Author Archives: Hugo
Detail
I must re-emphasise, if just for my own benefit, that the films that I’ve been most impressed with and most engrossed in, pay attention to detail.
‘A Prophet’ is another great film that is rich in seemingly* authentic detail**. This creates the illusion that you are watching real events, real people, in a real world – [...]
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The Surface
There is a nice quote from Leonardo Da Vinci which goes something like this: “Think about the surface of the work. Above all think about the surface”
– Bresson in ‘Excerpts from an Interview with Robert Bresson’ (James Blue, 1965)
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Causation
The following may seem obvious to you, my esteemed reader, but for myself I’ve enjoyed having these concepts laid out – articulated. For this reason I highly recommend The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott, which I’m paraphrasing:
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
A happens, then B happens. So A must cause B, right?
No, not [...]
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Levels of Reality
…literature does not recognise Reality as such, but only levels.
I’ve also enjoyed Italo Calvino’s ‘The Uses of Literature’, in particular his essay ‘Levels of Reality in Literature’. It’s fools errand to try distill Calvino’s lucid argument into a blog post, but this is a scrapbook after all - so here is the vibe of it;
Different levels of reality [...]
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Orchestration
An old friend moved cross-country and left me with a bunch of film books that I’ve been flicking through recently. I really like this idea of orchestration from Lajos Egri’s ‘The Art of Dramatic Writing’;
When you are ready to select characters for you play, be careful to orchestrate them right. If all the characters are the same [...]
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Mental Image
I’ve been writing with Sam and we’re up to a sequence set in a forest. I don’t live in a forest, or even near a forest, so sometimes I forget what a forest looks like. I wish I could spend a couple months trekking through the wilderness to address this problem. Photos are a more [...]
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What makes a film ‘too bleak’?
One of the arguments recently levelled against Australian films is that they tend to be too bleak or too miserable (Last Ride, Beautiful Kate, Blessed, etc.).
But many of the greatest films ever made are incredibly dark to the point you might label them ‘bleak’ or ‘miserable’.
So what makes a film ‘too bleak’? I don’t really [...]
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Scary Face
In the most terrifying moments in film, there is always a face
The face of someone who shouldn’t be there. (Bob, at the end of the bed in ‘Twin Peaks’)
The face of the dead. (The girl in the jar of formaldehyde in ‘The Kingdom’)
The face of the old. (The old woman in the veil in ‘The [...]
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My Favourite Films of the Decade
Mulholand Dr. (2001, David Lynch)
City of God (2002, Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund) / Elite Squad (2007, José Padilha)
The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan)
Zodiac (2007, David Fincher)/ The Departed (2006, Martin Scorsese)
Punch-Drunk Love (2002, Paul Thomas Anderson)
You, The Living (2007, Roy Andersson)
District 9 (2009, Neill Blomkamp)
Dancer in the Dark/ Dogville / Antichrist (2000, 2003, 2009 - Lars Von Trier)
A History of Violence/ Eastern Promises (2005, [...]
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Violence