Criticism Concepts 4: Filmmaking calculus with the Director

 
(Here’s part two of the criticism concepts production. Click here for part 1.)

A few months back, I decided to launch a series examining the many hands which join together to create the film and television works that bring so much joy into our lives. We started with the screenplay, since it provides the blueprint with which to construct the film, even if the idea originated elsewhere. But for most movie goers and critics alike, the answer to “Who made this movie?” rests undoubtedly with one figure: the director. The screenwriter may produce the outline, but the film or series finds its form through the skillful eyes and nimble hands of the one parked in the director’s chair. Yet for all the attention thrown its way, few roles in the creative team are as murky or misunderstood, due largely to its all-encompassing nature. While we all “know” that Steven Spielberg was “responsible” for the success of Jurassic Park, few can draw a clear picture of what he actually did on the set, minus the caricature of a little man in a black beret with a megaphone yelling “Cut!” at appropriate moments.

Though I stand firmly against the errency of fingering one role as “the one” behind a movie or show’s impact, the director has an undeniably central part in transforming the screenplay's rough scaffolding into a grand creative monument. So with that in mind, let’s dive in and uncork the magic behind the megaphone.

 

Contributor 2: The Director

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about - Satyajit Ray

You might forgive the great Indian director Satyajit Ray for his seemingly self-serving observation; truthfully, he’s not far off the mark. Screenwriters, actors, and many others make essential contributions in any production, but the director hovers over the entire process from start to finish. They mind the producers' budget and modify the script as needed; through casting directors, they have a say in finding the right actors and actresses; and they steer what stays and what goes in the post-production chopping block. The director provides the crucial link among the creative, technical, and production arms of a project, and therefore makes the best claim for most crucial member in the whole shebang. 

Though the director's shadow looms large over the entirety of the film and television pipeline, we’re concerned only with its creative function right now. If the screenwriter provides the film’s fundamental structure, then the director’s main job involves injecting that structure with dynamism. Directors control the plot’s scope, set or modify the pacing, and create a sense of continuous narrative flow. If I could condense this to a simple analogy (a preemptive pardon to those who suffer from high school math PTSD) the screenplay is a lot like algebra: structured, relatively static, and concerned with how its pieces fit together. Film direction, meanwhile, is calculus, bringing the structure of the screenplay into an environment which requires dynamic, real-time application of the production’s narrative elements.

As such, tagging the specific nuts-and-bolts of screen direction can never be a point-for-point checklist as with the screenplay; the role fits the turbulent flow of the production process too closely. A basic starting point concerns film time. A director must lift the neatly structured segments of the screenplay and adjust them to the flow of time.This is not synonymous with pacing, that much-used but little-understood word. Pacing involves the rate of movement within a film narrative, while film time incorporates that, plus the general sense of temporal perception the work imposes upon the audience. The centrality of time as a narrative constraint, and how it’s preserved, presented, chopped, or concentrated, represents scripted media’s signature departure from the strictly printed word. Though “pacing,” loosely defined, counts in a novel or short story to some degree, those media can afford to unfurl their narratives in a leisurely manner; few readers, after all, attempt something like Infinite Jest in one sitting. But when you only have thirty minutes to two hours to capture and hold your audience’s attention, you can’t take their compliance for granted, especially if you take your sweet time getting to the point.

In addition, the director molds the narrative’s collective vision. As a film’s supposed primary author, the director must gather the contributions of disparate and often cantankerous creative types into a cohesive (if somewhat motley) crew, ready to set sail towards their ever-widening horizon. And as captain, directors forge vision as much by what they constrain as by what they allow. With a finger on financial and production as well as creative concerns, skilled directors must bring the static screenplay images to life within budgetary boundaries established by his or her producers (assuming, of course, that he/she isn’t also rolling the checkbook). Lastly, the director has primary control over the film’s tonal style. Genre, if applicable, can be outlined within the screenplay, but the director sorts through the various styles that genre may embody and converts it into a visual experience that rings true to the audience. Romantic comedies, for example, may flake from the great mountain of Hollywood like so many interchangeable pieces of flint, but subtle intonations of character direction, of lighting and music, peculiar to that genre add a degree of luster and variance. Though style carries a rather sour taste in the mouths of most directors thanks to over-eager critics applying the term to broad swaths of a creator's work in a fruitless exercise of pattern-seeking, I use "style" solely as it applies to an individual film or series. Spatial acuity also plays into tone, since building the sense of wide open space, or taking many small shots of actor closeups, creates or destroys a sense of intimacy, which has a major impact on how we experience what we watch. This relates to what's called the mise-en-scène, the arrangement of lighting, music, costume, and cinematography which together constructs the camera’s visual logic.

Film Direction: The Good and The Bad

Distinguishing good from bad directing presents the same challenges as writing: you may know it when you see it, but might struggle to put the "how" and "why" into any kind of analysis. The director’s ubiquity on the set compounds this, since the designated auteur will inevitably get blamed for any failing in the film’s narrative.

Good directing first and foremost gives the film a sense of being a cohesive whole, bringing together the myriad collective visions of a feature's contributors — writers, actors, composers — and creating a seamless entity as a result. This demands above all a sense of balance as well as a comprehension of both the genre and expected audience. Good directors make works which immerse the audience into the world as created, and fosters any willingness to suspend disbelief. Likewise, good directors have mastered the art of film time, including pacing and other conditioned temporal experiences imparted to the audience. Controlling the flow of time is perhaps the director’s prime creative raison d'etre, and films live and die by its mastery. Equally important is the competent utilization of space — like the much mangled term “cinematography,” which, stripped of all pretense, denotes the science of capturing light and motion for aesthetic appeal. By that same token, a competent director must pour his or her full attention into the art of casting. Good actors make or break one’s film, so choice casting goes a long way towards a successful production.

Bad directing is, quite bluntly, bad film making. While any number of factors may combine to lift bad acting, a bad screenplay, unfitting music, and a host of other snags from sinking a piece too far down the toilet drain, the director in the end has the final responsibility for how well or poorly the finished work turns out. The worst directors are too hands off with the medium’s numerous contributors, failing to properly synthesize the creative collective and leaving the end product a disjointed, ungainly mess. Poor directors fumble the fine-tuned calculus needed to maintain the film’s pacing and through extension, the audience's engagement. I may harp on the critical importance of film time like a broken record, but it really does demand attention as the most under appreciated yet essential element of good screen storytelling, and its execution lies solely in the hands of the director.

Analytical outline

The inherently dynamic nature of directing eschews any simple outline as built in the previous post about screenplays. Indeed, any movie failing can, legitimately, be placed on a director’s shoulders in some fashion, whether it be in the script, in the acting, or even the post-production. But where the director stands alone in his or her might or folly concerns those specific elements of time and unity; a film or television show could not exist without them, and here, the director truly lives up (or down) to the contentious “film author” label.

• Film time: More than anything, the director controls the flow of time in a work, determines how the story unfolds, and shapes how the audience perceives the events as displayed. 
• Pacing: Does the film seem to drag out or race ahead in certain spots, leaving you confused? Pacing is essential to any production, and if you can’t make heads or tales of where something is headed and why, then your director isn’t doing their job. 
• Internal chronology: Do the events unfold in a time frame that doesn’t stretch the imagination too thin? Did your lead characters, say, plan a robbery, knock over an armored truck, and high-tail it across the country to Phoenix in the span of, oh, 5 hours? This punts suspension of disbelief way left of the goalpost by a good bit, and is a faux pas of a cardinal order. 

• Integrating Visions: The director must bring together various narrative elements into one seamless whole — arguably the most difficult creative component of the job. Although screenwriters, actors, and cinematographers share an especially large slice of the creative pie when it comes to the quality of the final product, the director functions not only to bridge the writer’s vision with the cinematographer’s technical know-how to build a polished product, but to ensure the right actors match the roles they have been given. The rules for integrating this vision, as with so much in the director’s calculus, contain much flexibility and subtlety, so recognizing where and when something goes wrong is more art than science; but the director must always keep in mind the collaborative nature of the set, even with something as fundamentally solitary as writing. 

• Style: As I touched on above, I propose style here to mean something more modest than the usual application: a set of elements which combine to reflect a film or television set's own internal logic.
• Applicability: Does the tone and direction match what one would expect of a work in this particular genre? This skates a fine line, since you don't want to punish a director for attempting something different, and yet, you still want an end product recognizable as what you expected when you walked into the theater. If you came in looking for high fantasy and leave with something completely different, a disconnect between marketing and the director's vision likely bears the blame.
• Spatial manipulation: Are there too many long, overhead shots for a seemingly light-hearted film? Does a film set in a wide-open or constructed world narrow in too closely to the characters' faces at the exclusion of the setting? These aren't cinematography errors; they reflect a wrong-headed commitment to injecting a particular stylistic mood into an environment which does not warrant it.

• Cinematography: Though the director of photography arguably deserves his or her own moment in the spotlight, this vital link ultimately takes most cues from the big chair itself. As both a fine art and a technical science, nailing down what does and doesn't work unfortunately falls into the "know 'em when you see 'em" category, but poor application of cinematography usually involves using a particular angle or style of framing when it would not enhance the film, or using too little or too much lighting to the same effect.

Despite the critical importance of the screenwriter and screenplay, the director's chair constitutes the creative nexus on any set. Turning a static script into a dynamic screened medium remains to this day an art arcane in its methods, daunting in its challenges, and, flawlessly performed, almost divine in execution. But though a film's entire production staff remains beholden to the directors and their jazzy calculus, there remains one crew member who rivals the chair in the ability to make or brake audience engagement. These are the actors, and next time, I'll dive into their own contribution to the film making process.

Criticism Concepts 3: Screenplays and the bones of a story

Film and television provide unique vehicles for creative expression. Unlike the singular vision of a novelist, concerned with forging an individual connection with a particular readership, screened media represents a massive collaborative effort unlike any other form of entertainment. Even theater relies heavily on the chops of its playwrights, with actors playing close to character as crafted on the page. Though stories created for the screen start with the written word, they quickly float into a wider creative world to which directors, actors, cinematographers, and others all stake a claim.

This creates a special challenge for the critic.  Giving a fair assessment of a movie or television program—pointing out what works and how to make it better, as opposed to merely picking at its rotten bones like a vulture—requires a recognition of the many voices bubbling underneath.  The predefined grooves of genre and demographic help guide our expectations, but standing out from the herd demands bringing together these different visions into a cohesive whole, and the strength of the final product rests in how well the creators accomplish this.  A decent movie can get away with a deficiency in any one area with a strong showing in another; a great movie brings out the best of every element, achieving a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

So with that in mind, we'll begin a short series here on how to walk through and critically examine a film not as a whole, but though each creative collaborator. I don’t intend to provide an exhaustive list of a movie or television series’ who’s-who, nor do I think such an atomized analysis of a holistic medium to be the “proper” method of critique. But acknowledging the many talents who coalesce to make a movie or show work may deepen an appreciation of what each of them individually contributes.  

So without further ado, let’s start with arguably the heart of the matter: the screenplay.

Contributor 1: The Screenwriter

 Writers are the most important people in Hollywood. And we must never let them know it.” - Irving Thalberg  

The quote above hints at a basic though often unacknowledged truth in Hollywood. Even if an idea originates elsewhere, the script and storyboard provide the scaffolding upon which the narrative of a film is built.  A building is only as strong as its foundation, and the foundation begins with a cornerstone; a solid screenplay forms that first slab of bedrock, igniting the interests of a production team who then scramble to complete the grand design. When evaluating the merits of a screened entity from the standpoint of its writing, the would-be critic's principle concern is its structure.  A screenplay should include the divisions of the story—the beginning, middle, and ending of classical storytelling—and provide answers to the Five Ws at the core of any plot: Who is it about, What are they doing, Where and When are they doing it, and Why any of it matters to anyone, in or out of the story.  And of course, a good screenplay should at least hint at the essential ingredient of any good narrative: conflict.  The story's conflict must be clear and compelling, and must resonate with both the production staff, and the screenwriter's target audience.

Besides the narrative structure, the screenplay also determines at least the initial form of the narrative’s characters. Characters sit at the center of most stories, yet no other element relies so much on the creative input of other participants.  Although I argue that effective onscreen characterization owes more to the talents the medium's actors or even director, the screenwriter initiates the creation of well-rounded, credible humans via a character profile.  Though many writers turn their noses up at character profiling under the belief that it stifles creativity or limits the imagination, a detailed yet flexible profile fleshes out characters while keeping them grounded in some semblance of reality. A good profile will cover basic personality construction and a survey of motivations, as well as permit consistency and complexity to continue within the writer’s direction.  This proves critical when creating plot-driven works, where characters serve as much to facilitate the setting as to be dynamic entities in their own rights. As many of today’s most popular genres fall under that broad tent, character profiles land a heightened importance within the screenwriter's creative toolkit.  

Screenplays: The Good and The Bad Screenplay writing is an art with many faucets, but the above should be a good place to dive into critical analysis.  So how do we cut the blockbuster wheat from the B-studio chafe?

A good screenplay covers all of the bases above, besides crafting its subject with enough flare to rouse interest even in the first few pages of reading.  A good screenwriter knows he or she writes for a visual medium, and when setting the pace of their narratives, must frame them in a way that draws the attention of both their imagined audience, and the producers who wield the power of life or death for their nascent story.  Connected to that, good screenwriters recognize that they’re not novelists— they’re writing for the collective effort, not the one-on-one interaction between reader and author. Therefore the screenplay should be detailed enough to give the studio collaborators something to work with, but not so much as to demand extensive pruning. 

A bad screenplay muddles its storytelling, either forgetting the aforementioned core elements, or smashing them in with such incompetence as to turn away prospective viewers.  Note that a bad screenplay is not, necessarily, a bad idea, or even a bad story; the distance between inspiration and execution depends on the writer’s media awareness as much as skill.  I imagine but a fraction of the world’s best novels would turn a producer’s head if they landed in his or her lap.  Though grabbing the reader’s interest as soon as possible can spell life or death for a story in any format, novels have more time to develop and expand over numerous facets and subplots.  Neither producers nor moviegoers are that forgiving. A screenplay demands a more direct and linear narrative style, one which gets at the heart of the drama, clearly states the conflict, and incorporates the narrative elements mentioned above within a concise, reasonable time frame.  All writers worthy of the name understand that they are writing for others and not just themselves; screenwriters should be doubly aware of this, and neglect it at their peril. 

Analytical Outline 

Being the cornerstone of a movie or television series means having a heap of other structures built on top of you, obscuring your essential role. But keeping the above in mind, we can pierce through the mortar to hash out an outline of this essential keystone's direct contribution:

1. The Structure: Remember: a screenplay’s fundamental contribution to a movie is its general structure.  Does the structure make sense?
1. The Five Ws: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Does a movie/show fail to adequately introduce its main characters or explain their motives and/or purpose for being there?  If so, that reveals a fundamental flaw in the shaping narrative.
2. Conflict: Meaningful conflict rests at the heart of any good story; even solid comedies possess protagonists who desire and antagonists who, however light-heartedly, thwart them.  Keep an eye out for the classic conflicts of literature: Man against Nature, Man against Man, Man against Society, Man against Self, and Man against Fate (sometimes colluded with the Supernatural).  Can you recognize any of those elements over the course of the production? If the conflict onscreen makes not one lick of sense to you, then there’s a rot somewhere down in the source.
3. Beginning, Middle, and End: The beginning establishes our characters and the basic setting, the middle deepens our empathy for said characters and spotlights the central conflict, and the ending rises to climax and offers a resolution.  While certain structural dynamics, like pacing and scene compression, lay with the director and others, a solid screenplay should limit the necessary work by clearly marking those divisions.
2. Characterization outline: Actors bring characters to life, but the screenplay provides the clay they work with.  This is especially important in indie productions, where the individual talents of a big name actor or director won’t swoop in to uplift a shoddy script.  A character profile should provide at least four things:
1. Consistency: Do the characters seem to wander all over the place?  Hold wild swings of thought and values from beginning to end without a sensible reason given?  Foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little scripts, so losing track of who the characters are supposed to be is a serious foundational problem. 
2. Complexity: This may not seem that important if you’re writing, say, a slasher film with disposable teen bodies, but a profile should allow enough complexity to avoid base stereotypes and provide sufficient character motivation, which even the best actors require to fully breath into their roles.
3. Individuality: This goes hand-in-hand with complexity.  Are the characters     mirror images of one another, with hardly any deviation of traits or motives?  If so, it makes for a bad screenplay and a boring film. 
4. Exaggeration: This might seem to clash with the warning about stereotypes above, but tasteful exaggeration, particularly in tense moments, can deepen characterization, arouse interest, and forge empathy onscreen.  Though actors hold the reigns on how effectively this comes across in action, if the scene calls for an “angry outburst,” but fails to determine how angry and at whom (or what), then it will fall a bit flat in all but the most capable performances.
   

   

Take the guidelines above with a grain of salt, but when you next walk into a theater or sit down for your monthly “Netflix and chill,” keeping an eye out for those points. Next time, we’ll visit the directors and how they solve the calculus of film making.

Until then, keep watching.

Anime: A Meditation on Appeal

The Appeal of Anime

Look back to the early 90s, and you'll find anime - that special brand of animation from the Land of the Rising Sun - a niche entity, with a small yet devoted following among a few bands of dedicated geeks. Fast forward to the present, and that once niche outcrop standing lonely in the West is now a towering mountain of popularity, sheltering a huge, multi-million dollar industry across both sides of the Pacific. For those on the outside, the luster of this Japanese juggernaut seems way beyond us. What’s the big deal, we ask, about a bunch of cartoons?  

Well, a lot, apparently - enough to merit an examination of all the myriad ways anime has touched its faithful devoted - and why it might fall flat with others.

Cowboy Bebop

But first, the brass tacks: anime is not a genre. It is a medium, and that makes a big difference in this discussion. Too often, people toss around careless statements, like “I don’t like anime” or “Anime is the best,” like you're declaring a love for comedies or action films. Any snap judgment about anime centered on a few select tropes is bound to fizzle since it's basically the equivalent of saying you love or hate "movies" in the very broadest sense. Anime as a category is too vast for any kind of all-encompassing opinion to make a lick of sense, since series like Cowboy Bebop and Sailor Moon have next to nothing in common - any more than Friends and 24 can be counted as the same because they’re both live action shows from America.  

So with that in mind, let’s take a stab at why this broad medium reigns in the hearts of many millions of people worldwide.

 For the Love of Animation

Quite simply, you can’t appreciate anime if you don’t appreciate animation as a medium of entertainment. While there are quite a few self-declared anime fans who thumb their noses at anything they construe derisively as a “cartoon,” their enmity is more a rejection of the cultural baggage dredged up by those other, mostly American forms. Anime forges a connection with those who spurn the idea that they are too old/mature/masculine/whatever to “waste time on cartoons.” Personally, I’ve always held a great love for creative media, whether in text, graphic or animation form, and never miss an opportunity to pass time with a good animated flick or series, no matter where it comes from. Animation is an art form, one capable of  breathtaking beauty and wondrous enchantment, and for cultures reared on the Disney formula, stepping out of the "for kids only" cartoon ghetto can be quite liberating.

Hajime no Ippo

With that in mind, anime stands out as a unique animation vehicle, with a number of distinctions that sets the hearts of its fans ablaze. You can generally divide these traits into two camps: extrinsic factors of the medium itself - i.e. its diversity and aesthetics; and intrinsic factors bound up with what the viewers bring to the table, particularly how they concern subculture identification.

A Wide, Wide World

I know I keep beating that "it's a medium, not a genre!" shtick like a red-headed dead horse, but it's needed. We in the West are often blind to animation's potential through our maddeningly opaque set of Disney goggles, and even as the scales slowly fall from our eyes with the advent of more “adult” cartoons, it'll be a long time before we see anything close to the stunning diversity found in Japan’s best studios. Many of the same genres that grace the big screen in Western box offices, like heavy action flicks, stylized sci-fi and the like, are equally abundant in anime, and without the constraints of special effects budgets or real world physics. But there are rarer beasts lurking as well: a plethora of teen musical dramas, goofball comedies, gritty didactic fiction, and other genres that are practically unicorns in American entertainment.  Sports dramas, for example, are an endangered species on film, and virtually extinct in series format; but they thrive in anime with popular shows like Hajime no Ippo and Haikyuu!! The infamous “harem” genre, featuring an average joe or jane dating or even marrying multiple men and/or women, is a no-man's land in the States, but common as dirt in anime. And some of the flat-out bizarre comedy madhouses like FLCL and Excel Saga have few if any analogs anywhere in the West - animated or not. The freedom inherent to the medium means that all sorts of scenarios you couldn't imagine playing out in real life find a comfortable home under its umbrella.

That Certain (Aesthetic) Touch

Still, anime's tremendous diversity doesn't keep its manifold manifestations from sharing certain traits that split off from most Western media in culturally specified ways. Anime encompasses a great swath of genres, from the dark and gritty to the bright and shimmering, but on the whole it leans towards an idealized aesthetic. At the risk of generalizing, youth and energy are prevalent dressing on the backdrops of many anime properties, and in Japanese multimedia as a whole. This is at the heart of the “big-eyed” and cute appearance of many anime characters, especially those targeted at younger demographics, and even in less optimistic settings, fair looks and colorful clothes are not out of place. Not only that, but anime characters are largely more expressive and emotional than their Western counterpoints, often exaggerating facial features to get a particular mood across. For its

Akira

devotees, these traits lend anime a relatability that's harder to find in the more subdued or stiff styles typical to the West, and the expressiveness in particular can heighten the emotional charge, for comedic or dramatic purposes, in very potent ways. However, this bend towards the bright, the colorful, and the expressive slips between the ire of many anime “haters,” especially those who equate seriousness with the dark, gritty, or even the grotesque. But besides being superficial to the point of causing headaches, this line of thinking falls flat against the medium’s diversity.  You don't waltz into a Pixar film and complain about the lack of violence or dark realism; likewise, don't stumble into an anime with bright colors and characters who look like they fell out of a rummage sale truck bin if you want to satisfy those same urges.  There's a big enough pie out there to feed anyone's tastes.   

A Marker of Identity

But besides the visual feasts and wide selection offered, many fans in the West latch onto anime as a counterculture identification. Anime has often been a magnet for many who, either by their own reckoning or others', fall outside of the mainstream: the freaks and geeks, the shy and socially awkward, the derided and the untouchable. There has always been a certain unity in geekdom, tying cartoon, anime and manga fans together with fantasy fanatics, sci-fi nerds, and, to a lesser extent, trading card and video gamers. This knot was a bit tighter way back in the early- and mid-90s, when a stream of new wave anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell swept through theaters as JRPG imports like the Final Fantasy juggernaut dominated console gaming; but even today, there is enough shared ground to bring all of these diverse fandoms together at massive, city-wide pop culture conventions. Some fans gather to dissect their animes for peeks into Japanese culture; some use it as a badge of difference, a line in the sand separating their hobbies from those of the “other” kids. And still others simply enjoy sharing interests with like-minded people, even as they take a secret pride in knowing said interests are terra incognito to the wider culture and makes their inner circle seem all the more exclusive. The need to belong is a universal human instinct, and anime is no different from any other trend, past or present, that accepts the perennial social misfits into its sphere.  This is all broad generalization, of course, and with the expanded popularity of anime in recent years, it's not uncommon to see the so-called "cool kids" making a fuss over the latest Dragon Ball Super or My Hero Academia episode.  But as long as the mark of stigma in any way clings to the medium in the West, it will always serve to shelter those looking for a subculture to belong to.

I know the arguments above might still leave the perplexed scratching their heads in incredulity. To them, I simply recommend asking an anime watcher in their lives (there's bound to be at least one, especially if children are afoot) and ask them about what they watch and why.  They’re likely to drop a few names and recommendations, so why not give it a shot?  There’s something for just about everyone, and I'll guarantee you'll find something worth watching.