Toward New Discoveries in Independent Narrative Feature Filmmaking

By Henry Turner

Because I became the father of a son three years ago I have had the opportunity of watching certain animated films hundreds of times in succession—a sort of spiritual practice in monotony, breeding patience — and through my pained effort to take an interest in what I was seeing I made a certain discovery. In no animated film, be it an old one from Disney or something new from one of the digital studios, do the leaves move on the trees. In short, the background is arbitrary; it exists as décor. Yet it occupies eighty percent of the frame.

The point I’m about to make, which uses the above instance as a proof and precursor, is difficult to understand, and yet essential to grasp how filmmaking has diverged — probably fatally — from what might have been its true path. Film has spent its history trying to disprove its nature as a visual art; filmmaking is not treated as a visual art, nor is it intended as a visual experience; in short, as films stand, the images are by and large arbitrary, bear no internal reference in the course of their sequence, and rely on properties anterior to those primary in the appreciation of visual beauty.

In the days when I made independent features I became conscious of something missing from films in general. I watched thousands of films to gain an understanding of the medium, but in all of them the balance between narrative and visual qualities seemed off. Even the films I loved and watched many times emphasized the narrative over the visual aspects; everything was subordinated to the story. And yet, when actually using the camera, I had the intuition that I was using a tool of visual art, not simply a device intended to record an actor’s performance. The best directors, Hitchcock, Eisenstein, Welles, Kubrick, Stroheim, and a few others were able to invest their stories with visual interest and variety, but always in terms secondary to the story at hand as revealed by the actors. When certain visual patterns emerged in their films, patterns related more to composition, tonality, or tempo, these patterns were nipped in the bud as soon as the story shifted into narrative areas that had no need for their continuation. And, in the end, even in the films of the masters, their work fell into the common language of two shots and three shots, of actors talking and describing events which might in the best instances be resolved in the narrative, given proper setup, by “montage sequences.”

It was only after coming to Hollywood and working as an entertainment journalist that my thoughts went from being an intuition to an actual clarified idea. I have interviewed hundreds of film professionals, and in response to certain questions, their answers have always been identical. This uniformity is suspect, and suggests adherence to credo that is motivated by a desire to protect their jobs, rather than to create work that would lead to the furthering of film art in toto. In short, these people, to a one, have told me that everything must be sublimated to the story; that sets, costumes, and frame elements other than those directly related to the lead actors should be rendered visually neutral; finally, they say, when pressed, the ultimate cop-out, that  “nobody knows anything,” which is not only an irresponsible admission that negates any foreknowledge they may have regarding the impact of their work on an audience, but implies that through what they do there can be no artistic progression, because it does not impart knowledge that could be used as a platform for growth. In short, industry films are made by people who seek to make their work unnoticeable, and admit quite freely that they do not know what they are doing.

The result, for me at any rate, is that over the last ten years I have found all of the films I have seen to be uninteresting, uninvolving, and actually a chore to sit through. None of the current actors, in my opinion, can “carry” a film; none of the stories fascinate me to the extent that I can accept the universal absence of visual art in terms of tone, composition, and tempo. The only aesthetic enjoyment I have extracted from industry films is to catch little asides or secondary characters who, on the periphery, afford me a sort of distraction from the film itself. I have learned that films per se are uninteresting; only when taken as a whole, as a sort of cultural phenomenon, and broken down into trends and analyzed sociologically as a cultural indicator, can they be said to have any interest at all. Like in a horror story, they are the individual cells of a huge single organism. Hence attending a film has become something of a ritual rather than an aesthetic experience—if anything, I’ll go to a film to feel that I am part of some given intended demographic—to offer myself up as fodder for the organism, so to speak—rather than expecting to actually enjoy seeing the movie.

In The Guermantes Way, Proust defines beauty as ordered complexity, and this is a condition to which film, under current production conditions, can never aspire to, because its most complex aspects are rarely if ever put into order. Much of this is due to how money is handled in the making of a film—how raising money and producing films that act more as indicators of their budgets than as creative expressions takes precedence over artistic values. Lillian Ross, in her book Picture, chronicling the making of John Huston’s Red Badge of Courage, quotes Huston as saying, “I could make a film for five thousand dollars, but I am not in the business of making films for five thousand dollars.”

I am not suggesting that narrative feature films should become low budget experimental films like those presented at Anthology Film Archives. I am talking about discovering how independent filmmakers can stop making films that act as cartes de visit for entry into the studios, and learn to shoot narrative films that convey a story in a way that ceases to conform to the bad habits accrued over a century of filmmaking based on the most puerile themes. Henry Miller, in his essay The Golden Age, about the eponymous Bunuel film, says of film in general that it has spent forty years being born, and that any creature who took that long being born cannot help but be a monster, an idiot. Writing in the 30s, we must only change his statement by adding 70 more years. The great art historian Eli Faure says, in his essay The Art of Cineplastics, that, “the revelation of the cinema of the future came to me one day; I retain an exact memory of it, of the commotion that I experienced when I observed, in a flash, the magnificence there was in the relationship of a piece of black clothing to the gray wall of an inn. From that moment I paid no more attention to the martyrdom of the poor woman who was condemned, in order to save her husband from dishonor, to give herself to the lascivious banker who had previously murdered her mother and debauched her child.” This plot, from a film made in 1908, bears much resemblance to today’s legal dramas. Such narrative banality is also arbitrary—hence both the image and the story are arbitrary. So what we are experiencing is something else—something not there—something entirely sociological.

The composition of a given frame and its relationship to the shot sequence deserves just as much attention as the actor’s performance. In fact, lessening constant focus on the actor by simply following him around, and rather allowing him to shift in and out of prominence into the periphery, will create a more realistic over-all effect, and realism is what filmmakers, especially commercial filmmaker, have been seeking after, fumbling after really, with shaking handheld shots and talking heads looking off camera and CGI and staggered frame effects. Look to the other arts—especially music—for inspiration, and allow the actor to be; in this way, his performance will gain its true power. Allow him to wander. Allow him, even, to leave. Use an indirect approach.

Think. Discover. Achieve. And don’t fall into the lockstep of improvisation, like jaded jazz musicians who rely on the same chord progressions in every solo they play. Really think about it.

The first step in finding a new method is to achieve an equal measure, a balance, between the compositional elements of the frame and its investigation, as much as keeping focus on the actor’s performance, which would not dictate the cutting. The camera simply ceases to follow the actor around; it becomes an expressive device, not a recording device. “Blocking” would cease to exist.

The use of visual metaphor, of graphics, of multiple soundtracks, of effects that enlarge visual content informationally and not simply as exploitation, are virtually unused, and keep films corralled as little penny-dramas that never achieve the stature they could have if filmmakers would only think of the real nature of their art. The main thing that must be eliminated is preconceived images. In making a film, a filmmaker must make the effort to discover images, and not simply re-create some mental image. Our senses are set for perception, not pre-conception. In using storyboards and pre-vis and blocking methods and the rest of the arsenal of techniques created to make films easily repeatable, one must remember that the films themselves will become almost identical. Pre-production/production/post-production—these phases inhibit expression by constantly delivering the most readily apparent solutions. 

Only independent filmmakers who are not harnessed to a production schedule and harassed by money-mad producers can do what I am about to suggest: shoot the film first, and write the script later. This is to say, find real elements you think are interesting. People. Props. Costumes. Find a location that interests you. Take everything there and shoot. Watch the footage, editing as you go. The themes will emerge. Follow them. Return to the location; find other locations. Discover the progression of the narrative. Edit as you go. Add and subtract people and things. Create complexity; order it.  And when the film has met a satisfactory sense of completion not based on some absurd theory of morals, (which is the thing unseen that grips us in the mainstream films—the definitions of love, hope, pain and faith that are hammered home—redemption chief among them,) then add dialogue. Lip synch. Match up or don’t. Dub. Multi-track it, if you like. Add graphics and inter-titles. Do what the artwork demands. The same with music and soundtracks in general. This is how to make a film that will be your expression, and not the expression of how a film should be made.

There are no formal rules for such a structure; as with any structure worth its salt, it must be redefined for each example. I would never say that a wide angle shot should be broken down through editing into this or that component part; that would be absurd, without any pertinence to any given scene. I would however say, stop following the actors around with your camera. Cease following John Ford’s dictum that the main problem in establishing composition is “where to put the Duke.”

My next installment in this series will detail the structure of film studios and their relationship to medieval architecture.

Til then.

Henry Turner

Henry Turner, former Slamdance programming coordinator and Slamdance alum, resides in Hollywood with his wife Alma and son Hugo, where he writes novels, entertainment journalism, and contemplates the use of his new Krasnogorsk 3. Have you ever seen a Krasnogorsk? They're incredible, built like tanks, and cost hardly anything on Ebay.

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