I am an artist. It is the
very opposite of saying "I know all about it. I've already found
it." As far as I am concerned, the word means "I am looking,
I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved."
– Vincent
VanGogh
 My
roommate in my Freshman-year had a weird habit. Every time he came across
a thought-provoking idea in a novel, poem, or essay, he would print it
in big block letters on an index card and stick it up somewhere in the
room. Putting a slice of bread in the toaster, I would be faced with William
Blake's "Energy is eternal delight" taped on the side.
Shaving in the bathroom mirror, I'd have to scoot down a little to see
myself underneath Clement Greenberg's "All profoundly original
art looks ugly at first." Climbing into bed, I'd see Marshall
McLuhan's "When first proposed, new systems of knowledge don't
look like revolutions or breakthroughs–but like chaos" posted
with a stick pin on the opposite wall. The nuttiness only lasted a couple
of months. As the semester wore on, he got busier and busier, and ultimately
discontinued the practice sometime around Thanksgiving break. The funny
thing was that though I had begun by hating them, when he stopped doing
it, I missed those index cards with their mysterious, inspirational ideas.
That was a long time ago
in a galaxy far away, and to tell the truth I forgot all about it until
recently. But something from those days must have stayed with me, since
I've now become an inveterate keeper of my own lists of aperÁus, insights,
and quotes–though I don't write mine on note cards, but scribble them
on dog-eared tablets thrown in the back of drawers. A lot of them are
on ratty scraps of paper stuck in the folders behind my lecture notes,
because they are prompted by something the students in my Boston University
film classes say. At least once a week, in the middle of a discussion,
someone says something so thought-provoking that I stop the class for
a minute to write it down before I forget it. Those comments (and the
counter-observations they frequently provoked in me) were the source of
many of the following aphorisms. All of the others came from puzzling
over films I've seen.
This is the second of a
three-part article. The final installment will appear in the next issue
of MovieMaker. For those who missed the first, short of requesting
a back issue from Tim Rhys, the best summary I can offer is the quote
from one of VanGogh's letters that is at the top of the page (which was
given to me last year by one of my students, and is just the sort of thing
my roommate would have tacked on the wall).
The unreality of Hollywood
movies is not geographical or sociological. It's emotional. The problem
is not that the characters are rich and beautiful, and live in Beverly
Hills, but that no one was ever motivated by such simple, unitary emotions.
Hollywood spends millions getting the automobiles and haircuts right,
but gets the feelings all wrong.
* * *
Get real feelings into
your movie–our insecurities, our uncertainties, our confusions, our discouragements,
our laughter at ourselves for being stupid, our constant changes of mind.
People's feelings don't stand still the way they do in Psycho,
Red Rock West, Reservoir Dogs, or L.A. Confidential.
They continuously shift and change. And we aren't clear about what we
are doing or why we are doing it, but mixed-up with mixed motives.
* * *
Outer space is much less interesting
than inner. The world that matters is the world of the spirit. Opera and
ballet understand that. Because your heroine wears cotton underwear and
a T-shirt instead of a silk nightgown does not make her any more truthful
than Jean Harlow. Mark Rappaport's The Scenic Route is one of the
truest movies ever made, and not a shot in it looks like the world of
our eyes and ears.
* * *
In Marianne Moore's words,
the real wars are always inward. Conflicts between figures are far less
important than the conflicts within any one of them. What goes on inside
us is more dramatic than the mere events of the Holocaust.
* * *
The horrors of horror movies
are too external. The real horrors are inside us–our need to have others
support our fantasies of ourselves, our desire for praise, our idiotic
quest to be successful, our bottomless emotional neediness.
* * *
Slasher pictures are too tame.
Emotional violence is far worse than physical. Casual remarks cut more
deeply than Freddy Kruger's blades. The masks we wear are scarier than
Jason's–and don't come off. The irrationality of our doubts and despairs
is more frightening than any monster's rampage.
* * *
Hannibal Lector is too logical,
too rational. His actions make sense. Ours don't. He knows what he wants
and how he will get it. We are only fooling ourselves when we think we
do. There's a man next-door to me who mows his lawn every single day,
sometimes twice a day, and a man across the street who sits in his car
by himself listening to the radio almost every night without going anywhere.
Their actions are far less rational, and their emotions more mysterious
than anything in Nightmare on Elm Street.
* * *
Film important emotions.
The Blair Witch Project is full of emotions, but trivial ones.
Our flight-or-fight responses are the least interesting part of us. They
are our reptilian brain stems. Make a movie about what makes us human,
not what we have in common with a crocodile.
* * *
If there is an act of physical
violence, an assault or attack, a single instant of Hitchcockian "suspense,"
"terror," or "shock" in your movie, you might as well
quit. Speaking personally, I change the channel the instant a gun appears
in a film. I know nothing interesting can follow.
* * *
Make your characters at least
as complex as your self-deluded former boyfriend. In John Cassavetes'
Love Streams, every time Robert Harmon opens his mouth, he thinks
he is saying one thing, while a viewer hears something different. In Caveh
Zahedi's A Little Stiff, every time the main character thinks he
is making one impression on a girl, the viewer comes to the opposite conclusion.
(But be subtle! The subtlety of our unawareness of ourselves is the only
thing that separates Dumb and Dumber from Uncle Vanya.)
* * *
Forget sets, props, costumes,
locations, lighting. Acting is what matters. You can make a whole movie
in your living room if the emotions are complex enough. If there is enough
movement in the feelings, no one will notice if your actors are sitting
still. If you think that's an exaggeration, look at the living-room conversations
in Gertrud, or the living room scenes in John Cassavetes' Faces
and A Woman Under the Influence or Tom Noonan's The Wife.
No car chase was ever more thrilling.
* * *
Ask your actors if there is
a single word or feeling in your film that would not occur in their own
lives. If so, strike it out, or get a new actor. Ask them if the events
were really happening to them in their lives, if they would do anything
differently. Ask them if they think their character is true to their lives.
* * *
We are so deep in the culture
of salesmanship that we can no more see it than fish can see water. Everyone
is selling something. Mainly emotions. Television commentators sell sadness
when an airplane crashes. Politicians sell their honesty and sincerity.
Peter Jennings sells his sensitivity and Dan Rather sells his intensity.
But like any product mass-produced for mass consumption, to be hawked
this way, the emotion has to be pulled up by the roots, killed, freeze-dried,
dyed, and processed.
* * *
Watch out for actors and movies
that try to sell you canned, synthetic feelings. Real emotions are too
small, delicate, and unpredictable to be shouted up and traded on the
stock market.
* * *
The more experienced the actor,
the greater the tendency to pull things out of a bag of tricks. Jack Nicholson
mugs his way through every movie he's in; Meryl Streep tenses her way
through hers; Nick Cage clowns and showboats. Fancy acting is too easy–and
too false.
* * *
Beware of "star performances."
Actors like Keitel, DeNiro, and Cage do it only to justify their ridiculous
salaries. Great acting is about interacting–not dominating, but responding;
not getting everyone to look at you, but listening to them.
In both life and film, a solo flight is always easier and less interesting
than a collaboration, an ensemble performance. The critics who sing Jack
Nicholson's or Robert DeNiro's praises will never understand this.
* * *
"Star-system" understandings
of life are everywhere–on television, in the newspapers, in movies. We
crave a story with a superhero, a Princess Diana, a Bill Gates at the
center of it. But that's what's sick about our culture. If your movie
has a star–a superb, powerful, strong actor who dominates scenes–treat
it not as an asset, but a problem to be dealt with.
* * *
What happens in life when someone
wants to be the center of attention all the time? How do they lose their
sensitivity and responsiveness? How do they make everyone around them
feel?
* * *
 Life
is the opposite of the star-system. Experience is never reducible to one
person's drama. Your point of view doesn't dominate or absorb mine, but
endlessly jostles with it, and ours bumps up against everyone else's.
* * *
Every time a character starts
to dominate a scene or sequence, make sure you remind the viewer of another
character's point of view. Every time one character launches into a solo
riff, remind the viewer that there are other ways of understanding and
being, other dramas going on. Look at Grand Illusion or Breaking
the Waves or The Celebration.
* * *
If you have to deal with a
hammy actor, mess up his rhythms a little, catch him off balance. Secretly
change the blocking or a couple of the other actors' lines just before
the big scene so that he'll have to think on his feet, actually listen
to them, truly respond to what they say.
* * *
You can also use amateurs and
real situations to force a little truth in. If an actor is put in a partially
real situation (with a child, animal, or nervous nonactor), she may be
forced to play a little truer than if she were in a completely predictable,
staged situation. Film in a real house with a few real family members.
Include a real grandmother. There's a chance a real tone of voice might
sneak in. It worked for Jim Jarmusch–brilliantly–in the second half
of Stranger than Paradise.
* * *
A strictly personal aside
to any actor reading this: If you are a famous, established actor–if
you are Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Robert DeNiro, or Meryl
Streep–volunteer to work for free in some real indie's no-budget production.
Why be a whore all of your life? Do you really believe that The Godfather,
Apocalypse Now, Terms of Endearment, Apollo 13,
Saving Pvt. Ryan, and Cape Fear are the greatest expressions
of which the human spirit is capable? Nicholson in particular hasn't taken
a risk with a really daring project since he appeared in Five Easy
Pieces thirty years ago. (And that wasn't that daring then anyway,
since he couldn't get anything bigger at that point in his career.) It
was his last decent performance. Jack, do yourself a favor. Act in one
honest, experimental, artistic, non-entertainment movie before you die.
What are you afraid of? Accept a script by a no-name director. Take some
chances with projects that take some chances. Ones that might be
just dreadful, but could be great. Work with Caveh Zahedi or Gordon
Erikson or Mark Rappaport or Tom Noonan or Charles Burnett. And, to all
the big-name actors who think you are already doing this: If you
think that movies like As Good as it Gets, Pulp Fiction,
Eyes Wide Shut, Taxi Driver, Blue Velvet, The Shining, and Fargo
are art, get an advisor who can tell the difference. I'll do it for
you if you're really desperate. You've been reading Pauline Kael, Stephen
Holden, Anthony Lane, Janet Maslin, and David Denby too long. These movies
are kitsch. They are knock-offs of the real thing, promoted by journalists
(they don't deserve the title of "critics") who don't know the
difference. At the other extreme, if you are a novice, unestablished actor:
vow that even if you become as rich and famous as Jack Nicholson you'll
keep doing something for art, to explore what we are, not just for the
money and to protect your career and box office image.
* * *
Chewing the scenery is bad
for both the movie and the scenery. It's easy to "make a scene"
by throwing a fit, but temper tantrums belong in Kindergarten. If your
big scene is one in which your actors shout, gesticulate, or cry, there's
probably something wrong with your understanding of life–or theirs.
* * *
As Carl Dreyer said, life's
greatest dramas are usually played quietly. They take place in silence,
off in a corner somewhere. When you get really bad news, you are usually
left speechless. It may be days until you can talk about it.
* * *
A great scene is not when the
actor cries, but when the viewer does–which is frequently in response
to an actor's refusal to. The fact that Dreyer's Joan of Arc doesn't
weep is why we do. The fact that Inger stays cheerful no matter how
bad things may be is why we love her.
* * *
But don't confuse this with
what Todd Solondz does. A character in Happiness may not cry in
a painful situation either, but not because she is patient, sensitive,
and wise, but because she is a fool. It is the very opposite of Dreyer.
Dreyer loves his characters, which is why we love and care
about them so much. Solondz–like Robert Altman or Neil LaBute–has contempt
and scorn for his, which is why we do too, and ultimately have every right
to feel contempt and scorn for their creators
* * *
Satirizing limited characters
is too easy, anyway. Art is not about judging, but understanding. We judge,
judge, judge most of our lives. It's the worst part of us–the smuggest,
most petty, self-congratulatory part. A work of art exists to allow us
to be better than that: to see even the saddest or most doomed figures
sympathetically, lovingly, caringly.
* * *
If you don't, in some way or
other, love your characters, believe in them, and hope to redeem them,
you haven't entered into their points of view deeply enough. You're still
trapped in your view; you haven't seen them the way they see themselves.
* * *
All of the greatest works of
art are about characters who–notwithstanding their flaws and shortcomings–are
in some respects better than we are. Oedipus, Lear, Cleopatra,
Othello, Sonya, Joan, Inger, Gertrud, George Bailey, Mabel Longhetti,
and Sarah Lawson are stronger in the face of adversity, more
persistent, more trusting, more giving, more self-sacrificing,
and more daring emotionally than we are. That's why they justify
our time and interest. Because they are better than we are, is why their
struggles touch us so deeply. Their refusal to feel sorry for themselves
when confronted with greater obstacles than we will ever face inspires
us.
* * *
If possible, prevent the viewer
from being able to make any moral judgments. Of all the fashionable
forms of knowledge in our culture, the most pernicious, most limiting
is morality. If anything in your film can be understood in terms of right
and wrong, as being moral or immoral, you don't understand your characters
deeply enough.
* * *
If your narrative poses ethical
questions and choices, you are asking the wrong questions. All of the
most interesting parts of life are too complex to be reduced to morality.
* * *
The "bad" characters
in the movies (the kind Chris Walken plays) tell a lie about life. They
set out to do wrong, and know they are doing it. No one intends to do
wrong in life. No one. Ever. Not even Hitler had bad intentions or thought
he was doing anything wrong. As Renoir said: "Everyone has
his reasons." At the very instant someone is treating you most cruelly,
most heartlessly, most insensitively, he genuinely, sincerely
believes he is doing something good. He thinks he is acting out of principle.
He thinks he is doing it to help you or to make you a better person. He
thinks he is doing it to get the task done efficiently.
* * *
An actor should defend his
character from criticism the way he would defend a lover. As you write,
find some way for your character to defend his point of view–no matter
how screwed up it may be. Find the inner logic that makes what he is not
only reasonable, but, in his view, virtuous. Let him present his side
of the story. Let your characters genuinely justify themselves and their
actions the way we all do in our imaginations, the way we all want to
be justified–and inwardly believe we are justified.
* * *
The most flawed characters
in Mike Leigh's work–Peter in Bleak Moments, Beverly in Abigail's
Party, Keith in Nuts in May, Stan in Home Sweet Home–are
doing the very best they are capable of. Like Mama Longhetti, even as
they wreak havoc everywhere they go, they are sincerely just trying to
help out.
* * *
Make sure there are no "good
guys" in your film either. Allow your hero's good intentions to miscarry.
Let him drop the lifeboat on the heads of the people he intends to save.
Make him deeply flawed. That's the only way he can have any relevance
to a deeply flawed viewer. Leave the pure, noble, romantic souls to Judy
Blume. Study Astrov in Uncle Vanya to appreciate how much more
moving human fallibility is than inhuman perfection.
* * *
You can make the same mistake
in the opposite direction, of course. Hollywood upside down is still Hollywood.
Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz make their callow figures too callow. They
give us Sad Face Balloons in place of John Hughes's Happy Face Balloons–but
a balloon is still a balloon. Show real nobility, real intelligence, real
wit, and humor on top of the selfishness or insecurity and you have created
something like life.
* * *
 On
the other hand, if your characters are in hell, keep them there. Resist
the impulse to sweeten them at the end or give them a narrative reward.
Vincent Gallo negated everything he had achieved in the first hour of
Buffalo 66 with the film's final twenty minutes. His hero went
from interestingly annoying to tritely sentimental.
* * *
The goal is not to get your
point of view in–as a screenwriter, a director, an actor–but your
characters'. The point of art is not to turn the world into a lot of little
you's, but to create a world of genuine "others." Put aside
your own view of the character. Don't look at him through your eyes,
but his eyes. Think about him the way he thinks about himself.
* * *
To watch a Hollywood movie
is to see ourselves as seen by ourselves–in other words, blinded in layer
after layer of self-delusion. Real art is about seeing ourselves as others
see us. Leaving our own views behind to explore different ways
of thinking and feeling.
* * *
Make your characters at least
as different from the viewer and as resistant to being made over in his
image as people are in life. We can't color real people in with our personal
emotional crayons. They are already filled in. We must learn to see their
colors, rather than impose ours on them. The place you want to get
your movie characters to is where they resist the viewer, fight
him, defend their own independent identities. A challenging
relationship–in life or in art–is the place of growth.
* * *
Brecht said drama should be
performed with the house-lights up. If the viewer "falls into the
story" and simply "becomes" the character, he loses his
ability to think critically about the character. He doesn't learn anything.
Create characters sufficiently different that the viewer can't identify
with them.
* * *
Hold the viewer just a little
outside the action, as when he is watching a documentary. (Needless to
say, run the other direction away from all forms of flabby Hollywood
romanticism–all subjective editing, all point-of-view shots, all emotional
mood music, all soulful shots of eyes looking into eyes!)
* * *
Figures who defeat imaginative
appropriation force us out of ourselves to confront genuine "otherness"
(in a sense far deeper than is dreamt of by the multiculturalists). For
a MasterClass on the subject, look at Todd Haynes' Safe, Paul Morrissey's
Trash, or Mike Leigh's Sense of History.
* * *
Real art is not about yanking
the viewer around, playing with expectations, showing how ingenious
you
are, but reverentially exploring something you don't understand. It's
the product of humility, not cockiness. Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential,
and the complete work of the Coen brothers are to filmmaking what
the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball. If we had as high an opinion
of film as we do of sports, we wouldn't sit still for them.
* * *
Any art that can't reach the
viewer with real emotions can use surprises and shock tactics to simulate
them: violent, unexpected, astonishing, or outrageous narrative events
or cinematic tricks. If you can't be Picasso, you can be Salvador Dali.
You know its a trick when a striking cut, shot, sound doesn't tell you
how much the filmmaker knows about life, but how much he knows about film.
* * *
Why do you want your film to
look good? Perfection repels; flaws and roughness invite. The smoothness
of a mirror holds us on the outside; the bumpiness of a cloud allows our
minds to discover unexpected images. The meanings in Norman Rockwell are
complete; those in Picasso leave room for a viewer to do something to
them and with them. Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep would be
a lesser picture if the photography were prettier.
* * *
The fragmentation, the incompleteness
of a Matisse pencil sketch is far more interesting than the perfection
of a Technicolor postcard photograph. The mystery, the openness of life
is left intact. There is more power in evocation than argumentation. More
can be suggested than can ever be spoken.
* * *
Look at the barbecue scene
in Rick Schmidt's Morgan's Cake or the weight-lifting scene in
Harmony Korine's Gummo to appreciate the vitality of roughness.
Precisely because the acting and shooting are not polished and
smooth, but hesitant and uncertain, they capture the awkwardness of real
(not to be confused with reel) life. As with a barbecue, it's better to
err on the side of being a little raw than overcooked.
* * *
We know the world we live in
is in extreme rough-draft state–in half-illegible hand-writing, severely
dog-eared, crinkled, and curled; why do we want our cinematic world in
a gilt-edged, Moroccan bound edition?
* * *
Our culture is obsessed with
appearances. We are devoted to looking and sounding good. If your main
concern is with how your movie looks, you're part of the problem.
* * *
Hollywood films are devoted
to quick knowledge: See this? Yep. Get it? Got it. Pauline Kael's whole
life was a druggy addiction to snappy pleasures and Dog Yummy quick-treats.
A series of seismic wows, pows, zaps, and yikes in quest of orgasmic,
wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am insights. But her orgasms were fake–because
they didn't involve knowledge, acquaintance, trust, sincerity, living
with something, or letting it into your heart. No experience that really
matters yields to a microwave heat-and-eat presentation.
* * *
In Hitchcock, Tarantino, Stone,
Dahl, Hanson, or the Coens, knowledge comes in flashes of insight, in
revelations and discoveries–for viewers and for characters. But any experience
that can be communicated in a glance, a cut, a witticism, a narrative
twist is a superficial one.
* * *
All the important knowledge
we acquire in life is slow, tentative, partial, and subject to revision.
In Elaine May's and Barbara Loden's work, you watch faces and listen to
voices for a long, long time before you understand even a little about
them. You know things only by getting to know them. It's the difference
between knowledge as insight and knowledge as acquaintance.
* * *
The time in our films is too
shallow, too abstract, too merely "indicated." Our films are
too fast. We need calmer, slower movies that give us time to think and
feel–that allow us to live with and live into a situation the way we
do in life. Jeanne Diehlman, The Taste of Cherry, Umberto
D, and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, in their different
ways, offer the experience of "lived" time.
* * *
Movies like Casablanca,
Back to the Future, and Four Weddings and a Funeral have
deadlines, but no sense of duration. Watching Tarkovsky, Ozu, or Kiarostami
you feel you live with their characters and their experiences for a long
time. You get to know these people and experiences the way you get to
know people in the world.
* * *
Ultimately, what you must provide
the viewer with is not knowledge but experience. Experiencing is far greater
than knowing. To know what something means is too easy, too relaxed, too
passive a relation to it. The point of art is to force us to undergo longhand
experiences that are too complex to be reduced to the shorthand of meaning.
* * *
 Harmony
Korine said that he wanted the characters and situations in Gummo to
have the status of objects in the world. The viewer wouldn't be able to
judge them, wouldn't be able to identify with them; would just encounter
them. That's a far more complex and challenging relationship than
when we bring the image down to our level by plugging our little pet emotions
into it and making it over as an extension of us and our trivial belief
systems.
* * *
There are too many brainy movies
and brainy filmmakers. Too much film school thinking and theorizing behind
them. We need films that don't come out of ideas and that defy being translated
back into ideas by critics and viewers. Films which don't make us think,
but feel–that don't tell us about something, but let us live
through it. Movies that tell you what to think and feel are part of
the culture of salesmanship.
* * *
We have misunderstood the maxim
that art should imitate life. It doesn't mean that art should imitate
the appearance of life, but the experience of it–the turbulence,
concreteness, turbidness, uncertainty, and immersion of what life feels
like.
* * *
We need movies that force viewers
to scramble, to work, to climb through the barbed wire resistance of unanalyzed,
uneditorialized experiences. Rouse your viewers from the slumber of thought.
Challenge them. Force them to become active. Your goal is not to tell
them something, but to stimulate and invigorate them, to bring them
back to life.
* * *
"One must not be afraid
of going wrong. One must not be afraid of making mistakes. That way
lies
stagnation, mediocrity."–Van Gogh
* * *
"Truth is what is–not
what should be. Truth is what is."–Lenny Bruce
* * *
"Film what you are.
Not what you want to be. Not what people want you to be. Film what you
are. And what you are is good enough."–John Cassavetes
–Excerpted from "The
Path of the Artist–II," MovieMaker, Vol. 8, issue 37,
(Fall 1999).
1
<
Page
2 <
3
Page
1 / Page 2 / Page 3
This page only
contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's writing. To
obtain the complete text of this piece as well as the complete texts of
many pieces that are not included on the web site, click
here.
|
