Odorless&Transparent

"the deadliest bullshit is odorless and transparent" - William Gibson

Friday, June 11, 2004

i started re-reading mamet's "on directing film" eventhough my roomate hid it from me, b/c he though mamet's influence was hampering our ability to write together. he might be right, but there were a few quotes i wanted to get right in my head as touchstones:

"the movie, finally, is much closer than the play to simple storytelling. if you listen to the way people tells tories, you will hear that they tell them cinematically. they jump from one thing to the next, and the story is moved along by the juxtaposition of images - which is to say the CUT."

this is totally true if you pay attention. people don't worry about transitions, they don't match cut. they go from detail to detail, backwards and forwards and tangentally.

mamet's demands that the images in a given scene or montage be uniflected and without value judgement.

"the images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting. and most of them are uninflected. it is their juxaposition that gives the dream its strength. the terror and the beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrealted mundanities of life."

"the shots are all you have. that's it. your choice of the shots is all you have. it's what the movie is going to be made up of. you can't make it more interesting when you get to the editing room....keep giving yourself over to the simple task. the dedication will give you great satisfaction. the very fact that you have forsworn the cult of self for a little while -the cult of how interesting you and your consciousness are - will communicate itself to the audience. and they will be appreciative in the extreme and give you the benefit of every doubt."

"the purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. if you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free. that's true creativity. if not, you will be fettered by your conscious mind. because the conscious mind always wants to be liked and to be interesting. the conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliche, because these things offer the security of having succeeded in the past. only the mind that has been taken off itself and put on task is allowed true creativity."


0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home