"New York Movie", Edward Hopper, 1939
“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.”
“If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”
- Edward Hopper
While these may not be the definitively ‘best’ films released this decade, they are the ones that I found most personally satisfying, moving, stunning, touching or worthy. There are even 2 bona fide masterpieces in there – films for the ages (see if you can guess which).
1. Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
2. There Will Be Blood (Anderson)
3. Elephant – (Van Sant)
4. Pan’s Labyrinth (Del Toro)
5. The Wrestler – (Aronofsky)
6. Zodiac (Fincher)
7. Let the Right One In (Alfredson)
8. The Station Agent (McCarthy)
9. Hidden (Haneke)
10. The Lives of Others (Von Donnersmarck)
11. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (Gondry)
12. No Country for Old Men (Coens)
13. Children Of Men (Cuarón)
14. Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki)
15. The Prestige (Nolan)
16. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel)
17. Atonement (Wright)
18. The Prestige (Nolan)
19. Hunger (McQueen)
20. The Devil’s Backbone (Del Toro)
21. The Quiet American (Noyce)
22. Adaptation (Jonze)
23. The Host (Joon-Ho)
24. Downfall (Hirschbiegel)
25. Control (Corbijn)
26. Grizzly Man (Herzog)
27. A History Of Violence (Cronenberg)
28. Jesus Camp (Ewing/Grady)
29. Up (Docter)
30. We Own The Night (Gray)
In my last post, I mentioned that Sexy International Film Festival Director Jason Turley has been a great champion of my short film, The Body Watchers, and the following exemplifies his support.
Unbeknownst to me, he was approached by the organisers of Sexpo, who this year have launched the inaugural Australian Erotic Film Festival, which is dedicated to films that depict a personal view on love, romance or eroticism (“no porn, please”, their application form states). Jason offered them several of the Sexy entries, from which they selected The Body Watchers and one other film (the name of which escapes me). The Body Watchers ended up being one of 6 finalists, chosen by the festival judges.
These films were played at a gala opening evening in Sydney recently, and will be played on the big screen at Sexpo Sydney & Melbourne, in between stage shows. Winners will be chosen by public voting, via SMS. A $5000 prize is available to the winner of the festival. If any of you are heading to Sexpo, I’d appreciate your vote!
Some good news for ‘The Body Watchers’, which was recently judged Best Australian Short Film at the 2009 Sexy International Film Festival at their closing night in Melbourne.
Still from The Body Watchers.
I was most surprised, and my acceptance speech wasn’t much to write home about – I think I forgot to thank my wonderful cast and crew which, given my guiding philosophy that film is an essentially collaborative medium (and my rabid hatred of auteur theory), is very regrettable. So, to redress this remissness – many thanks, people; I couldn’t have done it without you, and the award belongs to every one of us. Thanks also to the festival’s director, Jason Turley, a lovely chap who has championed The Body Watchers and really helped its progress.
From here, the Sexy International Film Festival travels to Perth, and then next year will tour Paris, Los Angeles & New York. I’m currently in the process of subtitling the film into French, in preparation for the Paris screening, and I’d like to add yet another thanks to Charly Vanni, for his excellent and thorough translation of the film’s dialogue, and thereby teaching me the French term for ‘golden shower.’
2009 is looking like the year that will restore my faith in Australian Cinema.
It was an auspicious year already, with the long-awaited restoration and cinema/DVD re-release of Ted Kotcheff’s seminal masterpiece “Wake In Fright”, one of the most important (and greatest) Australian films of all time. I’ll write a blog on this film soon, as I attended a screening a while back that was introduced by Ted himself, and have had a long-standing obsession with it.
Donald Pleasance in 'Wake In Fright'.
But we’re also seeing a real return to form in the films currently being produced and released here, too. To date, I have seen (and been incredibly impressed by) Adam Elliot’s first animated feature Mary & Max, Warwick Thornton’s brutal, essential Samson & Delilah, Robert Connolly’s terribly angry and moving Balibo, and Rachel Ward’s Beautiful Kate (which holds a special personal significance for me, as it is the first feature film shot by my long-time friend, the very talented cinematographer Andrew Commis. I’m also eagerly awaiting Jonathan Auf Der Heide’s Van Deimen’s Land, which looks like a cross between the sensibilities of John Boorman and Werner Herzog, if the 20 minute short version I saw is any indication.
It seems, at least temporarily, that Australian film-maker’s are throwing off the yoke of the fussy, static, twee and cowardly ‘coming of middle-age’ movies that plague our industry (and die lonely, deserved deaths at the box office) for darker, more expansive and bold works, that delve into our culture and have some actual relevance.
About. Fucking. Time.
Kelly Ann Doll in The Body Watchers.
My short “The Body Watchers” is proving to be a tenacious little film.
After being selected for the 2009 St Kilda Film Festival (where it played to a sold-out crowd at the Palace George Cinema), it has gone on to be screened at the 2009 Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF), and has just been chosen as an opening night film for the upcoming 2009 Sexy International Film Festival.
I’m particularly excited by this last festival, as it means “The Body Watchers” will not only screen in Melbourne this October, but will then travel to Perth in November, and from there tour Paris, New York and Los Angeles next May.
My recently completed second film collaboration with Lisa MacKinney, a performance film of her latest musical guise ‘Mystic Eyes’, has been accepted into Perth’s Revelation Film Festival.
Poster for 'Mystic Eyes.'
Coming on the heels of ‘The Body Watchers’ making it into the official Top 100 selection at the 2009 St Kilda Film Festival, it’s a (film) festive season all-round.
Here’s a 30-second trailer for the final film. Enjoy; the poster image below links to the Youtube video. I’ll post more on its recent screening at the prestigious St Kilda Film Festival once I recover from aforementioned festival.
Lisa MacKinney in 'Mystic Eyes.'
In 2006, I shot a performance film of the noise duo Second Viennese School; Michael Munson and Lisa MacKinney. Their particular brand of ’sonic terrorism’ takes the form of long (40 minute), hypnotic pieces, constructed from early house beats looped to form a rhythmic foundation, which are then layered with live organ drones, repetitive chord strumming and guitar feedback. The effect is mesmerising and immersive; the listener becomes lost in the gradual, ascending, organic flow of harmonic collisions until you swear you’re hearing things that aren’t even there, like million-angel choirs and glaciers collapsing into the ocean.
A still from the 2006 Second Viennese School performance film "SVS".
Late last year I had the good fortune to once again team up with Lisa MacKinney, who now performs mainly solo, under the name Mystic Eyes. We’d discussed making another musical document, but I wanted this one to be a more minimalist affair than the previous film, which had the (deliberate) 60’s aesthetic of a black and white archival film from Andy Warhol’s Factory – raw, jagged and industrial.
I wanted the film-making process to mirror, as closely as possible, the style and structure of the music; a single take that would last the duration of the piece (around 28 minutes) to reflect the unbroken sonic line of the music, that would begin in a wide shot and gradually move into a roving close up and become immersed in the detail of the image, just as the listener is drawn into the rich and resonant depths of what seems at first to be very simple music.
Lisa amid the tools of her trade.
We filmed the performance against a white cyclorama, as I wanted to focus purely on the technology and instruments used to create the music, and the human operator of that equipment, decontextualised from any particular environment or surrounding. The stark essence of the result is particularly pleasing and pure.
I guess the concept for this film doesn’t exactly entail screenwriting per se, but there’s an element of ‘design’ in allowing the style of the music to dictate the visual execution; an example of the form-follows-function principle at work.
The titular Mystic Eyes.
For trivia fans, the title sequence – a close-up of Lisa’s eyes under the credits – is intended as an homage to the opening of Roman Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’.
The film was shot by Adrian Price, cinematographer of the AFI Award-nominated documentary ‘Beyond Our Ken’ (see it, it is great), and the sound was recorded by James Dean (not the dead method actor, the chap from Tugboat). A special thanks also to Tash Blankfield, who loaned us her enviable photography studio for the day.
‘Mystic Eyes’ was completed in early March 2009, and was recently accepted into Perth’s Revelation Film Festival.
1. Sight & Sound Magazine
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/
First published in 1932, and shortly thereafter taken over by the British Film Institute, Sight & Sound is without question the best film review and criticism magazine on the planet. Each month they review every new film released in the UK, from art house fare to Hollywood blockbusters (including full credits), always in a very thoughtful and cine-literate way.
The articles are to die for; I think I’ve learned most of what I know about film from Sight & Sound. The journalism is of an extremely high standard, and just on the right side of academic, without being dry. They do not confine themselves to purely contemporary filmic matters and are forever profiling some brilliant film, film-maker, actor or genre I’m unfamiliar with.
The BFI also publishes a series of monographs on individual films. In-depth close readings of modern and classic films that make amateur analysts like me drool. They’re small and expensive (a bit like Sight & Sound itself, which is slim but pricey, although it does contain a wealth of material in the small space between the front and back cover.)
I bought my first issue in 1990, and now have an (almost) unbroken collection of this very fine magazine stretching back nearly 20 years.
I am obsessed with filling in the gaps.
2. Creative Screenwriting Magazine’s Podcast
http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_details.php?pod_id=8894
My God, this is addictive. I hardly ever listen to music on my iPod anymore, as I’m too busy listening to these fascinating interviews, conducted by editor Jeff Goldsmith, with many of the greatest screenwriters in the business. The best interviews are lengthy conversations conducted in front of a live audience immediately after the screening of the writer’s latest film, and feature an audience Q & A after Jeff has worked through his stock (but always relevant) questions; How did you break in to the business? What was the hardest scene to write? What’s your writing habit and process? How do you deal with writer’s block? Etc.
I admit to having an almost unhealthy interest in the writing processes of others; there’s always something to be learned from the idiosyncratic technique someone else has developed, so this podcast is catnip for me.
Jeff’s slightly grating Californian geek voice takes a bit of getting used to, but he’s a genuine guy and genuinely passionate about screenwriting.
Subscribe, screen scribes!
3. The Four Word Film Review
“The fwfr is a film review site like no other – an ever expanding collection of extremely brief film reviews and summaries. Submissions are welcomed from anyone – the only condition being no more than four words may be used.”
I love FWFR. It tickles me to death. I thrive under the yoke of a constrictive creative parameter, which no doubt explains why I find it so enjoyable to write reviews for FWFR.
Here are my own reviews:
http://www.fwfr.com/display.asp?sort=2&id=4539&Mode=reviewer&Rows=100&Start=1&do=
And if you’re looking to laugh until things hurt, check out the Top 100 Reviews Of All Time:
http://www.fwfr.com/tops.asp?mode=att
A random sampling of the concise genius on display here:
Kramer Vs. Kramer: “I bet Kramer wins.”
Passion Of The Christ: “Gory, gory, Hallelujah.”
Tootsie: “Hoff-man, Hoff-woman.”
Robocop: “Copper is metal.”
Pretty Woman: “Shags to riches.”
Spiderman: “Teenager emits sticky substance.”
Psycho: “Unfortunate Leigh.”
Eyes Wide Shut: “Pretty shitty gang bang.”
For those of you who believe brevity is the soul of wit. And probably good practice for writing punchier log lines.
Eddie Cochran (L) & Gene Vincent (R).
I first became interested in the story of 50s rock and roll singer Gene Vincent sometime around 1990-91. Of course I knew the song “Be Bop A Lula” – almost everyone does. But I had no idea about the epic tragedy that constituted the life of this somewhat obscure but very influential star.
I was going out with a girl called Judy, who turned me onto rockabilly – we did the hair, the clothes and the car thing, and hung around on the periphery of the small but devoted Rockabilly scene in Adelaide. The wilfully retrograde attitudes and attention to period detail made you feel like you were in a movie, but some of the purist attitudes to the genre were amusingly extreme. (A typical quote: “If it happened after 1959, I don’t wanna know about it.”)
What struck me most, though, was the music – it was like a direct line back from punk – raw, crude, often amateurish, aggressive, sexy and dark.
The image of Gene Vincent – hunch-backed, leather-clad, wild-eyed and greasy-haired – epitomised for me the dark underbelly of 50s rock and roll – a loooong way away from Happy Days and the whitebread crooners. (I’d also been blown away a few years previously by David Lynch’s revolutionary deployment of old 50s songs in Blue Velvet – he had accessed the sinister undertones of those songs about love that you had always felt were there but never quite heard with such sharp focus.)
Around this time a friend of mine, Grant Lee Sullivan (now sadly passed away), gave me a copy of a UK bio of Gene called “The Day The World Turned Blue” written by Britt Hagarty in the mid 80s. What a story! The tragic, Shakespearean arc of Gene’s life had me hooked. I was pretty much obsessed with his story from that point on, and the idea about writing a screenplay based on his life took hold then and there.
Cut to: 10 YEARS LATER.
In 2002, I saw Susan Van Hecke’s biography “Race With The Devil: Gene Vincent’s Life In The Fast Lane” at Minotaur Books here in Melbourne, and had to buy it. It rekindled instantly my desire to write a screenplay about Gene, primarily because Susan had chosen the same title for her book as I’d always imagined for my screenplay (it’s the title of one of his early songs, and what else are you gonna call a bio about Gene? It says it all.)
God bless the internet – I cast around trying to work out a way to contact Susan, and eventually arrived at the Gene Vincent Discussion Group via The Rockabilly Hall of Fame site’s Gene Vincent page.
UK Gene authority (and interviewee for Susan’s book) Derek Henderson, who runs the discussion group, kindly forwarded my request on to Susan, who got back to me very promptly – sometime in late 2002.
I outlined to her in an email my desire to write a screenplay using her book as the main research material, and I think my take on the story convinced her. (She recently told me that, having been burned by film production companies before, she was all set to give me an uncategorical “NO”. I’m glad she didn’t).
I set about underlining in pencil all the sections of the bio that I thought were the most dramatic (as well as bits of The Day The World Turned Blue and a couple of bios on Eddie Cochran, Gene’s best friend – the script is something of a dark ‘buddy’ picture) and wrote them up in a kind of first-draft-cum-scrapbook, also incorporating many of the scene ideas I’d had gestating in my head for close to a decade.
The result was less than good; very stock standard in fact, but what it did was give me a single source from which to develop the story. It was merely a collection of events; I had yet to discover the underlying stuff that had hooked me to this story on a subconscious level.
I ended up sending Susan this rough first draft, just to show her I was sincere in my efforts. She soon got back to me, and admitted she thought my first draft was shit, but she admired any writer with enough balls to send such an embryonic work in progress to another writer. Her candour kicked off what proved to be a very close and fruitful back-and-forth about the story.
Once I was on the right track, it soon came time to confess to Sue that I didn’t have a cent to purchase the rights to her book, but we hit upon a mutually satisfactory agreement, whereby she would transfer the rights to adapt the screenplay and approach producers with it, in return for which I would cut her in for a percentage of any eventual screenplay sale. I’m not sure how common such an arrangement is, but it’s not without precedent in the industry.
I wanted the script to have some of the feel of biopics like “Raging Bull” and “Lenny”, both of which have a gritty darkness to them that I admire, as well as unsympathetic protagonists. Sometimes I’d write sitting in front of the TV, on which I’d play both these films with the sound turned down, as if peering over the screen of my laptop at the images might somehow permeate the rhythm and tone of my writing.
I was also fortunate enough to have some brilliant guidance in the form of my good friend and fellow screen scribe Stuart Page, who acted as an informal script editor, and badgered me constantly with the dreaded question ‘What’s it about?’ until I though I was going insane.
Quite late in the process, I contacted Gene Vincent’s daughter, Sherri, via the same fan website that kicked this whole thing off. From my correspondence with her, it became apparent that Sherri had been involved in some bitter legal disputes over Gene’s estate throughout the years, and had recently won the right to be the guardian of his memory. Which meant if this project was ever to have a hope of being made, it would have to be with her approval, or it’d be a music biopic with no music (at the very least).
However, she was very supportive of the project, but I must confess to a real sense of trepidation when I finally dropped a copy of the finished screenplay into the mail for her to read – what if she hated it?
It took a while for her to read it, which gave me several restless weeks (months, in fact) – but her comments were all I could have wished for. She does not labour under the misapprehension that her father was an angel, but I was gratified that she found the script moving and meaningful.
She also agreed to help push the project in any way she can. The one thing I (correctly) surmised was that she’d be disappointed that my screenplay totally ellided the years between 1960 and 1971, when she was born. But, with an incredibly generous spirit, she acknowledged that the script was my baby (even though she’s Gene’s baby) – and that I should write what I believe in.
The other great thing that came out of this project was winning 2nd Prize in the 2004 Nashville Screenwriters Conference script competition. I knew that I’d made life difficult for myself by picking an American-based story for my first feature film, (what with me not living in Los Angeles and all), but it was the story that had the hook deepest in me at that time.
Once I wrote it, I figured I’d take a gamble and enter it into a few US screenwriting competitions, to see if I could win and generate interest in the script that way. Luckily, the Nashville competition had a special category for music-themed films, which I thought was a good way to further narrow the odds. What was also attractive was the fact that part of the prize was the winning scripts would be sent to about 20 production companies in the US, including HBO, Lion’s Gate and Plan B. All that hard submission work would be done for me.
The gamble paid off, although the script was deemed by the production companies who read it to be ‘too dark’, or ‘not quite the kind of thing we do’, even though many of them loved it. But all those rejection letters with impressive letterheads make me feel like a real writer. (I also got to travel to Nashville the following year, and attend the 2005 Nashville Screenwriters Conference as a aspecial guest, which I’ll write about in another post.)
That was a few years ago, now. But ‘Race With The Devil’ is far from dead. My passion for the project remains undiminished, I keep looking for possible avenues to send it to, and I know it’s only a matter of time before it passes beneath the gaze of someone who sees the potential in it for a music biopic as great as recent successes like ‘Control’ or ‘Walk The Line’.
Last week I bought a great book by author J.J. Murphy called “Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work”. It examines a number of the most influential independent American films of the past 20 years or so, including some of my favourite recent films; Elephant, Fargo, Mulholland Drive and [SAFE].
Murphy’s introduction describes the traditional rules/conventional wisdom of screenwriting, as proscribed by such screenwriting ‘authorities’ as Robert McKee, Syd Field and Linda Seger, before going on to demonstrate how the screenplays of the aforementioned films (and over a dozen others) utilise innovative new approaches to structure and character.
These films bend the rules to breaking point at times, and yet have their own narrative integrity that is not so reliant on such well-worn devices as turning points, goal-driven protagonists and classic act structure. And yet all the films evidence a keen knowledge of classical form; they are not pieces of naive art. In the book, Jarmusch says; ‘Before you break rules, it’s good to know what they are.’ Or, as I like to say, learn your craftsy before your artsy.
‘Me and You…’ is a very entertaining and illuminating read, and Murphy demonstrates great insight in the thematic and structural analyses of the representative films.
This one will sit proudly among my library of screenwriting reference books, right alongside my other two faves:
1) ‘On Film-Making’, by the wonderfully eloquent Alexander MacKendrick, is a book ostensibly about Directing, although almost 3/4 of its length is devoted to screenwriting (which gives you some idea of how important Mac considered the script to be in the scheme of things).When I first got my hands on this, I was so impressed by MacKendrick’s insights – which were gleaned first-hand, through his 30-odd years as a director actually making films, and not simply a bunch of formulas cooked up by a self-proclaimed ‘guru’ – I was almost tempted to toss out all my other screenwriting references.
2) ‘Writing For The Screen’ by Arrar Jackson is an ancient, ancient screenwriting book written in the late 1930’s, which focuses almost exclusively on writing scenarios for silent films – it is ALL about visual writing, and mentions ‘talkies’ as if they were a passing fad; brilliant! No cover image for this, as it is extremely old and out of print. Shame, because it has a beautifully designed Art Deco dustjacket.
Popular Melbourne burlesque performer Kelly Ann Doll stars in The Body Watchers.
Last November, I directed my first narrative film, a 6 minute short entitled ‘The Body Watchers’. The brief synopsis is ‘Burlesque meets B-movie Sci-Fi, when a peepshow stripper has a close encounter of the voyeuristic kind.’ Citizen Kane it ain’t, but it was intended as a directorial practice run for me, as I intend making another of my screenplays, ‘Turn Right’, later this year, and wanted to ‘bust my cherry’ (so to speak) on a less ambitious project.
The film was shot in one of Melbourne’s actual peepshows, Crazy Horse (located on Elizabeth Street in the CBD, for all you voyeurs out there). We were only able to film between the hours of 3am and 10am, when the peepshows were closed, so it was an intense seven hour shoot, with a minimal crew.
The other great logistical challenge (for our cinematographer, David Hawkins, at least) was that all four walls of our location, the interior of the peepshow, were covered in mirrors, which made finding suitable angles from which to shoot very tricky. But Dave’s good, and was able to come up with some simple but effective ways of concealing the camera without compromising our compositions or the story.
There were a couple of significant things I learned on this shoot.
The first was the transition from screenwriter to director, and how that affected my relationship with the script. The night before we shot, I looked again at the script, from a purely practical perspective, and was compelled to immediately hack away about a page of superfluous material (ie; 1/6th of the script). It was either ‘internal’ character stuff, repetitive action, or dialogue (which I found could be played silent and still come across). It was a very swift process and I didn’t have a moment of grieving for anything cut; I just knew we’d have to work fast, so anything that could go, must go, and better then than on the set.
The second significant lesson I learned was about half an hour before we had to wrap the shoot and vacate the location, and we still had 6 set-ups to do in order to get the whole film in the can. That’s a LOT of shots, in terms of the time we had. We were all tired and wired at the point where Helen, our boom operator, turned to me and asked “What’s the time?” I felt everyone freeze and turn to me as one. I’d just glanced at my watch, and got a bit of a jolt when I saw that it was 9:30 am. The first (real) stripper of the day would be arriving at 10am, and probably wouldn’t be too pleased to find a film crew in her ‘office’.
I realised that our ability to either finish the film or not finish the film depended on my response to Helen’s question. If I said “It’s fucking 9:30! We gotta hurry!” everyone would’ve panicked and started making mistakes under stress and duress.
I’d kind of been feeling all night long that I was the only person there who didn’t really have a function, or know what they were doing – I was frequently standing at the epicentre of a storm of rapid activity going on around me, and all I had to do was make the occasional helpful suggestion and observe the actors closely whenever the camera was rolling. But I realised the reason for this; I had chosen my cast and crew wisely, they all knew exactly what the film was about, because I’d discussed it at length with everyone long BEFORE we got to the set, so I just had to sit back and let them get on with their jobs and not hover over their shoulders or talk for the sake of seeming important. I had to provide a calm, confident, stable centre around which the crew could orbit.
The Director is the nerve centre of the crew, and the crew will react to whatever vibe you are giving off.
All these realisations went through my head in a matter of seconds, after which I turned to Helen and replied; ‘Don’t worry what time it is. Let’s just do these shots.’ It worked.
The Body Watchers is currently in post production, and should be completed in March 2009.
It strikes me that, when creating a character for a screenplay, we are performing the equivalent of Psychology in reverse.
The Psychoanalytic professional will delve behind the words of the patient to intuit the subtext, find hidden traumas, bring them to the surface and try to ‘heal’ or obviate them.
Conversely, the Screenwriter sets out to deliberately create fucked-up people. We contrive fictional histories filled with traumatic formative experiences, tragedies, pathologies and dysfunctions that are papered over with an idiosyncratic facade.
Then we send them out into social situations that play into their deepest fears and vulnerabilities.
It’s a cruel world… but at least it’s fictional.
This is the first in a series of examinations of images and scenes that perplexed and fascinated me at first, but which perfectly encapsulate the theme of the films in which they appear.
Jeff & Lisa viewed, frustratingly, from behind.
This shot from Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ begins wide and pushes in to the above composition, holding there for approximately 13 seconds while Jeff (James Stewart) and Lisa (Grace Kelly) exchange several lines, before pulling out into the original wide shot again.
For most of its length, ‘Rear Window’ uses subjective shots, from Jeff’s point of view, intercut with close-ups of his reactions to what he sees from his wheelchair-bound position at his window, causing the viewer to identify strongly with the increasingly unhealthy interest he develops in his neighbours. Throughout the film, the time Jeff spends glued to his window invisibly observing (and judging) his neighbours grows, as his own relationship with Lisa becomes more problematic and suffocating. Like the movie viewer, Jeff’s watching is a form of vicarious escape from his own life.
This shot immediately precedes Lisa drawing down the blinds on the window, cutting off the source of Jeff’s distraction so she can have his undivided attention; she is about to interrupt his addictive observations, but by concealing his characters from us, Hitchcock gives us a foretaste of the medicine Lisa is intent on administering to Jeff.
In a film explicitly about voyeurism (and subtextually about the act of viewing film), the sense of frustration one feels at this moment is palpable – one expects the camera to circle around them (or cut to a more convenient angle) so we can see their faces, as is our ‘right’. The viewer’s identification with Jeff is once again reinforced.
The brilliance of this shot is that this seemingly ‘bad’ composition is completely intentional; a subtle and sublime example of Hitchcock’s manipulative mastery.
I wish I could take credit for coming up with the title of this blog: “The film is the damaged version of the script.”
But to give credit where it’s due, that line was spoken by a student in Sydney, who was attending an intensive screenwriting workshop I conducted some years ago. Perhaps, at least, I can console myself with the fact that whatever the Hell I was talking about at the time was the prompt for her to come up with it.
I recall I was talking about the idea that the filmed result of one’s carefully structured screenplay – having been passed through the collective vision of a director, cast and crew, subjected to the vicissitudes of budgetary constraints and weather and location considerations, and THEN reshaped by an editor – may bear considerably less resemblance to the original words on paper than the writer might have hoped.
I think her version is more succinct.
