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THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF FILMMAKING,
WITH TOO MANY DIGRESSIONS AND AVATAR REFERENCES (cont'd)
an essay by andrew bujalski
Another film festival memory springs to mind, from the charming city of Lisbon, where I was eating breakfast when a stranger approached me and whispered to me conspiratorially, "Look, I'm not supposed to be talking to you, I'm on the festival jury, I've just seen your film Mutual Appreciation and I need to know if, in the scene where the guitarist plays a concert, is he supposed to be a good musician or a bad musician? I don't know anything about pop music so I wasn't sure." Sitting there staring at my eggs and coffee, I'm sure I stammered for a while, wanting to help this polite gentleman, but ultimately perhaps I cost myself some kind of prize by telling him that I couldn't be of any use. The scene hadn't been crafted with any notion that the audience must be forced to perceive either victory or defeat for the character. Though I'll admit to enjoying the musical performance myself, I would not disagree with the audience member who thought it was a flop, nor do I think that that interpretation would throw the narrative arc wildly off course; the movie is built so that you can get something out of it whether you think the character's a good musician or not...Of course, given the opportunity, I suppose I should have told the juror was that the entire film was meant to be received as a brilliant triumph, and if he'd missed that on the first viewing he'd best go back and look at it again-but instead I left him adrift, and presumably annoyed with me.
Since I've brought that film up, let's put up a scene from Mutual Appreciation. As the previous clip I showed you involved drunk people doing things they'll regret at parties, for the purposes of scientific comparison, we'll do a congruent chunk from this film... [Cue Mutual Appreciation DVD at 59:10, play through to 1:06:55. Alan is compelled by the wig party girls to try on a wig, and then a dress.]
I do enjoy showing these scenes out of context. Though they function better in context, and I know for sure they function better on a 35mm print, I do have a hippie-dippie belief that any piece of a movie, indeed every frame of a movie must somehow carry a piece of that movie's soul. That's why we can look at a poster with a single image on it and have a pretty good guess as to whether or not we think that movie is worth seeing.
I have just cavalierly made reference to movies having "souls." If we were all now in that hotel room in Vancouver, passing that joint around, this I think would be a good question to take up: Do movies have souls? It depends on your definition of the word, clearly, but if we're talking about an animating spirit that cannot quite be located in any tangible technical aspect, then yes, I'd say absolutely they do.
In 1998, Gus Van Sant got Universal Pictures to bankroll the insane experiment of remaking Psycho shot for shot, and I think this was a great gift to cinema, because watching it side by side with the original teaches us so much about how movies do and do not work. I happen to be a fan of Van Sant's Psycho, but a list of its virtues would have nothing in common with a list of the Hitchcock film's virtues. They have the same screenplay, 98% identical camera set ups and edit points, the same musical score, and in a few cases even visuals or sounds interpolated directly from the original movie. And they just don't feel anything like each other. You may argue that the difference is in the actors' performances, or you may argue that the difference is in context, or just in novelty, that the remake had relinquished the element of surprise. And these differences are profound, but I think the divide goes even deeper. I think that these two movies have very different souls. The scares and the laughter and tears in any given movie-or vomit if you're seeing Jackass-are all things you leave in the theater, but there's something else, some greater sense of it that you take with you, and creating that is the most daunting task set before us directors.
When I mention Psycho, you all know the movie I'm referring to, it conjures a specific feeling in the room. I say the word Persona and that creates a different vibration, or Brazil creates another. Airplane. We may get into disagreements about whether or not these movies are any good, we may get into even more vehement disagreements about what they represent or mean, but in some strange way I think we tend to have an agreement about what their essential natures are.
Last week my wife and I fed our infant son solid food for the first time, and we decided the occasion needed to be documented with a Flip Cam. After a 5 minute shoot, the kid had had enough rice cereal and we had all the footage we needed, so I stopped recording and started looking through some other videos stored on the camera, there were a few that I hadn't yet seen. Pretty soon my wife and I were both watching the little playback screen and cooing at it, much to the confusion of the little boy sitting directly in front of us, wondering what could possibly be tearing our attention away from him. Getting to know the real beautiful boy is going to be a lifelong project for us-my wife and I often remark to each other how he looks different every day and from every angle. We can't quite trust our perception because he gives us more than we can take in. But the specific perspective that the video gave us on him was instantly identifiable and, for a moment, distracting in its intensity.
I can only assume that this experience of recognition was even more intense for Auguste Lumière, who included a movie of his baby daughter eating in the first public exhibition of movies ever. There seems to be enthusiasm and wonderment still alive in those frames, as there is in all of the early Lumière Brothers films. Watching them today, it's almost as if these workers leaving the factory were their babies too, and this train entering a station their baby also. Anywhere they pointed their camera, they were exploring a fresh view on the world. As I've mentioned, I am not a film scholar, so I never studied deeply on the historical or technical background of these films, but I know that the first time I saw them projected in 35mm on a big screen, I found the experience surprisingly memorable and surprisingly moving. Maybe I was projecting too, putting on the screen my own gratitude for the Lumières pioneering a medium I so adore-but I believe there was something inherent in the films themselves. I knew these simple little films had souls.
Of course not all movies feel so vital. The story of the Lumières and the other progenitors of movies has been diligently reported, but no one ever talks about the invention of bad movies. It's a rare occasion, but every few years I see a movie so bad that I find myself looking away from the screen-I'd prefer to watch the light flicker on the walls, or maybe my own tapping toes-and I wonder who was the first person to figure out the formula for that, and how, and when? My guess is that didn't take long. I think someone realized that if you could make money by making the world seem to come alive inside of a little square projection, then you could probably make more money by draining the life out of that square, conquering time and space and presenting it like a trophy.
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