Post-1945 Film-making - Essay Example

 Post-1945 Film-making Through the use of camera movement, film style, actor choice and soundtrack, directors are able to create very different effects that subtly enhance our movie-watching experience as well as work to underline the main ideas that the director is trying to portray. Looking at the filming choices of two directors such as Oliver Stone and Robert Altman can help explain how these elements work to play a large role in the movies that are produced. By mixing truth with conjecture and historical records with staged and choreographed scenes, Oliver Stone in JFK has created a film that nearly defines its own genre. Through his use of historical footage, recordings and photographs, Stone is able to capture a sense of the historic in JFK that is rarely seen in films that aren’t strictly within the documentary classification. Despite his insistence that he is not trying to portray a historically factual documentary regarding the assassination, Stone utilizes several real-life players in depicting his version of events. Key among these is President Kennedy himself. By refusing to recast the president, Stone not only proves his talent as a director working with limited available footage, he provides a sense of reality into the story. When he uses the Zapruder film, Stone is able to inject a somber mood of reflection as audiences realize this is the actual event and not a staged recreation. The man in the picture really ends up dead when the camera stops rolling. Another significant cameo appearance is that of Jim Garrison himself as the Honorable Chief Justice Earl Warren. By placing him in this role, Stone adds an ironic twist to the story, yet also suggests that anyone placed in the real life role may have been obligated to come to the same conclusions the Warren Commission delivered. The film’s technical consultant Robert Groden appeared several times in the film, first as a doctor trying to resuscitate the president at Parkland Hospital and later as the court’s projectionist. Through these roles, Stone, who believes in the subtlety of film as shown in his use of subliminal messages, perhaps is suggesting that he has his own eyes and ears in the most significant aspects of the story. Real life assassination witness Jean Hill also appeared in the film as the stenographer taking down Hill’s real life statement. Again, the underlying message is that of authenticity – Hill wouldn’t change her own statements or misrepresent what she said herself. Layton Martens, a friend of David Ferrie who had been staying at Ferrie’s house at the time of the assassination, appears as one of the silent FBI officials in the scene in which Ferrie is released from custody as a suspect. For those who recognize the man and his connection to the story, this could be seen as an indication that Ferrie was released by his friends and protected by organizations higher up than anyone at the time realized. The overall style of the film further emphasizes authenticity regardless of whether the footage being shown is authentic news coverage or movie-produced recreations. The video montage of the first section of the film establishes its link with reality through its use of almost exclusively actual news footage of the president and his family, as well as important events of the time. The video is left in its television-sized format, surrounded by plenty of black space, making the theater dark and bringing the mood of the audience into alignment with the seriousness of the images being shown and the movie to follow. Military-styled music, heavy on the drums, further emphasizes this attitude throughout the montage, although various voiceovers are heard detailing the important information regarding these events. Inserted scenes are integrated so smoothly as to appear a part of the news footage scenes that have been shown to this point. However, the gradual reduction of the music to only rhythmic, heartbeat-like strikes on the drum help create a dramatic tension leading up to the flash of a completely black screen, the sound of shots being fired followed by the almost equally dark CBS New Bulletin screen and newscaster voiceover announcing the news that the president had been shot. The first full screen footage seen by the audience is that of the Zapruder film documenting the president’s final moments within a nearly silent environment. All that can be heard is the hollow, wind-like noise such as that made by an early video camera. The silence, as opposed to the screams and other crowd noise one would expect in such a situation, is eerie, causing many to catch their breath in an unconscious reaction to the extreme shock of the moment and preparing the audience for the remainder of the film’s investigations. Robert Altman tells a similarly dark story in The Gingerbread Man, in which a southern lawyer works to discover the truth behind a client’s desperate plea for protection against her crazy father. Snugly classified as a film noir, Altman has included several dark scenes to help portray the fact that no one is going to win in this story. From the very beginning, when Magruder meets Mallory in the middle of a deluge, the viewer gets the sense that this meeting cannot lead to anything good. The unfamiliar weather pattern further helps to offset our sense of security in a well-ordered world. When the two main characters are shown together in bed, there are constantly shifting shadows lying across them, whether from the fan in the window or the palm fronds outside. Through this technique, both characters are shown to be in constant flux and always partially hidden. In addition, the almost unnatural whiteness of their bare skin in contrast to the dark shadows makes both characters seem horribly diseased and corpselike, another hint of subtle foreshadowing. Characteristic techniques of Altman’s used in the film include a rich and multi-layered sound track, restless camera movement and characters that just kind of join the story (Taylor, 1998). The sound track, featuring numerous sounds overlapping each other even in conversation, helps to convey the dark sense of being involved in the action. This obscures some of the dialogue, contributing to the sense that there’s something sinister under the surface that should never see the light of day. As in real life, background noise does not seem to be filtered out, so televisions, barroom chatter and heavy winds serve to obstruct portions of conversations we wish we’d heard, but couldn’t. This technique leaves the audience in a constant state of uncertainty as well, never sure they’ve heard all they need to know to solve the puzzle presented. The wandering camera eye, now showing the action close up, now viewing the characters from outside a window as if someone else were watching them surreptitiously with us, also helps to increase the sense of unease inherent in the film constantly making viewers feel as if they should be checking over their shoulder to make sure all is well. It is a unique way of building suspense that works precisely because it is unusual in filmmaking. No one has had the chance to become immune to it yet. By switching viewpoints in such a way, Altman gives the viewer the sense that they are observing the scene through the eyes of an incredibly unstable individual, and feel unstable themselves. Even when traditional techniques are used to build suspense, rising crescendos in the musical score, for instance, they are delivered with dramatic effect because of the camera position or the shaded lighting that ensures something is always in hiding. “His camera work is full of sly, subtle tricks. During one especially tense sequence when Rick stops at a roadside gas station, Altman makes us jump every time a truck zooms by on the highway and blocks our view. After Dixon is committed and his oddball buddies show up under cover of darkness to bust him out, Altman includes a shot of them disappearing among the gravestones of a cemetery, like spooks evaporating into the night” (Taylor, 1998). It is precisely because of little tricks like these, sometimes leading to nothing more than the next seemingly innocuous scene, which keeps the audience in a heightened state of suspense throughout the movie. Although both directors use shifting camera angles, shifting shadows or quickly shifting images to help define their topic and to encourage audience members to see things in the same ‘light’, Altman and Stone are able to do so in unique ways that develop completely different ideas about their subject. By watching the scenes without sound, one can begin to develop an appreciation for the ways in which the camera alone takes on the duties of an actor by portraying the shifting nature of man or the way in which memory tends to capture only isolated images rather than a smoothly running motion clip. References Altman, Robert. (1998). The Gingerbread Man [motion picture]. United States: PolyGram. Stone, Oliver. (1991). JFK [motion picture]. United States: Warner Home Video. Taylor, Charles. (March 6, 1998). “Midnight in the Garden of Altman and Grisham.” Entertainment Salon. March 30, 2006 . Read More