Film might never reach its potential if it is constrained by path-dependent notions. Perhaps certain notions and ideas are only accidental habits. Perhaps in the fullness of time, those ideas might constitute the evidence of an art form that was in its infancy. One such idea is that a film must side with one particular character, […]
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 […]
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)
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, […]
…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 […]
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 […]
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 […]