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In anticipation of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations, the Citizen’s Bruce Deachman has been out in search of Ottawans — 150 of them — to learn their stories of life and death, hope and love, the uncommon and the everyday. We’ll share one person’s story every day until Canada Day.
“Twenty-five or so years ago at the Toronto Film Festival, I was interviewing Alan Rudolph, an independent movie director, about a movie he’d made called Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, about Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table.
“We had a really long conversation and during the course of it he explained to me how to watch a movie, and it’s a lesson I’ve sort of used ever since. He said that the movie-watching experience takes place in the no man’s land between the viewer and the screen. It’s a collaboration between the filmmaker and the audience, and the filmmaker has to bring his movie a little bit off of the screen so that it sort of dangles in mid-air over the auditorium. And the viewer has to come a little bit out of himself and give himself to the movie, and they meet somewhere more or less halfway between the screen and the viewer.
“When I thought about that, I thought that there are some filmmakers — artistic, new-wave filmmakers — Jean-Luc Godard, maybe, who just sticks his movie up there on the screen and it’s flat. It’s his vision; he’s not really giving you anything, and the viewer has to do all the work. He has to give himself towards the screen and interpret what’s in the movie and figure out what Jean-Luc Godard is saying.
“The other extreme is maybe a Michael Bay movie, where the viewer just sits there and the movie comes totally off the screen and washes over him with special effects and explosions, and you don’t have to do any work. You don’t have to think. Those are the kind of movies people go to on a Friday night when they say, ‘I just want a break from things. I don’t want to think.’
“They can both be interesting ways to see a movie, but the idea of collaborating with the filmmaker makes the most enjoyable movies I’ve seen. I don’t think about it when I’m watching, but I think about it later — that’s the way I want to watch a movie, with that collaboration.
“And I’ve thought about it in other contexts as well. It’s also true with books. It’s also true with art. There are certain types of art — like abstract art — where you have to give yourself totally to whatever the artist is trying to say. And then there’s the other kind of thing — maybe Elvis on velvet — in which you don’t do anything. The story is just about what you’re seeing and there’s no subtlety to it. So it’s an interesting way of looking at any kind of art.
“The second lesson I learned about movies when I was interviewing people was from Russell Banks, the American novelist who at the time lived near Lake Placid, New York, at the Lake Placid Film Forum. They used to have a meeting of authors and talk about movies.
“Russell Banks had two excellent books made into excellent movies — The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction — so he knew something about it. People were talking about the adaptation of novels into movies, and how they’re often disappointing. And he said a book is a vase, and a movie is the stained-glass window that the filmmaker has made out of the pieces after he’s smashed it with a hammer. And to me that sort of explained how you’re using the pieces of one kind of art to make a totally different kind of art. They have a really close relation, but there’s no point complaining that your stained-glass window doesn’t hold flowers. It’s not meant to do that. It’s a different thing.
“Since then, whenever I see a movie that’s based on a novel, I don’t really hold the filmmaker to account for not being exactly the same as the novel was or leaving out a character or conflating some stuff or changing it a little bit, because he’s not making a book; he’s making a different thing.
“So those are two people I talked to who sort of taught me how to think about movies when I was young and working.”
— Film critic Jay Stone. ByTowne Cinema, June 12, 2017.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
“Twenty-five or so years ago at the Toronto Film Festival, I was interviewing Alan Rudolph, an independent movie director, about a movie he’d made called Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, about Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table.
“We had a really long conversation and during the course of it he explained to me how to watch a movie, and it’s a lesson I’ve sort of used ever since. He said that the movie-watching experience takes place in the no man’s land between the viewer and the screen. It’s a collaboration between the filmmaker and the audience, and the filmmaker has to bring his movie a little bit off of the screen so that it sort of dangles in mid-air over the auditorium. And the viewer has to come a little bit out of himself and give himself to the movie, and they meet somewhere more or less halfway between the screen and the viewer.
“When I thought about that, I thought that there are some filmmakers — artistic, new-wave filmmakers — Jean-Luc Godard, maybe, who just sticks his movie up there on the screen and it’s flat. It’s his vision; he’s not really giving you anything, and the viewer has to do all the work. He has to give himself towards the screen and interpret what’s in the movie and figure out what Jean-Luc Godard is saying.
“The other extreme is maybe a Michael Bay movie, where the viewer just sits there and the movie comes totally off the screen and washes over him with special effects and explosions, and you don’t have to do any work. You don’t have to think. Those are the kind of movies people go to on a Friday night when they say, ‘I just want a break from things. I don’t want to think.’
“They can both be interesting ways to see a movie, but the idea of collaborating with the filmmaker makes the most enjoyable movies I’ve seen. I don’t think about it when I’m watching, but I think about it later — that’s the way I want to watch a movie, with that collaboration.
“And I’ve thought about it in other contexts as well. It’s also true with books. It’s also true with art. There are certain types of art — like abstract art — where you have to give yourself totally to whatever the artist is trying to say. And then there’s the other kind of thing — maybe Elvis on velvet — in which you don’t do anything. The story is just about what you’re seeing and there’s no subtlety to it. So it’s an interesting way of looking at any kind of art.
“The second lesson I learned about movies when I was interviewing people was from Russell Banks, the American novelist who at the time lived near Lake Placid, New York, at the Lake Placid Film Forum. They used to have a meeting of authors and talk about movies.
“Russell Banks had two excellent books made into excellent movies — The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction — so he knew something about it. People were talking about the adaptation of novels into movies, and how they’re often disappointing. And he said a book is a vase, and a movie is the stained-glass window that the filmmaker has made out of the pieces after he’s smashed it with a hammer. And to me that sort of explained how you’re using the pieces of one kind of art to make a totally different kind of art. They have a really close relation, but there’s no point complaining that your stained-glass window doesn’t hold flowers. It’s not meant to do that. It’s a different thing.
“Since then, whenever I see a movie that’s based on a novel, I don’t really hold the filmmaker to account for not being exactly the same as the novel was or leaving out a character or conflating some stuff or changing it a little bit, because he’s not making a book; he’s making a different thing.
“So those are two people I talked to who sort of taught me how to think about movies when I was young and working.”
— Film critic Jay Stone. ByTowne Cinema, June 12, 2017.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
