Friday, January 13, 2012

mc Response to Brandon

Boring I'll grant you. mc isn't for everyone. Lazy I won't. Is Jackson Pollock lazy because he saw beauty it letting the paint fall where it may? Maybe that's not the best example. Nevertheless, in any category of any sort of art there's good stuff and bad stuff. But I see a director's role in the best that mc has to offer as one of arrangement. Dialogue (and probably some action, what little there may be) in mc could be seen as "found art" and a good director will know how to present it in a pleasing and hopefully significant way. The plots tend to be as close to stream-of-consciousness as you can get while still being narratively coherent (Cold Weather being an exception); a good director will guide that flow and move things out of the way so it's smooth and natural. To some degree, mc creates itself as it goes--I imagine you never know what the end product is going to look like entirely. But you're setting the parameters and paying attention to what happens the whole time, intervening where necessary, but not unless it's really necessary. I watched a making-of special feature for the film My Effortless Brilliance and learned that most of the dialogue was unscripted. But you'd watch the director at work, and she'd set up a scene like, "this happens and you're feeling this and you're going in this direction with the conversation and ACTION." Then another take, and another and another. And she'd pick the best stuff in the editing room and put it in the movie. They had like six or seven people TOTAL making that film. The actors, one cameraman, one sound guy, one director, and one person making meals. And the film was funny, and meaningful, and tense...That's hardcore, man. That's raw. It's inspiring. That's filmmaking at its roots, in my opinion. And it's anything but lazy.

1 comment:

  1. “Boring I'll grant you. mc isn't for everyone. Lazy I won't. Is Jackson Pollock lazy because he saw beauty it letting the paint fall where it may?”

    Hmmmm. I don’t think that’s the best example but I think I know what you mean here. I’m not saying that it can’t work but rather as a movement it can get lazy and reliant on it’s built in audience and specifically their allergy to “sensationalism.” I guess I’m saying that I find the whole genre extremely constrained and in need of a guy like Katz to push the boundaries. You make sense if only I could see a film that brought out these great qualities. I’ve watched about five mc films (Cold Weather excluded) and found them all boring and lazy. YES LAZY!

    I don’t doubt that it can be great but I haven’t seen it yet. You certainly have spent more time and energy discovering its potential.

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