In the last post, we discussed the idea of the “tone meeting.” This is something done for TV and movies and theater, the purpose of which is to figure out how to do a scene in the way that most meaningfully supports its ultimate purpose.
This post, I’d like to round this idea out with an exercise I’ve done with my students at Syracuse, using the movie Bicycle Thieves. This exercise is described in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, pages 61-62. Here’s a pdf of the relevant pages from the book:
The section of the film we’re discussing runs from about 54:16 to 1:00:15 in the Criterion Collection version:
(I wish I could post the video here but I think we might run into some permissions issues. You may be able to access it on Vimeo.)
The exercise is:
—Watch the section once, for fun. Try to come up with the Hollywood Version (which, as I found out this week, via the Comments section, is also, and probably more properly, called the “logline”).
—Then watch it again (and again), each time through trying to notice more of the choices made in the filming - the framing, the pattern of cuts, the background action, and so on - and how they work within the context of the logline. (Some examples are discussed in the excerpt from the book.)
What always strikes us a class when we’ve done this exercise is that none of these directorial decisions seem random; everything seems to have been considered. With each watching, the section comes to feels more and more rife with choices (even if, on some occasions, the “choice” is just to leave in something that happened naturally.)
This choosing is so much of what we are about as artists. We might say that “craft” is simply the process of learning to create the opportunity for ourselves to make choices. (Think of how rife with specific decisions the first pulse of “My First Goose” was, and, therefore, how full of personality.)
As we get better at choosing, we come to know the feeling of a good swerve vs. a bad one. We come to sense when we are working too hard to provide specific details and thus over-packing our story and making it feel unnatural; we come to sense when we skim past a place where we might want to linger. We learn the tiny mind-adjustments that cause good phrases to appear. We learn how our writing sounds when we are leaning too much on the analytical mind. We learn - we actually can learn - how to steer our minds toward an intuitive place from which it will surprise and delight and sometimes shock us.
This exercise reminds us that, in theory, every element of a work of art can be charged with meaning. I remember, with fondness, a certain giddy feeling that used to come over the classroom as we passed into our fifth or sixth viewing, amazed that we were still finding evidence of care on the part of the director, Vittorio De Sica, who seemed to be saying, from the other side of the film: There is no limit to the extent to which a work of art can be made ever more meaningful, even by way of the smallest adjustments.
Next time, we’ll move on to Pulse #2 of “My First Goose.”
Logline: A frustrated father slaps his son and attempts reconciliation.
- The son follows closely behind and right by his father’s side as they exit the church.
- Camera cuts to the river when the father notices it. Camera is still on the river when the son asks “why’d you let him go for his lunch?” — tying together the question inciting the slap with the river, which will prompt the father to reconcile, and with lunch, the means with which the father will reconcile.
- Father immediately regrets slap.
- But he gets angry rather than apologetic as his son walks away and hides behind a tree.
- The physical distance between them is established from the father’s point of view before the exchange of medium shots as the son expresses his hurt and asks why, and the father blames the son and demands he come along, which he does reluctantly (unlike before).
- The son appears to catch up and we get more medium shots framing them each equally — a visual resolution? — as he threatens to “tell mama” and the father says “we will settle this at home.”
- But the next shot shows that the son in fact is still maintaining quite a distance from his father (camera still from the father’s perspective) — the son’s forgiveness was tentative and is now withdrawn.
- The father walks out of frame before the son, camera doesn’t cut to the river until the son walks out of frame.
- Father runs to the river alone in the frame.
- Then the son stands alone in an extreme long followed by a medium, the camera no longer phsyically from the father’s perspective (or is it projecting what’s actually on his mind?).
- When the father hears the commotion, he thinks of his son, and shouts his name.
- First he must cross under a bridge, where, the light blocked, he becomes a silhouette.
- This side of the bridge is busy, full of people and danger as they try to save the drowning boy — a stark contrast to the solitude on the other side.
- Bruno appears at the top of some stairs, and the father runs — he must ascend this obstacle — to reach him.
- The camera cuts away from the stairs before he reaches the top, and now it’s back at the wall where he first left Bruno. The wall vertically halves the frame, obscuring the father who’s still running up the stairs, Bruno still visually alone. Bruno, not waiting for him, stands up and begins walking, and only after that does the father cross the top of the stairs out past the wall and reappear.
- The father is now concerned for his son, urging him to put on his jacket, staying close, touching his shoulder.
- Now they walk along with the trees between them, until the son crosses over to his father’s side, which he does because a wheelbarrow is in his way. He could have swerved back to his side, but he isn’t angry enough. All he needed was a slight nudge from the world (not his father), although he’s still hurt.
- The truck of happy boys celebrating a soccer tea passes by, the father looks from the truck to his son, asks if Modena is a good team, the son shakes his head, unphased.
- Asks his son if he’s hungry, he nods, the father checks his wallet, asks if he wants a pizza. The son, happy now, says yes.
- They enter a bustling restaurant which apparently doesn’t serve pizza. They may not get what they want, but they can make do. Both the son and the father keep checking out this table of a wealthier family, more properly dressed, with more proper manners, with more food.
These last few My First Goose posts reminded me so much of scriptwriting, I am glad we connect loglines to "Hollywood versions". The "pulses" are also what we call a beat sheet. The moments, turns, conflicts, forward progression broken up by pages of a script. It's making me visualize the story on the screen. I don't want to say it would be a difficult story for screen but it definitely would be work visualizing the "meaning" to screen.
I would like to point out that the translation of Bicycle Thief to English takes away meaning. As it is Bicycle Thieves in Italian. "The original Italian title is Ladri di biciclette. It literally translates into English as "thieves of bicycles"; both ladri and biciclette are plural." (wiki)