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How is Film theory viewed in a professional environment?
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Hi
Yeah I agree thats a must, but I think once you go deeper than that and look for an underlying agenda it begins to get silly.
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[Jon Fidler] “How does politics actually fit into storytelling though. I mean unless the subject matter involves it, like the tv show Rome or something like the office where work politics is the forefront of the story, other than that im lost.”
Writers, producers and directors are constantly using the story or character development to advance their own politics, and often not in an obvious political story. This is nothing new, and is more common, than not.
TV shows like All In the Family, Barney Miller, MASH, The Andy Griffith Show and Family Ties, or movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Air America, and Catch-22 are some examples that come to mind, but there are plenty of others. And then there are some that are more upfront about the agenda, like DR Strangelove, Paths of Glory, The Manchurian Candidate, Johnny Got His Gun, and Fail-Safe. But even at that, non of those are ‘political’ films, but are well known for pushing a political agenda. Of more recent films that have been criticized for a deliberate political undertone, Avatar, Crash, District 9, and Happy Feet come to mind.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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I’ve struggled with this myself. I’m an avid reader of editing books (excuse the pun) and film theory. I soak that stuff up like a sponge. After I got my degree studying film, media, semiotics, film noir aesthetics and all that jazz I spent six months peeling stickers of VHS tapes. Seriously.
More recently, it was about Walter Murch vs Me. Specifically, I’d read all of Mr. Murch’s genius insights then jump back into the edit suite ready to rock it like a pro and get feedback like “make her look less fat” or “I don’t care, just do it” or “how about a jump cut?”
You said: “I’m currently editing a pilot for a new comedy tv show … I just don’t understand the relevance of any of this to anything I do, and its driving me crazy” – you’re over thinking it.
And that’s the thing, 90% of all media you – and I – cut requires no or little insight into anything remotely cerebral. It’s LOW END. Our fluffy, artsy-fartsy, liberal-arts, euro-posing education means nothing when it comes to “editing a comedy pilot” or pretty much anything else for a big audience. Not to say that a university education isn’t worthwhile; you just have to weed out the relevant from the irrelevant.
The only analogy I can think of is of someone taking three years of culinary school in Paris, then working at Mr. Meat in South End: “she said well done, this is medium you idiot!” Sigh.
HOWEVER, if you meet and team up with a director or production company who appreciates the same kinds of things you, such as a Coppola or a Murch and you end up at the Cannes Film Festival, then you might have a place for your film theory, sociology and post structuralism. We’re talking high art here.
When you’re a hired professional, there’s not a lot you can do. It simply isn’t your job to find meaning in the subtext as it relates to the socio economic status and whatnot. It’s your job to entertain and/or inform.
If you are one of those people who desire to create deeper, more meaningful, subtexual, symbolic work (aka “art”) – and draw upon a diverse literary background, you’re probably going to have to suck it up and become your own auter. After all, that’s what those people we studied were.
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Wow Rocco! I read, have done since I was a kid. Adventure, mystery, romance, political, classics. I have a couple of books on editing, I am sure one is by Walter Murch. Flicked a few pages, found nothing to change my thinking, style or direction. Never believed in theory. Never had a professor. My study of autuers was via film festivals and collecting the classics. i learned film editing off a guy my own age who never went to High School, possibly the best editor I have ever met. Instinct for story telling. Having a point of view. Building a body of work. Not suffering fools, even my self 🙂 90% of the media I have edited has challenged and inspired me to make something more, take it further, surprise, pleasantly, the client. The way to learn from people like Walter Murch is to study the films they worked on and little by little take what you like, leave the rest, start introducing it into your work, take a risk. Editing has been an awesome journey of over 40 years, I continue today. My goal is to bring my sensibilities to the table and so far directors and clients seem to approve. Have you considered other careers? think about it.
Richard Clark’s kiwicafe.com
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[Richard Clark] “Wow Rocco! I read, have done since I was a kid. Adventure, mystery, romance, political, classics. I have a couple of books on editing, I am sure one is by Walter Murch. Flicked a few pages, found nothing to change my thinking, style or direction. Never believed in theory. Never had a professor. My study of autuers was via film festivals and collecting the classics. i learned film editing off a guy my own age who never went to High School, possibly the best editor I have ever met. Instinct for story telling. Having a point of view. Building a body of work. Not suffering fools, even my self 🙂 90% of the media I have edited has challenged and inspired me to make something more, take it further, surprise, pleasantly, the client. The way to learn from people like Walter Murch is to study the films they worked on and little by little take what you like, leave the rest, start introducing it into your work, take a risk. Editing has been an awesome journey of over 40 years, I continue today. My goal is to bring my sensibilities to the table and so far directors and clients seem to approve. Have you considered other careers? think about it.”
I have to agree with this. You can learn a lot just by watching, both other peoples stuff, and your own. But you have to know how to watch. IMO this would be a better use of time than discussing the social ramifications of film, unless you’re going to be a lifer at PBS. And that is something it seems like the newer guys don’t have a clue how to do. There is a huge amount of “There’s this cool video with ______ transition/effect/look/lighting, how do I ______?” posts on the cow. I think this illustrates most don’t know how to deconstruct what they are seeing in other peoples work, or do any critical viewing. When I was starting out, this was one of only ways to learn. There was no internet, forums, or comprehensive how-to books, behind the scenes DVD’s, or free tutorials. And when you got OTJ training from other editors, you were certainly not going to learn all their secrets.
While slightly OT, one of the things I find ironic, is that a lot of shooters/editors that have come up in the NLE generation seem to fancy themselves as these film uber-geeks. Sitting around coffee shops with their Macbook Pro, talking about film theory, and storytelling. Then they will run around ‘filming’ with their 5D’s, espousing the virtues of shooting video at 24fps to ‘get the film look’, but then slather on intrusive and unmotivated camera moves/lighting/FX/transitions that call attention to themselves and completely distract from the story they are supposedly trying to tell in their ‘film’. So I’m not sure all that discussion of theory is doing much good at all.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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Haha – maybe I should quit! I’m kinda broke now as it is…
I like your description of how to apply the things you have learned to what you are doing and I absolutely admire your ability to keep that alive in everything you do.
But I still struggle with the notion that film theory is relevant to most of the content that’s out there.
Please tell me: if you were to get a seat cutting Jersey Shore and a producer said “this sequence needs more oomph!” how would you draw from your “high” education and produce results in a timely manor? I just don’t think it applies in this case. Or many, many cases. In fact, you’d get laughed out of town if you said “For this sequence I was inspired by Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera”
I keep coming back to the OP’s statement “I just don’t understand the relevance of any of this to anything I do, and its driving me crazy” and I want to point out that it will drive you crazy if you expect it to be relevant. Allow me to rephrase that: IF an editor had absolutely zero formal education and/or interest in film theory, he or she could still cut that comedy pilot through self discipline and practice alone.
We basically agree: I adore film theory as much as you, but where we differ is unless you’re cutting the next Terrence Malick (which I would die for by the way) it is mostly irrelevant, like the Parisian-educated chef hurling well done T-bones on a grill.
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I really enjoy discussions like this. Let me add my late TLDR to this.
In your Jersey Shore example, you have a scene or set piece of characters interacting and you say it needs more “oomph”. The guy or gal with the film studies background has a LOT more stylistic weapons in the arsenal to deploy on that problem than one who doesn’t, because they have seen more examples of how this problem has been solved by others.
Moreover, they also have a good idea already of what approaches will NOT help, so they can save time by not running down blind alleys. The famous shots in movies thru history have some common threads in them, and one of these is that they were a creative way to solve a problem. A story-telling problem. Be they camera shots or editing tricks, they found a new way to depict something normally unseen, specifically, emotions and thoughts.
But to best use these tricks, you must first have some basic understanding of them, and that’s where all the posh talk and philosophizing comes into play. It may sound pretentious and much of it may be, but there isn’t really any better way to learn the tools than to first see them used and explain them to yourself.
Jersey Shore isn’t going to be High Art, no matter what you do. But there are tricks you can play by altering the mood and the audience’s perception of what passes for the unspoken thoughts of these kids in that scene you’re talking about needing more “oomph”.
What is “oomph”? I will interpret that as a call to escalate a sense of drama and importance to a scene. So besides the shots you’re given, what can you do with that?
You can alter the color timing. You can play with music cues and beds. You can introduce parallel action. You can swap around b-roll and cut-aways to imply reactions that weren’t there, propose alternate reactions or magnifications of the reactions. You can add flashbacks. You can jack up the rhythm of the cuts, their pace.You can pull interview quotes and voiceover commentaries out and re-align them. You can make waiting for someone to get out of the bathroom into very high drama, just taking some time to apply rules of classic drama and storytelling, and you cna make that wait seem like a minute or like days. I would say you could do the whole Campbellian Hero’s Journey in that waiting-for-the-bathroom-to-free-up sequence. Just look at how Larry David’s show blows one tiny foible or simple act into a complicated evolution of epic tragic proportion.
When I make something like a 30-second PSA, I try for that level of Campbellian subtext in it. I consider the semiotics – the unspoken visual symbolism – of everything in the frame, and everything implied by but NOT in the frame. The audio, the sound effects, the music, the color timing, the props. The spacial relationships and blocking of the room and the actors. The casting. The camera angles. The cutting and it’s pace.The typography and colors used. All of these, I try to tweak to serve the script as much as possible, so you could watch this with the sound off and still understand it. More than understand it; accept it, internalize it, and FEEL it as truth. “That really does happen”, or “Yes, that guy could be me” “I might react just that same way”.
I do this for the cheapest spots the same as I do for the highest budget ones. It is the largest part of what is FUN about this job for me.
I don’t mean to say you can only learn these tricks in a formal film school. If you’re an auto-didact, you can do the independent reading yourself, watch all the movies and study them, yourself, and learn a LOT. ANd a good liberal arsts and sciences background is exceptionally sueful in all kinds of way you wouldn’t expect for a video editor. I think the frosting on that cake though is sharing what you think with others and testing your assumptions against theirs, to see if they hold true. That sometimes pretentious-sounding debating really does serve a purpose.
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Mark maybe you can help me out with something I need to know as you seem to have semiotics down. You hear about all these semiotic readings, but to me whats going on is clear as day.
The connotative meaning of a single shot will always be related to the denotative meaning, e.g if someone was glum and it was raining etc for a simple example. To me this is stuff I pick up on intuitively and I suspect most people do too. Isnt that the point of this stuff you just have a sense for it. To me like you said this is one of the most enjoyable things about editing being able to insert subliminal ideas.
Plus doesnt all this stuff just add up so its one overall meaning per shot anyway, its made out to sound so over complicated in these theory books and to me it sounds like something you could sum up in about thirty seconds.
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[Mark Suszko] “I don’t mean to say you can only learn these tricks in a formal film school. If you’re an auto-didact, you can do the independent reading yourself, watch all the movies and study them, yourself, and learn a LOT. ANd a good liberal arsts and sciences background is exceptionally sueful in all kinds of way you wouldn’t expect for a video editor. I think the frosting on that cake though is sharing what you think with others and testing your assumptions against theirs, to see if they hold true. That sometimes pretentious-sounding debating really does serve a purpose.”
I really don’t think you need a 4 year degree to understand what schmaltz is, or how to add more ompf to a scene. If you can last a year or two in a working environment with other pro’s, you will learn ten times more useful items, then you will in the average school program. I have had interns in their third year from well known schools that didn’t know what the term ‘3 point lighting’ meant, but they could prattle on about ‘the meaning’ of the dolly-zoom in Vertigo. Duh. Do I need a degree to get the meaning of that shot?
Over the 30 years or so I have done this, dozens of my interns, and hundreds of colleagues have come and gone. Of those with a 4 year film school degree that actually had a career and stayed in the biz, I could count on one hand with fingers left over. Most had a ‘day job’ in 5 years, or less. Those that had no degree of any kind, or a BA in Mass Comm or other light-weight subjects seemed to do better, with long careers in the biz.
It seemed like there was a direct connection to how ‘arty’ someone was, and how well they worked out in the real world. It seemed to me some folks would rather talk about film, than actually make one because it is hard work and the majority of the ‘philosophers’ seemed rather lazy, and were better at talking than doing. I always told the interns, if your on a gig as a grip or a PA, be the best damn PA there is. Don’t spend a lot of time debating style with the AD, or telling the DP how to light, or asking to look in the frame. Just do your job, and do it well. And for god sake don’t show up on time, be there early! The arty film school kids almost always did the exact opposite of this.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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check this out:
https://www.etap.org/demo/englishhs/instruction_last.html
Look at their example of “Mother”.
Now, think about a scene where one character has more or less this role, but isn’t the typical female. Expand that notion, look at the movie “Gran Torino”, where Clint’s character becomes a somewhat unwilling father-figure and mentor to a kid he would normally have nothing to do with. It is not full of very overt straight-ahead statements like: “Now I will choose to be the mentor, and you the mentee”. It evolves in a painfully halting way. Clint hands the kid one tool to borrow, shows him how to use it, how to treat it, tells him to bring it back. It’s a test. Step by step, a bond is forged, a character, defined. The day he tells the kid he can keep the tool, what is the symbolism going on in that, the subtext of that? Now that’s more along the lines of scriptwriting and storytelling, directing and acting, and not editing, but all these elements intertwine in a film or video, and you could think about how you edit scenes like that, how you play up or play down the significance of the symbolic object, what cutting techniques you use to make the object more or less important.
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