A film score (also sometimes called background music or incidental music) is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects. The score comprises a number of orchestral, instrumental or choral pieces called cues which are timed to begin and end at specific points during the film in order to enhance the dramatic narrative and the emotional impact of the scene in question.
Songs are usually not considered part of the film's score, although songs do also form part of the film's soundtrack. Although some songs, especially in musicals, are based on thematic ideas from the score (or vice-versa), scores usually do not have lyrics, except for when sung by choirs or soloists as part of a cue. Similarly, pop songs which are "needle dropped" into a specific scene in film for added emphasis are not considered part of the score.
Scores are written by one or more composers , under the guidance of the film's director and/or producer, and are then usually performed by an ensemble of musicians - most often comprising an orchestra or band, instrumental soloists, and choir or vocalists - and recorded by a sound engineer.
Film scores encompass an enormous variety of styles of music, depending on the nature of the film it accompanies. The majority of scores are orchestral works rooted in Western classical music, but a great number of scores also draw influence from jazz, rock, pop, blues, New Age ambient music, and a wide range of ethnic and world music styles. Since the 1950s, a growing number of scores have also included electronic elements as part of the score, and many scores written today feature a hybrid of orchestral and electronic instruments.
Since the invention of digital technology and audio sampling, many low budget films have been able to rely on digital samples to imitate the sound of live instruments, and many scores are created and performed wholly by the composers themselves, by programming sophisticated music composition software.
Spotting
The composer usually enters the creative process towards the end of filming, at around the same time as the film is being edited, although on some occasions the composer is on hand during the entire film shoot, especially when actors are required to perform with or be aware of original diegetic music. The composer is shown an unpolished "rough cut" of the film, before the editing is completed, and talks to the director or producer about what sort of music is required for the film in terms of style and tone. The director and composer will watch the entire film, taking note of which scenes require original music. During this process the composer will take precise timing notes so that he or she knows how long each cue needs to last, where it begins, where it ends, and of particular moments during a scene with which the music may need to coincide in a specific way. This process is known as "spotting".
Occasionally, a film maker will actually edit his film to fit the flow of music, rather than the other way around, which is the norm. Director Godfrey Reggio edited his films Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi based on composer Philip Glass's music. Similarly, the relationship between director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone was such that the finale of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the films Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America were edited to Morricone's score as the composer had prepared it months before the film's production ended. Also, the finale of Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was edited to match the music of his long-time collaborator John Williams: as recounted in a companion documentary on the DVD, Spielberg gave Williams complete freedom with the music and asked him to record the cue without picture; Spielberg then re-edited the scene later to match the music.
Less frequently, a composer will be asked to write music based on his or her impressions of the script or storyboards, without seeing the film itself, and is given more freedom to create music without the need to adhere to specific cue lengths or mirror the emotional arc of a particular scene. This approach is usually taken by a director who does not wish to have the music comment specifically on a particular scene or nuance of a film, and which can instead be inserted into the film at any point the director wishes during the post-production process. Composer Hans Zimmer was asked to write music in this way in 2010 for director Christopher Nolan's film Inception; composer Gustavo Santaolalla did the same thing when he wrote his Oscar-winning score for Brokeback Mountain.
Writing
Once the spotting session has been completed and the precise timings of each cue determined, the composer will then work on writing the score. The methods of writing the score vary from composer to composer; some composers prefer to work with a traditional pencil and paper, writing notes by hand on a staff and performing works-in-progress for the director on a piano, while other composers write on computers using sophisticated music composition software such as Digital Performer, Logic Pro, Cubase or Protools.[9] Working with software allows composers to create MIDI-based demos of cues, called MIDI mockups, for review by the filmmaker prior to the final orchestral recording.
The length of time a composer has to write the score varies from project to project; depending on the post-production schedule, a composer may have as little as two weeks, or as much as three months to write the score. In normal circumstances, the actual writing process usually lasts around six weeks from beginning to end.
The actual musical content of a film score is wholly dependent on the type of film being scored, and the emotions the director wishes the music to convey. A film score can encompass literally thousands of different combinations of instruments, ranging from full symphony orchestral ensembles to single solo instruments to rock bands to jazz combos, along with a multitude of ethnic and world music influences, soloists, vocalists, choirs and electronic textures. The style of the music being written also varies massively from project to project, and can be influenced by the time period in which the film is set, the geographic location of the film's action, and even the musical tastes of the characters. As part of their preparations for writing the score the composer will often research different musical techniques and genres as appropriate for that specific project; as such, it is not uncommon for established film composers to be proficient at writing music in dozens of different styles.
Orchestration
Once the music has been written, it must then be arranged or orchestrated in order for the ensemble to be able to perform it. The nature and level of orchestration varies from project to project and composer to composer, but in its basic form the orchestrator's job is to take the single-line music written by the composer and "flesh it out" in to instrument-specific sheet music for each member of the orchestra to perform.
Some composers, notably Ennio Morricone, orchestrate their own scores themselves, without using an additional orchestrator. Some composers provide intricate details in how they want this to be accomplished, and will provide the orchestrator with copious notes outlining which instruments are being asked to perform which notes, giving the orchestrator no personal creative input whatsoever beyond re-notating the music on different sheets of paper as appropriate. Other composers are less detailed, and will often ask orchestrators to "fill in the blanks", providing their own creative input into the makeup of the ensemble, ensuring that each instrument is capable of performing the music as written, and even allowing then to introduce performance techniques and flourishes to enhance the score.
Over the years several orchestrators have become linked to the work of one particular composer, often to the point where one will not work without the other. Examples of enduring composer-orchestrator relationships include Jerry Goldsmith with Arthur Morton, Alexander Courage and Herbert W. Spencer; Miklos Rozsa with Eugene Zador; Alfred Newman with Edward Powell, Ken Darby and Hugo Friedhofer; Danny Elfman with Steve Bartek; David Arnold with Nicholas Dodd; Basil Poledouris with Greig McRitchie; and Elliot Goldenthal with Robert Elhai. Others have become orchestrators-for-hire, and work with many different composers over the course of their careers; examples of prominent film music orchestrators include Pete Anthony, Jeff Atmajian, Brad Dechter, Bruce Fowler, John Neufeld, Thomas Pasatieri, Conrad Pope, Nic Raine and J.A.C. Redford.
Once the orchestration process has been completed, the sheet music is physically printed onto paper by one or more music copyists, and is ready for performance.
Recording
When the music has been composed and orchestrated, the orchestra or ensemble then performs it, often with the composer conducting. Musicians for these ensembles are often uncredited in the film or on the album and are contracted individually (and if so, the orchestra contractor is credited in the film or the soundtrack album). However, some films have recently begun crediting the contracted musicians on the albums under the name Hollywood Studio Symphony after an agreement with the American Federation of Musicians. Other performing ensembles that are often employed include the London Symphony Orchestra, the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra (an orchestra dedicated exclusively to recording), and the Northwest Sinfonia.
The orchestra performs in front of a large screen depicting the movie, and sometimes to a series of clicks called a "click-track" that changes with meter and tempo, assisting the conductor to synchronize the music with the film.
More rarely, the director will talk to the composer before shooting has started, so as to give more time to the composer or because the director needs to shoot scenes (namely song or dance scenes) according to the final score. Sometimes the director will have edited the film using "temp (temporary) music": already published pieces with a character that the director believes to fit specific scenes.
Ideas and Reflections:
I find it very interesting that Godfrey Reggio edited his films Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi based on composer Philip Glass's music as this was what I was intending to do with my film. I have chosen several pieces of ambient music for my film that I think fit perfectly with the images in the film. One of my ideas is to mix and layer these ambient music tracks to get a richer and more powerful sound.
Sunday 1 May 2011
Monday 25 April 2011
Research into Experimental Filmmakers - David Lynch
David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound design. Indeed, the surreal and in many cases violent elements to his films have earned them the reputation that they "disturb, offend or mystify" their audiences.
Moving around various parts of the United States as a child within his middle class family, Lynch went on to study painting in Philadelphia, where he first made the transition to producing short films. Deciding to devote himself more fully to this medium, he moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977). After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct The Elephant Man (1980), from which he gained mainstream success. Then being employed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, he proceeded to make two films. First, the science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which proved to be a critical and commercial failure, and then a neo-noir crime film, Blue Velvet (1986), which was instead highly critically acclaimed.
Proceeding to create his own television series with Mark Frost, the highly popular murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–1992), he also created a cinematic prequel, Fire Walk With Me (1992), a road movie, Wild at Heart (1990), and a family film, The Straight Story (1999) in the same period. Turning further towards surrealist filmmaking, three of his following films worked on "dream logic" non-linear narrative structures, Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).
Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, for his films The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and also received a screenplay Academy Award nomination for The Elephant Man. Lynch has twice won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. The French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, the country's top civilian honor, as a Chevalier in 2002 and then an Officier in 2007, while that same year, The Guardian described Lynch as "the most important director of this era". Allmovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking", whilst the success of his films have led to him being labelled "the first popular Surrealist."
Early life: 1946–1965
Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. His father, Donald Walton Lynch, was a research scientist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his mother, Edwina "Sunny" Lynch (née Sundholm), was an English language tutor whose grandfather's parents had immigrated to the United States from Finland in the 19th century. Lynch was raised a Presbyterian. Due to Donald's job, the Lynch family often moved around according to where the Department of Agriculture assigned him. It was because of this that when he was two months old, David Lynch moved with his parents to Sandpoint, Idaho, and only two years after that, following the birth of his brother John, the family again moved, this time to Spokane, Washington. It was here that his sister Martha was born, before they once more moved, this time to Durham, North Carolina, then to Boise, Idaho and then to Alexandria, Virginia. Lynch found this transitory early life relatively easy to adjust to, noting that he found it fairly easy to meet new friends whenever he started attending a new school. Commenting on much of his early life, Lynch has remarked that "I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school… For me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude." Alongside this schooling, his father made him join the Boy Scouts, although he would later note that he only "became one so I could quit, and put it behind me." He rose to the highest rank of Eagle Scout. It was through being an Eagle Scout that he was present with other Boy Scouts outside of the White House at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, which took place on Lynch's birthday in 1961.
Lynch had become interested in painting and drawing from an early age, becoming intrigued by the idea of pursuing it as a career path when living in Virginia, where his friend's father was a professional painter. At Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Virginia, he did poorly academically, having little interest in school work, but was popular with other students, and after leaving decided that he wanted to study painting at college, thereby beginning his studies at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1964, where he was a roommate of Peter Wolf. Nonetheless, he left after only a year, stating that "I was not inspired AT ALL in that place", and instead deciding that he wanted to travel around Europe for three years with his friend Jack Fisk, who was similarly unhappy with his studies at Cooper Union. They had some hopes that in Europe they could train with the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka at his school, however upon reaching Salzburg they found that he was not available, and disillusioned, they returned to the United States after spending only 15 days of their planned three years in Europe.
"My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath. Because I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast." - David Lynch
Philadelphia and short films: 1966–1970
Back in the United States, Lynch returned to Virginia, but since his parents had moved to Walnut Creek, California, he was forced to stay with his friend Tony Keeler for a while, before he decided to move to the city of Philadelphia, where, at the advice of Jack Fisk, who was already attending it, he decided to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, something he preferred far more than his previous art college in Boston, claiming that "In Philadelphia there were great and serious painters, and everybody was inspiring one another and it was a beautiful time there." It was here that he began a relationship with a fellow student, Peggy Reavey, and they were married in 1967. The following year, Peggy gave birth to their child, a girl whom they named Jennifer. Later describing this situation, Peggy stated that "[Lynch] definitely was a reluctant father, but a very loving one. Hey, I was pregnant when we got married. We were both reluctant." As a family, they moved to the Fairmount neighbourhood of Philadelphia, where they were able to purchase a large 12-room house for a relatively low $3,500 due to the high crime and poverty rates in the area. Later describing living there, Lynch stated that "We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street… We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen. The house was first broken into only three days after we moved in… The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city." Meanwhile, in order to help financially support his family alongside his art studies, he took up a job printing engravings.
It was at the Philadelphia Academy that Lynch made his very first short film, which was entitled Six Men Getting Sick (1966). He had first come up with the idea when he developed a wish to see his paintings move, and he subsequently began discussing the idea of creating an animation with an artist named Bruce Samuelson. When this project never came about, Lynch decided to work on a film alone, and so purchased the cheapest 16mm camera that he could find in order to do so. Taking one of the abandoned upper rooms of the Academy as a working space, he spent $200 – which at the time he felt to be a lot of money – to produce Six Men Getting Sick. Describing the work as "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit", Lynch played the film on a loop at the Academy's annual end-of-year exhibit, where it shared joint first prize with a painting by Noel Mahaffey. This led to a commission from one of his fellow students, the wealthy H. Barton Wasserman, who offered him $1000 to create a film installation in his home. Spending $450 of that on purchasing a second-hand Bolex camera, Lynch produced a new animated short, but upon getting the film developed, realized that the result was simply a blurred, frameless print. As he would later relate, "So I called up Bart [Wasserman] and said, 'Bart, the film is a disaster. The camera was broken and what I've done hasn't turned out.' And he said, 'Don't worry, David, take the rest of the money and make something else for me. Just give me a print.' End of story."
Using this leftover money, Lynch decided to experiment on making a work that was a mix of animation with live action, producing a four minute short entitled The Alphabet (1968). The film starred Lynch's wife Peggy as a character known as The Girl, who chants the alphabet to a series of images before dying at the end by haemorrhaging blood all over her bed sheets. Adding a sound effect, Lynch used a broken Uher tape recorded to record the sound of his baby daughter Jennifer crying, creating a distorted sound that Lynch felt to be particularly effective. Later describing where he had got inspiration for this work from, Lynch stated that "Peggy's niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that's sort of what started The Alphabet going. The rest of it was just subconscious."
Learning about the newly founded American Film Institute, which gave grants to film makers who could produce for them both a prior work and a script for a new project, Lynch decided to send them a copy of The Alphabet along with a script that he had written for a new short film, one that would be almost entirely live action, and which would be entitled The Grandmother. The Institute agreed to help finance the work, initially offering him $5000, out of his requested budget of $7,200, but later granting him the further $2,200 which he needed. Starring people he knew from both work and college and filmed in his own house, The Grandmother revolved around the story of a neglected boy who "grows" a grandmother from a seed to care for him. The film critics Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell later remarked that "this film is a true oddity but contains many of the themes and ideas that would filter into his later work, and shows a remarkable grasp of the medium".
Los Angeles and Eraserhead: 1971–1979
In 1971, Lynch moved with his wife and daughter to the city of Los Angeles in California, where he began studying filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory, a place that he would later describe as being "completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great… you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing." He began writing a script for a proposed work entitled Gardenback, which had "unfolded from this painting I'd done." In this venture he was supported by a number of figures at the Conservatory, who encouraged him to lengthen the script and add in more dialogue, something that he reluctantly agreed to do. Nonetheless, with all the interference on his Gardenback project, he became fed up with the Conservatory, and announced that he was quitting. Attempting to prevent this, many of the teachers at the centre asked him to reconsider, believing that he was one of their best students, and he finally agreed, albeit on the condition that he could create his own project that would not be interfered with. Feeling that Gardenback was "wrecked", he instead set about on a new film, which he called Eraserhead.
Despite the fact that the film was planned to be about forty-two minutes long (it would end up being eighty-nine minutes long), the script for Eraserhead was only 21 pages long, and some of the teachers at the Conservatory were concerned that the film would not be a success with such little dialogue and action. Nonetheless, they agreed not to interfere as they had done with Gardenback, and as such Lynch was able to create the film free from interference. Filming, which began in 1972, took place at night in some abandoned stables, allowing the production team, which was largely Lynch and some of his friends, including Sissy Spacek, Jack Fisk, cinematographer Frederick Elmes and sound designer Alan Splet to set up a camera room, green room, editing room, sets as well as a food room and a bathroom. Initially, funding for the project came from the AFI, who gave Lynch a $10,000 grant, but it was not enough to complete the work, and under pressure from studios after the success of the relatively cheap feature film Easy Rider, they were unable to provide him with any more. Following this, Lynch was also supported by a loan given to him by his father, and by money that he was able to bring in from a paper round that he took up delivering the Wall Street Journal. Not long into the production of Eraserhead, Lynch and his wife Peggy amicably separated and divorced, and so he began living full-time on set. In 1977, Lynch would remarry, this time to a woman named Mary Fisk.
Filmed in black and white, Eraserhead tells the story of a quiet young man named Henry (Jack Nance) living in a dystopian industrial wasteland, whose girlfriend gives birth to a deformed baby whom she leaves in his care. The baby constantly cries, eventually leading to its accidental death, at which the world itself begins to fall apart. Lynch has consistently refused to either confirm or deny any interpretation of Eraserhead, or to "confess his own thinking behind the many abstractions in the film." Nonetheless, he admits that it was heavily influenced by the fearful mood of Philadelphia, and referred to the film as "my Philadelphia Story".
It was due to the financial problems with the production of Eraserhead that filming was haphazard, regularly stopping and starting again. It was in one such break in 1974 that Lynch created a short film entitled The Amputee, which revolved around a woman with two amputated legs (played by Jack Nance's wife, Catherine Coulson) reading aloud a letter and having her stumps washed by a doctor (played by Lynch himself).
Eraserhead was finally finished in 1976, after five years of production. Lynch subsequently tried to get the film entered into the Cannes Film Festival, but whilst some reviewers liked it, others felt that it was awful, and so it was not selected for screening. Similarly, reviewers from the New York Film Festival also rejected it, but it was indeed screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, from where Ben Barenholtz, the distributor of the Elgin Theater, heard about it. He was very supportive of the movie, helping to distribute it around the United States in 1977, and Eraserhead subsequently became popular on the midnight movie underground circuit, and was later described as one of the most important midnight movies of the seventies along with El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Harder They Come and Night of the Living Dead. The acclaimed film maker Stanley Kubrick said that it was one of his all-time favorite films.
The Elephant Man and mainstream success: 1980–1982
The cult success of Eraserhead on the underground circuit led to it being seen by Stuart Cornfeld, an executive producer to the producer Mel Brooks, who later remarked that "I was just 100 per cent blown away… I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. It was such a cleansing experience." Contacting Lynch, he agreed to help him with his next planned project, a film entitled Ronnie Rocket for which Lynch had already written a script. Nonetheless, Lynch soon realized that Ronnie Rocket, a film that he described as being about "electricity and a three-foot guy with red hair", was not going to be picked up by any financiers, and so he asked Cornfeld to find him a script written by someone else which he could direct. Cornfeld went away and found him four possible scripts, but upon hearing the title of the first, The Elephant Man, Lynch was already sure that that was the script for him, going on nothing but the title.
The Elephant Man script – written by Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren – was based upon a true story, that of Joseph Merrick, a heavily deformed man living in Victorian London, who was held in a sideshow but was later taken under the care of a London surgeon, Frederick Treves. Lynch wanted to film it, but at the same time also had to make some alterations that would alter the story from true events, but in his view make a better plot. However, in order to do so he would have to get the permission of Mel Brooks, whose company, BrookFilms, would be responsible for production; subsequently Brooks viewed Eraserhead, and after coming out of the screening theatre, embraced Lynch, declaring that "You're a madman, I love you! You're in."
The resulting film, The Elephant Man, starred John Hurt as John Merrick (his name was changed from Joseph), as well as Anthony Hopkins as Frederick Treves. Filming took place in London, and Lynch brought his own distinctively surrealist approach to the film, filming it in color stock black and white, but nonetheless it has been described as "one of the most conventional" of his films. The Elephant Man was a huge critical and commercial success, and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nods for Lynch.
The De Laurentiis films, Dune and Blue Velvet: 1983–1986
Following on from the success of The Elephant Man, the film maker George Lucas, himself a fan of Eraserhead, offered Lynch the opportunity to direct the third film in his Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi. Lynch however refused, arguing that Lucas should direct the film himself as the movie should reflect his own vision, not Lynch's take on it. Soon after however, the opportunity to direct another big-budget science fiction epic arose when Dino de Laurentiis of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group asked him to create a film adaptation of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune (1965). Lynch agreed, and in doing so was also contractually obliged to produce two other works for the company. He then set about writing a script based upon the original novel, initially with both Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren, and then just by himself when De Laurentiis wasn't happy with their ideas. Lynch also helped build some of the sets, attempting to create "a certain look" for the film, and he particularly enjoyed building the set for the oil planet of Giedi Prime, for which he "used steel, bolts, and porcelain to construct" it.
Dune is set in the far future, when humans live in an interstellar empire run along a feudal system. The main character, Paul Atreides (played by Kyle MacLachlan), is the son of a noble who takes control of the desert planet Arrakis which grows the rare spice melange, the most highly prized commodity in the empire. Lynch however was unhappy with the work, later remarking that "Dune was a kind of studio film. I didn’t have final cut. And, little by little, I was subconsciously making compromises" to his own vision. He produced much footage for the film that was eventually removed out from the final theatrical cut, dramatically condensing the plot. Although De Laurentiis hoped it would be as successful as Star Wars, Lynch's Dune (1984) was a critical and commercial dud; it had cost $45 million to make, and grossed a mere $27.4 million domestically. Later on, Universal Studios released an "extended cut" of the film for syndicated television, containing almost an hour of cutting-room-floor footage and new narration. Such was not representative of Lynch's intentions, but the studio considered it more comprehensible than the original two-hour version. Lynch objected to these changes and had his name struck from the extended cut, which has "Alan Smithee" credited as the director and "Judas Booth" (a pseudonym which Lynch himself invented, inspired by his own feelings of betrayal) as the screenwriter.
Meanwhile in 1983 he had begun the writing and drawing of a comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, which featured unchanging graphics of a tethered dog that was so angry that it could not move, alongside cryptic philosophical references. It ran from 1983 until 1992 in the Village Voice, Creative Loafing and other tabloid and alternative publications. It was around this period that Lynch also got increasingly interested in photography as an art form, and travelled to northern England to take photos of the degrading industrial landscape, something that he was particularly interested in.
Following on from Dune, Lynch was contractually still obliged to produce two other projects for De Laurentiis: the first of these was a planned sequel, which due to the film's lack of success never went beyond the script stage. The other was a more personal work, based upon a script that Lynch had been working on for some time. Developing from ideas that Lynch had had since 1973, the resulting film, Blue Velvet, was set in the fictional town of Lumberton, USA, and revolves around a college student named Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who finds a severed ear in a field. Subsequently investigating further with the help of friend Sandy (Laura Dern), he uncovers that it is related to a criminal gang led by psychopath Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped the husband and child of singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and repeatedly subjects her to rape. Lynch himself characterizes the story as "a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story."
For the film, Lynch decided to include pop songs from the 1950s, including "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison and "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton, the latter of which was largely inspirational for the film, with Lynch stating that "It was the song that sparked the movie… There was something mysterious about it. It made me think about things. And the first things I thought about were lawns – lawns and the neighbourhood." Other music for the film was also produced, this time composed by Angelo Badalamenti, who would go on to produce the music for most of Lynch’s subsequent cinematic works. Dino de Laurentiis loved the film, and it achieved support from some of the early specialist screenings, but the preview screenings to a mainstream audience were instead highly negative, with most of the audience hating the film. Although Lynch had found success previously with The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet's controversy with audiences and critics introduced him into the mainstream, and became a huge critical and moderate commercial success. The film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Woody Allen, whose film Hannah and Her Sisters was nominated for Best Picture, said that Blue Velvet was his favorite film of the year.
"I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That's why I love coffee shops and public places – I mean, they're all out there." -
David Lynch
Influences
Lynch admits that his work is more similar in many respects to those of European film makers than American ones, believing that most films that "get down and thrill your soul" were by European directors. Lynch has commented on his admiration for such film makers as Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog and Jacques Tati. He has also stated that Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) is one of his favourite films, as is Kubrick's Lolita (1962).
Recurring motifs
There are several recurring themes within Lynch's work, leading film critics Le Blanc and Odell to state that "his films are so packed with motifs, recurrent characters, images, compositions and techniques that you could view his entire output as one large jigsaw puzzle of ideas". One of the key themes that they noted was the usage of dreams and dreamlike imagery within his works, something they related to the "surrealist ethos" of relying "on the subconscious to provide visual drive". This can be seen in John Merrick's dream of his mother in The Elephant Man, Agent Cooper's dreams of the red room in Twin Peaks and the "dreamlike logic" of the narrative found in Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Discussing his attitude to dreams, Lynch has stated that "Waking dreams are the ones that are important, the ones that come when I'm quietly sitting in a chair, letting my mind wander. When you sleep, you don't control your dream. I like to dive into a dream world that I've made or discovered; a world I choose… [You can't really get others to experience it, but] right there is the power of cinema."
Another of Lynch's prominent themes include industry, with repeated imagery of "the clunk of machinery, the power of pistons, shadows of oil drills pumping, screaming woodmills and smoke billowing factories", as can be seen with the industrial wasteland in Eraserhead, the factories in The Elephant Man, the sawmill in Twin Peaks and the lawn mower in The Straight Story. Describing his interest in such things, Lynch stated that "It makes me feel good to see giant machinery, you know, working: dealing with molten metal. And I like fire and smoke. And the sounds are so powerful. It's just big stuff. It means that things are being made, and I really like that."
Another theme is the idea of a "dark underbelly" of violent criminal activity within a society, such as with Frank's gang in Blue Velvet and the cocaine smugglers in Twin Peaks. The idea of deformity is also found in several of Lynch's films, from the protagonist in The Elephant Man, to the deformed baby in Eraserhead, as is the idea of death from a head wound, found in most of Lynch's films. Other imagery commonly used within Lynch's works are flickering electrictity or lights, as well as fire and the idea of a stage upon which a singer performs, often surrounded by drapery.
With the exception of The Elephant Man and Dune, which are set in Victorian London and a fictitious galaxy respectively, all of Lynch's films have been set in the United States, and he has stated that "I like certain things about America and it gives me ideas. When I go around and I see things, it sparks little stories, or little characters pop out, so it just feels right to me to, you know, make American films." A number of his works, including Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway are intentionally reminiscent of the 1950s American culture even though they were set in the later decades of the 20th century. Lynch later commented on his feelings for this decade, which was that in which he grew up as a child, by stating that "It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways… there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork then for a disastrous future."
Lynch also tends to feature his leading female actors in multiple or "split" roles, so that many of his female characters have multiple, fractured identities. This practice began with his choice to cast Sheryl Lee as both Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks and continued in his later works. In Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette plays the dual role of Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield, while in Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts plays Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms and Laura Harring plays Camilla Rhodes/Rita and in Inland Empire, Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace/Susan Blue. By contrast, Lynch rarely creates multi-character roles for his male actors.
Reflections:
I find David Lynch's films very inspirational as the images in the film are powerful, hypnotic and unique.
Moving around various parts of the United States as a child within his middle class family, Lynch went on to study painting in Philadelphia, where he first made the transition to producing short films. Deciding to devote himself more fully to this medium, he moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977). After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct The Elephant Man (1980), from which he gained mainstream success. Then being employed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, he proceeded to make two films. First, the science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which proved to be a critical and commercial failure, and then a neo-noir crime film, Blue Velvet (1986), which was instead highly critically acclaimed.
Proceeding to create his own television series with Mark Frost, the highly popular murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–1992), he also created a cinematic prequel, Fire Walk With Me (1992), a road movie, Wild at Heart (1990), and a family film, The Straight Story (1999) in the same period. Turning further towards surrealist filmmaking, three of his following films worked on "dream logic" non-linear narrative structures, Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).
Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, for his films The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and also received a screenplay Academy Award nomination for The Elephant Man. Lynch has twice won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. The French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, the country's top civilian honor, as a Chevalier in 2002 and then an Officier in 2007, while that same year, The Guardian described Lynch as "the most important director of this era". Allmovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking", whilst the success of his films have led to him being labelled "the first popular Surrealist."
Early life: 1946–1965
Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946. His father, Donald Walton Lynch, was a research scientist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his mother, Edwina "Sunny" Lynch (née Sundholm), was an English language tutor whose grandfather's parents had immigrated to the United States from Finland in the 19th century. Lynch was raised a Presbyterian. Due to Donald's job, the Lynch family often moved around according to where the Department of Agriculture assigned him. It was because of this that when he was two months old, David Lynch moved with his parents to Sandpoint, Idaho, and only two years after that, following the birth of his brother John, the family again moved, this time to Spokane, Washington. It was here that his sister Martha was born, before they once more moved, this time to Durham, North Carolina, then to Boise, Idaho and then to Alexandria, Virginia. Lynch found this transitory early life relatively easy to adjust to, noting that he found it fairly easy to meet new friends whenever he started attending a new school. Commenting on much of his early life, Lynch has remarked that "I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school… For me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude." Alongside this schooling, his father made him join the Boy Scouts, although he would later note that he only "became one so I could quit, and put it behind me." He rose to the highest rank of Eagle Scout. It was through being an Eagle Scout that he was present with other Boy Scouts outside of the White House at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, which took place on Lynch's birthday in 1961.
Lynch had become interested in painting and drawing from an early age, becoming intrigued by the idea of pursuing it as a career path when living in Virginia, where his friend's father was a professional painter. At Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Virginia, he did poorly academically, having little interest in school work, but was popular with other students, and after leaving decided that he wanted to study painting at college, thereby beginning his studies at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1964, where he was a roommate of Peter Wolf. Nonetheless, he left after only a year, stating that "I was not inspired AT ALL in that place", and instead deciding that he wanted to travel around Europe for three years with his friend Jack Fisk, who was similarly unhappy with his studies at Cooper Union. They had some hopes that in Europe they could train with the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka at his school, however upon reaching Salzburg they found that he was not available, and disillusioned, they returned to the United States after spending only 15 days of their planned three years in Europe.
"My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath. Because I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast." - David Lynch
Philadelphia and short films: 1966–1970
Back in the United States, Lynch returned to Virginia, but since his parents had moved to Walnut Creek, California, he was forced to stay with his friend Tony Keeler for a while, before he decided to move to the city of Philadelphia, where, at the advice of Jack Fisk, who was already attending it, he decided to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, something he preferred far more than his previous art college in Boston, claiming that "In Philadelphia there were great and serious painters, and everybody was inspiring one another and it was a beautiful time there." It was here that he began a relationship with a fellow student, Peggy Reavey, and they were married in 1967. The following year, Peggy gave birth to their child, a girl whom they named Jennifer. Later describing this situation, Peggy stated that "[Lynch] definitely was a reluctant father, but a very loving one. Hey, I was pregnant when we got married. We were both reluctant." As a family, they moved to the Fairmount neighbourhood of Philadelphia, where they were able to purchase a large 12-room house for a relatively low $3,500 due to the high crime and poverty rates in the area. Later describing living there, Lynch stated that "We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street… We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen. The house was first broken into only three days after we moved in… The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city." Meanwhile, in order to help financially support his family alongside his art studies, he took up a job printing engravings.
It was at the Philadelphia Academy that Lynch made his very first short film, which was entitled Six Men Getting Sick (1966). He had first come up with the idea when he developed a wish to see his paintings move, and he subsequently began discussing the idea of creating an animation with an artist named Bruce Samuelson. When this project never came about, Lynch decided to work on a film alone, and so purchased the cheapest 16mm camera that he could find in order to do so. Taking one of the abandoned upper rooms of the Academy as a working space, he spent $200 – which at the time he felt to be a lot of money – to produce Six Men Getting Sick. Describing the work as "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit", Lynch played the film on a loop at the Academy's annual end-of-year exhibit, where it shared joint first prize with a painting by Noel Mahaffey. This led to a commission from one of his fellow students, the wealthy H. Barton Wasserman, who offered him $1000 to create a film installation in his home. Spending $450 of that on purchasing a second-hand Bolex camera, Lynch produced a new animated short, but upon getting the film developed, realized that the result was simply a blurred, frameless print. As he would later relate, "So I called up Bart [Wasserman] and said, 'Bart, the film is a disaster. The camera was broken and what I've done hasn't turned out.' And he said, 'Don't worry, David, take the rest of the money and make something else for me. Just give me a print.' End of story."
Using this leftover money, Lynch decided to experiment on making a work that was a mix of animation with live action, producing a four minute short entitled The Alphabet (1968). The film starred Lynch's wife Peggy as a character known as The Girl, who chants the alphabet to a series of images before dying at the end by haemorrhaging blood all over her bed sheets. Adding a sound effect, Lynch used a broken Uher tape recorded to record the sound of his baby daughter Jennifer crying, creating a distorted sound that Lynch felt to be particularly effective. Later describing where he had got inspiration for this work from, Lynch stated that "Peggy's niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that's sort of what started The Alphabet going. The rest of it was just subconscious."
Learning about the newly founded American Film Institute, which gave grants to film makers who could produce for them both a prior work and a script for a new project, Lynch decided to send them a copy of The Alphabet along with a script that he had written for a new short film, one that would be almost entirely live action, and which would be entitled The Grandmother. The Institute agreed to help finance the work, initially offering him $5000, out of his requested budget of $7,200, but later granting him the further $2,200 which he needed. Starring people he knew from both work and college and filmed in his own house, The Grandmother revolved around the story of a neglected boy who "grows" a grandmother from a seed to care for him. The film critics Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell later remarked that "this film is a true oddity but contains many of the themes and ideas that would filter into his later work, and shows a remarkable grasp of the medium".
Los Angeles and Eraserhead: 1971–1979
In 1971, Lynch moved with his wife and daughter to the city of Los Angeles in California, where he began studying filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory, a place that he would later describe as being "completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great… you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing." He began writing a script for a proposed work entitled Gardenback, which had "unfolded from this painting I'd done." In this venture he was supported by a number of figures at the Conservatory, who encouraged him to lengthen the script and add in more dialogue, something that he reluctantly agreed to do. Nonetheless, with all the interference on his Gardenback project, he became fed up with the Conservatory, and announced that he was quitting. Attempting to prevent this, many of the teachers at the centre asked him to reconsider, believing that he was one of their best students, and he finally agreed, albeit on the condition that he could create his own project that would not be interfered with. Feeling that Gardenback was "wrecked", he instead set about on a new film, which he called Eraserhead.
Despite the fact that the film was planned to be about forty-two minutes long (it would end up being eighty-nine minutes long), the script for Eraserhead was only 21 pages long, and some of the teachers at the Conservatory were concerned that the film would not be a success with such little dialogue and action. Nonetheless, they agreed not to interfere as they had done with Gardenback, and as such Lynch was able to create the film free from interference. Filming, which began in 1972, took place at night in some abandoned stables, allowing the production team, which was largely Lynch and some of his friends, including Sissy Spacek, Jack Fisk, cinematographer Frederick Elmes and sound designer Alan Splet to set up a camera room, green room, editing room, sets as well as a food room and a bathroom. Initially, funding for the project came from the AFI, who gave Lynch a $10,000 grant, but it was not enough to complete the work, and under pressure from studios after the success of the relatively cheap feature film Easy Rider, they were unable to provide him with any more. Following this, Lynch was also supported by a loan given to him by his father, and by money that he was able to bring in from a paper round that he took up delivering the Wall Street Journal. Not long into the production of Eraserhead, Lynch and his wife Peggy amicably separated and divorced, and so he began living full-time on set. In 1977, Lynch would remarry, this time to a woman named Mary Fisk.
Filmed in black and white, Eraserhead tells the story of a quiet young man named Henry (Jack Nance) living in a dystopian industrial wasteland, whose girlfriend gives birth to a deformed baby whom she leaves in his care. The baby constantly cries, eventually leading to its accidental death, at which the world itself begins to fall apart. Lynch has consistently refused to either confirm or deny any interpretation of Eraserhead, or to "confess his own thinking behind the many abstractions in the film." Nonetheless, he admits that it was heavily influenced by the fearful mood of Philadelphia, and referred to the film as "my Philadelphia Story".
It was due to the financial problems with the production of Eraserhead that filming was haphazard, regularly stopping and starting again. It was in one such break in 1974 that Lynch created a short film entitled The Amputee, which revolved around a woman with two amputated legs (played by Jack Nance's wife, Catherine Coulson) reading aloud a letter and having her stumps washed by a doctor (played by Lynch himself).
Eraserhead was finally finished in 1976, after five years of production. Lynch subsequently tried to get the film entered into the Cannes Film Festival, but whilst some reviewers liked it, others felt that it was awful, and so it was not selected for screening. Similarly, reviewers from the New York Film Festival also rejected it, but it was indeed screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, from where Ben Barenholtz, the distributor of the Elgin Theater, heard about it. He was very supportive of the movie, helping to distribute it around the United States in 1977, and Eraserhead subsequently became popular on the midnight movie underground circuit, and was later described as one of the most important midnight movies of the seventies along with El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Harder They Come and Night of the Living Dead. The acclaimed film maker Stanley Kubrick said that it was one of his all-time favorite films.
The Elephant Man and mainstream success: 1980–1982
The cult success of Eraserhead on the underground circuit led to it being seen by Stuart Cornfeld, an executive producer to the producer Mel Brooks, who later remarked that "I was just 100 per cent blown away… I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. It was such a cleansing experience." Contacting Lynch, he agreed to help him with his next planned project, a film entitled Ronnie Rocket for which Lynch had already written a script. Nonetheless, Lynch soon realized that Ronnie Rocket, a film that he described as being about "electricity and a three-foot guy with red hair", was not going to be picked up by any financiers, and so he asked Cornfeld to find him a script written by someone else which he could direct. Cornfeld went away and found him four possible scripts, but upon hearing the title of the first, The Elephant Man, Lynch was already sure that that was the script for him, going on nothing but the title.
The Elephant Man script – written by Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren – was based upon a true story, that of Joseph Merrick, a heavily deformed man living in Victorian London, who was held in a sideshow but was later taken under the care of a London surgeon, Frederick Treves. Lynch wanted to film it, but at the same time also had to make some alterations that would alter the story from true events, but in his view make a better plot. However, in order to do so he would have to get the permission of Mel Brooks, whose company, BrookFilms, would be responsible for production; subsequently Brooks viewed Eraserhead, and after coming out of the screening theatre, embraced Lynch, declaring that "You're a madman, I love you! You're in."
The resulting film, The Elephant Man, starred John Hurt as John Merrick (his name was changed from Joseph), as well as Anthony Hopkins as Frederick Treves. Filming took place in London, and Lynch brought his own distinctively surrealist approach to the film, filming it in color stock black and white, but nonetheless it has been described as "one of the most conventional" of his films. The Elephant Man was a huge critical and commercial success, and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nods for Lynch.
The De Laurentiis films, Dune and Blue Velvet: 1983–1986
Following on from the success of The Elephant Man, the film maker George Lucas, himself a fan of Eraserhead, offered Lynch the opportunity to direct the third film in his Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi. Lynch however refused, arguing that Lucas should direct the film himself as the movie should reflect his own vision, not Lynch's take on it. Soon after however, the opportunity to direct another big-budget science fiction epic arose when Dino de Laurentiis of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group asked him to create a film adaptation of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune (1965). Lynch agreed, and in doing so was also contractually obliged to produce two other works for the company. He then set about writing a script based upon the original novel, initially with both Chris de Vore and Eric Bergren, and then just by himself when De Laurentiis wasn't happy with their ideas. Lynch also helped build some of the sets, attempting to create "a certain look" for the film, and he particularly enjoyed building the set for the oil planet of Giedi Prime, for which he "used steel, bolts, and porcelain to construct" it.
Dune is set in the far future, when humans live in an interstellar empire run along a feudal system. The main character, Paul Atreides (played by Kyle MacLachlan), is the son of a noble who takes control of the desert planet Arrakis which grows the rare spice melange, the most highly prized commodity in the empire. Lynch however was unhappy with the work, later remarking that "Dune was a kind of studio film. I didn’t have final cut. And, little by little, I was subconsciously making compromises" to his own vision. He produced much footage for the film that was eventually removed out from the final theatrical cut, dramatically condensing the plot. Although De Laurentiis hoped it would be as successful as Star Wars, Lynch's Dune (1984) was a critical and commercial dud; it had cost $45 million to make, and grossed a mere $27.4 million domestically. Later on, Universal Studios released an "extended cut" of the film for syndicated television, containing almost an hour of cutting-room-floor footage and new narration. Such was not representative of Lynch's intentions, but the studio considered it more comprehensible than the original two-hour version. Lynch objected to these changes and had his name struck from the extended cut, which has "Alan Smithee" credited as the director and "Judas Booth" (a pseudonym which Lynch himself invented, inspired by his own feelings of betrayal) as the screenwriter.
Meanwhile in 1983 he had begun the writing and drawing of a comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, which featured unchanging graphics of a tethered dog that was so angry that it could not move, alongside cryptic philosophical references. It ran from 1983 until 1992 in the Village Voice, Creative Loafing and other tabloid and alternative publications. It was around this period that Lynch also got increasingly interested in photography as an art form, and travelled to northern England to take photos of the degrading industrial landscape, something that he was particularly interested in.
Following on from Dune, Lynch was contractually still obliged to produce two other projects for De Laurentiis: the first of these was a planned sequel, which due to the film's lack of success never went beyond the script stage. The other was a more personal work, based upon a script that Lynch had been working on for some time. Developing from ideas that Lynch had had since 1973, the resulting film, Blue Velvet, was set in the fictional town of Lumberton, USA, and revolves around a college student named Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who finds a severed ear in a field. Subsequently investigating further with the help of friend Sandy (Laura Dern), he uncovers that it is related to a criminal gang led by psychopath Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped the husband and child of singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and repeatedly subjects her to rape. Lynch himself characterizes the story as "a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story."
For the film, Lynch decided to include pop songs from the 1950s, including "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison and "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton, the latter of which was largely inspirational for the film, with Lynch stating that "It was the song that sparked the movie… There was something mysterious about it. It made me think about things. And the first things I thought about were lawns – lawns and the neighbourhood." Other music for the film was also produced, this time composed by Angelo Badalamenti, who would go on to produce the music for most of Lynch’s subsequent cinematic works. Dino de Laurentiis loved the film, and it achieved support from some of the early specialist screenings, but the preview screenings to a mainstream audience were instead highly negative, with most of the audience hating the film. Although Lynch had found success previously with The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet's controversy with audiences and critics introduced him into the mainstream, and became a huge critical and moderate commercial success. The film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Woody Allen, whose film Hannah and Her Sisters was nominated for Best Picture, said that Blue Velvet was his favorite film of the year.
"I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That's why I love coffee shops and public places – I mean, they're all out there." -
David Lynch
Influences
Lynch admits that his work is more similar in many respects to those of European film makers than American ones, believing that most films that "get down and thrill your soul" were by European directors. Lynch has commented on his admiration for such film makers as Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog and Jacques Tati. He has also stated that Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) is one of his favourite films, as is Kubrick's Lolita (1962).
Recurring motifs
There are several recurring themes within Lynch's work, leading film critics Le Blanc and Odell to state that "his films are so packed with motifs, recurrent characters, images, compositions and techniques that you could view his entire output as one large jigsaw puzzle of ideas". One of the key themes that they noted was the usage of dreams and dreamlike imagery within his works, something they related to the "surrealist ethos" of relying "on the subconscious to provide visual drive". This can be seen in John Merrick's dream of his mother in The Elephant Man, Agent Cooper's dreams of the red room in Twin Peaks and the "dreamlike logic" of the narrative found in Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Discussing his attitude to dreams, Lynch has stated that "Waking dreams are the ones that are important, the ones that come when I'm quietly sitting in a chair, letting my mind wander. When you sleep, you don't control your dream. I like to dive into a dream world that I've made or discovered; a world I choose… [You can't really get others to experience it, but] right there is the power of cinema."
Another of Lynch's prominent themes include industry, with repeated imagery of "the clunk of machinery, the power of pistons, shadows of oil drills pumping, screaming woodmills and smoke billowing factories", as can be seen with the industrial wasteland in Eraserhead, the factories in The Elephant Man, the sawmill in Twin Peaks and the lawn mower in The Straight Story. Describing his interest in such things, Lynch stated that "It makes me feel good to see giant machinery, you know, working: dealing with molten metal. And I like fire and smoke. And the sounds are so powerful. It's just big stuff. It means that things are being made, and I really like that."
Another theme is the idea of a "dark underbelly" of violent criminal activity within a society, such as with Frank's gang in Blue Velvet and the cocaine smugglers in Twin Peaks. The idea of deformity is also found in several of Lynch's films, from the protagonist in The Elephant Man, to the deformed baby in Eraserhead, as is the idea of death from a head wound, found in most of Lynch's films. Other imagery commonly used within Lynch's works are flickering electrictity or lights, as well as fire and the idea of a stage upon which a singer performs, often surrounded by drapery.
With the exception of The Elephant Man and Dune, which are set in Victorian London and a fictitious galaxy respectively, all of Lynch's films have been set in the United States, and he has stated that "I like certain things about America and it gives me ideas. When I go around and I see things, it sparks little stories, or little characters pop out, so it just feels right to me to, you know, make American films." A number of his works, including Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway are intentionally reminiscent of the 1950s American culture even though they were set in the later decades of the 20th century. Lynch later commented on his feelings for this decade, which was that in which he grew up as a child, by stating that "It was a fantastic decade in a lot of ways… there was something in the air that is not there any more at all. It was such a great feeling, and not just because I was a kid. It was a really hopeful time, and things were going up instead of going down. You got the feeling you could do anything. The future was bright. Little did we know we were laying the groundwork then for a disastrous future."
Lynch also tends to feature his leading female actors in multiple or "split" roles, so that many of his female characters have multiple, fractured identities. This practice began with his choice to cast Sheryl Lee as both Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks and continued in his later works. In Lost Highway, Patricia Arquette plays the dual role of Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield, while in Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts plays Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms and Laura Harring plays Camilla Rhodes/Rita and in Inland Empire, Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace/Susan Blue. By contrast, Lynch rarely creates multi-character roles for his male actors.
Reflections:
I find David Lynch's films very inspirational as the images in the film are powerful, hypnotic and unique.
Tuesday 19 April 2011
David Lynch - The Grandmother (1970)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meDI2hhEQ3w
A young boy plants some strange seeds and they grow into a grandmother. Short, surreal, and David Lynch's third film.
A young boy plants some strange seeds and they grow into a grandmother. Short, surreal, and David Lynch's third film.
Tuesday 5 April 2011
Influences on commercial media
Though experimental film is known to a relatively small number of practitioners, academics and connoisseurs, it has influenced and continues to influence cinematography, visual effects and editing.
The genre of music video can be seen as a commercialization of many techniques of experimental film. Title design and television advertising have also been influenced by experimental film.
Many experimental filmmakers have also made feature films, and vice versa. Notable examples include Kathryn Bigelow, Curtis Harrington, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Jean Cocteau, Isaac Julien, Sally Potter, David Lynch, Gus Van Sant and Luis Buñuel, although the degree to which their feature filmmaking takes on mainstream commercial aesthetics differs widely.
The genre of music video can be seen as a commercialization of many techniques of experimental film. Title design and television advertising have also been influenced by experimental film.
Many experimental filmmakers have also made feature films, and vice versa. Notable examples include Kathryn Bigelow, Curtis Harrington, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Jean Cocteau, Isaac Julien, Sally Potter, David Lynch, Gus Van Sant and Luis Buñuel, although the degree to which their feature filmmaking takes on mainstream commercial aesthetics differs widely.
Exhibition and distribution
Beginning in 1946, Frank Stauffacher ran the "Art in Cinema" program of experimental and avant-garde films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
From 1949 to 1975, the Festival international du cinéma expérimental de Knokke-le-Zoute — located in Knokke-Heist, Belgium — was the most proeminant festival of experimental cinema in the World. It permits the discovery of American avant-garde in 1958 with Brakhage's films and many others European and American filmmakers.
From 1947 to 1963, the New York-based Cinema 16 functioned as the primary exhibitor and distributor of experimental film in the United States. Under the leadership of Amos Vogel and Marcia Vogel, Cinema 16 flourished as a nonprofit membership society committed to the exhibition of documentary, avant-garde, scientific, educational, and performance films to ever-increasing audiences.
In 1962 Jonas Mekas and about 20 other film makers founded The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City. Soon similar artists cooperatives were formed in other places: Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, the London Film-Makers' Co-op, and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center.
Following the model of Cinema 16, experimental films have been exhibited mainly outside of commercial theaters in small film societies, microcinemas, museums, art galleries, archives and film festivals.
Several other organizations in both Europe and North America helped develop experimental film. These included Anthology Film Archives in New York City, The Millennium Film Workshop, the British Film Institute in London, the National Film Board of Canada and the Collective for Living Cinema.
Some of the more popular film festivals, such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant-Garde" Side Bar and the International Film Festival Rotterdam prominently feature experimental works.
The New York Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, the LA Freewaves Experimental Media Arts Festival, MIX NYC the New York Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and Toronto's Images Festival also support this work and provide venues for films which would not otherwise be seen. There is some dispute about whether "underground" and "avant-garde" truly mean the same thing and if challenging non-traditional cinema and fine arts cinema are actually fundamentally related.
Venues such as Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris often include historically significant experimental films and contemporary works. Screening series no longer in New York that featured experimental work include the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, Ocularis and the Collective for Living Cinema.
Recently Pacific Film Archive eliminated their experimental Tuesday night program. The new curator (since 2000) of the Whitney stated in a 2001 interview on Charlie Rose that he believed it was the responsibility of the Anthology Film Archives to show the work because the work is essentially unsellable and the Whitney was not interested in "renting" video art and films. He went on to intimate that it would fall out of favor in coming biennials. (PBS/Charlie Rose).
Some distributors of experimental film today include Le Collectif Jeune Cinema, Cinédoc and Light Cone in Paris, Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, Canadian Filmmaker's Distribution Centre, The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York, and Lux in London. Sixteen mm prints are still available through these organisations. All these associations and movements are permit the birth and development of national experimental films and schools like “body cinema” ("Écoles du corps" or "Cinéma corporel") and “post-structural” movements in France, and “structural/materialism" in England for example.
From 1949 to 1975, the Festival international du cinéma expérimental de Knokke-le-Zoute — located in Knokke-Heist, Belgium — was the most proeminant festival of experimental cinema in the World. It permits the discovery of American avant-garde in 1958 with Brakhage's films and many others European and American filmmakers.
From 1947 to 1963, the New York-based Cinema 16 functioned as the primary exhibitor and distributor of experimental film in the United States. Under the leadership of Amos Vogel and Marcia Vogel, Cinema 16 flourished as a nonprofit membership society committed to the exhibition of documentary, avant-garde, scientific, educational, and performance films to ever-increasing audiences.
In 1962 Jonas Mekas and about 20 other film makers founded The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City. Soon similar artists cooperatives were formed in other places: Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, the London Film-Makers' Co-op, and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center.
Following the model of Cinema 16, experimental films have been exhibited mainly outside of commercial theaters in small film societies, microcinemas, museums, art galleries, archives and film festivals.
Several other organizations in both Europe and North America helped develop experimental film. These included Anthology Film Archives in New York City, The Millennium Film Workshop, the British Film Institute in London, the National Film Board of Canada and the Collective for Living Cinema.
Some of the more popular film festivals, such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant-Garde" Side Bar and the International Film Festival Rotterdam prominently feature experimental works.
The New York Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, the LA Freewaves Experimental Media Arts Festival, MIX NYC the New York Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and Toronto's Images Festival also support this work and provide venues for films which would not otherwise be seen. There is some dispute about whether "underground" and "avant-garde" truly mean the same thing and if challenging non-traditional cinema and fine arts cinema are actually fundamentally related.
Venues such as Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris often include historically significant experimental films and contemporary works. Screening series no longer in New York that featured experimental work include the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, Ocularis and the Collective for Living Cinema.
Recently Pacific Film Archive eliminated their experimental Tuesday night program. The new curator (since 2000) of the Whitney stated in a 2001 interview on Charlie Rose that he believed it was the responsibility of the Anthology Film Archives to show the work because the work is essentially unsellable and the Whitney was not interested in "renting" video art and films. He went on to intimate that it would fall out of favor in coming biennials. (PBS/Charlie Rose).
Some distributors of experimental film today include Le Collectif Jeune Cinema, Cinédoc and Light Cone in Paris, Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, Canadian Filmmaker's Distribution Centre, The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York, and Lux in London. Sixteen mm prints are still available through these organisations. All these associations and movements are permit the birth and development of national experimental films and schools like “body cinema” ("Écoles du corps" or "Cinéma corporel") and “post-structural” movements in France, and “structural/materialism" in England for example.
Experimental Film and the Academy
With very few exceptions, Curtis Harrington among them, the artists involved in these early movements remained outside of the mainstream commercial cinema and entertainment industry. A few taught occasionally, and then, starting in 1966, many became professors at universities such as the State Universities of New York, Bard College, California Institute of the Arts, the Massachusetts College of Art, University of Colorado at Boulder, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Many of the practitioners of experimental film do not in fact possess college degrees themselves, although their showings are prestigious. Some have questioned the status of the films made in the academy, but longtime film professors such as Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, and many others, continued to refine and expand their practice while teaching. The inclusion of experimental film in film courses and standard film histories, however, has made the work more widely known and more accessible.
Feminist avant-garde and other political offshoots
Laura Mulvey's writing and filmmaking launched a flourishing of feminist filmmaking based on the idea that conventional Hollywood narrative reinforced gender norms and a patriarchal gaze. Their response was to resist narrative in a way to show its fissures and inconsistencies. Chantal Akerman and Sally Potter are just two of the leading feminist filmmakers working in this mode in the 1970s. Video art emerged as a medium in this period, and feminists like Martha Rosler and Cecelia Condit took full advantage of it.
In the 1980s feminist, gay and other political experimental work continued, with filmmakers like Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Tracey Moffatt, Sadie Benning, Moira Sullivan, and Isaac Julien among others finding experimental format conducive to their questions about identity politics.
The queercore movement gave rise to a number experimental queer filmmakers such as G.B. Jones (a founder of the movement) in the 1990s and later Scott Treleaven, among others.
In the 1980s feminist, gay and other political experimental work continued, with filmmakers like Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Tracey Moffatt, Sadie Benning, Moira Sullivan, and Isaac Julien among others finding experimental format conducive to their questions about identity politics.
The queercore movement gave rise to a number experimental queer filmmakers such as G.B. Jones (a founder of the movement) in the 1990s and later Scott Treleaven, among others.
The 1970s and time arts in the conceptual art landscape
Conceptual art in the 1970s pushed even further. Robert Smithson, a California-based artist, made several films about his earthworks and attached projects. Yoko Ono made conceptual films, the most notorious of which is Rape, which finds a woman and invades her life with cameras following her back to her apartment as she flees from the invasion. Around this time a new generation was entering the field, many of whom were students of the early avant-gardists. Leslie Thornton, Peggy Ahwesh, and Su Friedrich expanded upon the work of the structuralists, incorporating a broader range of content while maintaining a self-reflexive form.
The New American Cinema and Structural-Materialism
The film society and self-financing model continued over the next two decades, but by the early 1960s, a different outlook became perceptible in the work of American avant-garde filmmakers. Artist Bruce Conner created early examples such as A Movie (1958) and Cosmic Ray (1962). As P. Adams Sitney has pointed out, in the work of Stan Brakhage and other American experimentalists of early period, film is used to express the individual consciousness of the maker, a cinematic equivalent of the first person in literature. Brakhage's Dog Star Man (1961–64) exemplified a shift from personal confessional to abstraction, and also evidenced a rejection of American mass culture of the time. On the other hand, Kenneth Anger added a rock sound track to his Scorpio Rising (1963) in what is sometimes said to be an anticipation of music videos, and included some camp commentary on Hollywood mythology. Jack Smith and Andy Warhol incorporated camp elements into their work, and Sitney posited Warhol's connection to structural film.
Some avant-garde filmmakers moved further away from narrative. Whereas the New American Cinema was marked by an oblique take on narrative, one based on abstraction, camp and minimalism, Structural-Materialist filmmakers like Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow created a highly formalist cinema that foregrounded the medium itself: the frame, projection, and most importantly, time. It has been argued that by breaking film down into bare components, they sought to create an anti-illusionist cinema, although Frampton's late works owe a huge debt to the photography of Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and others, and in fact celebrate illusion. Further, while many filmmakers began making rather academic "structural films" following Film Culture's publication of an article by P. Adams Sitney in the late 1960s, many of the filmmakers named in the article objected to the term.
A critical review of the structuralists appeared in a 2000 edition of the art journal Art In America. It examined structural-formalism as a conservative philosophy of filmmaking.
Some avant-garde filmmakers moved further away from narrative. Whereas the New American Cinema was marked by an oblique take on narrative, one based on abstraction, camp and minimalism, Structural-Materialist filmmakers like Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow created a highly formalist cinema that foregrounded the medium itself: the frame, projection, and most importantly, time. It has been argued that by breaking film down into bare components, they sought to create an anti-illusionist cinema, although Frampton's late works owe a huge debt to the photography of Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and others, and in fact celebrate illusion. Further, while many filmmakers began making rather academic "structural films" following Film Culture's publication of an article by P. Adams Sitney in the late 1960s, many of the filmmakers named in the article objected to the term.
A critical review of the structuralists appeared in a 2000 edition of the art journal Art In America. It examined structural-formalism as a conservative philosophy of filmmaking.
The postwar American avant-garde
The U.S. had some avant-garde filmmakers before World War II, but much pre-war experimental film culture consisted of artists working, often, in isolation. Douglass Crockwell (1904–1968) made animations with blobs of paint pressed between sheets of glass at Fall River, New York.
In Rochester, New York, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber directed The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933). Harry Smith, Mary Ellen Bute, artist Joseph Cornell, and painter Emlen Etting (1905–1993) made early masterpieces in the 1930s, and Christopher Young made several European-influenced experimental films. In 1930 appears the magazine Experimental Cinema (for the first time, the two words are directly connected without any space between them. The editors are Lewis Jacobs and David Platt. A very large panel of films of that time are been edited, in 2005, on DVD : Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid is considered to be one of the first important American experimental films. It provided a model for self-financed 16 mm production and distribution, one that was soon picked up by Cinema 16 and other film societies. Just as importantly, it established an aesthetic model of what experimental cinema could do. Meshes had a dream-like feel that hearkened to Jean Cocteau and the Surrealists, but equally seemed personal, new and American. Early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Willard Maas, Marie Menken, Curtis Harrington and Sidney Peterson followed in a similar vein. Significantly, many of these filmmakers were the first students from the pioneering university film programs established in Los Angeles and New York. In 1946, Frank Stauffacher started the "Art in Cinema" series of experimental films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
They set up "alternative film programs" at Black Mountain College (now defunct) and the San Francisco Art Institute. Arthur Penn taught at Black Mountain College, which points out the popular misconception in both the art world and Hollywood that the avant-garde and the commercial never meet. Another challenge to that misconception is the fact that late in life, after each's Hollywood careers had ended, both Nicholas Ray and King Vidor made avant-garde films.
In Rochester, New York, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber directed The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933). Harry Smith, Mary Ellen Bute, artist Joseph Cornell, and painter Emlen Etting (1905–1993) made early masterpieces in the 1930s, and Christopher Young made several European-influenced experimental films. In 1930 appears the magazine Experimental Cinema (for the first time, the two words are directly connected without any space between them. The editors are Lewis Jacobs and David Platt. A very large panel of films of that time are been edited, in 2005, on DVD : Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid is considered to be one of the first important American experimental films. It provided a model for self-financed 16 mm production and distribution, one that was soon picked up by Cinema 16 and other film societies. Just as importantly, it established an aesthetic model of what experimental cinema could do. Meshes had a dream-like feel that hearkened to Jean Cocteau and the Surrealists, but equally seemed personal, new and American. Early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Willard Maas, Marie Menken, Curtis Harrington and Sidney Peterson followed in a similar vein. Significantly, many of these filmmakers were the first students from the pioneering university film programs established in Los Angeles and New York. In 1946, Frank Stauffacher started the "Art in Cinema" series of experimental films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
They set up "alternative film programs" at Black Mountain College (now defunct) and the San Francisco Art Institute. Arthur Penn taught at Black Mountain College, which points out the popular misconception in both the art world and Hollywood that the avant-garde and the commercial never meet. Another challenge to that misconception is the fact that late in life, after each's Hollywood careers had ended, both Nicholas Ray and King Vidor made avant-garde films.
The European avant-garde
Two conditions made Europe in the 1920s ready for the emergence of experimental film. First, the cinema matured as a medium, and highbrow resistance to the mass entertainment began to wane. Second, avant-garde movements in the visual arts flourished. The Dadaists and Surrealists in particular took to cinema. René Clair's Entr'acte (1924) took madcap comedy into nonsequitur, and artists Hans Richter, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Germaine Dulac, and Viking Eggeling all contributed Dadaist/Surrealist shorts. The most famous experimental film is generally considered to be Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un chien andalou (1929). Hans Richter's animated shorts, Oskar Fischinger's abstract films and Len Lye's GPO films would be excellent examples of more abstract European avant-garde films.
Working in France, another group of filmmakers also financed films through patronage and distributed them through cine-clubs, yet they were narrative films not tied to an avant-garde school. Film scholar David Bordwell has dubbed these French Impressionists, and included Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, and Dimitri Kirsanoff. These films combines narrative experimentation, rhythmic editing and camerawork, and an emphasis on character subjectivity.
In 1952, the Lettrists avant-garde movement in France, caused riots at the Cannes Film Festival, when Isidore Isou's Traité de bave et d'éternité (also known as Venom and Eternity) was screened. After their criticism of Charlie Chaplin at the 1952 press conference in Paris for Chaplin's Limelight, there was a split within the movement. The Ultra-Lettrists continued to cause disruptions when they announced the death of cinema and showed their new hypergraphical techniques. The most notorious film of which is Guy Debord's Howlings in favor of de Sade (Hurlements en Faveur de Sade) from 1952.
The Soviet filmmakers, too, found a counterpart to modernist painting and photography in their theories of montage. The films of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Vsevolod Pudovkin were instrumental in providing an alternate model from that offered by classical Hollywood. While not experimental films per se, they contributed to the film language of the avant-garde.
Working in France, another group of filmmakers also financed films through patronage and distributed them through cine-clubs, yet they were narrative films not tied to an avant-garde school. Film scholar David Bordwell has dubbed these French Impressionists, and included Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, and Dimitri Kirsanoff. These films combines narrative experimentation, rhythmic editing and camerawork, and an emphasis on character subjectivity.
In 1952, the Lettrists avant-garde movement in France, caused riots at the Cannes Film Festival, when Isidore Isou's Traité de bave et d'éternité (also known as Venom and Eternity) was screened. After their criticism of Charlie Chaplin at the 1952 press conference in Paris for Chaplin's Limelight, there was a split within the movement. The Ultra-Lettrists continued to cause disruptions when they announced the death of cinema and showed their new hypergraphical techniques. The most notorious film of which is Guy Debord's Howlings in favor of de Sade (Hurlements en Faveur de Sade) from 1952.
The Soviet filmmakers, too, found a counterpart to modernist painting and photography in their theories of montage. The films of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Vsevolod Pudovkin were instrumental in providing an alternate model from that offered by classical Hollywood. While not experimental films per se, they contributed to the film language of the avant-garde.
Experimental film
Experimental film or experimental cinema describes a range of filmmaking styles that are generally quite different from, and often opposed to, the practices of mainstream commercial and documentary filmmaking. "Avant-garde" is also used, for the films shots in the twenties in the field of history’s avant-gardes currents in France or Germany, to describe this work, and "underground" has been used in the sixties, though it has also had other connotations. Today the term "experimental cinema” prevails, because it’s possible to make experimental films without the presence of any avant-garde movement in the cultural field. Like in the present time.
While "experimental" covers a wide range of practice, an "experimental film" is often characterized by the absence of linear narrative, the use of various abstracting techniques (out of focus, painting or scratching on film, rapid editing), the use of asynchronous (non-diegetic) sound or even the absence of any sound track. The goal is often to place the viewer in a more active and more thoughtful relationship to the film. At least through the 1960s, and to some extent after, many experimental films took an oppositional stance toward mainstream culture. Most such films are made on very low budgets, self-financed or financed through small grants, with a minimal crew or, quite often, a crew of only one person, the filmmaker. It has been argued that much experimental film is no longer in fact "experimental," but has in fact become a film genre and that many of its more typical features - such as a non-narrative, impressionistic or poetic approaches to the film's construction - define what is generally understood to be "experimental".
While "experimental" covers a wide range of practice, an "experimental film" is often characterized by the absence of linear narrative, the use of various abstracting techniques (out of focus, painting or scratching on film, rapid editing), the use of asynchronous (non-diegetic) sound or even the absence of any sound track. The goal is often to place the viewer in a more active and more thoughtful relationship to the film. At least through the 1960s, and to some extent after, many experimental films took an oppositional stance toward mainstream culture. Most such films are made on very low budgets, self-financed or financed through small grants, with a minimal crew or, quite often, a crew of only one person, the filmmaker. It has been argued that much experimental film is no longer in fact "experimental," but has in fact become a film genre and that many of its more typical features - such as a non-narrative, impressionistic or poetic approaches to the film's construction - define what is generally understood to be "experimental".
Thursday 31 March 2011
Jump cut
A jump cut is a cut in film editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly. This type of edit causes the subject of the shots to appear to "jump" position in a discontinuous way. For this reason, jump cuts are considered a violation of classical continuity editing, which aims to give the appearance of continuous time and space in the story-world by de-emphasizing editing. Jump cuts, in contrast, draw attention to the constructed nature of the film. Although the term is sometimes used in a loose way, a cut between two different subjects is not a true jump cut, no matter how jarring.
Continuity editing uses a guideline called the "30 degree rule" to avoid jump cuts. The 30 degree rule advises that for consecutive shots to appear "seamless," the camera position must vary at least 30 degrees from its previous position. Some schools would call for a change in framing as well (e.g., from a medium shot to a close up). Generally, if the camera position changes less than 30 degrees, the difference between the two shots will not be substantial enough, and the viewer will experience the edit as a jump in the position of the subject that is jarring, and draws attention to itself. Although jump cuts can be created through the editing together of two shots filmed non-continuously (Spatial Jump Cuts), they can also be created by removing a middle section of one continuously-filmed shot (Temporal Jump Cuts).
George Méliès is known as the father of the jump cut as a result of having discovered it accidentally, and then using it to simulate magical tricks; however, he tried to make the cut appear seamless to complement his illusions. Contemporary use of the jump cut stems from its appearance in the work of Jean-Luc Godard (at the suggestion of Jean-Pierre Melville) and other filmmakers of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. In Godard's ground-breaking Breathless (1960), for example, he cut together shots of Jean Seberg riding in a convertible (see right) in such a way that the discontinuity between shots is emphasized and its jarring effect deliberate. In the screen shots to the right, the first image comes from the very end of one shot and the second is the very beginning of the next shot — thus emphasizing the gap in action between the two (when Seberg picked up the mirror). Recently the jump cut has been used in films like Snatch, from Guy Ritchie, and Run Lola Run, from Tom Tykwer. It is frequently used in TV editing, in documentaries produced by Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel (NatGeo), for example.
The jump cut has sometimes served a political use in film. It has been used as an alienating Brechtian technique (the Verfremdungseffekt) that makes the audience aware of the unreality of the film experience, in order to focus the audience's attention on the political message of a film rather than the drama or emotion of the narrative — as may be observed in some segments of Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin.
In informal contexts the term jump cut is sometimes used to describe any abrupt and noticeable edit cut in a film. However, technically this is an incorrect usage of the term. A famous example of this is found at the end of the "Dawn of Man" sequence in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A primitive ape discovers the use of bones as a weapon and throws the bone into the air. When the bone reaches its highest point, the shot cuts to that of a similarly-shaped space station in orbit above the earth. This edit has been described as a jump cut, including on the box of the DVD release of the film, but it is more correctly a graphic match because the viewer is meant to see the similarity between the bone and the space craft and not the discontinuity between the two shots.
The jump cut was an uncommon technique for television until shows like Homicide: Life on the Street popularized it on the small screen in the 1990s. It was also famously used in a campaign commercial for US President Ronald Reagan's successful 1984 reelection bid.
Jump cuts are sometimes used to show a nervous searching scene as is done in the 2009 sci-fi film Moon where the protagonist is looking for a secret room on a space station and District 9 where Wikus searches for illegal objects in the house of Christopher's friend.
Reflections:
I am not intending to use any jump cuts in the film at the moment but I will still leave it open as a possibility.
Continuity editing uses a guideline called the "30 degree rule" to avoid jump cuts. The 30 degree rule advises that for consecutive shots to appear "seamless," the camera position must vary at least 30 degrees from its previous position. Some schools would call for a change in framing as well (e.g., from a medium shot to a close up). Generally, if the camera position changes less than 30 degrees, the difference between the two shots will not be substantial enough, and the viewer will experience the edit as a jump in the position of the subject that is jarring, and draws attention to itself. Although jump cuts can be created through the editing together of two shots filmed non-continuously (Spatial Jump Cuts), they can also be created by removing a middle section of one continuously-filmed shot (Temporal Jump Cuts).
George Méliès is known as the father of the jump cut as a result of having discovered it accidentally, and then using it to simulate magical tricks; however, he tried to make the cut appear seamless to complement his illusions. Contemporary use of the jump cut stems from its appearance in the work of Jean-Luc Godard (at the suggestion of Jean-Pierre Melville) and other filmmakers of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. In Godard's ground-breaking Breathless (1960), for example, he cut together shots of Jean Seberg riding in a convertible (see right) in such a way that the discontinuity between shots is emphasized and its jarring effect deliberate. In the screen shots to the right, the first image comes from the very end of one shot and the second is the very beginning of the next shot — thus emphasizing the gap in action between the two (when Seberg picked up the mirror). Recently the jump cut has been used in films like Snatch, from Guy Ritchie, and Run Lola Run, from Tom Tykwer. It is frequently used in TV editing, in documentaries produced by Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel (NatGeo), for example.
The jump cut has sometimes served a political use in film. It has been used as an alienating Brechtian technique (the Verfremdungseffekt) that makes the audience aware of the unreality of the film experience, in order to focus the audience's attention on the political message of a film rather than the drama or emotion of the narrative — as may be observed in some segments of Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin.
In informal contexts the term jump cut is sometimes used to describe any abrupt and noticeable edit cut in a film. However, technically this is an incorrect usage of the term. A famous example of this is found at the end of the "Dawn of Man" sequence in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A primitive ape discovers the use of bones as a weapon and throws the bone into the air. When the bone reaches its highest point, the shot cuts to that of a similarly-shaped space station in orbit above the earth. This edit has been described as a jump cut, including on the box of the DVD release of the film, but it is more correctly a graphic match because the viewer is meant to see the similarity between the bone and the space craft and not the discontinuity between the two shots.
The jump cut was an uncommon technique for television until shows like Homicide: Life on the Street popularized it on the small screen in the 1990s. It was also famously used in a campaign commercial for US President Ronald Reagan's successful 1984 reelection bid.
Jump cuts are sometimes used to show a nervous searching scene as is done in the 2009 sci-fi film Moon where the protagonist is looking for a secret room on a space station and District 9 where Wikus searches for illegal objects in the house of Christopher's friend.
Reflections:
I am not intending to use any jump cuts in the film at the moment but I will still leave it open as a possibility.
Point of view shot
A point of view shot (also known as POV shot or a subjective camera) is a short film scene that shows what a character (the subject) is looking at (represented through the camera). It is usually established by being positioned between a shot of a character looking at something, and a shot showing the character's reaction (see shot reverse shot). The technique of POV is one of the foundations of film editing.
A POV shot need not be the strict point-of-view of an actual single character in a film. Sometimes the point-of-view shot is taken over the shoulder of the character (third person), who remains visible on the screen. Sometimes a POV shot is "shared" ("dual" or "triple"), i.e. it represents the joint POV of two (or more) characters. There is also the "nobody POV", where a shot is taken from the POV of a non-existent character. This often occurs when an actual POV shot is implied, but the character is removed. Sometimes the character is never present at all, despite a clear POV shot, such as the famous "God-POV" of birds descending from the sky in Alfred Hitchcock's film, The Birds. Another example of a POV shot is in the movie Doom, which contains a fairly long POV shot which resembles a head-up display in a first-person shooter video game, with the viewer watching through a character who is venturing through hallways shooting and killing aliens.
"Point-of-view , or simply p.o.v., camera angles record the scene from a particular player's viewpoint. The point-of-view is an objective angle, but since it falls between the objective and subjective angle, it should be placed in a separate category and given special consideration. A point-of-view shot is as close as an objective shot can approach a subjective shot - and still remain objective. The camera is positioned at the side of a subjective player - whose viewpoint is being depicted - so that the audience is given the impression they are standing cheek-to-cheek with the off-screen player. The viewer does not see the event through the player's eyes, as in a subjective shot in which the camera trades places with the screen player. He sees the event from the player's viewpoint, as if standing alongside him. Thus, the camera angle remains objective, since it is an unseen observer not involved in the action." - Joseph V. Mascelli in The Five C's of Cinematography
A POV shot need not be established by strictly visual means. The manipulation of diegetic sounds can be used to emphasize a particular character's POV.
It makes little sense to say that a shot is "inherently" POV; it is the editing of the POV shot within a sequence of shots that determines POV. Nor can the establishment of a POV shot be isolated from other elements of filmmaking — mise en scene, acting, camera placement, editing, and special effects can all contribute to the establishment of POV.
With some POV shots when an animal is the chosen character, the shot will look distorted or black and white.
A POV shot need not be the strict point-of-view of an actual single character in a film. Sometimes the point-of-view shot is taken over the shoulder of the character (third person), who remains visible on the screen. Sometimes a POV shot is "shared" ("dual" or "triple"), i.e. it represents the joint POV of two (or more) characters. There is also the "nobody POV", where a shot is taken from the POV of a non-existent character. This often occurs when an actual POV shot is implied, but the character is removed. Sometimes the character is never present at all, despite a clear POV shot, such as the famous "God-POV" of birds descending from the sky in Alfred Hitchcock's film, The Birds. Another example of a POV shot is in the movie Doom, which contains a fairly long POV shot which resembles a head-up display in a first-person shooter video game, with the viewer watching through a character who is venturing through hallways shooting and killing aliens.
"Point-of-view , or simply p.o.v., camera angles record the scene from a particular player's viewpoint. The point-of-view is an objective angle, but since it falls between the objective and subjective angle, it should be placed in a separate category and given special consideration. A point-of-view shot is as close as an objective shot can approach a subjective shot - and still remain objective. The camera is positioned at the side of a subjective player - whose viewpoint is being depicted - so that the audience is given the impression they are standing cheek-to-cheek with the off-screen player. The viewer does not see the event through the player's eyes, as in a subjective shot in which the camera trades places with the screen player. He sees the event from the player's viewpoint, as if standing alongside him. Thus, the camera angle remains objective, since it is an unseen observer not involved in the action." - Joseph V. Mascelli in The Five C's of Cinematography
A POV shot need not be established by strictly visual means. The manipulation of diegetic sounds can be used to emphasize a particular character's POV.
It makes little sense to say that a shot is "inherently" POV; it is the editing of the POV shot within a sequence of shots that determines POV. Nor can the establishment of a POV shot be isolated from other elements of filmmaking — mise en scene, acting, camera placement, editing, and special effects can all contribute to the establishment of POV.
With some POV shots when an animal is the chosen character, the shot will look distorted or black and white.
Match cut
A match cut is a cut in film editing between either two different objects, two different spaces, or two different compositions in which an object in the two shots graphically match, often helping to establish a strong continuity of action and linking the two shots metaphorically.
Match cuts form the basis for continuity editing, such as the ubiquitous use of match on action. Continuity editing smoothes over the inherent discontinuity of shot changes to establish a logical coherence between shots. Even within continuity editing, though, the match cut is a contrast both with cross-cutting between actions in two different locations that are occurring simultaneously, and with parallel editing, which draws parallels or contrasts between two different time-space locations.
A graphic match (as opposed to a graphic contrast or collision) occurs when the shapes, colors and/or overall movement of two shots match in composition, either within a scene or, especially, across a transition between two scenes. Indeed, rather than the seamless cuts of continuity editing within a scene, the term "graphic match" usually denotes a more conspicuous transition between (or comparison of) two shots via pictorial elements. A match cut often involves a graphic match, a smooth transition between scenes and an element of metaphorical (or at least meaningful) comparison between elements in both shots.
A match cut contrasts with the conspicuous and abrupt discontinuity of a jump cut.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey contains a famous example of a match cut. After an ape discovers the use of bones as a tool and a weapon, there is a match cut to a spacecraft or satellite in orbit. The match cut helps draw a connection between the two objects as exemplars of primitive and advanced tools respectively.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale contains the influence for the 2001: A Space Odyssey match cut in which a fourteenth century falcon cuts to a World War II aeroplane. The sense of time passing but nothing changing is emphasised by having the same actor, in different costumes, looking at both the falcon and the aeroplane.
An early example comes from Orson Welles's Citizen Kane which opens with a series of match dissolves that keeps the lit window of C.F. Kane's in the same part of the frame while the cuts take us around his dilapidated Xanadu estate, before a final match dissolve takes us from the outside to the inside where Kane is about to die.
Another match cut comes from Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) where an edit cuts together Lawrence blowing out a lit match with the desert sun rising from the horizon. Director David Lean credits inspiration for the edit to the experimental French New Wave. The edit was later praised by Steven Spielberg as inspiration for his own work.
A match cut occurs at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. As Cary Grant pulls Eva Marie Saint up from Mount Rushmore, the cut then goes to him pulling her up to his bunk on the train. The match cut here skips over the courting, the marriage proposal, and the actual marriage of the two characters who had for much of the film been adversaries. Another Hitchcock film to employ the use of a match cut is Psycho. Right after Marion Crane is murdered in the infamous "shower scene", the camera shows blood flowing down the drain of the tub, then cuts to a shot of Marion's eye.
German director Fritz Lang provided early uses of match cuts in his silent and first sound films. In Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, he shows a circular casino from above and cuts to a circle of hands at a seance happening the same night involving Mabuse and others. This not only smoothly transitions into the simultaneous scene, but also links the two activities as "decadent" pastimes of the rich in pursuit of excitement and fashionability. Lang reused the technique in M while cross cutting between the meetings of Schränker's criminal union and Inspector Karl Lohmann's homicide investigation squad. Schränker and Lohmann are matched both in movement and in dialogue (which is carried over the cut to form a coherent phrase) to illustrate their unlikely connection in a shared goal, to capture a serial child killer.
Yet another example of a match cut can be found in the final episode of the first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost's television show Twin Peaks. In the opening moments as Dr. Jacoby is struck down by a masked assailant and rolls over onto his back, the camera zooms in onto his eye which slowly fades away to a roulette wheel in One Eyed Jack's casino. This transition is a key moment in the episode as it connects two very different story lines together through a strategic cut.
Independent filmmaking
Filmmaking also takes place outside of the mainstream and is commonly called independent filmmaking. Since the introduction of DV technology, the means of production have become more democratized. Filmmakers can conceivably shoot and edit a film, create and edit the sound and music, and mix the final cut on a home computer. However, while the means of production may be democratized, financing, traditional distribution, and marketing remain difficult to accomplish outside the traditional system. In the past, most independent filmmakers have relied on film festivals to get their films noticed and sold for distribution. However, the Internet has allowed for relatively inexpensive distribution of independent films. As a result several companies have emerged to assist filmmakers in getting independent movies seen and sold via mainstream internet marketplaces, oftentimes adjacent to popular Hollywood titles. With digital self distribution, independent filmmakers who fail to garner a traditional distribution deal now have the ability to reach global audiences.
180 degree rule
The 180° rule is a basic guideline in film making that states that two characters (or other elements) in the same scene should always have the same left/right relationship to each other. If the camera passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line. The new shot, from the opposite side, is known as a reverse angle.
In the example of a dialogue between two actors, if Owen (orange shirt in the diagram) is on the left and Bob (blue shirt ) is on the right, then Owen should be facing right at all times, even when Bob is off the edge of the frame, and Bob should always be facing left. Shifting to the other side of the characters on a cut, so that Bob is now on the left side and Owen is on the right, will disorient the viewer, and break the flow of the scene.
In the example of an action scene, such as a car chase, if a vehicle leaves the right side of the frame in one shot, it should enter from the left side of the frame in the next shot. Leaving from the right and entering from the right will create a similar sense of disorientation as in the dialogue example.
An example of sustained use of the 180 degree rule occurs throughout much of The Big Parade, a 1925 drama about World War I directed by King Vidor. In the sequences leading up to the battle scenes, the American forces (arriving from the west) are always shown marching from left to right across the screen, while the German troops (arriving from the east) are always shown marching from right to left. After the battle scenes, when the weary troops are staggering homeward, the Americans are always shown crossing the screen from right to left (moving west) and the Germans from left to right (moving east). The audience's viewpoint is therefore always from a consistent position, in this case southward of the action.
The 180 degree rule enables the audience to visually connect with unseen movement happening around and behind the immediate subject and is important in the narration of battle scenes. The visual disjointedness of the battle scene on Geonosis in the Star Wars film Attack of the Clones is an example.
Avoiding crossing the line is a problem that those learning filmcraft will need to struggle with. In the above example with the car chase, a possible solution is to begin the second cut with the car driving into frame from the "wrong" side. Although this may be wrong in the geographic sense on set, it looks more natural to the viewer. Another possibility is to insert a "buffer shot" of the subject head-on (or from behind) to help the viewer understand the camera movement.
In professional productions, the applied 180° rule is an essential element for a style of film editing called continuity editing. The rule is not always obeyed. Sometimes a filmmaker will purposely break the line of action in order to create disorientation. Stanley Kubrick was known to do this, for example in the bathroom scene in The Shining. The Wachowski Brothers and directors Tinto Brass, Yasujiro Ozu, Wong Kar-wai, and Jacques Tati sometimes ignored this rule also, as has Lars von Trier in Antichrist.
The British television presenters Ant & Dec extend this continuity to almost all their appearances, with Ant almost always on the left and Dec on the right, as does the Japanese pop duo PUFFY, with Yumi Yoshimura on the left and Ami Onuki on the right.
Some Filmmakers state that the fictional axis created by this rule can be used to plan the emotional strength of a scene. The closer a camera is placed to the axis, the more emotionally involved the audience will be.
In the Japanese animated picture Paprika, two of the main characters discuss crossing the line and demonstrate the disorienting effect of actually performing the action.
In Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Gollum has a conversation with himself or with his other personality. Because the Filmmakers use the 180 degree rule, and have the "good" Gollum looking left as he speaks while the "evil" Gollum looking right, the audience perceives Gollum as two different characters talking to each other.
Editing techniques
Vsevolod Pudovkin noted that the editing process is the one phase of production that is truly unique to motion pictures. Every other aspect of film making originated in a different medium than film (photography, art direction, writing, sound recording), but editing is the one process that is unique to film. Kubrick was quoted as saying: "I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit."
* Edward Dmytryk stipulates seven "rules of cutting" that a good editor should follow:
o "Rule 1: Never make a cut without a positive reason."
o "Rule 2: When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short."
o "Rule 3: Whenever possible cut 'in movement'."
o "Rule 4: The 'fresh' is preferable to the 'stale'."
o "Rule 5: All scenes should begin and end with continuing action."
o "Rule 6: Cut for proper values rather than proper 'matches'."
o "Rule 7: Substance first—then form."
* According to Walter Murch, when it comes to film editing, there are six main criteria for evaluating a cut or deciding where to cut. They are (in order of importance, most important first, with notional percentage values.):
o Emotion (51%) — Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment?
o Story (23%) — Does the cut advance the story?
o Rhythm (10%) — Does the cut occur "at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'" (Murch, 18)?
o Eye-trace (7%) — Does the cut pay respect to "the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame" (Murch, 18)?
o Two-dimensional plane of the screen (5%) — Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule?
o Three-dimensional space of action (4%) — Is the cut true to the physical/spatial relationships within the diegesis?
Murch assigned the notional percentage values to each of the criteria. "Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom."-Murch
* Edward Dmytryk stipulates seven "rules of cutting" that a good editor should follow:
o "Rule 1: Never make a cut without a positive reason."
o "Rule 2: When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short."
o "Rule 3: Whenever possible cut 'in movement'."
o "Rule 4: The 'fresh' is preferable to the 'stale'."
o "Rule 5: All scenes should begin and end with continuing action."
o "Rule 6: Cut for proper values rather than proper 'matches'."
o "Rule 7: Substance first—then form."
* According to Walter Murch, when it comes to film editing, there are six main criteria for evaluating a cut or deciding where to cut. They are (in order of importance, most important first, with notional percentage values.):
o Emotion (51%) — Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment?
o Story (23%) — Does the cut advance the story?
o Rhythm (10%) — Does the cut occur "at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'" (Murch, 18)?
o Eye-trace (7%) — Does the cut pay respect to "the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame" (Murch, 18)?
o Two-dimensional plane of the screen (5%) — Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule?
o Three-dimensional space of action (4%) — Is the cut true to the physical/spatial relationships within the diegesis?
Murch assigned the notional percentage values to each of the criteria. "Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom."-Murch
Alternatives to continuity editing (non-traditional or experimental)
Early Russian filmmakers such as Lev Kuleshov further explored and theorized about editing and its ideological nature. Sergei Eisenstein developed a system of editing that was unconcerned with the rules of the continuity system of classical Hollywood that he called Intellectual montage.
Alternatives to traditional editing were also the folly of early surrealist and dada filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel (director of the 1929 Un Chien Andalou) and René Clair (director of 1924's Entr'acte which starred famous dada artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray). Both filmmakers, Clair and Buñuel, experimented with editing techniques long before what is referred to as "MTV style" editing.
The French New Wave filmmakers such as Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut and their American counterparts such as Andy Warhol and John Cassavetes also pushed the limits of editing technique during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. French New Wave films and the non-narrative films of the 1960s used a carefree editing style and did not conform to the traditional editing etiquette of Hollywood films. Like its dada and surrealist predecessors, French New Wave editing often drew attention to itself by its lack of continuity, its demystifying self-reflexive nature (reminding the audience that they were watching a film), and by the overt use of jump cuts or the insertion of material not often related to any narrative.
Ideas and Reflections:
I would like my film to be non-narrative and have a lack of continuity. I have had an idea to use fading transitions for every shot in the film to give the impression that things are constantly fading, changing, flowing and evolving.
Alternatives to traditional editing were also the folly of early surrealist and dada filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel (director of the 1929 Un Chien Andalou) and René Clair (director of 1924's Entr'acte which starred famous dada artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray). Both filmmakers, Clair and Buñuel, experimented with editing techniques long before what is referred to as "MTV style" editing.
The French New Wave filmmakers such as Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut and their American counterparts such as Andy Warhol and John Cassavetes also pushed the limits of editing technique during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. French New Wave films and the non-narrative films of the 1960s used a carefree editing style and did not conform to the traditional editing etiquette of Hollywood films. Like its dada and surrealist predecessors, French New Wave editing often drew attention to itself by its lack of continuity, its demystifying self-reflexive nature (reminding the audience that they were watching a film), and by the overt use of jump cuts or the insertion of material not often related to any narrative.
Ideas and Reflections:
I would like my film to be non-narrative and have a lack of continuity. I have had an idea to use fading transitions for every shot in the film to give the impression that things are constantly fading, changing, flowing and evolving.
Continuity editing
What became known as the popular 'classical Hollywood' style of editing was developed by early European and American directors, in particular D.W. Griffith in his films such as The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The classical style ensures temporal and spatial continuity as a way of advancing narrative, using such techniques as the 180 degree rule, Establishing shot, and Shot reverse shot.
Ideas and Reflections:
I would like to avoid this type of editing and try something more experimental.
Ideas and Reflections:
I would like to avoid this type of editing and try something more experimental.
Montage sequence
A montage sequence consists of a series of short shots that are edited into a sequence to condense narrative. It is usually used to advance the story as a whole (often to suggest the passage of time), rather than to create symbolic meaning. In many cases, a song plays in the background to enhance the mood or reinforce the message being conveyed. One famous example of montage was seen in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), depicting the start of man's first development from apes to humans.
Ideas and Reflections:
I may consider using a montage sequence in my film.
Ideas and Reflections:
I may consider using a montage sequence in my film.
Soviet montage
Lev Kuleshov was among the very first to theorize about the relatively young medium of the cinema in the 1920s. For him, the unique essence of the cinema — that which could be duplicated in no other medium — is editing. He argues that editing a film is like constructing a building. Brick-by-brick (shot-by-shot) the building (film) is erected. His often-cited Kuleshov Experiment established that montage can lead the viewer to reach certain conclusions about the action in a film. Montage works because viewers infer meaning based on context.
Although, strictly speaking, U.S. film director D.W. Griffith was not part of the montage school, he was one of the early proponents of the power of editing — mastering cross-cutting to show parallel action in different locations, and codifying film grammar in other ways as well. Griffith's work in the teens was highly regarded by Kuleshov and other Soviet filmmakers and greatly influenced their understanding of editing.
Sergei Eisenstein was briefly a student of Kuleshov's, but the two parted ways because they had different ideas of montage. Eisenstein regarded montage as a dialectical means of creating meaning. By contrasting unrelated shots he tried to provoke associations in the viewer, which were induced by shocks.
Although, strictly speaking, U.S. film director D.W. Griffith was not part of the montage school, he was one of the early proponents of the power of editing — mastering cross-cutting to show parallel action in different locations, and codifying film grammar in other ways as well. Griffith's work in the teens was highly regarded by Kuleshov and other Soviet filmmakers and greatly influenced their understanding of editing.
Sergei Eisenstein was briefly a student of Kuleshov's, but the two parted ways because they had different ideas of montage. Eisenstein regarded montage as a dialectical means of creating meaning. By contrasting unrelated shots he tried to provoke associations in the viewer, which were induced by shocks.
Methods of montage
In motion picture terminology, a montage (from the French for "putting together" or "assembly") is a film editing technique.
There are at least three senses of the term:
1. In French film practice, "montage" has its literal French meaning (assembly, installation) and simply identifies editing.
2. In Soviet filmmaking of the 1920s, "montage" was a method of juxtaposing shots to derive new meaning that did not exist in either shot alone.
3. In classical Hollywood cinema, a "montage sequence" is a short segment in a film in which narrative information is presented in a condensed fashion.
There are at least three senses of the term:
1. In French film practice, "montage" has its literal French meaning (assembly, installation) and simply identifies editing.
2. In Soviet filmmaking of the 1920s, "montage" was a method of juxtaposing shots to derive new meaning that did not exist in either shot alone.
3. In classical Hollywood cinema, a "montage sequence" is a short segment in a film in which narrative information is presented in a condensed fashion.
Emotional versus Physical continuity
Continuity is a film term that suggest that a series of shots should be physically continuous, as if the camera simply changed angles in the course of a single event. For instance, if in one shot a beer glass is empty, it should not be full in the next shot. Live coverage of a sporting event would be an example of footage that is very continuous. Since the live operators are cutting from one live feed to another, the physical action of the shots matches very closely. Many people regard inconsistencies in continuity as mistakes, and often the editor is blamed. In film, however, continuity is very nearly last on a film editor's list of important things to maintain.
Technically, continuity is the responsibility of the script supervisor and film director, who are together responsible for preserving continuity and preventing errors from take to take and shot to shot. The script supervisor, who sits next to the director during shooting, keeps the physical continuity of the edit in mind as shots are set up. He is the editor's watchman. If shots are taken out of sequence, as is often the case, he will be alert to make sure that beer glass is in the appropriate state. The editor utilizes the script supervisor's notes during post-production to log and keep track of the vast amounts of footage and takes that a director might shoot.
Editors can choose between emotional and storytelling aspects of any given film over continuity- something that is much more abstract and harder to judge. (Which is why films often take much longer to edit than to shoot.) Emotional continuity, and the clarity of storytelling, can take precedence over "technicalities". In fact, very often something that is physically discontinuous will be completely unnoticeable if the emotional rhythm of the scene "feels" right. If you were to slow down scenes from many of your favorite movies, you could easily find many minuscule physical differences from one cut to the next, which are completely hidden by the course of the emotional events.
However, if a continuity error is glaring enough (as in the case of the beer glass), and the edit is emotionally necessary, it is increasingly common to order a visual effect to fix the problem. Such an effect is not "cheating" or unnecessary: as a rule, anything that distracts from the storytelling is worthy of elimination.
A good example of a continuity error is in the film Braveheart with Mel Gibson. In one of the battle scenes you see William Wallace (Mel Gibson) and his army of Scottish rebels charging into battle with the English. At one moment, you see him with no weapon. Then you see him with his claymore in hand. Then again he has no weapon. Then a pick axe. And when he finally closes in on the enemy, you see him draw his claymore from his back. This often goes unnoticed by audiences and it does not cause any real problems. The whole idea of the scene is to show the rebels fiercely charging into battle, and these errors do not actually interfere with that.
Ideas and Reflections:
I may play with continuity in my film. I may leave camera mistakes or editing mistakes in my film just to see if anyone notices. I have already had some happy accidents while filming which may just work to my advantage in some shots.
Technically, continuity is the responsibility of the script supervisor and film director, who are together responsible for preserving continuity and preventing errors from take to take and shot to shot. The script supervisor, who sits next to the director during shooting, keeps the physical continuity of the edit in mind as shots are set up. He is the editor's watchman. If shots are taken out of sequence, as is often the case, he will be alert to make sure that beer glass is in the appropriate state. The editor utilizes the script supervisor's notes during post-production to log and keep track of the vast amounts of footage and takes that a director might shoot.
Editors can choose between emotional and storytelling aspects of any given film over continuity- something that is much more abstract and harder to judge. (Which is why films often take much longer to edit than to shoot.) Emotional continuity, and the clarity of storytelling, can take precedence over "technicalities". In fact, very often something that is physically discontinuous will be completely unnoticeable if the emotional rhythm of the scene "feels" right. If you were to slow down scenes from many of your favorite movies, you could easily find many minuscule physical differences from one cut to the next, which are completely hidden by the course of the emotional events.
However, if a continuity error is glaring enough (as in the case of the beer glass), and the edit is emotionally necessary, it is increasingly common to order a visual effect to fix the problem. Such an effect is not "cheating" or unnecessary: as a rule, anything that distracts from the storytelling is worthy of elimination.
A good example of a continuity error is in the film Braveheart with Mel Gibson. In one of the battle scenes you see William Wallace (Mel Gibson) and his army of Scottish rebels charging into battle with the English. At one moment, you see him with no weapon. Then you see him with his claymore in hand. Then again he has no weapon. Then a pick axe. And when he finally closes in on the enemy, you see him draw his claymore from his back. This often goes unnoticed by audiences and it does not cause any real problems. The whole idea of the scene is to show the rebels fiercely charging into battle, and these errors do not actually interfere with that.
Ideas and Reflections:
I may play with continuity in my film. I may leave camera mistakes or editing mistakes in my film just to see if anyone notices. I have already had some happy accidents while filming which may just work to my advantage in some shots.
Final cut
Often after the director has had his chance to oversee a cut, the subsequent cuts are supervised by one or more producers, who represent the production company and/or movie studio. There have been several conflicts in the past between the director and the studio, sometimes leading to the use of the "Alan Smithee" credit signifying when a director no longer wants to be associated with the final release.
Director's cut
When shooting is finished, the director can then turn his full attention to collaborating with the editor and further refining the cut of the film. This is the time that is set aside where the film editor's first cut is molded to fit the director's vision. In the United States, under DGA rules, directors receive a minimum of ten weeks after completion of principal photography to prepare their first cut.
While collaborating on what is referred to as the "director's cut", the director and the editor go over the entire movie with a fine-tooth comb; scenes and shots are re-ordered, removed, shortened and otherwise tweaked. Often it is discovered that there are plot holes, missing shots or even missing segments which might require that new scenes be filmed. Because of this time working closely and collaborating – a period that is normally far longer, and far more intimately involved, than the entire production and filming – most directors and editors form a unique artistic bond.
Ideas and Reflections:
If I am satisfied with the final cut then I will probably not make a directors cut of my film.
While collaborating on what is referred to as the "director's cut", the director and the editor go over the entire movie with a fine-tooth comb; scenes and shots are re-ordered, removed, shortened and otherwise tweaked. Often it is discovered that there are plot holes, missing shots or even missing segments which might require that new scenes be filmed. Because of this time working closely and collaborating – a period that is normally far longer, and far more intimately involved, than the entire production and filming – most directors and editors form a unique artistic bond.
Ideas and Reflections:
If I am satisfied with the final cut then I will probably not make a directors cut of my film.
Editor's cut - continued
There are several editing stages and the editor's cut is the first. An editor's cut (sometimes referred to as the "Assembly edit" or "Rough cut") is normally the first pass of what the final film will be when it reaches picture lock. The film editor usually starts working while principal photography starts. Likely, prior to cutting, the editor and director will have seen and/or discussed "dailies" (raw footage shot each day) as shooting progresses. Screening dailies gives the editor a ballpark idea of the director's intentions. Because it is the first pass, the editor's cut might be longer than the final film. The editor continues to refine the cut while shooting continues, and often the entire editing process goes on for many months and sometimes more than a year, depending on the film.
Rough cut
In filmmaking, the rough cut is the second of three stages of offline editing. The rough cut is the first stage in which the film begins to resemble its final product. Rough cuts do not flow well and still undergo many changes before the release of the film.
Editor's cut
An Editor's Cut of a motion picture is made by the film editor on his/her own, or working with the film director. The editor tapes together the first cut of the film, the "editor's cut", arranging the separate takes into a coherent story according to the plan communicated by the director. The editor's version of the film will often be as much as two hours beyond the final running time of the film. Working from the editor's cut, decisions then need to be made, usually together with other creative staff, to improve continuity, balance the story, trim or delete scenes, etc.
A version supposedly nearer the Director's original creative vision is sometimes marketed as a Director's cut, or Editor's cut. These special-market versions of a movie DVD are more expensive than the regular edition, as they are usually longer than the theatre version, and have extra discs often including "making of ... " documentaries, out-take collections, extended interviews with cast and crew, etc.
Ideas and Reflections:
I have been considering whether to do several different cuts of my film until I find my favourite version which would be the director's cut.
A version supposedly nearer the Director's original creative vision is sometimes marketed as a Director's cut, or Editor's cut. These special-market versions of a movie DVD are more expensive than the regular edition, as they are usually longer than the theatre version, and have extra discs often including "making of ... " documentaries, out-take collections, extended interviews with cast and crew, etc.
Ideas and Reflections:
I have been considering whether to do several different cuts of my film until I find my favourite version which would be the director's cut.
Wednesday 30 March 2011
History of film editing technology
Before the widespread use of non-linear editing systems, the initial editing of all films was done with a positive copy of the film negative called a film workprint (cutting copy in UK) by physically cutting and pasting together pieces of film, using a splicer and threading the film on a machine with a viewer such as a Moviola, or "flatbed" machine such as a K.-E.-M. or Steenbeck. Today, most films are edited digitally (on systems such as Avid or Final Cut Pro) and bypass the film positive workprint altogether. In the past, the use of a film positive (not the original negative) allowed the editor to do as much experimenting as he or she wished, without the risk of damaging the original.
When the film workprint had been cut to a satisfactory state, it was then used to make an edit decision list (EDL). The negative cutter referred to this list while processing the negative, splitting the shots into rolls, which were then contact printed to produce the final film print or answer print. Today, production companies have the option of bypassing negative cutting altogether. With the advent of digital intermediate ("DI"), the physical negative does not necessarily need to be physically cut and hot spliced together; rather the negative is optically scanned into computer(s) and a cut list is conformed by a DI editor.
When the film workprint had been cut to a satisfactory state, it was then used to make an edit decision list (EDL). The negative cutter referred to this list while processing the negative, splitting the shots into rolls, which were then contact printed to produce the final film print or answer print. Today, production companies have the option of bypassing negative cutting altogether. With the advent of digital intermediate ("DI"), the physical negative does not necessarily need to be physically cut and hot spliced together; rather the negative is optically scanned into computer(s) and a cut list is conformed by a DI editor.
Early experiments in film editing
Edwin S. Porter is generally thought to be the American filmmaker who first put film editing to use. Porter worked as an electrician before joining the film laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison in the late 1890s. Early films by Thomas Edison (whose company invented a motion camera and projector) and others were short films that were one long, static, locked-down shot. Motion in the shot was all that was necessary to amuse an audience, so the first films simply showed activity such as traffic moving on a city street. There was no story and no editing. Each film ran as long as there was film in the camera. When Edison's motion picture studio wanted to increase the length of the short films, Edison came to Porter. Porter made the breakthrough film Life of an American Fireman in 1903. The film was among the first that had a plot, action, and even a closeup of a hand pulling a fire alarm.
Other films were to follow. Porter's ground-breaking film, The Great Train Robbery is still shown in film schools today as an example of early editing form. It was produced in 1903 and was one of the first examples of dynamic, action editing (the piecing together scenes shot at different times and places and for emotional impact unavailable in a static long shot). Being one of the first film hyphenates (film director, editor and engineer) Porter also invented and utilized some of the very first (albeit primitive) special effects such as double exposures, miniatures and split-screens.
Porter discovered important aspects of motion picture language: that the screen image does not need to show a complete person from head to toe and that splicing together two shots creates in the viewer's mind a contextual relationship. These were the key discoveries that made all non-live or non live-on-videotape narrative motion pictures and television possible—that shots (in this case whole scenes since each shot is a complete scene) can be photographed at widely different locations over a period of time (hours, days or even months) and combined into a narrative whole. That is, The Great Train Robbery contains scenes shot on sets of a telegraph station, a railroad car interior, and a dance hall, with outdoor scenes at a railroad water tower, on the train itself, at a point along the track, and in the woods. But when the robbers leave the telegraph station interior (set) and emerge at the water tower, the audience believes they went immediately from one to the other. Or that when they climb on the train in one shot and enter the baggage car (a set) in the next, the audience believes they are on the same train.
Sometime around 1918, Russian director Lev Kuleshov did an experiment that proves this point. (See Kuleshov Experiment) He took an old film clip of a head shot of a noted Russian actor and intercut the shot with a shot of a bowl of soup, then with a child playing with a teddy bear, then with a shot an elderly woman in a casket. When he showed the film to people they praised the actor's acting—the hunger in his face when he saw the soup, the delight in the child, and the grief when looking at the dead woman. Of course, the shot of the actor was years before the other shots and he never "saw" any of the items. The simple act of juxtaposing the shots in a sequence made the relationship.
Ideas and Reflections:
These examples of early experiments in editing are very interesting to me and have inspired me to start experimenting in the editing stage of my film. This has also made me think about film narrative. Will I have a linear or non-linear story? I could also take the route of not having a story or particular message in the film which would be interesting to explore.
Other films were to follow. Porter's ground-breaking film, The Great Train Robbery is still shown in film schools today as an example of early editing form. It was produced in 1903 and was one of the first examples of dynamic, action editing (the piecing together scenes shot at different times and places and for emotional impact unavailable in a static long shot). Being one of the first film hyphenates (film director, editor and engineer) Porter also invented and utilized some of the very first (albeit primitive) special effects such as double exposures, miniatures and split-screens.
Porter discovered important aspects of motion picture language: that the screen image does not need to show a complete person from head to toe and that splicing together two shots creates in the viewer's mind a contextual relationship. These were the key discoveries that made all non-live or non live-on-videotape narrative motion pictures and television possible—that shots (in this case whole scenes since each shot is a complete scene) can be photographed at widely different locations over a period of time (hours, days or even months) and combined into a narrative whole. That is, The Great Train Robbery contains scenes shot on sets of a telegraph station, a railroad car interior, and a dance hall, with outdoor scenes at a railroad water tower, on the train itself, at a point along the track, and in the woods. But when the robbers leave the telegraph station interior (set) and emerge at the water tower, the audience believes they went immediately from one to the other. Or that when they climb on the train in one shot and enter the baggage car (a set) in the next, the audience believes they are on the same train.
Sometime around 1918, Russian director Lev Kuleshov did an experiment that proves this point. (See Kuleshov Experiment) He took an old film clip of a head shot of a noted Russian actor and intercut the shot with a shot of a bowl of soup, then with a child playing with a teddy bear, then with a shot an elderly woman in a casket. When he showed the film to people they praised the actor's acting—the hunger in his face when he saw the soup, the delight in the child, and the grief when looking at the dead woman. Of course, the shot of the actor was years before the other shots and he never "saw" any of the items. The simple act of juxtaposing the shots in a sequence made the relationship.
Ideas and Reflections:
These examples of early experiments in editing are very interesting to me and have inspired me to start experimenting in the editing stage of my film. This has also made me think about film narrative. Will I have a linear or non-linear story? I could also take the route of not having a story or particular message in the film which would be interesting to explore.
Film editing
Film editing is part of the process of filmmaking. It involves the selection and combining of shots into sequences, and ultimately creating a finished motion picture. It is an art of storytelling. Film editing is the only art that is unique to cinema, separating film-making from other art forms that preceded it (such as photography, theater, dance, writing, and directing), although there are close parallels to the editing process in other art forms like poetry or novel writing. Film editing is often referred to as the "invisible art" because when it is well-practiced, the viewer can become so engaged that he or she is not even aware of the editor's work.
On its most fundamental level, film editing is the art, technique, and practice of assembling shots into a coherent whole. A film editor is a person who practices film editing by assembling the footage. However, the job of an editor isn’t simply to mechanically put pieces of a film together, cut off film slates, or edit dialogue scenes. A film editor must creatively work with the layers of images, story, dialogue, music, pacing, as well as the actors' performances to effectively "re-imagine" and even rewrite the film to craft a cohesive whole. Editors usually play a dynamic role in the making of a film.
With the advent of digital editing, film editors and their assistants have become responsible for many areas of filmmaking that used to be the responsibility of others. For instance, in past years, picture editors dealt only with just that—picture. Sound, music, and (more recently) visual effects editors dealt with the practicalities of other aspects of the editing process, usually under the direction of the picture editor and director. However, digital systems have increasingly put these responsibilities on the picture editor. It is common, especially on lower budget films, for the assistant editors or even the editor to cut in music, mock up visual effects, and add sound effects or other sound replacements. These temporary elements are usually replaced with more refined final elements by the sound, music, and visual effects teams hired to complete the picture.
Film editing is an art that can be used in diverse ways. It can create sensually provocative montages; become a laboratory for experimental cinema; bring out the emotional truth in an actor's performance; create a point of view on otherwise obtuse events; guide the telling and pace of a story; create an illusion of danger where there is none; give emphasis to things that would not have otherwise been noted; and even create a vital subconscious emotional connection to the viewer, among many other possibilities.
On its most fundamental level, film editing is the art, technique, and practice of assembling shots into a coherent whole. A film editor is a person who practices film editing by assembling the footage. However, the job of an editor isn’t simply to mechanically put pieces of a film together, cut off film slates, or edit dialogue scenes. A film editor must creatively work with the layers of images, story, dialogue, music, pacing, as well as the actors' performances to effectively "re-imagine" and even rewrite the film to craft a cohesive whole. Editors usually play a dynamic role in the making of a film.
With the advent of digital editing, film editors and their assistants have become responsible for many areas of filmmaking that used to be the responsibility of others. For instance, in past years, picture editors dealt only with just that—picture. Sound, music, and (more recently) visual effects editors dealt with the practicalities of other aspects of the editing process, usually under the direction of the picture editor and director. However, digital systems have increasingly put these responsibilities on the picture editor. It is common, especially on lower budget films, for the assistant editors or even the editor to cut in music, mock up visual effects, and add sound effects or other sound replacements. These temporary elements are usually replaced with more refined final elements by the sound, music, and visual effects teams hired to complete the picture.
Film editing is an art that can be used in diverse ways. It can create sensually provocative montages; become a laboratory for experimental cinema; bring out the emotional truth in an actor's performance; create a point of view on otherwise obtuse events; guide the telling and pace of a story; create an illusion of danger where there is none; give emphasis to things that would not have otherwise been noted; and even create a vital subconscious emotional connection to the viewer, among many other possibilities.
Tuesday 29 March 2011
Lighting technique and aesthetics
Background light - The background light is used to illuminate the background area of a set. The background light will also provide separation between the subject and the background. In the standard 4-point lighting setup, the background light is placed last and is usually placed directly behind the subject and pointed at the background.
In film, the background light is usually of lower intensity. More than one light could be used to light uniformly a background or alternatively to highlight points of interest.
In video and television, the background light is usually of similar intensity to the key light because video cameras are less capable of handling high-contrast ratios. In order to provide much needed separation between subject and background, the background light will have a color filter, blue for example, which will make the foreground pop up.
Cameo lighting - Cameo lighting in film is a spotlight that accentuates a single person in a scene. It creates an 'angelic' shot, such as one where God is shining down and a light shines down onto this person.
Cameo lighting derives its name from the art form in which a light relief figure is set against a darker background. It is often achieved by using barn-doored spotlights. It helps focus on the subject and not its environment. A problem with cameo lighting is that it can lead to color distortion and noise in the darkest areas.
Fill light - In television, film, stage, or photographic lighting, a fill light (often simply fill) may be used to reduce the contrast of a scene and provide some illumination for the areas of the image that are in shadow. A common lighting setup places the fill light on the lens axis, roughly perpendicular to the key light.
The fill light is often softer and, by definition, less intense than the key light. The ratio between light and shadow depends on the desired effect. For example, a fill light that is a small fraction of the power of the key light will produce very high-contrast or low-key lighting, while filling with half or more of the key light power will produce a high key, low-contrast tone.
An alternative to using a direct light source as a fill is to re-direct or "bounce" the key light towards the subject by using a reflector.
High-key lighting - High-key lighting is a style of lighting for film, television, or photography that aims to reduce the lighting ratio present in the scene. This was originally done partly for technological reasons, since early film and television did not deal well with high contrast ratios, but now is used to suggest an upbeat mood. It is often used in sitcoms and comedies. High-key lighting is usually quite homogeneous and free from dark shadows. The terminology comes from the key light (main light).
In the 1950s and 1960s, high-key lighting was achieved through multiple light sources lighting a scene—usually using three fixtures per person (left, right, and central) —which resulted in a uniform lighting pattern with very little modeling. Nowadays, multiple hot light sources are substituted by much more efficient fluorescent soft lights which provide a similar effect.
The advantage to high-key lighting is that it doesn't require adjustment for each scene which allows the production to complete the shooting in hours instead of days. The primary drawback is that high-key lighting fails to add meaning or drama by lighting certain parts more prominently than others.
Most recently, shows with bigger budgets moved away from high-key lighting by using lighting set-ups different from the standard three-point lighting. Part of the reason for this is the advent of new lighting fixtures which are easier to use and quicker to set up. Another reason is the growing sophistication of the audience for TV programs and the need to differentiate.
The term "high-key" has found its way from cinema into more widespread usage, for example referring to an event that requires much organization or is subject to a great deal of publicity.
Key light - The key light is the first and usually most important light that a photographer, cinematographer, lighting cameraman, or other scene composer will use in a lighting setup. The purpose of the key light is to highlight the form and dimension of the subject. The key light is not a rigid requirement; omitting the key light can result in a silhouette effect. Many key lights may be placed in a scene to illuminate a moving subject at opportune moments.
Low-key lighting - Low-key lighting is a style of lighting for photography, film or television. It is a necessary element in creating a chiaroscuro effect. Traditional photographic lighting, three-point lighting uses a key light, a fill light, and a back light for illumination. Low-key lighting often uses only one key light, optionally controlled with a fill light or a simple reflector.
Low key light accentuates the contours of an object by throwing areas into shade while a fill light or reflector may illuminate the shadow areas to control contrast. The relative strength of key-to-fill, known as the lighting ratio, can be measured using a light meter. Low key lighting has a higher lighting ratio, e.g. 8:1, than high key lighting, which can approach 1:1.
The term "low key" is used in cinematography to refer to any scene with a high lighting ratio, especially if there is a predominance of shadowy areas. It tends to heighten the sense of alienation felt by the viewer, hence is commonly used in film noir and horror genres.
Ideas and Reflections:
There are some very interesting lighting techniques listed here but I have had the idea of using natural light for my film and filming out of focus lights.
In film, the background light is usually of lower intensity. More than one light could be used to light uniformly a background or alternatively to highlight points of interest.
In video and television, the background light is usually of similar intensity to the key light because video cameras are less capable of handling high-contrast ratios. In order to provide much needed separation between subject and background, the background light will have a color filter, blue for example, which will make the foreground pop up.
Cameo lighting - Cameo lighting in film is a spotlight that accentuates a single person in a scene. It creates an 'angelic' shot, such as one where God is shining down and a light shines down onto this person.
Cameo lighting derives its name from the art form in which a light relief figure is set against a darker background. It is often achieved by using barn-doored spotlights. It helps focus on the subject and not its environment. A problem with cameo lighting is that it can lead to color distortion and noise in the darkest areas.
Fill light - In television, film, stage, or photographic lighting, a fill light (often simply fill) may be used to reduce the contrast of a scene and provide some illumination for the areas of the image that are in shadow. A common lighting setup places the fill light on the lens axis, roughly perpendicular to the key light.
The fill light is often softer and, by definition, less intense than the key light. The ratio between light and shadow depends on the desired effect. For example, a fill light that is a small fraction of the power of the key light will produce very high-contrast or low-key lighting, while filling with half or more of the key light power will produce a high key, low-contrast tone.
An alternative to using a direct light source as a fill is to re-direct or "bounce" the key light towards the subject by using a reflector.
High-key lighting - High-key lighting is a style of lighting for film, television, or photography that aims to reduce the lighting ratio present in the scene. This was originally done partly for technological reasons, since early film and television did not deal well with high contrast ratios, but now is used to suggest an upbeat mood. It is often used in sitcoms and comedies. High-key lighting is usually quite homogeneous and free from dark shadows. The terminology comes from the key light (main light).
In the 1950s and 1960s, high-key lighting was achieved through multiple light sources lighting a scene—usually using three fixtures per person (left, right, and central) —which resulted in a uniform lighting pattern with very little modeling. Nowadays, multiple hot light sources are substituted by much more efficient fluorescent soft lights which provide a similar effect.
The advantage to high-key lighting is that it doesn't require adjustment for each scene which allows the production to complete the shooting in hours instead of days. The primary drawback is that high-key lighting fails to add meaning or drama by lighting certain parts more prominently than others.
Most recently, shows with bigger budgets moved away from high-key lighting by using lighting set-ups different from the standard three-point lighting. Part of the reason for this is the advent of new lighting fixtures which are easier to use and quicker to set up. Another reason is the growing sophistication of the audience for TV programs and the need to differentiate.
The term "high-key" has found its way from cinema into more widespread usage, for example referring to an event that requires much organization or is subject to a great deal of publicity.
Key light - The key light is the first and usually most important light that a photographer, cinematographer, lighting cameraman, or other scene composer will use in a lighting setup. The purpose of the key light is to highlight the form and dimension of the subject. The key light is not a rigid requirement; omitting the key light can result in a silhouette effect. Many key lights may be placed in a scene to illuminate a moving subject at opportune moments.
Low-key lighting - Low-key lighting is a style of lighting for photography, film or television. It is a necessary element in creating a chiaroscuro effect. Traditional photographic lighting, three-point lighting uses a key light, a fill light, and a back light for illumination. Low-key lighting often uses only one key light, optionally controlled with a fill light or a simple reflector.
Low key light accentuates the contours of an object by throwing areas into shade while a fill light or reflector may illuminate the shadow areas to control contrast. The relative strength of key-to-fill, known as the lighting ratio, can be measured using a light meter. Low key lighting has a higher lighting ratio, e.g. 8:1, than high key lighting, which can approach 1:1.
The term "low key" is used in cinematography to refer to any scene with a high lighting ratio, especially if there is a predominance of shadowy areas. It tends to heighten the sense of alienation felt by the viewer, hence is commonly used in film noir and horror genres.
Ideas and Reflections:
There are some very interesting lighting techniques listed here but I have had the idea of using natural light for my film and filming out of focus lights.
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