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Post by nickhaffieemslie on Jan 23, 2007 15:43:56 GMT -5
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Post by nickhaffieemslie on Jan 23, 2007 20:25:07 GMT -5
Charlie, you were talking about not liking the excessive violence in the film. I was reading a really cool American Cinematographer article on the film. I'll bring it to class if someone wants to borrow it and read it - they largely stayed away from film lights in the movie and shot mostly with available light and practicals, dialling aperture changes as they went and shooting on a low-contrast stock that they could later pull either shadows or highlights out of when they went to the Digital Intermediate. Anyway they quote the cinematographer in it talking about violence, here's an excerpt: "There's a lot of violence in the film, and I don't know why but violence looks beautiful on film. Destruction and the attendant texture and smoke all photographs well. Violence is very cinematic, and I didn't want this movie to beautify or glorify it."
To deglamorize the violence, Lubezki [the cinematographer] took his cue from documentaries. "When you're watching the news or a documentary on war, one of the things you notice is that there is no coverage. It's not all cutty with beautiful close-ups of the gun, or the trigger in slow motion. The other thing you notice in many good war documentaries is that the cameraman is often running with a fixed lens - running to cover the action and also running to save his life. So we tried to avoid cutting and beautiful framing. Somehow shooting handheld and not cutting makes violence not only less appealing, but stronger. It looks more naturalistic and you feel more for the characters, as opposed to falling in love with the horrible beauty of war. I think this speaks to the concerns you raised in class about aestheticized violence. I mean, it's hard to deny that some of the violence in the film was sexy as hell and meant to be an attractive cinematic spectacle. But this isn't always the case. In particular, I'm thinking of the scene when they're walking through the beseiged building with the baby, before the troops have entered it. There's this really profound sequence dominated by a mood of wonder and hope as everyone is frozen in silent reverence to the baby, even while they keep getting hit by stray bullets coming through the windows. I think it's one of the most poignant moments in the film, ringing with a surreal and paradoxical tone that frames the violence as not only tragic but also literally senseless - existing somewhere outside of rational thinking and even sensory perception. I think the violence is justified by the fact that the film is trying to establish a mortally dangerous, oppressive, violent, dystopic world and throw us into it. Like that World Socialist article says, it's about allegorizing a post-911, neo-colonial nationalism and all of the oppressive qualities that go along with what Cuaron (the director) sees as a critically dangerous approach to international politics. Oh he also talks about using handheld instead of steadicam. He says if you overuse handheld it uses its power, and he also doesn't like overusing it cause you get motion blur in wide shots so characters' faces aren't sharp. He wanted to mix handheld and steadicam, but Cuaron (the director) insisted on the handheld throughout.
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Post by justiniddrie on Jan 24, 2007 12:44:55 GMT -5
I gotta see this film.
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Post by fraser on Jan 25, 2007 3:11:17 GMT -5
Thanks for the insight Nick. Some theory stuff: Kracauer kind of gets a bad rap for making a list of things that are more cinematic than others. He really ought to have included violence in his list. Lubezki is right: it totally looks beautiful on film. What a gigantic problem. I love what Bresson does in A Man Escaped: the single act of violence happens off-screen. Fontaine waits, listening to the guard we know is just behind a wall. He goes to confront him. We hear nothing. Fontaine returns. We know the guard must be dead. It's incredibly powerful -- perhaps because it's entirely left to our imagination. I'm just thinking this up as I go but I'm pretty sure I could draw a pretty good correlation between descriptiveness of film violence (I guess we could also term it excessiveness) and effectiveness of that violence on the viewer (you could probably also frame it in terms of desensitization of the viewer). The 'beautiful close-ups of the gun' (or maybe Passion of the Christ?... I haven't seen all of it...) is one extreme of this while my Bresson example is the other. Children of Men is somewhere in the middle. That scene in the hallway you mention, Nick, is powerful because you don't hear the gunshots that kill those people -- it's less descriptive, it leaves something to the imagination... Thoughts? I'd also love to watch that again and try to catch all the allusions. There's the obvious Abu Gurab references but I thought I also caught some others. Not that i can remember them at the moment... The scene with the lantern on the stairs seemed right out of a Caravaggio painting. Not just in look but in meaning. The same religious intensity and drama. Check out www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/11/07/books/13handy.htmlI don't think it's the painting I'm thinking of exactly, but hopefully you get the drift. Note the lantern.
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rymo
New Member
Posts: 12
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Post by rymo on Jan 25, 2007 16:50:08 GMT -5
Since our short discourse in class about this movie, more and more I have been thinking about its merits and shortcommings. I am interested in the reviewer's note of the film as touching on some social relevant points, but lacks any sort of serious main 'point'. I also like the comparison to other films such as "V for Vendeta" and other lightly left activist films recently coming out of contemporary England, movement in the making, or just general blair/bush regime satire.
The realistic element of the film, from which one could defend the handheld shots, is deffinately lost in its spectacle and braggy technique. It takes away from the story (which is thin like Pho soup, not as thin as dialogue which is just plain watery), where as the subtext of humanity is what interests me the most. I agree with much of what Walsh is saying in the end of his article, but I think he misses some points of the film wholly. I find little has been discussed having to do with the choreography of figures and mise-en-scene in general. Though it is showy, I think the content is fitting to brutal chaos in our society as theme in the film. The chase scene away from Sid which ends in the car battery blungeoning is testament to this, as the bullets dent the door blindly as clive owen closes it. The sheep being hearded by the renegade collie, the chickens in the targeted building where the future of humanity hides, all of these chaotic moments really reflect, for me, the social statements that are being made.
It is like what Walsh notes the films explicit text touches on; the religous moevements, the treatment of fellow human beings, the repressive regime, all which I feel are well reflected in the mise-en-scene of the film. The moments of true humanity are the documentary style shots of cowering families in the city, the all too familiar sight of a renegade's death when they stop running to turn and fight and the sublimity of the infant being paraded through the seiged building that really solidify a place in my heart for this movie.
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Post by fraser on Jan 26, 2007 12:48:03 GMT -5
I don't know about bravura technique. From the point of view of Children of Men as a film -- that is, acknowledging it's production, cinematography, etc as a construction -- it's totally bravura, an incredible show of virtuosity. But if we're looking for realism, I think it's pretty bang on. The single take scene doesn't seem -- to me at least -- implausible in its construction. Its the sort of thing that's nearly impossible to choreograph as a single take in a film but that in real life, if such a scene could ever happen, would be impossible to film any other way. I should probably read the article to see exactly what it's saying, however, it strikes me that this discussion of realism might in fact be somewhat moot given the turn, right after the one take action scene, to something quite surreal: the silent journey through the hall, through the soldiers (none of whom try to apprehend them), and the final boat sequence (totally unreal, almost dream like). This final unreality points the film in a decidedly different direction -- I suppose a hopeful, forward looking direction. Something like, 'God things are fucked up. Lets hope the arrival of our saviour will snap people back to their senses.' In that sense, it's totally a religious film. The baby is the second coming of Christ. That's the only way I can think to work it out if we're going to read it allegorically (and it seems to be asking for an allegorical reading).
What do you think?
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Post by nickhaffieemslie on Jan 26, 2007 12:48:59 GMT -5
Fraser - good call on those gunshots, that's key to the effect. I think it pushes the violence away, distances us from it, by choosing not to follow the causal chain for the bullets explicitly (target is acquired, soldier gets ready, shoots the bullet, someone is hit).
The painting stuff is really cool too, and it's an important theme in the film - think of the art collecting brother for example. Wendy Birt is working on a paper right now that's looking at the kinds of allusions you're talking about. She's got an art history background and said there were all kinds of direct references. I think you're probably right about that stairway example too. It's kind of weird too to contrast this attempt at replicating paintings with the naturalistic, documentary realism that the cinematographer talks about aiming for.
Ryan - I like where you're going with the figure and mise-en-scene stuff. I do think that gets overlooked (especially by people like the author of that article who doesn't seem to be a film theorist per se). Definitely some really effective stuff happening in this film.
Also, while neither myself nor WUFS nor the University of Western Ontario would ever condone the illegal peer-to-peer sharing of intellectual property, there's a really good torrent of this film available (do a quick search isohunt.com, first thing that comes up) it's a rip of an academy consideration DVD.
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