"FILMMAKING" What We Mean by It
"FILMMAKING"
What We Mean by It
By Richard Leacock
January 14 1996
Who is “we”? A very small group of people who shoot their own pictures, edit their own material, create their own story; making movies. There are very few such people today and there were almost none in the entire history of cinema before the late 1950’s.
Film making has been a group effort with well defined, separate, professional departments; Script-writer, Director, Cameraman, Editor and, in the case of fiction films a veritable army of other craft-defined professionals, Gaffers, Electricians, Grips, Propmen, Soundmen, Boommen, Loaders, Continuity Girls, plus assistant this and assistant that.... on an average budget film nowadays, about 150 people. I attended a screening of a new film recently that included in the credits, a whole screen filled with about forty names of “drivers”.
Even in documentary film making (with the exception of Robert Flaherty) none of the directors did their own camera work. Vertov used his brother, Joris Ivens had John Ferno, and even today when cameras are so small and portable Fred Wiseman uses a very uncredited Cameraman.
It was not chic to be a cameraman. You would not want your daughter to marry one! There was something slightly grubby about it. Though Willard van Dyke, who was a famous still photographer (socially acceptable!) , worked as Cameraman on THE RIVER for Parre Lorenz (along with three others; Aye, there’s the rub!) he went on to become a Director and never touched the camera after that jump. I worked as Cameraman for Willard on several films and I worked for Johnny Ferno (after he quit shooting for Joris Ivens); I would set up a shot and they would come forward to peer through the viewfinder, look a little worried and suggest that I move the camera an inch up or an inch to the left... it amazed me, why didn’t they do it themselves? Flaherty did. We often shot with two cameras on LOUISIANA STORY. Granted, it made a certain amount of sense when the camera was a clumsy machine that had to be mounted on a tripod but today, with a cozy Aaton or a tiny Video-8 camera, hand held, shooting spontaneously events that no one is “directing” and yes I have worked this way with a “director” breathing down my neck whispering loudly “did you get that little black boy over there?” It is grotesque!
So, in this tiny group we don’t “direct” we observe and we don’t ask someone else to do our observing for us. We do it ourselves. THEN, we look at what we have done and we think, not always consciously, I usually let it set in my head for a while and somehow I make all kinds of decisions without consciously thinking about it. You have made a huge number of decisions while shooting. What to shoot, how to shoot, how to relate to the people you’re with. Lots of these decisions were probably wrong but you are stuck with them. You are confronted, in the editing, with an incredibly complex maze; a labyrinth that you must decode in such a manner that a fascinating trail develops that your audience will want to follow and that will give them something to think about, something that will give them a basis for forming an opinion about whatever it is that you want to share.
Do you hand this complex and very personal process over to an editor? to some one else? Not if you are a Filmmaker in our sense of the word. Why should you? This is where the fun begins!
In conventional film schools where the separated skills are taught, and in industrial filmmaking enterprises such as TV networks, it is said that a camera person should never edit their own material “they are too close to it” “they fall in love with a particular scene that they shot and put in all their favorite material”. Nonsense! Only they know what happened and how it felt to be there. Only they know that they shot a whole lot of footage on something that never developed, that never came to fruition and that therefore all this material should be ignored.
You keep learning to shoot by editing and you keep learning to edit by shooting. It is all one process.
What is it then that a Filmmaker does?
For me, it has almost always been an intense desire to share an experience with others. How can I let you experience some aspects of what I am experiencing? Not all of it. Not the “whole truth”. But, to put it precisely, to share aspects of what I saw and heard with my camera-recorder in hand, arranged in such a manner that you will have the feeling of being there. And of course it will be subjective. there is nothing wrong with subjectivity. What happens around us is far too complex and multifaceted for us to be anything like objective in its scientific sense. Physics is not poetry but poetry can embody truth.
The basis of what I am talking about is what we roughly call the “sequence”. It is hard to give an accurate definition of what I mean by a sequence and I don’t want to be too precise. In my opinion, much too much time and effort during the last two hundred years has gone into trying to make the arts follow the rules of the “Scientific Method”. Philosophers have attempted to define and measure “beauty”, A pox on such rubbish! But it might be helpful to gently describe what I have in mind with the proviso that there are going to be lots of exceptions, our values are changing all the time, so even knowing that rules, as opposed to laws, are made to be broken, we will avoid even a pretense of rules and speak in terms most general!
Two years ago (1992) Valerie and I attended a week long seminar on early ethnological films. It was held in a charming former poorhouse in Marseillaise. We saw many early films. They were made of shots, scenes, events taking place in front of a camera. Then, one night, we saw NANOOK OF THE NORTH, and we saw sequences, culminating with the sequence of the Nanook family building an Igloo. It was astonishing in this context of other films made before and after NANOOK. Here was something entirely different. Not just how you build an Igloo but the relationships, the mother, her baby, the boy playing, the care of the puppies, the dogs and, of course, the window! The mystery of the block of ice that becomes the window and the piece of snow that is added to reflect light into the interior. What is most miraculous to me is the sense of life, and of love that emanates from a sequence made in 1921, conceived, filmed, developed, printed and edited by one man working with his friends and collaborators, the Eskimo.
This screening worked just as well today as it must have then. There was no sense in the audience, that we were looking at an antique form of film making. Then we saw other “scenes” shot by others in various exotic places, until again we were amazed. MOANA 1925 and again it was Flaherty, shot with his wife Frances in Samoa. And here, sequence after sequence each beautifully telling a small story. Each different. No rules excepting that the rules so often taught in schools such as “you should start a sequence with a long shot so that the audience can orient themselves and know where they are...” Nonsense, Flaherty uses the close shot consistently to conceal where we are, to make you want to know where and what is going on, to create visual and story tension so that you continue to want more and become more and more involved.
These sequences appear to be simple, and have been described as “merely telling a simple story”. They are not simple to make . For me they represent the very essence of Filmmaking. They do not provide easy stuff for the would be intellectual critic to write about as do the much admired sequences of Serge Eisenstein, the intricate juggling of images in the cream separator sequence in THE GENERAL LINE. Techniques that resulted in a rather crude sign language based on the idea that juxtaposing often unrelated images produced impacts that were not part of the individual shots. With the advent of synchronous sound in the early 1930’s these methods became redundant in all but the TV-Commercial industry.
Flaherty spent a great deal of time on each of his films. He watched what was going on around him and based much of his filming on recreating what he had observed and often, recreating what he had been told about past ways of doing things. He was not an Anthropologist, he was there to portray aspects of a peoples way of life that he particularly admired. He took guns, pipes and bags of sugar out of the hands of his Eskimo friends and in Samoa he portrayed life as it probably was before the Missionaries (his particular villains) changed the way people dressed. The families he filmed were composed of particularly attractive people.
Filming with a hand-crank 35 mm. camera, an Akeley which had a maximum load of 200 ft. (3 minutes at 16 fps.) mounted on its Gyro-tripod was, at best, a clumsy process. Had he been a “sensible” person he would have had a trained assistant and a trained crew to take care of the technical details. They would then have wrapped up the cans of rushes and stored them away till he got back to a proper film lab, but no, he preferred to see what he was doing and be with his friends, his subjects, so he learned to develop and print his 35mm film himself so that he could project his rushes within a day or two of shooting. Today it would be called “feed-back”; with Flaherty it was a way of life, shoot; look; shoot; look...
Today, working with video it is possible to work as he did but very few people do.
From the start, films were made to be seen by an audience; usually a paying audience in a cinema equipped with a large and expensive projector. This was the only way you could see a “film” and this tradition is still with us today, designing “films” that are to be shown at specific times either on a screen in a Cinema or on Television. But with the advent of the home VCR, the video-cassette, and now, the CD-ROM and next year the DVD (digital video disc) it is no longer necessary to construct a film that is to be seen at one sitting any more than you would write a book to be read at one sitting. With the video discs it is possible to integrate video-text-still pictures and other forms of data into a fabric that can be enjoyed leisurely at ones own pleasure. A development that can make the past history of film look very peculiar indeed to our grand children, “a whole you ball game” as they might say in America.
What We Mean by It
By Richard Leacock
January 14 1996
Who is “we”? A very small group of people who shoot their own pictures, edit their own material, create their own story; making movies. There are very few such people today and there were almost none in the entire history of cinema before the late 1950’s.
Film making has been a group effort with well defined, separate, professional departments; Script-writer, Director, Cameraman, Editor and, in the case of fiction films a veritable army of other craft-defined professionals, Gaffers, Electricians, Grips, Propmen, Soundmen, Boommen, Loaders, Continuity Girls, plus assistant this and assistant that.... on an average budget film nowadays, about 150 people. I attended a screening of a new film recently that included in the credits, a whole screen filled with about forty names of “drivers”.
Even in documentary film making (with the exception of Robert Flaherty) none of the directors did their own camera work. Vertov used his brother, Joris Ivens had John Ferno, and even today when cameras are so small and portable Fred Wiseman uses a very uncredited Cameraman.
It was not chic to be a cameraman. You would not want your daughter to marry one! There was something slightly grubby about it. Though Willard van Dyke, who was a famous still photographer (socially acceptable!) , worked as Cameraman on THE RIVER for Parre Lorenz (along with three others; Aye, there’s the rub!) he went on to become a Director and never touched the camera after that jump. I worked as Cameraman for Willard on several films and I worked for Johnny Ferno (after he quit shooting for Joris Ivens); I would set up a shot and they would come forward to peer through the viewfinder, look a little worried and suggest that I move the camera an inch up or an inch to the left... it amazed me, why didn’t they do it themselves? Flaherty did. We often shot with two cameras on LOUISIANA STORY. Granted, it made a certain amount of sense when the camera was a clumsy machine that had to be mounted on a tripod but today, with a cozy Aaton or a tiny Video-8 camera, hand held, shooting spontaneously events that no one is “directing” and yes I have worked this way with a “director” breathing down my neck whispering loudly “did you get that little black boy over there?” It is grotesque!
So, in this tiny group we don’t “direct” we observe and we don’t ask someone else to do our observing for us. We do it ourselves. THEN, we look at what we have done and we think, not always consciously, I usually let it set in my head for a while and somehow I make all kinds of decisions without consciously thinking about it. You have made a huge number of decisions while shooting. What to shoot, how to shoot, how to relate to the people you’re with. Lots of these decisions were probably wrong but you are stuck with them. You are confronted, in the editing, with an incredibly complex maze; a labyrinth that you must decode in such a manner that a fascinating trail develops that your audience will want to follow and that will give them something to think about, something that will give them a basis for forming an opinion about whatever it is that you want to share.
Do you hand this complex and very personal process over to an editor? to some one else? Not if you are a Filmmaker in our sense of the word. Why should you? This is where the fun begins!
In conventional film schools where the separated skills are taught, and in industrial filmmaking enterprises such as TV networks, it is said that a camera person should never edit their own material “they are too close to it” “they fall in love with a particular scene that they shot and put in all their favorite material”. Nonsense! Only they know what happened and how it felt to be there. Only they know that they shot a whole lot of footage on something that never developed, that never came to fruition and that therefore all this material should be ignored.
You keep learning to shoot by editing and you keep learning to edit by shooting. It is all one process.
What is it then that a Filmmaker does?
For me, it has almost always been an intense desire to share an experience with others. How can I let you experience some aspects of what I am experiencing? Not all of it. Not the “whole truth”. But, to put it precisely, to share aspects of what I saw and heard with my camera-recorder in hand, arranged in such a manner that you will have the feeling of being there. And of course it will be subjective. there is nothing wrong with subjectivity. What happens around us is far too complex and multifaceted for us to be anything like objective in its scientific sense. Physics is not poetry but poetry can embody truth.
The basis of what I am talking about is what we roughly call the “sequence”. It is hard to give an accurate definition of what I mean by a sequence and I don’t want to be too precise. In my opinion, much too much time and effort during the last two hundred years has gone into trying to make the arts follow the rules of the “Scientific Method”. Philosophers have attempted to define and measure “beauty”, A pox on such rubbish! But it might be helpful to gently describe what I have in mind with the proviso that there are going to be lots of exceptions, our values are changing all the time, so even knowing that rules, as opposed to laws, are made to be broken, we will avoid even a pretense of rules and speak in terms most general!
Two years ago (1992) Valerie and I attended a week long seminar on early ethnological films. It was held in a charming former poorhouse in Marseillaise. We saw many early films. They were made of shots, scenes, events taking place in front of a camera. Then, one night, we saw NANOOK OF THE NORTH, and we saw sequences, culminating with the sequence of the Nanook family building an Igloo. It was astonishing in this context of other films made before and after NANOOK. Here was something entirely different. Not just how you build an Igloo but the relationships, the mother, her baby, the boy playing, the care of the puppies, the dogs and, of course, the window! The mystery of the block of ice that becomes the window and the piece of snow that is added to reflect light into the interior. What is most miraculous to me is the sense of life, and of love that emanates from a sequence made in 1921, conceived, filmed, developed, printed and edited by one man working with his friends and collaborators, the Eskimo.
This screening worked just as well today as it must have then. There was no sense in the audience, that we were looking at an antique form of film making. Then we saw other “scenes” shot by others in various exotic places, until again we were amazed. MOANA 1925 and again it was Flaherty, shot with his wife Frances in Samoa. And here, sequence after sequence each beautifully telling a small story. Each different. No rules excepting that the rules so often taught in schools such as “you should start a sequence with a long shot so that the audience can orient themselves and know where they are...” Nonsense, Flaherty uses the close shot consistently to conceal where we are, to make you want to know where and what is going on, to create visual and story tension so that you continue to want more and become more and more involved.
These sequences appear to be simple, and have been described as “merely telling a simple story”. They are not simple to make . For me they represent the very essence of Filmmaking. They do not provide easy stuff for the would be intellectual critic to write about as do the much admired sequences of Serge Eisenstein, the intricate juggling of images in the cream separator sequence in THE GENERAL LINE. Techniques that resulted in a rather crude sign language based on the idea that juxtaposing often unrelated images produced impacts that were not part of the individual shots. With the advent of synchronous sound in the early 1930’s these methods became redundant in all but the TV-Commercial industry.
Flaherty spent a great deal of time on each of his films. He watched what was going on around him and based much of his filming on recreating what he had observed and often, recreating what he had been told about past ways of doing things. He was not an Anthropologist, he was there to portray aspects of a peoples way of life that he particularly admired. He took guns, pipes and bags of sugar out of the hands of his Eskimo friends and in Samoa he portrayed life as it probably was before the Missionaries (his particular villains) changed the way people dressed. The families he filmed were composed of particularly attractive people.
Filming with a hand-crank 35 mm. camera, an Akeley which had a maximum load of 200 ft. (3 minutes at 16 fps.) mounted on its Gyro-tripod was, at best, a clumsy process. Had he been a “sensible” person he would have had a trained assistant and a trained crew to take care of the technical details. They would then have wrapped up the cans of rushes and stored them away till he got back to a proper film lab, but no, he preferred to see what he was doing and be with his friends, his subjects, so he learned to develop and print his 35mm film himself so that he could project his rushes within a day or two of shooting. Today it would be called “feed-back”; with Flaherty it was a way of life, shoot; look; shoot; look...
Today, working with video it is possible to work as he did but very few people do.
From the start, films were made to be seen by an audience; usually a paying audience in a cinema equipped with a large and expensive projector. This was the only way you could see a “film” and this tradition is still with us today, designing “films” that are to be shown at specific times either on a screen in a Cinema or on Television. But with the advent of the home VCR, the video-cassette, and now, the CD-ROM and next year the DVD (digital video disc) it is no longer necessary to construct a film that is to be seen at one sitting any more than you would write a book to be read at one sitting. With the video discs it is possible to integrate video-text-still pictures and other forms of data into a fabric that can be enjoyed leisurely at ones own pleasure. A development that can make the past history of film look very peculiar indeed to our grand children, “a whole you ball game” as they might say in America.