THE LONG ARM OF HOMER

Daniel Lee

To me, and I think for many people, the language of film is, or can be, abstract and non-linear. Understanding it is intuitive. It becomes more like music. And because time is involved and things seem to happen in sequence, certain things are introduced and then others are introduced and then they come together just like in music and knowing what has gone before makes them even greater. There are certain harmonics. If you just played that bunch of chords and notes, it wouldn't do it. But because of what's gone before there's a greater thing happening now. Films can do these things and they can show emotions that are very abstract and suddenly you catch it and it gets your heart. Or it catches it in your mind and it starts ... kinda zooming. Intuition is such a beautiful thing. It's a knowingness inside. And to me it's part of the language of cinema.

David Lynch

from an interview with Roger Ebert

Context creates meaning. The context of an object, its surroundings, its history, these things in some way determine its perceived meaning, and these things change. View the Mona Lisa in the context of the Louvre, and one makes certain connections, consciously or not, thereby creating a specific meaning: “This is fine art,” “a masterpiece,” or something to that effect. Were one to view the same painting in the context of, say, a series of mug shots, his/her assigned meaning would change, even if the new meaning were simply “a masterpiece surrounded by mug shots.” More likely, however, one would begin once again to make connections, and perhaps ask questions such as, “what is the artist trying to say by associating these images with one another? Am I to view Mona Lisa as a criminal? Am I to view these criminals as artists, or, perhaps, as themselves subjects of art?” Perhaps one would begin looking for some sort of linear story in the images, expecting each image, or frame, to advance that story, and therefore attempting to impose narrative where there may not even be one.

What is this if not dialectical montage? Two or more images are placed next to each other, adding up to an unique meaning, one greater and more complex than that of either image on its own: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This is one way visual stories are told. We can put together that one scene follows another, and that each successive scene is a new part of the same story, adding to and redefining that which has preceded it. We understand that a new scene doesn’t necessarily signal the start of a new story.

Our art consists entirely of imitation, first of Nature and then, as it cannot rise so high of itself, of those things which are produced from the masters with the greatest reputation.

Giorgio Vasari

Lives of the Painters (1568)

So it is with any artist, building upon the work of those who have come before, adding to and redefining the history of that art. What is that history if not a context for any one artist, or any one of his pieces? Can’t each piece be viewed as a part of a montage? And can’t the artist’s life be seen as a sort of macro-context in which to view this montage?

Cases can be made for both sides, but there are times when I find it more interesting NOT to separate the artist from the art and subsequently study the progression and evolution of style, content, message, technique, and even medium in relation to the progression and evolution of the artist himself. Individually, a painting / film / photograph / novel / poem can and probably should be viewed as an independent work: valid, important, and meaningful in and of itself. Viewed alongside other pieces by the same artist, these pieces can and should be observed in relation to one another. When the work is presented chronologically, the importance of evolution is even more vehemently stressed, for here we can actually observe how the artist's thoughts, feelings, and visions changed as he lived and created, how context influenced production.

And so the true macro-context of any story, as with any piece of art, is its context within the life of its creator, and, by extension, within the sociopolitical environment (or context) in which he lives.

Yet how do we explore any body of work when the slightest change to its context changes its meaning? As though Kuleshov, we recognize that the order of the sequence, the very fabric of the montage, is inevitably an elusive prey. Shall we observe the work of a filmmaker chronologically? Then, as stated above, we turn our eyes toward evolution, toward development of style. And yet our focus would change were we to concentrate on specific aspects of this filmmaker’s production technique and contrast these specific elements with their like kind across his body of work, or, at least, within our sample. Then, like Kuleshov, we would see that although the individual frames of our montage do not change, the order in which they are viewed alters the way they are read.

A line of ants, a baby being born, a crowd of people, a man dying.

A crowd of people, a line of ants, a man dying, a baby being born.

And yet the question remains: linearity or fragmentation? But the answer cannot be so simple. It must, inevitably, be both. As though a film itself, this thesis moves ahead, with perhaps an overarching linearity, and yet, along the way, flashing forward or backward in service of the greater macro-context, often contradictory, perhaps, but no less an example of the mind behind it. Often it will seem concerned with those topical issues best represented by a specific film. So be it. It is the shape of a man, defined by smaller shapes and elements, influences and ideas. A montage, yes, but one not necessarily wedded to chronology.

My own career hasn’t even begun, yet here I am, about to engage four of my student films (Gilgamesh, In the Dark, The Most Dangerous Game, Untitled No. 7) and use them as a means by which to discuss this idea of context creating meaning. Into play come the contexts in which these films were made, the influences behind them, and the learning process of making movies. Take it as you will, for in the end I can’t alter your perception beyond my attempts within these pages. For my part, I’m engaged in a clearly indulgent affair. Inevitably, after completing a work, interpretations arise which may contradict those originally intended. This has never bothered me, for I encourage multiple readings of a text. Still, herein lies the opportunity to make known my own original intentions and the personal meanings they carry. Here are four films, of which I say I am the author. Here is the vessel, and here is the route: linear context with sometimes non-linear content. Aboard this craft we begin not at the beginning, nor at the conclusion, but somewhere in the middle, and hope for the best.

Here we seek the long arm of Homer, for the stories we tell and the tales we weave pass on like waves, rolling over one another and becoming an ocean, rich in life, all submerged, waiting to be seen. They are our dreams, and they become our myths. The legends, the simple fables, the stuff of parables — these are our symbols, these are our stories. We are carriers, bottles within which rest the messages, the stories of our forefathers. Truly, the carrier is the medium, regardless of whatever media by which he chooses to translate the message. And so, as a carrier, I set down in video what had once been set down in clay tablet: one of the earliest stories, the epic of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, in Mesopotamia.

I saw myself a translator, adapting to a visual mode a story of such antiquity that the fingers of its iconic symbols and archetypes have global reach. The story is itself the key piece of Mesopotamian literature, as well as a supreme example of common themes and motifs among ancient near-eastern mythological texts. Here upon the death of the wild man Enkidu, King Gilgamesh, part man and part god, embarks on an epic search for immortality.

And yet the path taken by the film differs greatly from that of the epic. Much of the story has, in fact, been changed to reflect a personal statement. So how does personalization through translation affect the original text? Does the process alter the idea to the point where it is no longer recognizable as the same source material? Is there, indeed, any one true version of the epic? Weren’t even the original tablets but a translation of some freefloating idea?

Structuralist theory proposes that narrative exists independent of any medium. French structuralist writer Claude Bremond suggests the presence of a

… layer of autonomous significance, endowed with a structure that can be isolated from the whole of the message: the story [récit]… It may be transposed from one to another medium without losing its essential properties: the subject of a story may serve as argument for a ballet, that of a novel can be transposed to stage or screen, one can recount in words a film to someone who has not seen it. These are words we read, images we see, gestures we decipher, but through them, it is a story that we follow, and this can be the same story. (1978, p. 4)

What this means is that any narrative consists of two parts: story (content) and discourse (expression). The story of Gilgamesh, then, could be translated from epic to film, to prose, to painting, to comic book, and indeed from poem form to another poem form. The essence of the epic becomes Descartes’ piece of wax: how much can it change before it is no longer the same narrative? Inevitably significant changes must occur for the narrative to transcend medium. From epic to music, say, what must take place? The narrative itself becomes entirely inferred.

Jean Piaget suggests self-regulation, the idea that the structure will maintain itself, when he writes, “Transformations inherent in a structure never lead beyond the system but always engender elements that belong to it and preserve its laws.” (1970, p. 14) This implies that however an author chooses to express the narrative, only certain possibilities can occur, to the point where the narrative will itself not admit events or phenomena which do not obey its laws.

In addition, we must remember Roman Ingarden’s distinction between the “real object” and the “aesthetic object,” that the aesthetic is a construct of the reader, and that “aesthetic objects may exist in the absence of a real object.” (1967, p. 304) To this end, the material book isn’t itself a work of literature, but rather the means by which the work is made accessible to the reader. It is a medium through which to channel the real object: the idea.

And so, if the narrative of Gilgamesh is indeed subject to only a finite number of possible changes through transcendence of medium, then my own translation is as close to God as any other, only two, maybe three, incarnations removed from the original stone.

I made the bull from Heaven into a flying shark. I turned the scorpions into a giant cat. I eliminated some characters, changed others. Urshanabi is now more the Ghost of Christmas Future than Vasudeva, the ferryman of Siddhartha. And Utnapishtim has become a reflection of what Gilgamesh once was, suggesting that perhaps Gilgamesh always had within him that which he has sought. Yet these are merely changes to content, and to truly personalize the text changes had to be made to the expression as well. The translation itself had to carry meaning outside that of the narrative. And so elements of production design are addressed.

Vast fields of billowing grass, the minimal stage, the empty canvas, the core of everything. Here we find the abstract, the undefinable, the soul upon which we paint a thousand faces. Here men are icons, symbols, actions become mythic, characters become archetypes.

And so the backdrop falls: a white square on a white canvas. The aesthetic of such minimalism is all-important to the film, which I have described not as modern, but as modernist. The very absence of production design becomes the production design: stark white space. Look at Donald Judd’s Untitled, the cover of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, or Dante Ferretti’s art gallery in Fellini Satyricon, and see the primary influences. Yet space alone isn’t enough of a design, the method must extend itself to those occupying that space, their motion, their movement, the very nature of their behavior. They are posed as statues, almost as though aware of their mythic, iconographic stature. In his throne room, Gilgamesh moves only once: to see Enkidu.

Once they have left the white space, their movements become grander, yet remain superficial. These are archetypes engaged in mythic activities. When Enkidu fights Gilgamesh, he lifts the king into the air, for these are mighty, god-like men. Bloody blows to the face are never exchanged. Rather in Gilgamesh, the idea that they are fighting is more important than the details of the fight.

Against the expanse of the empty canvas these pieces play out their parts. And so the drama of the film, set upon a minimal stage, is itself played out in minimal garb. The costumes, although in some way remotely period, accentuate more a reference to minimal stage productions than true Mesopotamian fashion: white t-shirts, perhaps a piece or two of animal skin, a robe, a cloak, a blank white mask. Small suggestions, indicative of what must be inferred, what has been left up to the viewer’s imagination. Inference does not, however, necessarily equal interference with the meaning of specific clothing in the film. At his most primal, Enkidu essentially wears nothing. Once he is tamed, his hair is cut and he has taken to covering his chest. At the time of his death, he is simply wearing a t-shirt.

The reason for this had to do with the fact that, during the early stages of making this film, I was not fully aware of the resources available to me through the Santa Clara University costume shop. What this meant was that, as I made more connections within the theatre department and better learned the system there, the production value of my film began to increase. So Enkidu gained animal skin. Prior to this, however, we had already shot his death in a white t-shirt. And I was so pleased with his performance there that I didn’t want to reshoot it. What remains as a result is Enkidu’s gradual progression from completely animal and filthy, with long wig and animal skins, to clean cut with an animal skin shirt, to a white t-shirt. In my own mind, I had, in the process of production, begun to justify this change by deciding that as he becomes more civilized, the wild man takes on an increasingly contemporary appearance. This was good enough for me, although it undoubtedly draws unwanted attention to the fact that the film was a student production.

Aimed at the minimalist stage was the camera. And, for the most part, it shot as though a member of the audience, observing the action often in profile, seeing at most two-thirds of a person. All exceptions are significant, serving to draw attention to the fact that the viewer is present, watching the piece, and is in fact a participant in the action, or at least in its decoding. In his throne room, Gilgamesh stands stolidly as though he were himself a set piece, eyes cast at the audience, who watch from below. The king stares out at the viewer as he smears his face with muddy war paint. Utnapishtim eyes us as he declares the burden of humanity: mortality.

The most obvious deviations from this seemingly consistent technique involve action taking place in the forest, which suggest the animalistic quality of the environment, and its subsequent effect on the psyche of those present within it. Take, for instance, the seduction of Enkidu by the prostitute Shamhat, the actual act shot as though caught by some camcorder-wielding voyeur. It is a consistent characteristic of my films, this idea of mankind reduced to his most animalistic, often when in the forest or jungle, as will later become clear.

What, however, beyond aesthetics? This translation was not bound simply to matters of production design, but also to those of narrative design, for the very structure of the piece tests the limits of Piaget’s self-regulation model. This is not a tale told linearly, for in it we periodically flash forward to events yet to be, with no indication of any kind that these are happenings of the future.

It was an idea I first attempted with my film The Messiah, in which a mental patient describes how he has killed God, and subsequently become God. In this movie, there is no telling what’s a flashback, what’s actually happening now, or what might be happening in the future, and so structure becomes not simply non-linear, but wholly abstract. And while the narrative throughline does exist, it’s left up to the viewer to decipher it for himself. Inevitably, it is part of that deciphering to determine for oneself the linearity of the narrative structure, which scenes and events take place when, subsequently allowing the viewer to create his own timeline.

Scott McCloud touches upon this in Understanding Comics when he presents before the reader a small story in which the entire course of the narrative depends on where the reader’s eyes fall. “The idea,” he writes, “that the reader might choose a direction is still considered exotic.” (1993 p. 105) The crucial difference, of course, is that in a comic book the reader’s eyes take in all the events of a page simultaneously, and move from left to right only because it is a convention to do so. Past, present, and future are all present on the same white page, and in the blink of an eye the reader can be in any one.

Film is a decidedly more linear animal, simply because of the way it functions. One may tell his story in a non-linear way, but the film must still, in the end, be projected in a straight line. Only one frame is visible at any given time, and so the filmmaker still dictates when the viewer sees what. Therefore while the structure of the narrative may remain individually determined, the manner in which the narrative is presented is constant. That is, provided one views the film from beginning to end.

In the original Epic of Gilgamesh, the character of Siduri, the barmaid, first appears near the end of the story to comfort Gilgamesh and talk with him about man’s mortality. When writing the script, I felt as though it would be more powerful if Siduri had already appeared earlier, so that when Gilgamesh burst into her tavern, she could be shocked at how much he had changed. This, of course, presented a logic problem, I suppose, since Gilgamesh would not be anywhere near her tavern at the beginning of the story.

My solution was to approach it as I had The Messiah. The first time we see Siduri, Gilgamesh has burst into her tavern, and she tells him to get out. Then she sees the sorrow in him and asks him to tell her what has happened to him. Cut back to: the main story. Later, we go back to the tavern, and Gilgamesh is telling Siduri that his friend has died. Cut back to: the fight with Humbaba. Later, near the end of the film, we once again see Gilgamesh burst into the tavern, but this time we cut from there to Siduri cleaning his wounds. This accomplishes several things: 1) we are introduced to the Siduri character earlier in the film, 2) it imbues the film with the feeling of a story being told to someone, 3) it avoids making the viewer sit through the entire Siduri scene in one chunk, and 4) it challenges the audience. Here, as in Messiah, it is not expressly said whether the flashforwards are indeed glimpses of what is to come or what has already been. That is, until the second time Gilgamesh explodes into the tavern, at which point the viewer begins to make the connections.

It is an important difference, I believe, between story structure and narrative structure. For while both Messiah and Gilgamesh tell their tales in non-linear ways, both tell linear stories. And so it is that narrative structure is essentially one expression of the content.

It is the fight with Humbaba which best demonstrates the idea of archetypes engaged in archetypal activities. If the fight between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is evidence that the details of a battle must be inferred rather than seen, so the battle with Humbaba exemplifies the apex of inferred action, for in fact there is absolutely no motion whatsoever. The two heroes agree upon some mythic motivation for their attack on Humbaba, then proceed to tear up the grassy hill, leap into the sky, and… freeze in mid air. We then see a series of stills, mid-shots of our two protagonists as well as the threshold guardian. Cut back to the wide shot, the two still frozen in the air. Suddenly they land, and Humbaba is dead on the ground. How can this be? At no point did we see either Enkidu or Gilgamesh touch Humbaba. And yet we understand that they have defeated their enemy. What is important is not HOW they did it, but THAT they did it.

It’s a deliberate fracture of the film’s stylistic continuity, and it is directly inspired by The Chameleon, a series of underground comic books I have been writing since 1996. In it we follow the exploits of the man known as “The Chameleon: Man of a Thousand Faces, Lover of a Thousand Women,” a mercenary of sorts who possesses the ability to become anyone. In the last two episodes of Chameleon, violence was approached by showing not the event in whole, but rather fragments, close-ups, through which the greater event was insinuated. A panel of eyes squinting. A mouth screaming, The victim’s eyes wide open in shock. THEN: cut to the wide shot, one man standing over the body of the other. No actual killing is witnessed, yet the violence is implied.

Perhaps the flaw in the Gilgamesh approach lies in the absence of extreme close-ups. The violence is more difficult to infer in the film than in the comic book, I suspect, in large part because the frozen actions do not depict the kind of anger or violence present in the graphic novel. One would be hard pressed to show on the face of Gilgamesh the kind of exaggerated physical features seen when The Chameleon pounces on his prey, for instance, without reaching into the domain of computer animation. I may be wrong. It may be my weakness as a filmmaker. Still, the experiment was worth attempting, and that, I propose, is enough. So we move on.

In the Dark, a live studio-based production, more play than film, told the story of a young writer whose father attempts reconciliation with her after many years of estrangement. This was an original story, inspired in many ways by my relationship with a girl named Bridgette Dunlap.

KATE: We don’t actually talk much anymore. She moved to New York, and... well, she’s met new people. She doesn’t really have time to... she had to move on. You know? She had to start over.

— In the Dark

Dealing with my breakup with Bridgette was a difficult thing for me, and the first film I made after it happened was a three-hour character-driven film noir called Lost Angeles, which told the story of a professional assassin who begins to question himself and his profession. I think, placed in the context of our breakup, the darkness of that film, the depression of the main character, can be pretty well understood. That said, I didn’t want In the Dark to fall into the same slump Lost did. That is to say, I had more to say this time, specifically about my relationship with Bridgette. And yet I wanted to avoid producing a film that was only so much self-indulgent catharsis.

With the first two drafts of In the Dark I was trying, I think, to say that I believed there was such a thing as a second chance, and so Kate and Richard reconciled at the end. Discussions with my professor opened my eyes to the realization that I had to do what was right for these characters. And these characters would not reconcile. In fact, Richard, the father, although he has the most important monologue in the film, does not change, and proceeds to fake a stab wound in order to reenter the apartment.

Inherent in the skin of this film was the movement forward from some past regret, and in this passage engagement in the deconstruction of that thing. Bridgette had for me become less a former love than the idea of love itself, simultaneously perhaps the sliced umbilical of my naivete concerning it. Had I been in love with her, or the idea of her? Such abstraction did these hands unmake that did itself these hands create. And so before me sat perhaps my most autobiographical film. Draft after draft produced a story with greater edge, one that worked better dramatically.

In many ways Kate was an extension of Thomas Richter, the main character of Lost Angeles, in that both characters felt sorry for themselves. The difference was that Richter’s pathos was far more abstract while Kate’s was decidedly focused: she despised her father for having been a drunk, for cheating on his wife, and for leaving his family. In addition, Kate realized her own self-pity, and so became even angrier… at herself.

Upon first reading Siddhartha, having already produced In the Dark, I began seeing parallels between the two. Richard seemed, in a way, to be Siddhartha, seeking to change and yet never succeeding. It is my opinion that the defining moment for Siddhartha is when his son leaves him. And, in a way, it’s the same for Richard, at least in terms of the child being the impetus for change. We don’t know if Richard becomes a better person after Kate throws him out into the riots, but what we can probably assume is that, should he survive, he will try again to make peace with her. It seems to me that the crucial factor is the role of the child in the attempted self-improvement and growth of the father.

Yet perhaps therein lies something greater, a hint at the larger current moving through the movies we are discussing. More often than not, it seems, my main characters are engaged in the process of destroying, or at least deconstructing, their gods. Thomas Richter is essentially a fallen angel, a “lost” angel, who learns his god is truly the devil, and vice versa. Walter in The Messiah literally kills his god, and subsequently becomes a god himself. Gilgamesh defies his gods, yet seeks to become one.

Athalya Brenner writes of the traditional gender of the Hebrew god: “God is primarily depicted as a (single) M parent, cast and stereotyped from the outset as the Great Father.” (1992, p. 48) And this is, for me, another one of the main ideas in In the Dark.

Kate is motivated by hate for her father to the point where she not only wants to severe ties with him, she will literally destroy him, throwing him out to the wolves. In addition, she seems to have developed a wholly antagonistic relationship with men, sleeping with her publisher to get her book printed, and yet clearly sparring with him on any creative criticism. She sees the world around her as male dominated, and so by extension her father as a sort of projected phalocentric god-figure. In her defiance of her father Kate therefore seeks separation not only from him, but from the masculine god he represents. And so again a principal character seeks to destroy his god.

Raised Catholic, baptized and confirmed, having chosen agnosticism as a teenager, yet leaning strongly toward Taoist and Buddhist philosophies, the conflict between structured religious belief in a deity and liberated spiritual belief in the possibility of an abstraction is itself a triggered nerve within my psyche. And since I was a junior in high school this has always been one of the core themes at work in my films. It was in Pistolero, an El Mariachi-inspired film I made when I was seventeen, roughly the age at which I began seriously questioning my faith, that I first consciously touched on this theme, staging a violent conflict inside a chapel. I would go so far as to say that in my films the conflict of my central characters arises not from hatred toward their gods, but rather their inability to make peace with their gods, to reconcile their own faith.

When Gilgamesh was screened, one of the viewers — in fact, the supervisor of the project — suggested that the crucial moment of the film takes place when Enkidu and Gilgamesh are about to kiss… and Enkidu dies. The implication, said the viewer, was that the two heroes had acted in defiance of the gods by attempting to consummate an homosexual relationship, and so the wild man was struck down. Defiance of the plan laid out by the gods, in a sense defiance of a predetermined path, resulted in punishment. And while for me the motivation for Enkidu’s death had more to do with revenge than punishment, there is something there, and it’s important. The goal, after all, of Gilgamesh’s journey is to find some way to change his predetermined path, to live forever rather than die.

In the Dark would seem to imply a more Buddhist approach. For while Richard himself seems to be struggling to make peace with his own faith, as well as with his daughter, his monologue near the end of the film suggests that just when one believes he has come to terms with his personal demons, that is when he is the least ready to reenter society:

“That’s when you’re the most self-absorbed, and the most pretentious. And then you spend the next few years after that trying to lose that... second skin of... something... and you realize that it’s totally impossible for you to make peace with yourself. It’s not going to happen. You’re going to have to carry this... weight with you... for the rest of your life.”

Self-analysis, then, occupies oneself so much with oneself that he becomes self-absorbed. To paraphrase Baba Ram Dass, the man who says “I’m enlightened” probably isn’t. It would appear it is only once the conscious desire for self-improvement is gone that change is truly possible. Again: Siddhartha. So it is with Richard… and so it is with Kate. It is a narrative parallel that rhymes with Kate’s own novel, for the story she is writing is essentially the key to the movie. Both Kate and Richard must deal with their pain, carry with them the cross of their regrets, for who on this planet is not Sisyphus, forever condemned to struggle against the weight of his unique stone? But this is not the only level on which the story acts as parallel. For, in fact, her story is one I am myself working on. It is the story to the fourth installment of The Chameleon. Twenty pages into the book, our hero is already being burned at the stake. And at the time I was writing In the Dark, I genuinely had no idea how I was going to get him out of it. And so what we have in In the Dark is intertextuality to the point where the characters of the film are actually helping me figure out how to solve the problem I was having in the comic book.

Inevitably, translation must take place. From page to screen and beyond… from screen to the understanding of the audience. And yet, as on Gilgamesh, as on ANY film, the expression of the content is entirely central to the understanding which follows (or does not follow, as may be the case for poorly executed films). The production design for In the Dark, was, in many ways, still based in a sort of minimalism, although this time more inspired by Ikea than Dante Ferretti. I liked the sparseness and space of Kate’s apartment. More significant, however, were matters of light. Because so much of the movie takes place in the dark, it was necessary to find a way to make the action visible while still making it clear there was no power.

Working with Cindy Blyther, the film’s director, we arrived at a lighting setup which allowed the characters to move from pools of light cast by “candles” through darkness and emerge again sidelit by the moonlight through Kate’s venetian blinds. This was a triumph for me, personally, since this aesthetic, this film noir look of light slicing through blinds and striping skin with horizontal shadows, was something I’d tried very hard to achieve in Lost Angeles. I had succeeded in creating the effect in that film, but at the time I really had no idea how to manipulate exposure, or truly deal with light. So the darkness in Lost Angeles was mostly very grainy, very camcorder-looking. With In the Dark I felt as though I’d finally been able to achieve the effect I’d attempted four years earlier. Here the skills learned in production classes were visibly evident, and perhaps the quality of the visual is due in large part to the quality of the equipment with which it was produced. And yet I believe strongly the words of my good friend Azad Jafarian, who once told me, “It’s not the camera, it’s the mind behind it that matters.”

I awoke as though from some deep sleep to find I had willed my keepsakes, signed away what portion of me was left, to sacrifice to some other eye. This was my production, written and produced by me. And yet at its head was a small line which at once changed everything and nothing: A CINDY BLYTHER FILM.

I had, until then, been the sole creator of every film I had made, with the exception of the five-minute Little Red Riding Hood, on which I’d had a director of photography, a classmate named Roland Bailie, whose name will reappear later. For all intents and purposes, I was not, technically, the director of In the Dark. I knew going in this would be the case, and in all honesty it was perfectly fine with me, for in studio production directing meant something different than in field production. Cindy literally called the shots. Ready one, take one, ready three, take three. And so I had in fact sacrificed very little, for as producer it was my job to direct the actors, and that was what I cared about. It was I who planned and storyboarded each shot in the film, but the film would have been very different were Cindy not at the helm. In spite of how heavily scripted every shot was for the project (In the Dark has 76 specific shots in it, many of them subdivided into several sub-compositions. Shot 45, the longest in the film, went up to 45f), directorial liberties were inevitably taken, and the film is better for them. Any flaws in her direction were in some way due to flaws in my producing. So well did Cindy and I work together that finishing a sentence was often unnecessary. Once one person began a thought, the other would pick it up and run. And from this union, combined with the sound design efforts of Anita Chan, what I had seen in my head began to take form before my eyes.

Never before had I built a set, and the work was hard. In less than one week we painted ten flats, sawed furring strips into various lengths, mounted five-foot strips across from the studio wall, secured them to the flats, and finally dressed and furnished the apartment. The process was made more difficult by the fact that the spaces between the mounting strips on the studio walls were not equal or consistent. Some strips were three feet apart, others two and a half, some three and an inch… This became particularly frustrating when we realized that the distances between some of those strips actually changed slightly from the top of the studio to the floor. What this meant was that, if we measured the space near the floor and used that as the guide by which to cut our wood, we might find that our strip did not fit in its allotted space ten feet above the ground. In this situation, much profanity often ensued.

Studio, an environment traditionally associated with the production of television programming, became for us the soundstage upon which we had erected the striped blackout of Kate’s apartment. In the Dark had, by design, taken on the aesthetics of a film noir. And yet while writing and producing it, having spent ten weeks prior studying the genre of family melodrama, I recognized elements present within my own film which seemed to suggest that I was myself in the process of producing a film of that kind. It seemed strange to think that two such seemingly polar genres could be so combined. And yet, isn’t it the case with most modern family melodramas that they are themselves reconstitutions of film noir characters and themes? For it’s in the noir films of the 1930s and 40s that we see the seed lain for what will become an entire concept of commentary by allegory. From the idea of the antihero as central lead and the empowered woman as duplicitous femme fatale we move through the 50s and 60s, through the age of Ward Cleaver and Steve Douglas, past Ozzie Nelson and onto the likes of Archie Bunker and Mary Richards. By the 1970s family melodrama on television had returned to the idea of the antihero and femme fatale, reinterpreted for the times.

When Vietnam happened, the population began to question the establishment and the WASP standards against which they were placing themselves, and the younger generations, particularly women, became increasingly liberal. So it was that the empowered woman became not the threat to the male role in society, but rather the symbol of a strong, smart, capable female in a liberated time. Mary Richards would have been a femme fatale in the 30s and 40s. As a woman with a career, she would have symbolized a society off balance, and this would have resulted in her inevitable depiction as a duplicitous, manipulative female figure whose fate was predictably either death or incarceration.

With the presence of Archie Bunker as the antihero lead of All in the Family and Mary Richards as the equivalent of the femme fatale in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, popular culture had come full circle. These were still family melodramas, as they contained all the traditional elements of such a genre, but things had changed significantly and inescapably. So it was that the film noir and the family melodrama became so linked as to resurface, still as joined as Chang and Eng, in a student production.

In the Dark essentially echoed the American Playhouse style of live television drama, i.e. Requiem for a Heavyweight, and so, as a studio production which used as its inspiration a television experiment, the film was, for all intents and purposes, one modern incarnation of television film noir family melodrama.

Yet I would argue that noir was and is more a style than a genre, more defined by its aesthetic than its content. In the 30s and 40s, with many “b-pictures” produced on ridiculously low budgets, filmmakers resorted to quick setups and minimal lighting designs. A single chiaroscuro lighting setup would flood much of the frame in blackness, illuminating a single subject, at the same time concealing the shabby sets behind them. A no-budget film now developed a visual cinematic style which created the illusion of production value by way of shadows. Blackness. Hence: film noir. Along these lines, it’s simple to see how a film could be a noir science fiction film, or a noir horror film, or, yes, a noir family melodrama.

Those things that seem most revolutionary to us seem to be either totally new ideas, or the reinterpretation of older ideas into something new and original. And the latter is precisely what can be found in All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Archetypes from the 1930s and 40s resurfaced in order to expose the true threat presented by the archetypes of the 50s and 60s. What this created was a new and totally original breed of cultural iconography. The feminist. The protester. A publicized liberalism not seen since the arrival of Rock ‘N Roll. This was of course reflected in film as well, with the failure of an organized establishment or father-figure resulting in terrible crises (Terms of Endearment, The Exorcist, etc.), as well as bringing women’s issues and the empowerment of women to the forefront.

In the Dark seems in many ways a fusion of all these elements. It is a film, written and directed as though a stage play, produced in a television environment, shot in a film noir style, dealing with a familial crisis resulting from the failure of the father-figure. The crucial difference between Kate and Mary Richards is that Kate is herself threatened by the male domination of the working world, and her own antagonistic tenacity for wanting to succeed in a man’s world is directly linked to her view of the world as phalocentric and threatening. In a sense, because of the manner in which she sees the world, Kate’s feminist determination is itself one cause of the crisis.

I propose In the Dark is a theatrical melodrama centered around issues of family and shot in a noir aesthetic. Increasingly, it seems, genres are a clumsy system of film taxonomy, tending to exist less as individual categories and more as elements within other genres, perhaps resulting in a complete disintegration of genre theory and the birth of a new formalistic approach.

We carry with us no ingrained duty to preserve the endangered species of genre, for the dissolution of such classification is inevitable. Still, playing devil’s advocate, consider the term “genre,” and what do you see if not a method of categorization not unlike that with which we organize the animals of this world? Gaze then upon genre as species, and what obligation do we hold to its survival?

“In the most substantial literary theory of the last two centuries,” wrote Raymond Williams, “genre has in practice been replaced by form.” (1977, p. 186) So it is that genre, as species, is only so much false construction. And if manmade systems of organization can’t be applied to the natural world, so they can’t be applied to its manmade echo, for that echo exists in so baroque an era that one genre is in fact a composite of several rather than simply one. It therefore follows that the preservation of so inaccurate a tradition proves pointless as the very benefits of that tradition begin to fade from view. Quite clearly not limited to one medium, the replacement of genre by form is then equally as inevitable in film as in literature.

What, however, is meant by form? Don’t we gaze at the Rodin sculpture and search its skin for the fingerprints of its creator? Don’t we gaze at one another and search for the same? Aren’t all things, natural or manmade, animal or art, determined more by the intent of the mind behind them than any classification later assigned? It seems logical, then, to approach critical discussion from the perspective of authorship and, perhaps, auteur theory.

“Once the principle of directorial continuity is accepted even in Hollywood,” said Andrew Sarris, “films can never look the same again.” (1973, p. 37) Movies then become more than simply members of a generically coded species. They become texts linked together by common parentage, a common creator. One author, producing several texts, becomes a means by which to decode those texts and see within them their mirrored autobiographies. Again, the life of the artist becomes the macro-context by which to read a piece of art.

And yet perhaps it’s not enough to say that form is solely dictated by the former, that the director is the primary author of a film. For, suggests Peter Wollen, auteur theory implies more “an operation of decipherment; it reveals authors where none had been seen before.” (1969, p. 77)

Are the forms of my films then determined more by my contributions, or by those of the viewers doing the decoding? If two people can look at the same film and see it differently, do they not in fact look at two different films? And so who is the true author of any text?

In the end, however, authorship is quite clearly assigned to the former, to the director, in spite of whoever may be responsible for the decipherment. It may have been the writer who decoded the freefloating idea and translated it into a screenplay, thereby becoming the author of the film, yet Jaws doesn’t begin with the credit “A Peter Benchley Film.” Rather it’s known as “A Steven Spielberg Film.” In addition, many of the great auteurs did not, in fact, write and direct their films. Rather directors like Ford, Sirk, and Capra made themselves known as filmmakers whose personal style and intent allowed their films to transcend the characteristically cookie-cutter quality of genre films.

“Indeed,” wrote Holmes Rolston III, “biologists routinely put after a species the name of the ‘author’ who, they say, ‘erected’ the taxon.” (1985, p. 64) So it is that The Searchers is a John Ford film. And perhaps the idea of species is still useful to us, less as a means of discussing genre, but more as one of associating films with their auteur directors. For if species is indeed a manmade, subjective method of categorization, what’s to stop us from simply altering the parameters?

In the words of Darwin, “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other.” (1968, p. 108) As with the four films discussed in this volume, then, let us proceed by allowing species to represent for us not classification by genre, but rather classification by filmmaker. This makes it relatively simple to see in a filmography the face of its creator, for one may strain from the entire body of work similarities, making it possible to average out the personality of the mind behind it. With that in mind, here we go again…

The first movie I ever made was called Adventure. It was made in 1990, the year my father first brought home a video camera, and starred my sister Jessica as Sarah, an adventurer on the trail of an ancient gem. Along the way our heroine encountered a multitude of obstacles, including snakes, a two-headed dragon, and snakes again. All of this, of course, took place in our backyard, a location which, for me, had quite obviously been transformed into whatever enormous landscape across which Sarah was travelling on her quest. I was eleven when I made Adventure, and in that film (if one can call it that) can be felt, I think, the fresh mind of a boy raised on Indiana Jones and Star Wars. In spite of my complete lack of skill or knowledge at the time, there is a gentleness to those early movies, a sweetness and total absence of cynicism, that I truly love. And some part of me, perhaps the biggest part of me as a filmmaker, has always wanted to make films that captured that gentleness, as well as that sense of romantic adventure and awe I so completely adored when I was a child. So it was that all my life I’d wanted to make a film adaptation of the Richard Connell short story The Most Dangerous Game.

I was 22 when I finally decided to attempt the translation, and so the life I had until then lived inevitably suggested a compromise between gentle naivete and the topical issues I knew I wanted to discuss within the text. Yet I found it quite easy to channel the Danny Lee of years past. Never have I allowed myself to forget how it was to be a child, how it felt, what frustrated me, what I loved. And so I find myself drawn to children, feeling a comradery with them often missing in my relationships with adults who have become far too adult. As a boy, growing up in a very large family, I had never truly felt a connection with those cousins older than I. To me they exuded an alien quality, a distanced element of seemingly untouchable grownupness. And so when my cousin Sean, some thirteen years younger than I, was very little, I knew I didn’t want with him the same relationship I’d had with my older cousins.

Sean in fact grew to become one of my closest relatives and friends, the Klaus Kinski to my Werner Herzog, minus the arguments. By 22 we had already made several small movies together, and with these I attempted to portray a truly moving innocence, the innocence of wide-eyed wonder at a world whose sights and sounds were overpoweringly awesome yet completely benevolent. The Human Competition, The Mysterious Cloak, Cabin No. 5… these are films that take themselves as seriously as one would a noogie. They are fun little movies. They are the world through the eyes of an eight-year-old, and even potentially scary moments are treated with a gentle smile rather than any semblance of genuine terror.

And while a film that I knew would deal with issues of communism vs. capitalism by the very nature of its content couldn’t be as simple as the Sean films, I still wanted to imbue the film with a sense more of gentleness than true horror. To me this was a fun film, in many ways an homage to the old school of adventure movies: films such as Chang, King Kong, The Lost World, and, of course, the original 1932 adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game.

The visual style of the film was subsequently very strongly influenced by the films above, particularly King Kong, which I used as my primary reference throughout the production of Most Dangerous Game. Having studied Kong extensively in preparation for our shoot, one aspect that for me remained consistently inspiring was the chase through the jungle after Fay Wray has been rescued from Kong. Cooper and Schoedsack’s choices for when to use moving camera here are surprising when one pays close attention to them, for the majority of the chase is in fact comprised of static compositions through which the actors move rather than camera moves which follow our heroes as they run. Perhaps this made easier the job of adding King Kong to the shots in postproduction, but where I feel the use of static compositions also succeeded was in their contrast to the moving camera shots. Preceded primarily by static comps, the shot of Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray tearing through the jungle, racing straight at the camera, is intensely exciting.

In MDG, I attempted to mirror this effect by having my actors, Aldo Billingslea and Daniel Maloney, chase one another through compositions that, for the most part, did not move with them. The major exception quite clearly occurs when Count Zaroff (Maloney) has spotted Rainsford (Billingslea) in his hiding spot, and Rainsford takes off running. We then cut to a series of shots in which the camera tracks alongside the hunter and prey, intercutting the two to the point where it is no longer clear who is chasing whom. It is an intense series of shots that I feel successfully works to crescendo at the moment when Rainsford’s hand becomes caught in a fox trap. We watch unblinking as he struggles to escape in a perfectly static shot from which we do not quickly cut away, effectively trapping the viewer along with our hero.

The intercutting of the running shots, masked by cuts made with the passing of trees in the foreground, was a technique I had used earlier, in Little Red Riding Hood. And this use of recurring techniques raises the issue of motifs and their influence on directorial style.

“Do we know what we are doing and why?”

“No.”

“Do we care?”

“We’ll work it out as we go along. Let our practice form our doctrine, thus assuring precise theoretical coherence.”

Edward Abbey

The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

In my freshman year of college, the year I made Lost Angeles, I was a student at Loyola Marymount University, and while there I acted in a friend’s short film. In this film, I played both Death and a doctor. And I had myself arrived at a reason for it in my own head, although the director, Matt Jillson, had never explicitly told me why I was playing both parts. When the film was screened before professors and students, one instructor questioned Matt as to why he’d had the same person play both parts. And Matt replied by saying, “I needed another actor, and I didn’t think anyone would notice.” What I learned from Matt was this: don’t feign that there is some grand design when none was intended. Be honest.

In my own films, more often than not, when something is done in a certain way I am aware of why I am doing it that way. Although I also admit to having learned this skill by way of significant experimentation and many, many accidents. I mean many accidents. And yet, as time has passed, I have grown to rely less on serendipity and more on the skills learned from it. I watch my own films a lot. And when watching them, I pay close attention to how certain things were done and whether or not my approach was successful. This, I think, is one of the key processes for me in developing a style, because I see in my own work what I like, keep it, discard the rest, and try not to make the same mistakes twice. Elements and ideas I like are repeated in subsequent films, and so become part of my style, I suppose. They become visual and stylistic motifs.

The closing shots in MDG are virtually exact copies of the closing shots in Lost Angeles, and in fact when preparing for that day of shooting on MDG, I showed my director of photography, Stephen Kozlowski, the final five minutes of the earlier film as a reference. Figures backlit against a stark white sky had become, for me, a visual motif, one that, after Lost Angeles, had already reappeared in several of my films (dreams of the apple, The Messiah, Sunnyvale, Untitled No. 4, Gilgamesh, and MDG).

Yet there are other significant motifs that have at this point so frequently recurred in my work that I find my films are often identified with them. These include:

• bird(s) moving across an often overcast sky

• fields of waving grass

• the ocean or, in lieu of an ocean, a lake or river

• spiders

In addition, I also find that I have a tendency to stage sex scenes in the outdoors, in nature. In Gilgamesh Enkidu is seduced by Shamhat in the forest and the two copulate in the dirt. The Little Red Riding Hood wolf orgy occurs in the forest. In MDG Rainsford and Ariana make love in a field of grass. Were one to press the issue, Ocean Blue (a piece within dreams of the apple) juxtaposes images of the nude female body with those of the ocean. The exception is clearly Lost Angeles, and for good reason, as the film takes place in an industrial, manmade environment. Although one could, perhaps, argue that Richter and Catherine make love in a “concrete jungle.”

And it’s in nature, in the openness of the fields or under the canopy of the jungle, that my characters often experience their most significant changes. It is here that their transformations are most vividly, and most literally, evinced. Albert Camus called the desert “a soulless place where the sky alone is king.” (1955, p. 165) Uruk in Gilgamesh for me was not a desert, but there indeed the sky alone was king. The sky in fact became the predominant symbolic visual motif in the film, an omniscient, omnipresent eye gazing down unblinking at the actions of our characters. The sky, the sun, the sound of thunder: the presence of gods at work. Gilgamesh screams at the sun, it is his enemy, and the closer he gets to it the madder he becomes.

And yet the wilderness is still more than simply the stage upon which characters play out their dramatic arcs. It is precisely what its name implies: the domain of the wild. So it is that in nature man is reduced to his most primal, most animalistic, self.

Therein lies a major thematic motif found in my films, one influenced strongly by stories like Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies. Those are tales that have always fascinated me, about how people change when lost in the wild. Or, more specifically in my films, how people change when forced to behave animalistically. “What have I become?” Rainsford asks at the end of MDG, having descended through the course of the film to the level of animal. He has been hunted like a tiger, he has cut off his own hand to escape a trap, and he has finally murdered a man.

The same idea can be seen in Gilgamesh, for it’s in the jungle that Gilgamesh reaches the apex of his insanity, but also, in perhaps a less expected way, in In the Dark. What are the rioters outside Kate’s apartment if not animals, people reduced to primitivism in a state of anarchy? And if it can be said that in the end Kate throws her father to the wolves, are these wolves not extensions of those in Little Red Riding Hood? This analogy was, of course, a complete and total coincidence.

What is not an accident is the primary thematic motif of my films. Since Lost Angeles, I have been acutely aware of the fact that just about every film I have made is essentially about the question of fate vs. free will.

In Gilgamesh, the focal point of the story is Gilgamesh’s search for a means by which to live forever, thereby defeating death and exerting free will over his predetermined fate. Siduri tells him that it’s the destiny of humans to die. Why not enjoy life while you can? But Gilgamesh is determined to reach Utnapishtim, the one person who can grant him immortality.

In In the Dark, Kate sees herself becoming someone she doesn’t like, someone very much like her father. And so she tries, like Gilgamesh, to beat fate, to take her life into her own hands and become a different person. Isn’t this the same thing Richard is trying to do? Is either one successful? This question has already been addressed.

In MDG, fate and free will are the canvas upon which I paint the allegory of socialism vs. capitalism. The two have an inevitable analogous relationship, one often contradictory in itself. In the Marxist philosophies we find the concept of a base (economy) and superstructures (all else influenced by economy). And its very groundwork is that of predestination, a determinism which dictates that economy will determine ideology.

In capitalism we find the groundwork that every man is, in the end, for himself. You are born in your environment, either rich or poor, and you go from there. The American Dream, after all, is about the ascension within stratified social classes, the basis upon which capitalism is founded. You determine your own destiny. You have free will.

In communism all practice their ideal task in service of the greater ruling body, and as such support the ideology that one is meant to do a certain thing. And so, because the structure is so defined by the single voice of the ruling body rather than by the voices of the many, there is, in spite of itself, a definite loss of individuality. People become automatons, commodities.

Now, one might say that the flaw in the metaphor is that in both situations there reside contradictions, to the point where one must question who is truly the communist and who is truly the capitalist. Taking, for example, the concept of applying a Marxist framework to the media and pop culture of America suggests that the undercurrent, or rather the subtext, of all American society is based upon a lie. All men are not created equal, for in fact the ruling body will determine what you can watch, or rather how you will perceive it. The implication is that the media is not owned and operated by the people, but by greater entities bent on manipulation, on the systematic brainwashing of the American population.

In MDG this analogy, and the contradiction, is illustrated by means of hunting. Rainsford’s argument is that a person is either born the hunter or the hunted, and that hunting is a sort of yin-yang balance between the two. He adds that the class – or species – into which a man is born will in some way determine his destiny. Zaroff argues that it is up to the individual to determine his own destiny. He goes on to suggest that because man chose, long ago, to be the hunter, we therefore have the right to hunt. We have chosen our role.

The irony here is that the American is preaching fate and the socialist is advocating free will. And in an early draft of the script I actually had Zaroff stop and ask Rainsford, “Which of us is the socialist?” But then, of course Rainsford would have been forced to reply with, “Which of us is the capitalist?” And by that point the flow of the scene would have been thrown off and their debate would have become even longer than it currently is.

As it is, their discussion is admittedly based on a primitive understanding of Marxism, one which, while I admit to being nothing resembling an expert, has since then grown, and so I see with greater clarity the flaws in Rainsford and Zaroff’s debate.

Fundamentally, socialism as fate is grounded in the idea of base and superstructure. But it isn’t enough to simply let that sit, for, if a good deal of this thesis is influenced by structuralist thought, we must consider the interpretations of Althusser. And while he himself denied being a structuralist, his work greatly affects us when we discuss story and discourse.

Althusser believed the superstructure was not solely determined by the base, specifically that the relationship between the two was not one-way, but rather reciprocal. That is to say, the economy of a nation may determine its ideology, but the nation’s ideology will also determine its economy. And while a discussion of Althusser’s complex divisions of base and superstructure are far too tangential for our purposes, it is crucial to note his central point: “that societies have to be thought of in terms of relations between structures rather than an essence and its expressions.” (1995, p. 148)

What does this mean, then, for content and expression? Paint the base and superstructure model beside that of story and discourse, and Piaget’s self-regulation model is, for all intents and purposes, blown away. For the production and narrative design of Gilgamesh and MDG then have the capability of completely altering the integrity of the source material to the point where the content has been totally changed by its expression.

At what point does my translation then become an original composition? At what point does a recontextualization of any material, of any subject, become defamiliarization? And so can’t the same happen to an actual event? Can’t a contemporary moment become just as recontextualized as the story of Gilgamesh?

By now all who might cast their eyes upon these words live in a world where terrorists have flown hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, resulting in the death of thousands. To this the United States, along with foreign allies, have retaliated against those believed to be responsible, resulting in the death of thousands more. To this the documentary production class in which I was enrolled just days after the event responded by producing a quartet of documentaries dealing with the incident.

In many ways Untitled No. 7 was a return to a style of filmmaking with which I had experimented prior to Gilgamesh, and so represented a sort of full circle for me: a reengagement of non-narrative montage.

And it’s important prior to discussing Untitled No. 7 (as well as its precursor, a film called Chair) to first establish a common ground from which to approach the concept of montage, or at least, for us, to reinforce and perhaps redefine the common ground that has heretofore been established. Dialectical montage has already been defined herein as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis… yet from what distant shore do we glean this idea? From that of Russia, homeland to Count Zaroff and Sergei Eisenstein, enigmatic figures both, to be sure.

Film form cannot exist solely as a collection of beautifully photographed individual compositions, says Eisenstein, for when combined these exhibit themselves as little more than a series of fragmented shots, each fine in itself yet not relating with those that either precede or succeed it. And yet it isn’t enough to say that a single shot is merely

… an element of montage. The shot is a montage cell. Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage. By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell—the shot? By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision. (1949, p. 37)

By this Eisenstein suggests meaning is created through the juxtaposition of opposing images. We return to the vantage point of Kuleshov, see its conflict with that of Eisenstein: the building blocks, or bricks, of montage, each “arranged in series to expound an idea,” (37) vs. a theory of collision, and find that both inevitably result in a film form in which two shots — bricks or cells — influence one another to imbue a third shot with added meaning. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Context creates meaning.

So it was that in my sophomore year of college I attempted an experiment against the very fabric of montage which we so take for granted. In Chair, shots are not combined so as to create meaning, but rather to refuse the imposition of meaning on the part of the viewer. One struggles to decode, and when he is faced with the realization that decoding isn’t possible in any conventional way, he is left with a complete rupture of his sense of dialectical logic. More often than not, people become really frustrated with the film. Really frustrated.

In the first of my two senior years, I exhibited Chair as a video installation in a student art show. There I learned something very interesting: even when there is no dialectical logic among shots, the viewer will often attempt to impose one anyway. What this left me with was an audience of friends who, upon seeing the film, either took away some strange meaning of their own (which was fine by me) or demanded angrily that I not only explain the film, but also justify its existence.

About six months after making Chair I saw the Stan Brakhage film Dog Star Man for the first time, and in many ways felt validated. It was then that the thought occurred to me: as a piece of art, should Chair need validation? Shouldn’t it be justifiable in itself? I posed this question to Brakhage himself, and his somewhat less-than-satisfying answer was something along the lines of, “Well, I’m the sort of person who can talk very easily. And I can very easily defend my films.” But it didn’t really answer my question.

In Untitled No. 7, shots quite obviously interact to create among them greater meaning. And so in the film I was not only taking advantage of the dialectical logic we take for granted but also attempting to stretch out that dialectical relationship across many, many shots rather than simply a few. At first this doesn’t seem like so difficult an experiment, but it was. For throughout the film were interwoven recurring themes and motifs, shots both expounding an idea and colliding to create one. And these spanned the face of whole sequences of the film, moving gradually from one larger idea to another, and doing so by means of subtle changes in the meanings of shots.

Here I’d like to demonstrate this point by providing a sort of running commentary of intended meaning for one small portion of the film’s central sequence:

Bird flying across the sky Bird building a nest Hands sculpting clay World Trade Center collapsing Waterfall Espresso pouring into cups 2 men in a coffee shop sitting before a US flag Airplane hitting the World Trade Center Man and woman kissing Baby being born Man swimming Sharks swimming People at an aquarium Father and daughter looking into a fish tank Crowd of people walking School of fish swimming Fish being tossed at Pike Place Man working at Fisherman’s Wharf crabstand Retail worker behind the counter “America: Open For Business” sign US flag on a car antenna Jack in the Box antenna ball Mickey Mouse US flag antenna ball Time-lapse of people in mall Cash changing hands Credit card changing hands ATM ejecting cash American flag Hand grasping the flagpole Hand grasping a gun Hand opens, dead goldfish inside

A visual motif used to transition from the assault of the film’s opening to this piano sequence, as well as to the next shot, which also stars a bird, this time flying into the frame and adding to a nest. Cut from this to hands sculpting clay and we have 2 shots about creation, construction. Cut from these to the destruction of the WTC and then to a waterfall. This was a very Buddhist idea for me, and I originally wanted to cut from the building falling to a leaf falling from a tree, the idea being that the building falling is just like a leaf or water falling: both happen in an instant, both are natural. Another liquid falls, this time espresso, taking us into the coffee shop, where 2 middle-eastern men (pure chance) sit composed against a US flag. The plane hits the building, not an indictment of the men in the previous shot, but rather a sign of the everyday quality of crisis. A man and woman kiss, a baby is born. Life goes on in spite of major human tragedies. The original title of this film was Even at the End of the World You Still Have to Do the Dishes. Our documentary instructor disliked this title, feeling it was too long, so I subsequently changed it to Untitled No. 7 (Even at the End of the World You Still Have to Do the Dishes) as a bit of a joke. Eventually the long title was dropped altogether when I began feeling like we were spoonfeeding meaning to the audience. I wanted them to view the film with no preconceptions spawned by a title. From the transcendence of birth we cut to the transcendence of swimming, almost like being in the womb. Cut to sharks swimming. This is the beginning of a major theme in this sequence: fish as a metaphor for people. It is a theme carried through the following shots, supported most strongly by the cut from a crowd of people to a school of fish, from which we cut to dead fish being thrown at Pike Place, a harbinger of the retail value of death, continued at the crabstand counter. Cut to a retail worker behind her own counter: if anything goes on in spite of crises, it’s business. In fact, businesses will profit from the crisis itself. Originally I wanted to include here a shot of a man selling American flags in a parking lot, but by the time we’d retrieved our gear and returned to the location, he was gone. The point is still made by cutting to the antenna flag, a symbol which has by now become as commercial as Jack in the Box or Mickey Mouse. People zoom through the mall without a moment’s pause, a continuation of the hurried rush I had juxtaposed with Tai Chi in the film’s opening sequence: this was the attempt to find peace amid chaos. Here the chaos has taken over, and people move as though motivated by a sole desire: commerce. And so money changes hands. When it’s gone, we go to the ATM for more. Here is my biggest disappointment about this film: originally after the ATM shot there was supposed to be a shot of a homeless man asking for money right next to an ATM, with people pulling cash out of the machines only feet away. I loved this shot. And it was lost, misplaced by my director of photography. To me the absence of that shot seriously affects this transition in the film. The cut to the flag is a summation of that which has come before: commerce as a result of tragedy is one sort of unfortunate nationalism that resulted from the WTC attack. But the most crucial type is that which is represented in the next 3 shots. Here the idea of fish as a metaphor for people returns, and the hand opens to reveal the product of reactionary nationalism: dead people. It is no accident that the hand grasping the flagpole and the hand grasping the gun both belong to white men, and that the hand holding the dead fish is black. It is also no accident that the gun is pointing at the black man. This is an idea echoed later with the specters of Japanese internment. History, endlessly repeating itself, finds itself the continual bearer of racial hatred.

Several weeks after the terrorist attack, I found myself sitting beside my father watching a televised Q & A between a crowd full of high school and college students, as well as several entertainment personalities, and Rudolph Giuliani. At one point Gideon Yago, an MTV News anchor, questioned Giuliani as to the ramifications of unquestioned American retaliation against the people of Afghanistan. “Wouldn’t a peaceful discourse be ideal?” Yago asked. Before I could hear the mayor’s response, my father angrily pushed himself up off the couch and said, “Give me a break. They killed six thousand people. Go over there and kick their asses.”

Untitled No. 7 was, for me, a serious criticism of this kind of thinking. The reactionary nationalism which emerged as a result of the attack began to grow and grow until American pride became synonymous with revenge and those who did not favor war were seen as un-American.

What surprised me was that very few people saw the film as an anti-war piece. All who viewed it picked up on the idea that life goes on in spite of major human crises, but almost no one who saw it read it as a criticism of any kind, except perhaps of commercialism. Did I fail as a filmmaker?

Untitled No. 7 is, in the context of this thesis, clearly unique in that it is the most experimental — and so seemingly out of sync with all that has by now been established as consistent stylistic characteristics — of the films herein discussed. Yet in it can be found every single visual and thematic motif that has until now been mentioned. Birds, ocean, grass, spiders, figures backlit against the sky… all of these appear in the film. But this is not all.

There is a choice presented in this film, one centered on whether or not we will succumb to war or persevere by finding peace amid the chaos. Will we destroy one another, or will we look to the horizon with the eyes of a child, full of love and wonder? The film’s final sequence, in which a diverse population of faces gazes out at the viewer, is precisely a statement about choice. It’s up to us to save ourselves. We shouldn’t simply allow history to repeat itself. We shouldn’t allow fate to determine our destinies. We have free will.

Must intentionality permeate the deepest aspect of production? Although I was aware that Untitled No. 7 was about fate vs. free will, at no point did I communicate this to either Mariah Dyen, my producer, or Roland Bailie, my director of photography. Having tried explaining all intended subtext to my cast and crew on MDG, I found that quite often even those working on a project are not completely interested in what may, for the writer or director, lie beneath the surface.

So I find that discretion must often be applied when deciding how much to reveal even to those with whom you are working. Not only does this prevent the director from appearing pretentious by talking about the film’s metaphors, it also allows those working on a project to bring to the table their own ideas and interpretations.

This, however, can also be a problem. On Untitled No. 7 juxtaposition of imagery was crucial to the creation of the film’s meaning. And so for me as editor every frame had to relate in a very specific way to the frame before it as well as the frame following. For Mariah, who is by nature a photographer, the individual aesthetics of a composition often appeared more important than their meaning when associated with other images. And so she would frequently suggest shot combinations which, while beautiful, would have drastically altered the meaning of the montage. Therein lies the rub, for it is a fine line between allowing your crew to interpret the film in their own way and allowing them to completely change the film’s meaning. It’s therefore important to make sure the goals of the film are communicated, so that everyone involved is on the same page.

It’s a different thing to work with a team on a film like Untitled No. 7 than to work with one on In the Dark or MDG, or work alone on a film like Gilgamesh. I began Gilgamesh as a project for a class on near-eastern mythology, and continued work on it after the class ended simply because I loved the story and the film so much. It was sheer luck that the film was suggested for an independent study project, and the metamorphosis the film took in many ways allowed me to spend an entire quarter of a school year simply editing the film. Without a crew I was able to work very fast, but also take my time to get certain moments down right. So it happened that Gilgamesh represented the first time the final product mirrored almost exactly what I’d had in my head while writing the screenplay. To this day it remains my favorite of my films.

So well did Cindy Blyther and I work together on In the Dark that I asked her to produce MDG, and between her and Steve Kozlowski, it was the single greatest collaborative experience I’ve had on a film. Never before had I had the kind of confidence I had in Cindy and Koz, to the point where I could truly delegate a responsibility and feel confident it would get done.

The first week of making MDG was one of the most intense of the whole production, for in that week the entire preproduction book for the film had to be completed, as shooting had to begin right away. So it was that we divided up the jobs to be done among the three of us, and became a well-oiled machine. One of the jobs given to Koz was the drawing up of the storyboards. This was a mistake, for as he began sketching them out, it immediately became clear that his drawings were not matching up with what I had in my head. So I took over the task, and at that moment realized how crucial storyboarding had become to my process.

I have used storyboards ever since Lost Angeles, but it was with Little Red Riding Hood that I began storyboarding virtually every shot in my movies. It became a necessity, especially when working with directors of photography or other camera operators. For me the best way to communicate a shot idea or composition is to show it. Forethought, previsualization, what Wim Wenders calls “prefabrication,” these become crucial.

Although there may be no way around it, one flaw of any film school is the problem of time constraints on equipment and locations. For MDG, we’d spend a good hour prepping a shot, lighting it and so on, rehearsing it, then have only enough time to get a certain number of shots. The result is seven minute scenes that are all shot and reverse-shot, as was the case with Rainsford and Zaroff’s long debate. We didn’t have the time to achieve some of the more complicated setups I’d had in mind for that scene.

In any case, what results is a school of auteur filmmakers all making films in the studio way. Very fast, very based on what will work in a hurry. It’s curious then that the emphasis is often on development of style. This is not Lawrence of Arabia. No student filmmaker can afford to get only one shot a day. What this means, of course, is that the emphasis is placed heavily on preproduction. Planning will make you or break you, and in pretty much all instances it made us. The only few times things became a little sloppy were when, pressed for time, we had to do things very kamikaze, like the truck across the hallway after Rainsford and Zaroff have first met, a poorly lit, out-of-focus shot which still frustrates me. And these are flaws which cannot be fixed in postproduction.

In the editing of MDG, there was a great deal of discussion about how much of the long den conversation was necessary for the story. Some, specifically the instructor of the class for which the film was produced, felt the den scene was too long, too tangential, and too static. For my part, I invoke the words of Quentin Tarantino, who, speaking on the editing of Pulp Fiction, said, “it’s the constant process of whittling it down and then saying, ‘Nope, I know we could lose this and no one would know it was lost,’ but I would know, and it’s not just because I’m holding onto my baby—it’s supposed to work that way.” (2000, p. 129)

The conversation between Rainsford and Zaroff was one of the main reasons I wanted to make the film in the first place. To have lost it, to have cut it down, to have excised from it the meat of philosophical and political discussion would have been to eliminate the anchor of the film, the heart. The static quality of the scene was in part due to the aforementioned time constraint. Still, the scene does look very much like what I’d seen while writing it, and when I sit down and watch the film today I find that, given the chance, I more than likely would not change it.

That said, I’m now distanced from the film by nearly a year, and although I love it, when I watch the den scene today I’m forced to ask myself some hard questions. Many with whom I’ve spoken about the film did understand the idea of fate vs. free will as represented by socialism vs. capitalism. But did anybody pick up on the swap of roles? Even if they had would they have cared?

What I learned from the making of MDG is that the film itself is not always the best place to directly engage theory in the way I did. I found that even people who were interested in their conversation didn’t necessarily want to sit through a seven minute scene about it. Viewers were anxious to get to the good stuff: people hunting each other. And the debate seemed only to get in the way of the story.

But then the pragmatics of production often exist in contradiction to whatever theory a filmmaker may be consciously attempting to exercise. It was also Wim Wenders who said that prior to shooting a film, a director never knows what the film is going to look or feel like. He may have a general idea, things he’s discussed with his DP, of the aesthetic of the film, but on the first day of shooting he is confronted with reality and everything he has planned changes.

For me directing is more a craft than anything else, not unlike acting. You know your theory to the point where it becomes your referent, even when absent. You have to learn it, and then forget it. That way even when you don’t realize it, there is theory behind your technique. It isn’t as though I’m on location prepping a shot and actively thinking about Althusser. Yet I also feel that whether one focuses more on just getting it done or directly dealing with theory depends on the film. Each project requires a specific approach. I couldn’t have shot MDG in the same way I shot Chair. These are questions of aesthetics and technique that must be asked at the beginning of any project, in the preproduction stage.

The preproduction for Untitled No. 7 was different than that for MDG. I had scripted early on an outline for what became the central sequence of the film, but since so many of the on-the-fly shots were impossible to anticipate, storyboarding did not apply. The hand holding the flagpole, the hand on the gun, the hand with the fish… these shots are quite