Assignment 2: Creating atmosphere

My understanding of this assignment is to create atmosphere using mise-en-scène, camera angles, lighting, colour etc without relying on the subject matter to carry this.  The instructions are to combine a day-to-day activity with a ‘mood’ for example: making a cup of tea in a very paranoid way.

I wanted to produce a sequence that fulfilled the brief but which was not frivolous. And, as with the first assignment, I looked very close to home for my inspiration and acting talent.

My husband Matt broke his back in 1986 by jumping off a 120 foot high waterfall for kicks.  Suffering a T12 spinal cord injury, he has had to use a wheelchair ever since.  Matt told me once that a favourite part of his day is the few seconds when he first wakes up before he remembers he is paralysed. He also insists that paraplegics have to channel a certain level of anger to even get out of bed in the morning and this is what I wanted to capture.  

For the purpose of staying close to the brief, the activity is ‘getting up’ in the morning and the atmosphere/mood is ‘dogged determination’.

It was important to me that Matt would look strong and competent throughout – the aim of the sequence is definitely not for people to feel sorry for him.  

I wanted the lighting to be flat (or harsh) if possible. With the absence of suitable strip lighting, natural gloomy daylight had to suffice. The sun snuck out a couple of times but I used the Venetian blinds to cast shadows on Matt, almost like prison bars to accentuate his confinement though his disability.  

My directorial brief was to keep this as real as possible in terms of reactions – I did not want a comedic level of anger and frustration – and I can vouch for the realism in all the scenes. 

Analysis by shot

Shot 1: View from behind his back, Matt is soundly asleep and does not move for the first few moments of the alarm going off. It gets louder until he slams the off button.  There are a few more moments of stillness and silence and then he suddenly turns over onto his back.  We get a sense from his face that he is mentally preparing to do battle with the day. 

I wanted this shot to look cluttered to set the scene of a claustrophobic, frustrating process. We see wires and stuff hanging down, annoying dots embroidered onto the pillow case and a pulsating red light in the background. The Buddha statue was placed there partly for ironic purposes (as our protagonist is not tranquil, in the slightest) but also to show this anger is necessary for the person to keep going - it is not just part of his character.

Shot 2:  Matt is now in his chair and on the way to the shower. He manoeuvres himself around the tight corner of the bed, getting himself caught up in a towel hanging up. He struggles to free himself of the towel and throws it on the bed angrily. The towel is red to symbolise his anger. [I would have liked everything else in the room to be quite colourless but unfortunately, we have a very brightly painted flat.]  We catch sight of his grimacing face in the mirror. 

Shot 3: View of the skirting board as the wheels of his chair bang into the wall and then go past with the camera still focused on the scuffs on the paintwork (to emphasise the repetitiveness).  We hear him rolling down the hallway.

Shot 4: We have a soft-focus view of the shower curtain. This is to build some anticipation and highlight our sense of voyeurism.

Shot 5: Matt then yanks back the curtain to reach for a razor.  The sound of the water helps to add crackly tension here.

Shot 6: CU of Matt shaving. His jaw is set and we hear the scratching of the razor on his face. This brief respite of normality and intimacy will hopefully allow the viewer to develop empathy with our protagonist.

Shot 7: View from almost ground level behind his chair as he transfers into the chair. We then endure the frustration as he struggles to get the chair into the right position to roll out of the bathroom. I wanted this shot to be dark and clunky and slightly confusing so that we really feel every annoying jolt of the process.

Shot 8: View from the end of the bed as Matt transfers back onto the bed. I wanted some awkward framing here (partly to compensate for the warm yellow glow in the room!) and for Matt to be pushed over to the left with the oppressive angle of the shelving over to the right.

Shot 9: Filmed from the side of the bed, we see the various laborious stages of Matt getting dressed.  This was one long shot, which I edited down – I thought the choppy cuts would emphasise the tiresome exertion required for something as simple as getting dressed.  Those are actually the facial expressions he pulls in real life.

Shot 10: This is the point where we start to feel that Matt is winning. His expression is more placid as he makes the bed, covering up the red towel with the now smooth, white duvet.

Shot 11: The POV is behind Matt (as the viewer has hopefully developed empathy by now) and the closeness adds an edginess.  He sets up his MP3 player and we hear some shouty French rap as he puts in his headphones on.  The song is called La Rage by Keny Arkana – an anthem for Matt.  He turns off the light and rolls to the door.  We can sense his confidence and control.

Shot 12: The camera has followed Matt to the door and we now watch him struggle to get over the threshold and to reach back to close the door. This is a reminder that his day will continue to be fraught with all kinds of physical challenges.  He slams the door and we hear the jangle of the wind chimes, leaving us a few seconds of contemplation.

Critical analysis

Overall I am quite pleased with the finished result, although I am keen to get some critical feedback from other students and friends. I think it succeeds in showing how hard it is for a disabled person to do some of the simple things we take for granted and I believe I achieved that, to a significant degree, through the mise-en-scène.

It is reasonably well-paced, with some slower moments to convey the arduous tediousness of the process.

The whole sequence feels edgy and uncomfortable due to framing, camera angles, lighting and choppy editing. The version I was actually just about to submit was 4 minutes 26 seconds but luckily I re-read the assignment briefing before posting this. “It should be no more than three minutes long”.  And the re-edit has actually tightened it up considerably though and, I think, increased the sense of dogged determination of the activity portrayed!

So I have just learnt two very important lessons:

1. Always re-read the brief several times BEFORE starting work. If I had been more aware of the very specific time restriction, I would have approached the shots and filming differently.
2. It is amazing how much you can edit out when you absolutely have to without losing the sense of the sequence.  This means I must go through more self-interrogation of which frames/seconds are absolutely essential.  Less is more, as they say.

Matt mentioned that he thinks my directing skills have improved considerably since the last assignment. This was helped by having planned every shot carefully in advance so there were no moments of me dithering. 

The assignment brief specifies no music so I am hoping I can get away with the sounds from the MP3 player counting as diegetic.  I successfully altered the level of the music (which was actually coming from a small speaker on Matt’s lap) to correspond with when his first earbud goes in which I think works OK.

A couple of things I was not happy with:

Matt is out of focus in some of the shots (very noticeably in shot 2) which is distracting. I need to be much more careful where I am using a very shallow depth of field (50mm f1,4 lens).

The painted walls of our flat did not fit with the atmosphere I was trying to create. Some of the scenes just look too warm and cosy. 

There is one small continuity issue that I will not draw attention to, in the hope that nobody notices it.

All in all, I have learned a lot from the assignment and feel there is much to build on. I need to practise making these kind of sequences much more. The last few months have been very focused on theory and watching lots of movies and now I need to spend more timing actually doing!

Bokeh and depth of field

"Being able to recognize good bokeh puts you on the path for better understanding one of the beautiful subtleties of movie making."

My lovely friend Kyle Cassidy has written a piece for Videomaker here:  Blogging about bokeh

Stalker (warning: contains spoilers)

I finally got around to watching Stalker (dir Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) and found it to be beautiful and strangely gripping.

This is a story of a guide, the eponymous Stalker (played by Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) who takes people into a forbidden zone near an unnamed city.  The zone seems to be sentient and within it is a room where visitors can apparently find the answers to their dreams.  The journey there is long and perilous and full of mysteries.

The Stalker – an obsessive, rather pathetic, figure - is guiding two strangers into the zone and most of the action seems to take place in one day. The first of the stalker’s customers is Writer (Anatoliy Solonitsyn) – irrational, emotional, garrulous. He believes in the power of art but has lost his inspiration.  And his hat.  The second character is Professor (Nikolay Grinko) – a scientist who is rational, logical, calm.  He has a bobble hat.  All three men have very different philosophies and this allows the film to explore many conflicts but primarily that of cynicism versus faith. 

This is a slow film with minimal cuts, which really pulls the viewer in to join in the contemplation of the meaning of it all.  It is a story of fears, escape and of hope but one where no one is really sure what they want at the end of their journey.

Tarkovsky does not tell us what to think but lets the dialogue and imagery co-exist beautifully to create a mesmeric adventure.  He uses colour and its absence carefully. The scenes outside the zone are in a grimy metallic sepia with lots of contrast.  Inside the zone is green and lush but never quite welcoming.  We sense a life force – a vibration throughout - something otherworldly. It is menacing but never really terrifying, despite of the Stalkers warnings. 

Nature has reclaimed the zone, with tanks overgrown with grass being the most obvious example of this. We can sense the delight for our protagonist rolling in the grass and the dew – he doesn’t even flinch when a tiny, no doubt ticklish, caterpillar (symbolic?) hunches its way along his finger.

The camera lingers over submerged reminders of the outside world – lots of tiles (not sure if this is symbolic or just typical of Russian décor?), coins, bottles, syringes, guns, religious icons, the Professor’s disarmed bomb, oil…

Most of the scenes are visually stunning. Perfect composition and incredible depth to the shots – leading our eye into the journey.

Water is a strong theme throughout  - in some cases clear and fresh (life-giving) and in others stagnant and polluted. The rain scene shot from the POV of inside The Room towards the end is a refreshing relief.

There is also a crown of thorns (worn by Writer not Stalker though) and lots of fish plus maybe a lot of other biblical references which I missed.

At the end of the film, Tarkovsky uses colour outside the zone – perhaps implying that the Stalker has broken through his obsession with the room? We see him carrying his daughter and leading the way for his wife as they walk home, rather than his customers.

The black dog appears at the point when the men are really starting to contemplate their lives, as they rest in the swamp.  It stays with them and comes out of the zone with the Stalker.

The final scene is of the daughter moving three jars/glasses along a table with telekinesis (she is one of the zone’s so-called mutant children).  She pushes one of them off the end of the table and it (presumably) breaks on the floor. Is this symbolic of the three men with the falling one being her father?

I am also intrigued by the nuts/bandages that Stalker throws ahead and did I miss it or do we never get an explanation of why Porcupine is so called? 

This complex film is apocalyptic but surprisingly hypnotic and I am sure it will stay with me for a long time. I am looking forward to reading Geoff Dyer’s Zona (“a book about a Film about a Journey to a Room”) and contemplating this elliptical masterpiece further.

Berberian Sound Studio

We watched the Berberian Sound Studio (dir Peter Strickland, 2012) last night. The ending felt very flat, to the point of ruining the movie (did the project run out of money or ideas?) but on reflection today, it did have some excellent moments. Plus it provided a fascinating insight to sound effects and the intricacies of being in a sound studio, which is good as the next part of the DFP course is about sound… 

The protagonist is Gilderoy, played brilliantly by Toby Young, who is an exquisitely stiff-upper-lip-Englisher in the fetid, sleazy world of 1970s giallo films. He has been brought in to work on a movie called The Equestrian Vortex, which - we quickly discover - is a brutal, misogynistic horror film (by implication this is possibly Suspiria – dir Dario Argento, 1977 or something similar). Although the viewer never sees the film we are forced to imagine the scenes from the voiceovers and visceral sound effects. Gilderoy is totally unprepared for the appalling scenes he has to enhance through sound but he seems to stay on the job as a result of being broke and also feeling that it is the professional thing to do. He loves the studio (we hear that he only has a garden shed in England for his work) in a wonderfully nerdy way and is flattered to think that he is the best man for the job. Gilderoy – a perfectionist - is manipulated by the intensely vile Francesco (played by Cosimo Fusco) and the film’s charismatic creator Santini (Antonio Mancino), handsome and charming but ultimately lecherous and predatory with the female actors. 

It was not clear to me what was happening towards the end. I suspect that Gilderoy has a kind of breakdown as he feels that he has become part of the actual film by being complicit in making such a gruesome piece of cinema. He is suddenly able to speak Italian even in the flashback to when he first arrives. One of the actresses practices her lines by speaking words from a letter sent by Gilderoy’s mother, which she could not have seen. 

The mise en scene is excellent in creating a mood of menace and claustrophobia: lots of use of dark shadows; throbbing red lights; close-ups of rotting vegetables; women in the recording rooms screaming in apparent silence; power cuts; distortion of sounds – especially the human voice; a focus on the machinery – turning reels and projector lights to indicate the monotony of the work. We become hypersensitive to sound like our anti-hero, leaving our nerves on edge throughout the film. The whole movie is set underground - in the studio, Gilderoy’s room (next door?) and the corridor nearby – we get the sense that our man has been imprisoned. 

There were echoes of the mystery of Barton Fink and for much of the film we feel a great secret may be revealed that things are not as they seem. This is interspersed with lots of black humour and the hilariousness of an Englishman abroad (the scene where he gets angry to try to get his expenses paid is brilliant). 

 This is a disturbing and ambiguous movie with lots of surreal moments. It is slow, brooding and quite creepy – manipulating the minds of the viewers to create the horror reflected in our protagonist’s wide eyes. By the end, we have no idea what or who is real. I would have given this pretty high marks if it had not just fizzled out so disappointingly in the final moments but I would recommend it for anyone obsessed with films.

Dayanita Singh - Go Away Closer, Hayward Gallery

The OCA study tour on December 7^th to the Hayward Gallery was interesting and enjoyable.  I had not been aware of Dayanita Singh’s work up until now but I found her images to be very appealing and quite inspiring. 

Singh, who was born in New Delhi in 1961, describes herself as a bookmaker who just uses photography as her medium but she is clearly an accomplished conceptual artist. The show is technically a retrospective but it seems to be a result of Singh’s habit of constantly sorting through her contact sheets; filtering, juxtaposing, re-grouping her captures.  This repurposing creates new narratives and she seems to take delight in the unexpected relationships that the images form with each other.

Although very time-consuming, it strikes me that doing this very consciously would be an excellent way to help a student find their “voice” as a photographer.

Before we went into the gallery, tutor Robert Enoch suggested that we think very much about the way the images are grouped and displayed as well as the images themselves. The words ‘elliptical’ and ‘whimsical’ were used a lot throughout the day and it was clear that some students found the work to be frustratingly difficult to categorise (or “pointless” in one person’s view). 

The first room is set up as a traditional gallery with framed pictures on the walls and sample photo books over by the large window.  The second room features the three dimensional ‘museum’ pieces, large wooden structures with many dozens of prints framed in panels, which are interchangeable.

There was some interesting discussion about labelling and captions. Singh has said she is reluctant to do this for fear of being patronising and would rather work with what is happening outside the frame: “If I were to put any kind of date or place or caption it reduces the image from what I wanted it to be,” she said. “The where and when is a burden on photography. If people know why and where it was taken, they think they understand the image and they can move on.”  [Source: http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/the-worlds-of-dayanita-singh/?_r=2&]

With this in mind I tried to read the Myself Mona Ahmed images without thinking about what I had already learned about the subject (ie that Mona is a Hijra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)) eunuch and had had an an adopted child taken away from her. The photographs have really captured the sadness and the loneliness as well as a mixture of Mona’s feminine and masculine gestures. Some of the compositions reflect the subject’s status as an outcast (emphasised by the gravestones) but we also see her place within a community and the happy moments with family.

The next set of photos appeared to have been grouped by colour (reds in this case) but we could also see some links in texture, strong verticals, a face on TV in the first image matching with a painting of a woman and a camera on the third.  The images were well composed and quite appealing me but may well have been throw-aways if that had not sat well as a group. This led to an (inevitably) inconclusive discussion about what is a valid photograph.

Many of the pictures we saw explore spaces without people. Singh admits being attracted to rooms and corners and doors, which she thinks have secrets and surprises. We can feel the lingering sense of human presence and traces of existence in the shadows but we get some sense of alienation and voyeurism.

Robert observed that many of the images look as if they could be movie stills, particularly from the French/Italian new wave (eg Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’, which I have yet to see).  They also have a very timeless quality and evoke a nostalgic sense of a country I have never visited.  We see a very different, darker side to India compared with the usual colourful busy street scenes that are so familiar.  It seems that this is more authentic and reminds me a little of Tokyo through Moriyama’s eyes.

Comparisons were made with Nan Goldin [http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/nan-goldin-2649] and Larry Clark [http://larryclark.com/] and Robert also told us about the rather fascinating Sophie Calle, with particular reference to creating elliptical portraits of a person [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Calle]. Really interesting ideas in there.

Some of the photographs we looked at were very ordinary and quite boring but as a collection they achieved a new resonance and it was quite an adventure to contemplate the various ‘museums’ she has created.  The display looks like huge contact sheets and it is fascinating to try to second-guess why certain images have been juxtaposed or included at all.  Her work slows the viewer down. It demands a reading.

We almost all agreed that the Sent a Letter accordion-fold booklets were gorgeous and that this is a wonderful way to present images.

http://www.dayanitasingh.com/sent-a-letter

The ‘moving still’ video of Mona was rather mesmerising but I felt as if we were intruding on a very personal, intimate moment between Singh and her friend.   The photographer said she felt this was the fist capture that did justice to Mona’s uniqueness and, of course, we can learn more about a person even in a short video portrait than with a single frame. I liked this device and may have to try some moving stills of my own.  Robert mentioned that Thomas Struth has also experimented with this. 

I like Singh’s relationship with the world. I like her playfulness and the way she approaches ideas and her use of language. I like how she leaves stuff out – the ellipsis – and how there is always another path to go down.  She is interested in stories and secrets and chance and indications of the human. “It’s the dream, it’s that time between waking and sleeping when things collide.”  Dark but never depressing and it has given me lots of food for thought.