When production has questions for key members of the crew

There are 3 moments to disturb the director, 1^st AD, DP, gaffer, key grip and art director during a shooting day with questions that need immediate answers. That’s right before crew call, during breakfast, during lunch or right after the shoot. NOT in between takes or during setup of shots or rehearsal with actors because their mind is working in the moment of what the scene needs or what the next scene needs.

Хрестоматия для самостоятельного чтения по специальности “Киноведение”

DOING FILM HISTORY

by David Bordwell

Nearly everybody loves movies. We aren’t surprised that people rush to see the latest hit or rent a cult favorite from the video store. But there are some people who seek out old movies. And among those fans there’s a still smaller group studying them.

Let’s call “old movies” anything older than twenty years. This of course creates a moving target. Baby boomers like us don’t really consider The Godfather or M*A*S*H to be old movies, but many twentysomethings today will probably consider Pulp Fiction (1994) to be old — maybe because they saw it when they were in their teens. Our twenty-year cutoff is arbitrary, but in many cases that won’t matter. Everybody agrees that La Grande Illusion from 1935 is an old movie, though it still seems fresh and vital.

Now for the real question. Why would anyone be interested in watching and studying old movies?

Ask a film historian, professional or amateur, and you’ll get a variety of answers. For one thing, old films provide the same sorts of insights that we get from watching contemporary movies. Some offer intense artistic experiences or penetrating visions of human life in other times and places. Some are documents of everyday existence or of extraordinary historical events that continue to reverberate in our times. Still other old movies are resolutely strange. They resist assimilation to our current habits of thought. They force us to acknowledge that films can be radically different from what we are used to. They ask us to adjust our field of view to accommodate what was, astonishingly, taken for granted by people in earlier eras.

Another reason to study old movies is that film history encompasses more than just films. By studying how films were made and received, we discover how creators and audiences responded to their moment in history. By searching for social and cultural influences on films, we understand better the ways in which films bear the traces of the societies that made and consumed them. Film history opens up a range of important issues in politics, culture, and the arts—both “high” and “popular.”

Yet another answer to our question is this: Studying old movies and the times in which they were made is intrinsically fun. As a relatively new field of academic research (no more than sixty years old), film history has the excitement of a young discipline. Over the past few decades, many lost films have been recovered, little-known genres explored, and neglected filmmakers reevaluated. Ambitious retrospectives have revealed entire national cinemas that had been largely ignored. Even television, with some cable stations devoted wholly to the cinema of the past, brings into our living rooms movies that were previously rare and little-known.

And much more remains to be discovered. There are more old movies than new ones and, hence, many more chances for fascinating viewing experiences.

We think that studying film history is so interesting and important that during the late 1980s we began to write a book surveying the field. The first edition of Film History: An Introduction appeared in 1994, the second in 2003, and the third will be published in spring of 2009. In this book we have tried to introduce the history of cinema as it is conceived, written, and taught by its most accomplished scholars. But the book isn’t a distillation of all film history. We have had to rule out certain types of cinema that are important, most notably educational, industrial, scientific, and pornographic films. We limit our scope to theatrical fiction films, documentary films, experimental or avant-garde filmmaking, and animation—realms of filmmaking that are most frequently studied in college courses.

Researchers are fond of saying that there is no film history, only film histories. For some, this means that there can be no intelligible, coherent “grand narrative” that puts all the facts into place. The history of avant-garde film does not fit neatly into the history of color technology or the development of the Western or the life of John Ford. For others, film history means that historians work from various perspectives and with different interests and purposes.

We agree with both points. There is no Big Story of Film History that accounts for all events, causes, and consequences. And the variety of historical approaches guarantees that historians will draw diverse conclusions.

We also think that research into film history involves asking a series of questions and searching for evidence in order to answer them in the course of an argument. When historians focus on different questions, turn up different evidence, and formulate different explanations, we derive not a single history but a diverse set of historical arguments.

What Do Film Historians Do?

While millions are watching movies at this moment, a few thousand are studying the films of the past. One person is trying to ascertain whether a certain film was made in 1904 or 1905. Another is tracing the fortunes of a short-lived Scandinavian production company. Another is poring over a 1927 Japanese film, shot by shot, to find out how it tells its story. Some researchers are comparing prints of an obscure film to determine which one can be considered the original. Other scholars are studying a group of films signed by the same director or set designer or producer. Some are scrutinizing patent records and technical diagrams, legal testimony, and production files. And still others are interviewing retired employees to discover how the Bijou Theater in their hometown was run during the 1950s.

Why?

Questions and Answers

One reason is evident. Most film historians—teachers, archivists, journalists, and freelancers—are cinephiles, lovers of cinema. Like bird-watchers, fans of 1960s television, art historians, and other devotees, they enjoy acquiring knowledge about the object of their affection.

Movie fans may stop there, regarding the accumulating of facts about their passion as an end in itself. But whatever the pleasure of knowing the names of all the Three Stooges’ wives, most film historians are not trivia buffs. Film historians mount research programs, systematic inquiries into the past.

A historian’s research program is organized around questions that require answers. A research program also consists of assumptions and background knowledge. For a film historian, a fact takes on significance only in the context of a research program.

A film archivist—that is, someone who works in a library devoted to collecting and preserving motion pictures—often comes across a film that is unidentified. Perhaps the title credit is missing or the print carries a title that differs from that of the original film. The archivist’s research program is, broadly, identification. The film presents a series of questions: What is the date of production or of release? In what country was it made? What company and personnel made the film? Who are the actors?

Our mysterious film carries only the French title Wanda l’espione (“Wanda the Spy”)—most likely a title given to it by a distributor. It was probably imported rather than made in Belgium, where the print was discovered. Fortunately there are some clues in the print itself. The lead actress, seated in the foreground, is a famous star, Francesca Bertini. Identifying her makes it almost certain that the film is Italian. But Bertini was a star from 1907 into the 1930s. How can we narrow the dates further?

The film’s style helps. The camera points straight toward the back wall of the set, and the actors seldom move closer to the camera than they are seen here. The editing pace is slow, and the action is staged so that performers enter and exit through a rear doorway. All these stylistic features are typical of European filmmaking of the mid-1910s. Such clues can be followed up by referring to a filmography (a list of films) of Bertini’s career. A plot description of a 1915 film in which she starred, Diana l’affascinatrice (“Diana the Seductress”), matches the action of the unidentified print.

Note that the identification depended on certain assumptions. For example, the researcher assumed that it’s extremely unlikely for a modern filmmaker to create a fake 1915 Italian film, just to baffle archivists. (Film historians need not worry about forgeries, as art historians must.) Note, too, that the researcher needed some background knowledge. She had reason to believe that films staged and cut a certain way are characteristic of the mid-1910s, and she recognized a star from other films of the period.

Most historians go beyond identification and tackle broader subject areas. Consider another common situation. An archive holds many films made by the same production company, and it also has numerous filing cabinets bulging with documents concerning that company’s production process. Its collection also includes scripts in various drafts; memos passed among writers, directors, producers, and other staff; and sketches for sets and costumes. This is a rich lode of data—too rich, in fact, for one researcher to tackle. The historian’s problem is now selecting relevant data and salient facts.

What makes a datum relevant or a fact salient is the historian’s research program and its questions. One scholar might be interested in tracing common features of the company’s production process; he might ask something like, “In general, how did this firm typically plan, execute, and market its movies?” Another historian’s research program might concentrate on the films of a certain director who worked for the company. She might ask, “What aspects of visual style distinguish the director’s films?”

Some facts would be central to one program but peripheral to another. The historian interested in the company’s business routines might not particularly care about a daring visual innovation introduced by the director who is the focus of the other historian’s inquiry. In turn, the stylistic historian might be uninterested in how the company’s producers promoted certain stars.

Again, assumptions exert pressure on the researcher’s framing of questions and pursuit of information. The company historian assumes that he can trace general tendencies of production organization, largely because film companies tend to make films by following fairly set routines. The director-centered researcher assumes that her director’s films do have a distinct style. And both historians would mobilize background knowledge, about how companies work and how directors direct, to guide their research.

Historians in any discipline do more than accumulate facts. No facts speak for themselves. Facts are interesting and important only as part of research programs. Facts also help us ask and answer questions.