Looking forward to seeing it.

Thank you for this great interview.

It’s wonderful to hear Lena’s voice
– a passionate, intelligent iconophile –
accompany these extraordinary images.

I enjoy her words about analogue sculpture
and her enthusiastic, soul-burning craft,
but it is indeed the content of her art
that transcends it all:
the philology, history, research, pyrogallol, lasers and paper
all fall away to reveal
what is left, the “it” of the image
– the ghostly presence of the lost soul.

Keep up the good work

Benjamin

Interesting piece, although I take issue with Stork’s choice of a scene from “Hardboiled” as an example of a film in which viewers never lose their bearings. Watch it again. We start by following two characters (the protagonists?) down a hallway, turn a corner and enter a room, guns blazing. But around 2:33, a man with an automatic weapon bursts into a room, but we don’t know which door this is or what room it opens into. The unknown assailant fires his weapon toward some windows and we assume our protagonists are on the other side of them, but who knows? He might be there to assist them for all we know.

Still, I agree with the main points of Stork’s essay. I feel television has been one of the main drivers of this filmmaking style. When the video vault at Universal Studios burned down a few years ago, my company was one of the beneficiaries, hired to retransfer dozens of tv shows from the 70′s for new high definition masters.

I was amazed that the shows I loved as a kid, now seemed so cheesy. One reason is that back then, directors always showed the audience a master shot of every scene, so the program’s landscape was clear.

But a wide shot of Universal’s New York Street, or the supposed interior of an opera house with 20 extras never looked real.

By contrast, consider “CSI”, which began shooting in 2000. The first two or three years of the series were filmed at the Santa Clarita studios. Later, with higher ratings and a bigger budget, production moved to the Universal backlot. The audience never felt the change. That’s because production had to be creative those first few years.

For example, they sometimes had to fake a police station exterior by dressing up a soundstage lobby.

But surely the viewers could tell the difference between the glass lobby of a soundstage and a police station, right? There was no sidewalk or curb in front of the lobby, no parking lot, no street signs, not even a street! But they shot everything tight, so it was all just a blur in the background and the audience accepted it immediately. A passing police car with the light and siren operating, completed the illusion.

The producers knew that the audience doesn’t need to see an entire casino to believe they are at a crime scene on the strip, just a few slot machines. By the time they moved to Universal, the look was so ingrained that they still avoided master shots, just because the formula had worked so well.

Television has also always been a medium of close ups and now that even features are edited on a computer, they’re less likely to be viewed on a large screen, until the movie is close to picture lock and by then the filmmakers have grown used to the look.

It’s interesting that so much of Michael Bay’s “Transformers” was show in Stork’s essays, as I vividly remember how annoyed I was with the intense shaky cam close ups the director employed during the car chase in his 1996 opus, “The Rock”. Viewers might have imagined Connery barreling down the hilly streets of San Francisco, but all I could see in my mind’s eye was a crew with a long lens, shaking the camera and shooting tens of thousands of feet of negative as he swerved the wheel left and right.

Box office receipts continue to decline, even as studios redouble their efforts to bombard the audience with a cacophony of images and sounds. What’s missing are things like subtext, plot development and the build up of tension.

Your blog should be required reading for studio executives. But then again, that assumes they read. Maybe they could at least watch the video essays!

JOHN’S REPLY: As always, Mark, your points are so well made. I had not thought about budget necessity being the father of CSI style in the first season. In the 70s, I was a camera operator on several Universal TV series such as “Kojak” and so I’m well aware of the by the numbers shooting style you bemoan. But it’s a style you also see in some of the feature directors who came out of 50s live TV. The two great European techniques of dealing with limited budget and resources are the French “plan sequence” where one shot flows into the next one, with virtually no coverage, an example being Louis Malle’s underrated “Lacombe Lucien.” And, of course, the long take style of Tarkovsky, Jansco, and Bela Tarr. I wrote about this in Part Two of the essay on Matthias Stork. Since seeing Tarr’s “The Turin Horse” I have become obsessed with it and can’t wait to see it again. In fact, I have ordered both “Satantango” and “Werckmeister Harmonies,” cinematic antidote to many of the year end screeners.