Gutbrain Records

Sunday, 07 July 2005

Does anybody compose images anymore? I sat through Ripley's Game yesterday and there wasn't a single moment that suggested the filmmakers appreciated that they were working in a visual medium. Like most movies these days, it looks like it was filmed by motion detectors. Okay, technology has reached the point where a scene of somebody swinging a lasso can now be shown from the point of view of the lasso, regardless of budget. This is neither good nor bad, but all I see in movies these days are moving cameras, not moving pictures.

(By the way, Ripley's Game is not a satisfying or faithful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel. The American Friend, Wim Wenders' film of the same book, starring Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper, was much better. Ripley is supposed to be a real person, not the superhuman, mincing spaz that Malkovich delivers. I spent most of the movie wishing that the filmmakers had gone all the way and hired Larry David to play Ripley.)

I find the image above to be very inspiring. It's from a movie called I Wake Up Screaming, starring Betty Grable and Victor Mature. The only performance of any note, though, is that of Laird Cregar (left), whose creepy, sadistic cop steals the show. This is not a great movie, but it's not bad. It's just a standard genre flick without any great ambition other than to deliver an entertaining vehicle for its two stars. What the title is supposed to mean, I have no idea. As I recall, nobody wakes up screaming.

The reason I find this image to be so inspirational is because it shows how much thought went into making this garden-variety movie. That shot of Laird Cregar looking out the window lasts 7 seconds. It's part of a scene which lasts less than a minute and a half. Yet the filmmakers went to a lot of trouble to show you something that's interesting to look at. In fact, just about every single camera shot in I Wake Up Screaming is a joy to behold, demonstrating the importance of mise en scène.

Does mise en scène mean anything to anybody anymore? Lighting, camera placement, framing, image composition and balance — it used to be taken for granted that these things matter. Few people making movies now seem to give them any thought at all.

Advice to film students: you're likely to learn more about the art of filmmaking from watching the Diana Rigg episodes of The Avengers (brilliantly crafted on a modest budget) and the pilot episode of Mission: Imposssible (photographed by John Alton!) than from most of what they'll show you in film school. For instance, when I attended NYU Film School, they had us watch Back to the Future: entertaining, but without a single memorable image.