wasn’t even from the same continent as India (he was Mexican). At least his appearance didn’t scream “Whitey McWhiteypants” as soon as he popped onto the screen. Is J.J. Abrams saying that today, in the 21st century, we can’t even do half as well as the 1960s, when it was a frakking big deal that Uhura was black and Chekov was Russian?

And I can tell you right now that it is easy as eating popcorn to find people of all ethnicities who are also excellent actors looking for work. My last two short film projects looked proportionally more diverse than both of J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek movies combined. And let’s not forget that…

1. I had barely any budget. I paid my cast and crew on both sets by feeding them and helping them with their own projects. Seriously. No cash, no checks. Just food and a little I’ll-help-you-if-you-help-me. J.J. Abrams had way more mula to spend on paying the actor who would be the perfect fit.
2. This low budget meant that I didn’t get any help from a casting director (which, I can assure you, J.J. Abrams had). This means that I did all my own networking and advertising for auditions, as well as helping friends cast their own films. Abrams was able to cast a wider net because he had the help of people – namely casting directors – who already had access to a huge network of actors.
3. You know what else Abrams had the budget to do? Search for actors outside of the city where he was living in at the time.

So, in short, J.J. Abrams had no excuse for casting a white boy as a very, very not white boy. And you know what makes it even worse? I said it before, and I’ll say it again – Khan is supposed to be a genetically superior human being. So what are we telling ourselves by turning him into Marty McWhite? Certainly not that darker skin is a superior trait to have.

It is a director’s responsibility – J.J. Abrams for Star Trek and Gore Verbinski (of Pirates of the Caribbean fame) for Lone Ranger – to judge all traits of an actor before making the final casting decision. Not just whether the actor has the right kind of talent, but whether (s)he can fit the part physically. You’re not going to cast Michael Cera as a wrestler or a mob boss in a film unless you’re going for slapstick. And no sane person would cast Mickey Rourke as an awkward, gangly teenager. Say what you want about their acting abilities, but those casting choices just wouldn’t make sense. Am I right, folks?

So sure, both Johnny Depp and Benedict Cumberbatch may be skilled at their craft, but no matter what great actors they are, they can’t all of a sudden stop being middle-aged white British guys. So why, in this day and age, did already big-name directors of already big-name movies with casts already consisting of other big-name actors (e.g. Helena Bonham-Carter in Lone Ranger, Chris Pine in Star Trek) feel the need to whitewash clearly non-white characters?

Sometimes, I’m afraid of taking up a career in film. I can’t help but think that I’ll be stepping into an environment that tells me, “Only white, cisgendered men are supposed to be badass. And sometimes sexy white girls.” Is that the culture that I want to be surrounded by? Is that what I want to help perpetuate?

‘Barbarella’: Barbie of the Film Industry

Like spaceships? Like the idea of floating around in space? What about girls? Do you like girls? What about girls in space? Sexy girls in space? Naked girls in space? Hmm? Hmm?

The 1968 film Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim, seems to be screaming these questions during its first scene – a strip tease in which Jane Fonda, playing Barbarella herself, awkwardly removes pieces of a clunky, futuristic space suit. Throughout its 98-minute run, the film can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a thrilling action adventure or a porn flick.

Jane Fonda as Barbarella in the kind of clothes that any normal space adventurer would wear.

Barbarella is a sexy young space traveler from Earth who has been sent on a mission by none other than the “President of Earth.” She must save the universe’s peacefulness, and thus Earth, by defeating the evil scientist Durand-Durand. And yet, for a hero who is entrusted with saving the universe, she seems to have trouble doing anything more than getting into scrapes that result in her becoming scantily clad and sexily positioned on the floor or tied to a pole. (Each time this happens, she promptly gets rescued by a man who solicits sex as repayment for saving her. You know, just like any normal girl.)

The film redeems itself a fair amount by refusing to take itself seriously. By acknowledging its own silliness, the film allows us to laugh along with it instead of just fidgeting uncomfortably and giggling at inappropriate moments. The pure silliness of Barbarella getting attacked by dolls and birds, and the extreme, hair-exploding reactions to the hand-orgy that she has with the revolutionary Dildano (that oh-so-average and un-suggestive name that everybody was giving to their kids in the sixties) are some of the most ridiculous things that you have probably ever seen. And Vadim seems to recognize that. Characters comically stumble and bumble into others’ intimate moments. And Barbarella is more wide-eyed and farcically innocent about sex than any adult woman could possibly be, all while engaging in at least four different sexual acts throughout the film.

Still, as much as the film is able to laugh at itself, a person almost feels guilty for enjoying the film, especially given its star’s history. Fonda struggled with bulimia at the time, and being shown as a sex object seemed to only increase her anxieties. Add onto that, she was married to Vadim during the shooting of the film, and they were going through one hell of a rough patch. The star has since admitted in interviews that she went along with threesomes that her husband suggested, despite her discomfort, in order to make Vadim happy. “It hurt me. It reinforced me feeling I wasn’t good enough,” she told CNN’s Rebecca Leung in 2009. “One of the reasons that I went along with it was because I felt that if I said no, that he would leave, and I couldn’t imagine myself without him.”

The sexily torn and otherwise strange, fetishistic costumes that Fonda wore as Barbarella seemed, to her, to be another way of enlivening a dying marriage. She described herself as, “infected with the disease to please. Not with women – I’m fine with women, but with men. ‘Whatever you want, honey, I’ll become.’”

These days, when she looks back at the film, Fonda is much more generous towards it. In a 2011 interview with Piers Morgan, she told him that, “I think it’s a charming camp movie, not very sexy. But at the time young men had their first experiences looking at the film and I’m glad of that. I think it’s kind of cool that I aroused a lot of young men at that certain time.”

For some of us, the film, despite its self-deprecating humor and camp, and despite Fonda’s more recent acceptance of it, is still somewhat difficult to digest.

Perhaps it would be a little easier to go along with the film if Barbarella was a more empowering character who could take care of herself. Instead of being rescued by a man every time she gets in trouble, it might be nice to see her gun down the man-eating dolls who attack her. Or break herself out of the glass cage in which she’s trapped with vicious birds who seem to hate the idea of a fully-clothed woman, rather than being flown down a secret escape chute by Dildano.

Maybe if the film had not fed its star’s insecurities and self-destructive behaviors at the time, it would be easier to accept Barbarella as a simple piece of fun. As it stands, Barbarella is the Barbie doll of film culture – a sexy-looking toy that you feel guilty for playing with as soon as you start paying attention to the implications it has for women.

Caché

Binoche as Anne Laurent in “Caché.” (source)

I am quickly learning that Juliette Binoche is an amazing actress. Anybody who’s seen Bleu (Blue) from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s famous Trois couleurs (Three Colors) series could tell you that. And despite having a supporting role in Caché (Hidden), she shines like a star, nearly overshadowing actual star Daniel Auteuil.

Binoche plays Anne Laurent, the wife of Georges Laurent (Auteuil), who has been receiving threatening drawings and creepy video tapes that record Georges as he goes about daily activities. We follow the Laurents as they try to figure out who is recording their lives and how, and what the drawings mean. Binoche’s expressions are soaked in vulnerability as she worries about her husband, her son, and herself alike. But I’ve learned to expect such excellence from her. She is an amazing drama actress.

Unlike that of Binoche, Auteuil’s performance was completely unexpected. Before Caché, I had only seen him in comic roles – the bumbling Ugolin in Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (Manon of the Springs); François Pignon, the too-straight-for-his-own-good lead man in Le placard (The Closet, a personal guilty pleasure film). So when I recognized him in Caché, with all its tension and drama, I naturally raised an eyebrow. But despite working in Binoche’s shadow, Auteuil gave his own powerhouse performance, delivering Georges Laurent’s neurosis and conflicted morals in such a way that we ping like pinballs between fully sympathizing and wanting to bash him over the head and not knowing which to feel. Both he and Binoche feel very real as Anne and Georges Laurent.

The supporting cast is also incredible. Maurice Bénichou delivers an amazingly sympathetic performance as Majid, a man of Arabic descent who Georges Laurent’s parents had adopted when Georges was only six years old. Walid Afkir only gets a couple of scenes as Majid’s son, but when he is onscreen, he steals the scene. (To go into detail about Majid and his son would be to risk spoiling significant portions of the movie.) And let’s not forget Lester Makedonsky, who is very convincing as the Laurents’ teenage son, Pierrot, who is obviously going through an emotional roller coaster.

Afkir as Majid’s son. (source)

Unfortunately, while the dialogue is captivating and the actors bring the script to life with great success, the editing is at best mediocre. In an attempt to capture the effect of the stalker’s monitoring cameras, the editors allowed for still shots that lasted several minutes without anything of evident significance happening. This works for the opening shot, in which we see little pockets of movement in the Laurents’ otherwise still neighborhood. But some of the other shots that use the same technique are so full of mundane activity, such as children leaving school, that we don’t know what to pay attention to and thus get bored after the first minute or two of the shot.

All the same, the dialogue and the actors carry the movie and do an excellent job. Anybody looking for a mind bending, if emotionally heavy thriller ought to find a DVD of Caché and prepare for a worthwhile Friday movie night.