"My First Goose" #4
A sidebar about the "tone meeting" idea...
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.”
Dear George and brilliant group, thank you for changing my writing life. {Whaaat?} No, I mean it. As a self-schooled outside artist, my methodology and creative process has been something along the lines of searching the grand canyon at night with a penlight for an occasional fossil or arrowhead that might lead me to understand the art of telling stories or (as a bonus, please) explain the purpose of my existence on the planet.
Now my world has changed {Hope it’s not too late, bud.} Working on my book is fun…dangerously fun…waking up at 3am and scribbling wondrous thoughts, sh#t-kicking fun. How?
By creating a wider and deeper working headspace for my otherwise shaky and risky project, by learning how to dig deeper in places I never knew existed, by being exposed to the beneficial and healthy glow of the phytoplankton stirred up by this giving and powerfully positive group of people I have never met, but recognize immediately as my people, who see the world as a place to create and build and open up. {Okay, that sounds good.} I know...but just had to say it.
Daniel Skrubal has provided a “tonecut” of almost exactly that sequence of Bicycle Thieves at https://vimeo.com/46113937. The sound has been excised, and a tone marks each cut. Skrubal says “This is a six minute slice of a full ToneCut for Vittorio DeSica's 'Bicycle Thieves' and is meant to serve as a supplemental piece to my analysis found at LivingInCine.com.”
A worthwhile way to experience the ‘purely cinematic’ aspects of the sequence. Much can be appreciated even without the audio-driven narrative layer.