Isegoria

In Split Decision, David Thomson, author of the forthcoming The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, applies some film studies to the recent debates:

In the spin that followed the first presidential debate, many commentators referred to the “split screen” effect, when the cameras would show one candidate’s reaction as the other spoke. [...] A true split screen was employed only by some networks, like ABC and C-Span, whereas others, like PBS, honored what might be called a spatial relationship between the two contestants.

A split screen is two or more separate images put together in one image, or one screen. Thus it was a split screen on ABC when similar images of Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry were set side-by-side with a clear dividing line. But on PBS the shots were actually what are called two-shots: a single image in which we see two people at the same time with the space between them. Such a shot may not accommodate the full figures, but as the first debate revealed, an ingenious director with a good camera angle could show one person speaking, with another (in the background, or to one side) listening, reacting and generally behaving like a natural idiot.

It only makes sense to apply “the American shot” to our political debates:

In film studies, and once upon a time in filmmaking, the two-shot was a staple. Indeed, the shot of two or more people, not quite full length, but conversing and interacting, was often called “the American shot” in French film commentary. That is because it used to be a staple of good American movie-making. It can be found everywhere in the films of Howard Hawks, for example, a director whose work includes “Bringing Up Baby,” “His Girl Friday,” “To Have and Have Not,” “The Big Sleep” and “Red River,” among others. I could praise him at length. Let me just say here that he is both “cool” and “neat,” and on both accounts because of his skill with the group shot.

I realize that we live in an age when many in the news media, to say nothing of the audience, take it for granted that film and television require nothing but the close-up. And I don’t want to knock the close-up. It is a splendid and lovely thing, even when it shows a linebacker spitting out a few of his own teeth.

But the two-shot and the group shot teach us another lesson: that there are spatial relationships in life. People in conversation look at each other; they listen or try not to. The variety of body language and posture is enormous and beautiful, and there was once a way of making movies that thrived on those bonds. If you care to check this out, I would recommend just about anything by Jean Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Oph?ls, Otto Preminger, Orson Welles, Yasujiro Ozu — and all of these guys are O.K., too.

Here’s where he loses me:

I’ll go a step further, if I may. There was once a set of theories on film direction, or mise en scène, that attested to the aesthetics and the ethics of using spatial relationships in movies. You can find this spelled out beautifully in the work of André Bazin.

I will simplify the matter here, but Bazin (and others) believed that the cinema (and why not television?) had (or has?) a natural affinity for showing people together and people in places so that we understand both better. The close-up (vital as it may be to storytelling) tends to emphasize the glamour, drama (or melodrama?) of lone people; it has the seed of dictatorship in it. The cinema was based for decades on the notion that all people are equal, alike but different, and it found glory in the group shot that allowed us to look from one person to another, and feel the kinship and the difference.

The close-up has the seed of dictatorship in it. Riiiiiiiggghhht…

This sounds like a winning formula — only it’s usually Shakespeare’s work that gets a twist. From Film Gives Jane Austen a Bollywood Twist:

A middle-class family. Four marriageable daughters. Tension between romantic love and social duty. They’re elements fit for a Bollywood epic ? and the plot of “Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen’s sharply observed portrait of English society at the turn of the 19th century.

Austen aficionados and Indian film fans alike gathered in London’s West End Monday for the premiere of British director Gurinder Chadha’s “Bride and Prejudice,” which transposes Austen’s comedy of manners to modern-day India.

It is, Chadha says, a perfect match.

“Once I started adapting the novel, I was convinced Jane Austen was Indian in a previous life,” said Chadha, whose last film was the cross-cultural soccer comedy “Bend it Like Beckham.”

Dozens of fans gathered outside London’s Palladium Theater — bedecked for the evening with orange and pink ribbons — to see the film’s stars including former Miss World and current Bollywood leading light Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson, the film’s leading man.

“Bride and Prejudice,” which opens in Britain and India on Friday, transforms Austen’s Bennet family into the Bakshis of Amritsar. Rai plays spirited small-town girl Lalita Bakshi, drawn into a sparring relationship with Mr. Darcy, the wealthy heir to an American hotel chain, while courted by a pompous accountant (Nitin Ganatra).

Reading Cable Chops Up Movies To Placate Advertisers made me angry:

Spike TV, the Viacom-owned cable network aimed at men, is hyping how it will run all three “Godfather” movies uncut this month.

But Spike has a funny definition of uncut. While it will show every scene in all three movies, the language will be edited, and nudity or sex scenes — of which there are only a handful in all three movies — will be blurred.

At least with “The Godfather” movies, the edits won’t be too annoying to viewers, since the films are relatively tame by today’s standards. But for other movies Spike tries to run “uncut,” the end result is often a big mess. That was the case recently when the network showed “Raging Bull,” the Martin Scorsese classic starring Robert DeNiro as troubled middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta. The network dropped the audio on the f-word and other expressions more than 100 times, rendering the movie almost impossible to watch. While Spike could be commended for not actually cutting scenes from the movie, the end result was still painful.

I can’t help but think, “You nerd!” That is what Spicoli calls Mr. Hand, isn’t it?

Last Friday, I caught NPR’s interview of James Earl Jones, and I learned a few surprising things:

Jones is one of the distinctive voices of our time, yet few people know he fights a stutter.

I believe that qualifies as ironic.

The Tony-Award winning actor took just one day to record the voice track for Darth Vader in Star Wars.

He got a few thousand dollars for a few hours work, and he was fine with that. In fact, he didn’t even consider it real acting; it was just special effects.

Oliver North’s new film on Alexander the Great comes out soon. Riding with Alexander explains Oxford classics professor Robin Lane Fox’s peculiar request of Oliver North, in return for his expertise:

Seven hours later, we parted, Oliver having put no end of questions about the outlines of the script, then forming in his mind, and me having specified my non-negotiable reward for this advice: a place on horseback in the front ten of every major cavalry charge by Alexander’s cavalrymen to be filmed by Oliver on location. I have ridden for years, including in horse-races, but even Oliver was surprised. To his credit, he agreed, and we lived up to the deal, as filmgoers can now see.

Mania Akbira’s first feature movie, “20 Fingers,” got around Iranian censors by shooting on digital video. Iranian Film Ventures Into Adultery, Lesbianism:

The only way to shoot in Iran on 35mm is to hire equipment from the central authorities, which means script approval and a government minder attending the shoot to ensure the script is adhered to. Shooting on digital video requires script approval, but no minder is sent along, so Akbari gained approval for one script and then shot another.

A digital video camera is small compared to a 35mm camera plus crew:

“The beauty about digital is that many people didn’t even notice we were shooting, and they thought it was a real fight; they respect you and leave you alone,” said Daneshmand. “On 35mm, you have a whole crew, and you have trucks and dollies and cranes. People know you’re shooting.”

Of course, it’s not just the Iranian government that isn’t ready for intimacy:

Akbari thinks her film’s subject matter would confuse and disturb an Iranian audience unused to seeing such topics discussed openly. “It’s not just the government that doesn’t want to admit that these things go on, but the general public,” she said.

Only Trey Parker and Matt Stone could come up with Team America: World Police, a movie done in the style of Jerry Bruckheimer (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Bad Boys), but with Thunderbirds-style marionettes.

Excellent. From The Giants of Anime are Coming:

In coming months, anime’s three most prominent directors will release major films in the US. Oshii’s Innocence will hit theaters in September. Soon afterward, Katsuhiro Otomo will debut Steamboy, an Indiana Jones-style adventure that takes place in an alternative Victorian age where turbo unicycles and pressure-powered jetpacks battle for supremacy. Then Hayao Miyazaki will deliver Howl’s Moving Castle, about a teenage girl who flees a curse by hiding in a gigantic mechanical castle that prowls about on insectlike legs. In addition, Disney will issue three older Miyazaki films on DVD early next year, two of which have never before been released in the US.

A bit of anime history:

Anime is both radically new and the latest variant on an ancient tradition. Japanese hobbyists made animated shorts as far back as 1917, and the industry grew steadily from there. For the most part, its films were warmed-over Disney, based on homegrown folk tales. By the 1960s, the studio Toei Animation was producing feature films for an increasingly receptive domestic audience.

But after decades of imitating American models, anime suddenly made a sharp turn in the late 1960s and embraced a totally different influence: manga, Japan’s wildly imaginative comic books. “The soul of anime is manga,” Otomo has said, and it is an old soul indeed. Unlike US comics, which took off from the rakish spirit of vaudeville and minstrel shows, manga stem from the ancient practice of lavishly illustrating woodblock-printed books.
[...]
In the immediate aftermath of Astro Boy, anime was considered pabulum for kids. But something changed in the early 1970s. Like every nation in the developed world, Japan brought forth an impatient new generation of artists. Unlike other countries, though, Japan’s music, theater, and film industries didn’t welcome boat-rocking young people. Meanwhile, manga publishers were abandoning their previous self-censoring code of content. Suddenly, what had been subliterature began looking like an opportunity for creative newcomers.

“There was tremendous energy in Japan bubbling up then,” says Masuzo Furukawa, founder of Mandarake, Japan’s largest manga store. “In your country, someone like Martin Scorsese got to make Mean Streets. In our country, somebody like Otomo went into manga.”

Turn Hollywood Secrets into Blockbuster Sales is a fairly lackluster article on using “Hollywood secrets” to improve your PowerPoint presentations — but it opens with a fairly insightful (if hokey) revelation: you, in the audience, are the star, as far as Hollywood is concerned:

One Hollywood secret is that the ultimate goal of any movie is to make you feel like you’re a star. To the degree that a film makes you feel like you’re the one on screen, is the degree to which it is successful. That’s because audience empathy translates into dollars. Audiences are willing to pay top dollar if they feel like they ‘own’ the characters, as if they had created them and lived their lives.