CHAPTER 16

FORM AND STYLE

 

FORM

Form is the manner in which content is presented. For a short film to maintain a memorable and intriguing outlook on the human life it portrays, the makers must choose a form unique to the story's purpose and nature. Norman McClaren's Neighbors (1952) or Pas de Deux (1969) make stunning use of pixilation and optical printing respectively to enhance what they have to say about men and territory and about dance. Chris Marker's unforgettable La Jetée (1962) is a futuristic fable told entirely in still photographs with just a few seconds of movement in one shot. Robert Enrico's moving Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) will be mentioned later in this chapter.

Though formal variations seem unlimited, they are, in fact, usefully confined by allied concerns, some of which we have already considered. Designing a film's form involves more than figuring out where to put the camera and what lens to use before shooting. It means articulating a clear and provocative purpose for telling the tale, which in turn means considering the subject, point of view, and the genre that will best serve your authorial purpose.

If, for instance, we want to show a holdup in a grocery store, we would first need to decide whose was the controlling point of view. It could be that of the store owner, the frightened clerk, a shortsighted old man out to buy a lottery ticket, the offduty policeman there getting a loaf of bread, or the robber himself. For each the events have a different significance, so each would tend to notice different things. This way of noticing lets the audience infer the nature and dilemma of each character. Point of view thus usefully limits and shapes your decisions, and the choice of lenses, camera positions, angles, and lighting all contribute to the cumulative impression you are building for the audience. Together they add up to a progression of distinct moods and to a particular way of seeing. Lighting would flow from the kind of place and the kind of interaction. How the camera was handled would also flow from point of view and the kind of comment the director wants to make.

In deciding on form we must always consider how to structure time. A crime, for instance, need not be shown in chronological order—you might also show it in discontinuous portions, as remembered by a survivor, perhaps, or from the stage-by-stage retrospect of the court case following the arrest of the robber. Different witnesses might have conflicting memories of key actions, and so on. Screen order, as these examples show, is affected by point of view.

Of overarching concern is the Storyteller's nature and premise, for this constitutes an agenda and purpose distinct from those of the characters or even the director. The Storyteller's POV might shift narrative focus among three of the characters, treating the point of view of each as equally important. The controlling point of view and the limitations inherent in the story's structure largely determine the form of any film, but good formal choices are seldom obvious nor can they be made without analysis and decisions.

FORM, CONFLICT, AND VISION

Events do not achieve significance just because someone frames them. An average audience is primed to know that good fiction is not a reproduction of life but an enactment of ideas about it. If your topic is robbery, your audience expects you to reveal something fresh about what robbery means—socially, culturally, or emotionally. Who carries it out, where, in what way, and why—these are questions of basic story philosophy, all of which run back to the audience's hope that the film will offer some interesting ideas about life.

To determine such issues you should review the major characters' basic makeup. Every human being is a mix of innate temperament, environmental influence, and what his or her peculiar history has instilled. Most of what is visible about people's characters—what moves them to act the way they do and what causes them to forge their own destinies—arises from their personal baggage of unresolved conflicts, both the internal ones they carry and the external ones they confront or cause.

Such conflicts already exist in you as you read these words. They are your unfinished business in life. However old or young you may be, however much you feel yourself to be lacking in “interesting” experience, you are stigmatized in certain ways and carry within you buried memories of events that still smolder. Their cause and effect you still feel deeply, and you will best find their significance by telling analogous tales. By this token, the Storyteller tells a tale not just to entertain, but to grow in spirit.

A film's form is therefore highly functional. It serves the tale you are really trying to tell, what you want to show through telling it, and reveals the best framework and visual or aural language to impart these things. The following examples highlight the elements of form you should take into consideration.

VISUAL DESIGN

This is something people readily notice, and it is determined by lighting, choice of lenses, camera height and movements, art directing, costuming, set dressing, and by the locations and terrain themselves. A film gains power when it finds visual equivalencies to its thematic concerns. Wim Wender's Paris, Texas (1984) finds in the arid and depopulated desert of Texas the perfect counterpart to the dehydrated emotions of the numbed, inarticulate man stumbling in search of his lost wife and child. Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1956) is set in the Middle Ages, when superstition and fear of the plague ruled men's hearts, so the story takes place amid gloomy forests and high contrast scenery. The dark figures, and low-key black-and-white photography prime us to anticipate the mixture of magic and superstitious terror at a time when life was “nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, 1588–1679).

Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) has an ingenious and effective development in its visual style (Figure 16–1). Two young women break into a shuttered house where a stagey domestic drama is slowly unfolding. Becoming absorbed by the characters and wanting to know the “play's” outcome, they are compelled to keep returning. Then they discover they can enter the play's action quite unnoticed by the other characters. As the piece develops, and as missing links drop into place, the characters and their setting gradually become more and more unnatural in color. What starts as realism gradually becomes more surreal, distanced, and artificial until the main characters have merged into a dynamic genre painting. The film's theme seems to be that living with passionate and active curiosity turns life into art.

Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001) has an unusual visual design that takes a college-age man on a walk through a series of philosophical conversations. The movie was rotoscoped (filmed, then traced as animation) so it has an animated feel that is initially beautiful, but as you get deeper into its 99 minutes a sort of fatigue sets in from the constantly shimmering imagery.

Films by painters such as Robert Bresson and David Lynch are often noticeably visual in a way entirely lacking in filmmakers who start from ideas rather than imagery.

SOUND DESIGN

Too much film sound is diegetic, slavishly providing everything that logically could accompany what we see on the screen. In this scenario, you must hear a miaow whenever a cat appears and hear every type of passing vehicle in a traffic scene. Every footfall in an interior is rendered, and it changes for every kind of surface the character traverses. The effect, far from the realism it aspires to, is cluttered and suffocating.

TEXTURAL DESIGN

Bresson said, “The eye sees, but the ear imagines.” Think what the imagination supplies for these sounds: the cooing of doves floating in through a sunny bedroom window, footfalls in a church, children distantly playing hide-and-seek, or muffled weeping in a darkened room. They work miracles on our imagination and receptivity. Against these perceptions by an acute mind, dialogue stands in poetic counterpoint. Sometimes the sound track can go quiet, presenting us with the shock and tension of silence. This is musique concrète, the texture and impact of which are poles away from the literal world of diegetic (realistic) film sound.

Sound designer Randy Thom complains with full justification that he is too often brought on to a production when it has been edited into wall-to-wall dia-logue—and he can do nothing. Quite apart from the audience fatigue this produces, he recommends deliberately writing for sound. That is, characters should listen, and quiet spaces should exist when the picture is deliberately withholding information so narrative momentum can come through the sound track. Again, David Lynch's films are very sound-sensitive and make good examples of movies that included sound in their original design. Sound should sometimes be a foreground player, not a late cosmetic applied to a stage play. See Thom's “Designing a Movie for Sound” at www.filmsound.org/.

RHYTHMIC DESIGN

The term rhythmic design probably suggests music or sound such as footsteps and clocks ticking, all used to supply a rhythmic identity to a scene. But other elements in a film can create a rhythmic design.

Rhythms of:

• sound effects
• speech patterns
• breathing patterns
• music, if used
• scene alternation (long scenes interspersed with short ones, for instance)

Frequency of:

• sound changes
• picture cuts

Inherent rhythm of:

• shot (affected by content and its movement and its composition)
• camera movements
• action
• particular characters (varies according to their temperament, mood, time of day, predicament, etc.)

Cinematic rhythms emanate from multiple sources at any given time. A good editor and an experienced director are acutely sensitive to their combined effect, and they know as instinctively as any musician when the combined effect is, or is not, working.

An audience's involvement, as any performer will tell you, is best sustained by variety. Shakespeare—who supported a large company of actors by satisfying the tastes of the common people—switches scenes from action to monologue to comedy, interspersing long scenes and short scenes, group scenes and duologues, duologues and soliloquies. Even while making a continuous thematic development, he juxtaposes very different textures and rhythms. Without the sustaining music of consummate form and poetically dense language, Shake-speare could never have delivered such profound themes and ideas to unlettered audiences.

Good film technique also refreshes the ear and eye with variations and com-parisons. These cause us to pass through a succession of perspectives and moods. Similar to variations in rhythm is the idea of changes in dramatic pressure. You can increase or relax the audience's sense of pressure by bringing the appropriate rhythmic changes. Surely this is why Bergman insists that film is a musical rather than a literary medium: “Film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence” (Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960, Introduction).

MOTIFS

Motifs are devices placed by the Storyteller to signify thematic aspects. For example, shots of flowing water might signify the theme that “life goes on no matter what.” Any formal element, aural or visual, can signify a motif, and one that recurs is called a leitmotif. They help to project ideas and interpretation into the insistently material world that film gives us.

AURAL MOTIFS

In Carpenter's Halloween (1978), a strange synthesizer sound accompanies the presence of the vengeful escapee. It is a non-diegetic sound (meaning it is heard by the audience and not by the characters) and serves to heighten our sense of their danger. Most film music uses the leitmotif principle, that is, a special instrumentation and/or special musical theme running through the film is assigned to a particular character, situation, or sentiment. Prokofiev's delightful orchestral Peter and the Wolf uses motifs for the main characters and was composed for children to demonstrate the different instruments of the orchestra and their tonal range using the medium of a fable.

VISUAL MOTIFS

Certain camera movements can be a motif, like the crabbing shots through the trees in Enrico's Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) that signify a guilty, uneasy voyeurism. In Abraham Polonsky's Tell Them Willy Boy Is Here (1969), the motif is the action of running. The fugitive Indian is on the run throughout the film, so running itself becomes emblematic of his existence (as it once was for Polonsky, badly victimized during the McCarthy witch-hunt years). Shots of trickling sand in Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes (1964) repeatedly characterize the woman's threatened situation. In Roman Polansky's Tess (1979) the use of color becomes a motif, as Thomas Hardy, in fact, specifies in the original novel. The young peasant heroine, moving unconsciously between what society sees as innocence and sin, is repeatedly associated with either white or red (the white dresses in the opening May walk, the red of the strawberry Alec puts between her unwilling lips, for example). The color red is also a motif connoting danger throughout Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973). Compositional balance or vantage (looking through foreground objects, for instance) or the use of sound and silence might all be pressed into service as motifs.

BRECHTIAN DISTANCING AND AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION

Cinema, unlike literature, generally views characters from the outside and sub-sequently favors action over contemplation. The suspense film and the action thriller go further, for they aim to make you identify with a particular character, and to “lose yourself,” as the alarming success of the James Bond films testifies. You might assume that all films promote audience identification, as theater tended to do until Berthold Brecht (1898–1956) set out to subvert this in a Germany succumbing to the Nazis. Realizing he could not make audiences critical if they were trained to abdicate their autonomy to a show, Brecht set out to redefine theater itself. Alert to the murderous simplifications of fascism, he needed to make people consider the collective currents of political and social life, not to let them dream their way through the fate and fortunes of a unique individual. So he devised a theater of mixed and constantly changing forms to keep the audience aware they were watching not an imitation of life but a show with an urgent dialectical purpose.

In a Europe seared by the after-effects of two world wars, a Brechtian discourse is still present in the work of Kluge, Godard, Gilliam, and Greenaway, to name just a few. Their styles may employ authorial narration, titles, songs, musical interludes, or surreal events peopled with bizarre, allegorical, or historical characters. Often elliptical, these films deliberately disrupt the audience's ever-present desire to lapse into that waking dream of identification that Brecht, surrounded as he was by incipient fascism, saw as suicidal escapism. Mass audiences are not yet drawn to Brecht's demanding alternative to traditional narrative form, but his work and that of those under his influence can be immensely moving and invigorating.

Keeping an audience thinking and not just feeling is a rare skill that awaits development on a wider scale in the cinema. Wim Wenders' two films about the angels over Berlin, Wings of Desire (1988) and Faraway, So Close (1993), point most excitingly in this direction.

LONG TAKES VERSUS SHORT TAKES

Without abandoning his wish to keep the audience at a distance, Alain Tanner in Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976) adopted a quiet and non-confrontational technique by playing whole scenes as single takes. Using only the simplest of camera movements he lets us stand back and consider the meaning of the characters' lives rather than urging us to participate in their emotions. The result is a cool and welcome distancing that invites you to ponder with the characters how they should live out their ideals when their 1968 social revolution has failed.

To eliminate the need for editing, the long take needs astute blocking and rehearsal. In conventional technique, editing and mobile camerawork inject nervous excitement and enable the point of view to zigzag around a central character—two classic ways of luring the spectator into identifying. Tanner uses some minor camera movement so locations won't appear flat like a backcloth. Otherwise he uses one take per scene; yet you feel no loss of the conventional apparatus of cinema. Because you can't intercut takes in this method, the director must closely maintain the level and consistency of playing. Actors and technicians may, at any time, abort not just a take but a whole scene, so this apparently simple approach may save nothing in time or filmstock. Hitchcock, in 1948, made his thriller Rope in the same way, but more as a technical challenge than because the story, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, called for it.

In the long take, the audience sees everything in its context so far as practicable. Close-ups are produced by blocking characters to move close to the camera. However, the conventionally shot and edited scene reveals only enough important fragments (of a room or of an action, for instance) to let us infer the whole. By completing their context in your mind you unconsciously enter the reality of the person whose experience the scene represents. In so doing, Brecht would say we yield intellect to sensation.

Somewhere between these extremes—Eisensteinian fragmentation with its control and exploitation of the spectator's sensibilities at one end of the spectrum, and the unbroken, uninflected presentation of Brechtian cinema at the other—lie choices reflecting not just convenience, but your storyteller's stance in relaying the story to the audience. There is a place for the emotions and the intellect in any intelligent film, though maybe not in every single scene it contains. Depending on the point of view and content of each scene, there may be room in your film for quite different language at different points.

SHORT FILM FORMS: A NEGLECTED ART

The short film is closest to poetic form because it requires deft characterization, a compressed narrative style, and something fresh and focused to say. Sadly, the short film subject is often overlooked by new directors with serious intentions. This is like would-be novelists rejecting poetry or the short story as forms unworthy of attention. Here are some classic short films, compiled with the help of Peter Rea and David K. Irving's excellent book, Producing and Directing the Short Film and Video, 2_nd edition (Boston: Focal Press, 2001). Because distributors change so rapidly, look for these films via the Internet or in specialized film listings, such as Facets Multimedia (www.facets.org), where you can often buy famous films in collections, or at Amazon (www.amazon.com), which also lists short film collections on DVD. Because the films come from several countries, I have included alternative titles.

Block, Mitchell: No Lies (USA, 1972, B&W, 16 minutes). It looks like a documentary as the director crudely presses a raped woman for an account of her misfortune, but it's all acted and for a purpose.

Bunuel, Luis: Un Chien Andalou/The Andalusian Dog (France, 1928, B&W, 20 minutes). A surrealist experiment in shocking imagery, undertaken with Salvador Dali, that consciously avoids any linear story logic.

Davidson, Alan: The Lunch Date (USA, 1990, B&W, 12 minutes) A deceptive encounter over a salad between a woman and a homeless man at Grand Central Station.

Deren, Maya and Alexander Hammid: Meshes of the Afternoon (USA, 1943, B&W, 13 minutes). Seminal work in which the mother of American experimental cinema plays a woman who dreams of being driven to suicide by loneliness and adversity.

Enrico, Robert: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge/La Rivière du Hibou (France, 1962, B&W, 27 minutes). A soldier in the American Civil War makes a miraculous escape from hanging—or does he? A fine film and a veritable catalogue of judiciously used sound and picture film techniques. From a tale by Ambrose Bierce.

Godard, Jean-Luc: Tous les Garçons s'Appellent Patrick/All the Boys Are Called Patrick (France, 1957, B&W, 21 minutes). Two girls find they are dating the same man.

Lamorisse, Albert: Le Balon Rouge/The Red Balloon (France, 1956, color, 34 minutes). A lonely boy in Paris makes friends with a balloon, which begins to reciprocate his attentions. No words.

Marker, Chris: La Jetée/The Jetty/The Pier (France, 1962, B&W, 29 minutes). A film almost entirely in stills about a survivor of World War III whose childhood memories allow him to move around at will in time. One shot has motion, and Georges Sadoul rightly says “the screen disarmingly bursts into sensuous life.”

Metzner, Ernö: Überfall/Accident/Police Report/Assault (Germany, 1928, B&W, 21 minutes). A man wins some cash in a beer hall, but it brings him nothing but bad luck. Almost a catalogue of camera techniques.

Polanski, Roman and Jean-Pierre Rousseau: The Fat and the Lean/Gruby i Chudy (France, 1961, B&W, 15 minutes). This allegory about a fat and a thin man explores the relationship of dependency between master and servant, and what stops the servant from escaping.

Polanski, Roman: Two Men and a Wardrobe/Dwaj Ludzie z Szafa (Poland, 1957, B&W, 15 minutes). Another allegory in which two men appear out of the sea, struggling with a bulky wardrobe, avoiding humanity and unable to solve their problems.

Renoir, Jean: Une Partie de Campagne/A Day in the Country (France, 1936, B&W, 37 minutes). A Paris shopkeeper takes his family for a day in the country, and his daughter—who already has a fiancé—falls in love with another man. Sadly, the relationship has no future. Renoir's debt to his famous father emerges, as well as to other Impressionists. From a tale by Guy de Maupassant.

Beginners work in short forms because they are inexpensive and place high demand on the control of craft and storytelling essentials. They also send you rapidly through the entire production cycle and are good learning vehicles. The dates in the films listed above tell you how few good short films there are. Any decent short film will readily earn a place in film festivals over an equally good but longer film because it is easier to schedule and very popular with audiences. To earn recognition, you must win prizes; so please be kind to yourself—save time and money, get invaluable experience, and compete in the less restricted arena.

Think of it this way: if you could make five 8-minute films for the price of one 60-minuter, you have increased your chances of recognition at least fivefold. After these you will handle a long film five times as well because you have tackled five sets of characterization, blocking, dramatic shape and flow, and editing challenges. You will also have directed a host of actors and given life to a gallery of characters.

What makes a good short subject? Much like a good short story, a short film needs:

• A limited but evocative setting
• Characters engaged in a significant form of struggle
• A character who develops—however minimally
• A resolution that leaves the audience pondering some aspect of the human condition

Such a film can be a farce, a dark comedy, a lyrical love letter, a Chaplinesque allegory (like Polanski's early shorts), a sitcom—anything. However, it must declare its issues and its personalities quickly and deftly. It should be well acted, interestingly shot, and tautly edited. A superb short film is the ultimate advertisement for what you could do with a bigger canvas. Two wedding videomakers in my area were invited to make a feature after circulating free copies around Hollywood of their deft comedy about a script doctor.

Finding your best short film subjects means defining what situations you know that best reveal a given character. This will almost certainly include some turning point, where pressures have built up and the main character is forced to take action. When he or she acts, there follow the inevitable consequences to which he or she must adapt. Because the turning point marks the onset of change, it may be the true starting point of the story (the buildup is only a prelude). In Polanski's dialogue-free The Fat and the Lean (1961) the thin man serves the fat man in all manner of humiliating ways, all the while visibly yearning to escape toward the Paris skyline. Eventually, to our joy, he runs away—only to be recaptured by the fat man who is roused to action by the loss of his slave. On one level a vaudeville comedy, on another a grisly political allegory, the film shows how neither slave nor master are free. Who can wonder that Polanski was soon entrusted with bigger things?

STYLE

The word style is often and confusingly interchanged with form. Godard when apparently speaking of form said, “To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and inside of the human body— both go together, they can't be separated” (Richard Roud, Jean-Luc Godard, London: Secker & Warburg, 1967, p. 13).

The style of a film is really the visible influence of its maker's identity. The distinction is made messy by the fact that film authorship is collective. But a Godard or a Lynch film, even if you hate it, is immediately recognizable. Partly this is content, partly it's the kind of tale and the characteristic forms each chooses, and partly it's because the films have the mark of individual personalities and tastes written all over them. It is this last, virtually uncontrollable, element that is properly known as style.

Just as you can't choose your own identity at any meaningful level, so you should let your film style take care of itself. You can and should locate your film within a genre and design its content and form to be an organic whole. If over the period of its creation you serve each controllable aspect of your film well, people will come to recognize in a succession of your films a continuity that is hard to pin down, but that will be called your style. From your audience and your critics you may even learn what it is—rather as (at considerable risk to your equilibrium) you extract a sense of your character from the reactions of friends, enemies, family, flatterers, and detractors.

Setting out to strike a style or artistic identity, as students often feel they must do in fine art schools, leads to superficialities and attention-demanding gimmicks. Far more important is to develop your deepest interests and make the best cinema you can out of the imprint left by your formative experience. Working sincerely and intelligently is what can truly connect your work to an audience. Even with these qualities you must expect a long evolution while you internalize all the technical and conceptual skills.

CHECKLIST FOR PART 4: AESTHETICS AND AUTHORSHIP

Note: There is an important set of prompts in the Form and Aesthetics Questionnaire in Appendix 2. It will greatly help you during the development and preproduction stages of your film. The recommendations and points summarized here are only those most salient or the most commonly overlooked from the chapters in this part. To find more about them or anything else, go to the Table of Contents at the beginning of this part, or try the index at the back of the book.

Point of View:

• Making the audience experience a character's point of view (POV) means making it experience a character's emotional situation as if it were their own.
• Complex drama often shows multiple POVs, which become poignant when the drama also shows characters' limitations, misperceptions, and miscommunications.
• The eyes and mind through which we view the film's events (personified as the Storyteller) also add up to a very important POV, which may be philosophical, critical, amused, ironic, detached, excited, terrified, etc.
• Everyone's POV, including that of the Storyteller, is stimulated and qualified by their own particular context (which is why juries are so carefully chosen).
• In daily life, make a point of backtracking whenever you get a sharp sense of someone else's reality to find out what opened the door for you.
• Make yourself aware of how POV is implied in literature, painting, photography, and theater, as well as film. There are common denominators arising out of audience response that will strengthen your command in film.
• It's important that the audience come to care deeply about at least one person in a story.
• Often films center on a main character's predicament and this person becomes the film's controlling POV. This does not exclude contrasting POVs, which can easily sharpen that of the main character or characters.
• That we care about your characters and care whether they overcome their difficulties is a major part of generating suspense and dramatic tension.
• To control POV takes a God-like ability of the story's creator(s) to see both from the character's viewpoints and also from the audience's.
• An omniscient POV gives the Storyteller the ability to be anywhere, see all, and know all (like God).
• A subjective POV means that the character through whom we are seeing is subject to special and very human limitations and passions.
• An audience has its own subjectivity that the filmmaker may or may not be able to anticipate, depending on how distant the audience is from the filmmaker's own culture.

Subtext and Making the Significant Visible:

• The audience must know what it is looking for in a story, so the story must declare its intentions.
• Merely showing events will probably leave the events' meaning buried under an avalanche of banal reality (a great hazard in filmmaking).
• Much of what is meaningful in human life goes on below the surface and requires interpretation and judgment—skills that an audience loves to exercise.
• What is cause and what is effect are plot considerations, but above these are moral implications, which interest us above everything else.
• The events chosen, their artful juxtaposition, irony, and humor are all ways to signify an underlying meaning or set of values.
• Allegory, analogy, metaphor, and symbol are more ways for the Storyteller to signify meanings.
• The struggle between right and wrong is not as morally testing as that between right and right.

Genre:

• A genre is a type of film the audience recognizes as a world running according to particular rules or norms.
• Film genres are often extensions of traditions begun in other media like painting, literature, music, or theater.
• Genre permits framing an area of life and seeing it through a particular prism of concerns or values.
• Subjectivity is inherently interesting and fertile in determining genre. “The public” as seen by an overworked postal clerk is a vastly different species from that seen by a newly ordained priest.

Duality and Conflict:

• The clash of values or temperaments is the stuff of drama.
• If drama is to be about people trying to get or do things, there must always be obstacles, difficulties, and unforeseen consequences, just as in life. This is conflict.
• Conflict does not have to be something negative; we learn through solving problems and every problem involves solving conflicts “Fire is the test of gold; Adversity of strong men” (Seneca 4 B.C.-A.D. 65).
• The core of every interesting personality is in his or her conflicts and “unfinished business.”
• Every credible person and situation contains contradictions and opposites— an actor playing a “bad” character must find the good in him, and if playing a good character, must find his weaknesses.

Microcosm and Macrocosm:

• The same truths are reproduced in large and small scales. An individual might represent a whole people, and dancers might be used to represent atoms. This can be useful.
• Nations behave with the passions of a myopic individual.
• An individual's complex psyche can be split up and represented as a group of characters, each representing different dominant traits.

Drama, Propaganda, and Dialectics:

• Representation and typifying can lead to flat characters unless you create interestingly ambiguous characters. In melodrama, however, characters tend to have one assigned characteristic and stand either for good or bad.
• Like yourself, cinema audiences are drawn to the ambiguities in their own lives and not to other people's certainties (for which one joins a church).
• If you must promote ideologies, make their opposition strong and intelligent.
• Your audience is as intelligent as yourself. It's wiser to reflect human predicaments than be caught trying to tell people how to live.
• Duality and ambiguity in a movie invite the audience to make judgments. Using your judgment is an important part of being gainfully entertained.

The Difference Between Observer Filmmaking and Storytelling:

• There is no right or wrong way to make any film, only effective and ineffective stories, and effective and ineffective forms for those stories.
• Some events are so powerful they need only to be relayed. They need little or no framing or implied commentary.
• Most fiction, however, needs a moral purpose in the telling and a moral attitude on the part of the teller. This should never be simplistic—even for young audiences.
• A story gains much from the added dimension brought by the critical intelligence of its Storyteller (good social criticism is less concerned with right and wrong than with enabling us to ponder ironies).
• When the Storyteller draws us emotionally into the film's world, we experience what it is like to be someone else. The audience longs to experience being other.
• The story, characters, and human predicaments in your movie are always going to be more important to get right than technique, which is at best a transparent vehicle for these.

Structure, Plot, and the Handling of Time:

• Plot is the arrangement of incidents and the logic of causality, which needs to seem credible and inevitable at every step.
• You can't be sure you have control of your movie's plot unless you maintain an up-to-date outline. This allows you to see it unobstructed.
• A film's structure should create forward momentum by posing questions and appropriately delaying their resolution.
• Plot structure should never be needlessly complicated unless the film's form is deliberately a maze.
• Clarity of Who/What/When/Where helps the audience concentrate on the thematic issues and the Why, which usually centers on the characters and their situations.
• How time is handled is a major organizing principle for any story.
• Departing from chronological time usually signals that the film is routed through someone's subjectivity, either that of a character or of the Storyteller.
• Flashbacks generally slow and weaken the forward momentum of a story.
• Heavy use of flashbacks (past tense) usually goes with a heavily determinist or even Freudian outlook (she does this now because of what happened to her then).
• Have you graphed the intended rise and fall of pressures in your film?
• Have you faced the faults this reveals?

Thematic Purpose:

• The thematic purpose is your Storyteller's motive for telling the tale.
• The Storyteller is not necessarily you; more likely he or she is a dramatized intelligence who has particular needs to fulfill through telling the tale. Make sure you elucidate what they are because this is the persona you are going to serve (play) when you direct, and it is the aura of this intelligence that gives the film an identity all its own.
• You won't be in control of your movie's thematic purpose unless you maintain an up-to-date premise or concept.
• Examine your outline and screenplay for how well the movie serves the thematic purpose.
• Thematic purpose is often best discovered by searching for appropriate metaphors.
• These metaphors will almost certainly suggest sound and visual motifs and even leitmotifs.
• A well-developed theme unifies and justifies your movie.
• It's important to your energy and focus that your movie serves a thematic purpose in which you deeply believe.
• Strong things are usually simple; don't feel your theme must be complex and all embracing.

Space, Stylized Environments, and Performances:

• Decide what kind of spaces your characters inhabit and what impression these should give.
• Depending on the film's system of POVs, you may want to show most, or very little, of the detail in each location.
• Characters can notice very little of their surroundings through familiarity, confusion, or preoccupation.
• Characters can notice very much about their surroundings because they have time on their hands, are in new surroundings, or have special reasons to take stock.
• Space may go noticed or unnoticed simply because that's the habit or temperament of the POV character.
• Stylization generally means departing from the unremarkable.
• In a movie a whole world or only aspects of it may be stylized.
• Stylization signals subjectivity on the part of the characters, the genre, or their Storyteller.

Music:

• Music can be misused as a dramatic crutch.
• It can legitimately suggest the interior state of the POV character.
• It can also signal the Storyteller's feelings about the story, impelling the audience to investigate what they're watching in particular ways.
• For the audience, music is like a drug habit; pleasant in the beginning and painful when perceived to be withdrawn.
• Music can illustrate or it can counterpoint.
• Music can accompany and enhance whatever is inherently strong in emotion.
• Avoid music that duplicates what we can see or hear (for instance, lush pastoral music over shots of cows in a wide meadow).
• Music can provide historical, social, or emotional context.
• Most music sold in music libraries is so bad, it isn't worthy of the name.
• Better to have no music than bad music.
• Too often bad music survives because it came free from a friend.

Form and Style:

• Form follows function.
• Less is more. Simple is strong.
• Kill your darlings. That is, remove anything you love that is not functional.
• Listen to your characters for what they need.
• Know where the movie belongs and where it departs from its genre.
• Don't neglect visual style; your cinematographer should be your ally here.
• Don't confuse visual style with directing; it's only part of the job and can lead you to neglect content and character.
• Design the sound track like a sound play, don't just leave it to trail after a picture.
• Remember that rhythms underlie everything in screen language, everything.
• Decide whom or what you want your audience to identify with.
• If you want to counter identification, you will first have to create it and subvert it.
• Only use long takes if your movie needs them; there are many other rewarding ways to challenge yourself.
• Short films are harder to make than long films; poetry is more demanding than prose.
• Short films get shown much more easily than longer ones.
• Let your film tell you its style, not vice versa.
• As far as your own style is concerned, you can only strive to become authentic to yourself. Personal style will take care of itself. In filmmaking you dress to impress at your peril.