Cinema Today

Elena Oumano

Published by Rutgers University Press

Oumano, Elena.
Cinema Today: A Conversation with Thirty-nine Filmmakers from around the World.
Rutgers University Press, 2011.
Project [Link]/book/890.

For additional information about this book

[Link]

[ Access provided at 15 May 2020 01:06 GMT from JHU Libraries ]

4

Cinematic Rhythm and Structure

Cinema’s ability to defy ordinary limits of time and space means that a
film’s structure can be as complex as an architectural space, with various
angles of entry and points of view, hidden rooms, and twisting, turning
passageways. Some films are labyrinths in which the viewer searches for
resolution, a way out, while other films are like big, empty rooms in which
everything is visible. The viewer enters through the front door, looks and
listens for a while, and then exits through the back door, often promptly
forgetting whatever he or she has experienced.
Rhythm, what some filmmakers refer to as a film’s music, greatly influ-
ences a film’s structure, and vice versa. Rhythm gives flow to a film that can
carry the viewer throughout, even when the film’s structure is labyrinthine,
dispensing with exposition and neat resolutions and creating an apparent
discontinuity in order to invite viewers to enter the film and fill in from
their own experiences whatever is “missing.” Together, structure and
rhythm contribute to a film’s meaning, emotion, and fluidity.
A film’s structure and rhythm can be written into the script and/or
come from many elements within shots—machinery, animals, the move-
ment and language of humans, passing shadows, light flashing through
objects, and diegetic music, that is, music present in the scene, such as
when a character listens to a car radio. A fi lm can also draw rhythms
from nondiegetic music on the sound track or from the natural tempos
of the culture in which the film is set. Of course, a film’s rhythms often
emerge from the continuity (or discontinuity) of the scenes and sequences
that constitute the story. The rushes, the daily shots, are usually out of

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sequence due to shooting schedules organized by location rather than by

story sequence, although some filmmakers prefer shooting in sequence so
that cast and crew can develop a keener sense of the story. In any case, the
film often takes on a certain rhythm from the continuity (or discontinuity,
if that is the desired effect) and the lengths of various shots as the film-
maker works with the rushes during the edit. Most filmmakers agree that,
as a powerful yet ineffable cinematic element, rhythm is more a matter of
instinct than intellect, so a filmmaker often finds his or her way to a film’s
rhythms intuitively.
Some contemporary movies are influenced by the kinetic pace and
busy structures of music videos and television commercials, with their
short takes and many sharp edits. Shooting commercials and music videos
teaches filmmakers and viewers a kind of cinematic shorthand—how to
say something quickly and vividly and sell a product or a story in fifteen
seconds or so—an experience that can sharpen directors and audiences.
However, when that style is used in a limited way—for example, just to tell
the story and ensure audience attention—the result is a superficial film
that might as well be a commercial advertisement.
The filmmakers here rely on the more subtle agency of a film’s rhythms,
knowing that if the rhythms of a film coalesce and work with its entire
expressive complex, viewers can be launched straight into the messy life
of a film’s subject and become involved, even if they enter in the middle
of the narrative or if they are confronted with the element of unreality in
a fantasy film. They will follow along, again injecting personal experiences
that echo the filmic experience in order to help themselves identify more
with the characters. Finding a film’s true rhythms is so crucial that, for
many filmmakers, it really means that they’ve arrived at the final edit.

Lance Hammer
Everything about Ballast (2008) was subservient to conveying accurately the
feeling of being in the Delta. The pace of the Deep South is different from
the pace in cities. The rhythms are slow and people have time, so I wanted
the rhythms of the editing to reflect that. It’s funny because there is a lot
of jump-cutting in Ballast, but I was trying to make that seem not frenetic,
so the jump cuts occur within an entire piece that is languid.
Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996) changed my life because I
realized what is allowable in film language, what people would accept,
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and I felt liberated as a filmmaker by seeing Lars von Trier totally and
purposely defy continuity. Dogma has liberated filmmakers from the
tyranny of Hollywood and preciousness, and I’m a big fan of reduction and
stripping away everything that’s not essential. Mark Hollis, a musician,
says if you can use one note to say something, why use three? Why not let
that one note reverberate and resonate across space and time and truly
understand its subtleties? Robert Bresson, my true hero, also insisted on
economizing—showing something in the simplest form and leaving space
for it to exist so you have time to consider it. If you have fourteen things
happening, that one thing will be lost or diluted. But if you just focus on
that one thing, it has the potential to be very powerful. Dogma basically
says we don’t need all this noise. Let’s talk about the essence of the story,
the essence of the shot. Let’s not put all this other shit in between that
expression and this expression. Let’s cut out every frame in between and
show just those two things. You move faster in time, and you don’t waste
so much eye space watching all these unnecessary frames. Even though
continuity and editing techniques tell you that you should put all that in,
you don’t need it. It’s unimportant; people will understand, because that’s
the way life is.

Pablo Larrain
I hate when I see a film and can tell what’s going to happen. If you always
follow what you should do, it kills the film because you don’t let it fly away
on its own wings. Although Tony Manero (2008) has a classic, Aristotelian
structure with three acts—a beginning, middle, and end—the film doesn’t
look classic in any sense, because every time you think something is going
in a particular direction, it twists and goes elsewhere. I didn’t do that to
manipulate but because I felt that’s the way it should be.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa
The truth is, I didn’t place a lot of weight on the concept of sonata for Tokyo
Sonata (2008). It takes place in Tokyo, there’s piano music at the end, and
“Tokyo sonata” had a super nice ring to it. But I did look up what “sonata”
means. It’s three or four pieces of music combined into a single, coherent
whole. My film has four central characters, and their dramas unfold inde-
pendently in the world. From time to time the characters come together to
share a meal, so I had to think a lot about the ideal way to structure this. It
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wasn’t as if one story was more important than another or one came first,
so I had to figure out the best combination for telling the individual stories
within the context of all four. It did make a difference in the way I cut the
film, in that I took fewer liberties in scene transitions and I stitched the
various scenes together meticulously. For example, I didn’t cut to scene B
until I was confident that scene A would be fully digested by the audience.
I didn’t want to leave a mystery about what was going on in scene A before
moving on to scene B, which would have been a rough editing style, just
moving along and pushing the film and leaving people wondering what they
had just seen. So I took my time to make sure that the audience understood
exactly what was going on in each scene.
I had always planned to end Tokyo Sonata with the piano recital, but in
my screenplay the boy just stops playing. So the real conundrum was what
to do after the music stops. I knew there wouldn’t be a standing ovation,
but people wouldn’t ignore the performance and walk out either. Right
before shooting, I couldn’t figure out what came in between. So the film’s
ending, where the boy and his family leave and the audience stays in the
room, is an abstract representation of watching over whatever will happen
to this family in the future because no problems have been resolved. To
me, it felt like the most honest position we are in as an audience, which
is that we just have to hold our breaths as we watch what we imagine will
unfold later.

Lucrecia Martel
Of course, everything in my films is planned, it’s artificial, but I believe that
everything goes through the body. There’s this idea that thoughts are intel-
lectual, but in my opinion, they’re not. They’re shaped by our perceptions
of time, rhythm, and tone, and so they’re really physical by nature. I believe
it’s naïve to say that this film is intellectual and that film is not intellectual.
In fact, there’s nothing more intellectual than commercial Hollywood films,
in the sense that they are like chess games, a series of thoughts that predict
what’s going to happen next.

Bette Gordon
You find the rhythm more in the editing room. In the writing, there’s a text,
but the pages are a blueprint for something else. It’s not really the thing
itself. For me, shooting is gathering information, everything I’m going to
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need. Getting into the editing room means construction and reconstruction,
so rhythm plays when we’re there.
It’s hard to teach. People have taught filmmaking using an analytical
projector, looking at each scene, each frame, and at the rhythm. But that’s
an analytical process used only by people who analyze films. As a director,
I never think about that. I use my instinct in the editing room to feel the
rhythm, and the more you watch it, the more you feel it.
I don’t think you can teach rhythm. You either have it or you don’t.
It’s something you have to feel and understand. Another way you feel it is
with an audience. That’s why people do the good kind of test screenings,
where you invite friends or random people into a screening room. It’s not
about “Did you like this or that,” but sensing how they respond to the way
in which the story’s told, to the rhythm, the timing. When they lose focus,
you can feel it in the room. When they’re sitting up and paying attention,
you can feel that too. As in oral storytelling, if I’m telling you a story, I
know when I’m losing your attention. You can feel that between people,
so a director has to feel that with the audience. That’s why you have to
test it with people. Even if you have only one person in the editing room,
you are now experiencing it through that person’s eyes, and you see where
things lose steam, where they gain momentum, and where they’re too long
or short.

Ivo Trajkov
I especially find the rhythm in the editing. Actually, sometimes I work as an
editor, as a doctor in the editing room for other films. I love that profession
because I love that period in making a film. Sometimes you actually shoot
something that you didn’t realize you shot, because so many circumstances
hit that frame during that moment. Suddenly, something is happening in
front of that camera, and often you’re not aware of it. So you need time after
the shooting and before the edit to forget about being the director, just as
you have to forget you are a writer after you’ve written the script (if you’re
the auteur) and before the shooting to avoid the danger of becoming stuck
in that first idea of it.
I’m saying this because I need a longer time to forget what I have in my
mind in order to discover what’s really there. Sometimes I need to listen to
that material—“Oh, this is interesting”—because it offers me a particular
direction and I start to follow that way. Of course, you need time for that.
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With genre films, though, it’s almost impossible because the rules are so
strict that you can’t play with the rhythm. It’s four weeks to edit and that’s
it. In auteur films, there’s time to listen and feel shots, to realize what’s
there and then try to go a different way, even if it’s different from what you
originally thought during the shooting.

Céline Sciamma
Rhythm matters most. I told my actors in Water Lilies (2007) to say the
dialogue in a flat way because that’s not a matter of tone but of rhythm.
To me, it’s all a matter of rhythm, and even tone is a matter of rhythm. For
example, if you speak fast, you tend to sing a little. I was shooting moments,
and I used a lot of long takes from a single angle, so I needed the rhythm
to be true in the shoot because I wasn’t going to create the rhythm in
the editing room. That’s why I was always telling my young actors things
like “Lift your head,” “Look right”—really coordinating their movements,
especially with Pauline, who played Marie. She has a lot of scenes where
she’s alone and doesn’t talk, so I created a rhythm with her as she acted. It
was a kind of choreography. Cinema is very much about the rhythm, and
that’s what makes the difference.
I contrasted the rhythm of the actors with the rhythms of the sound
track music, the electronica and the music that accompanied the girls’
synchronized swimming, as well as with the rhythm of the editing. I
wanted the movie to go fast, one hour and a half in all, a kind of pop
thing. I didn’t want any useless scenes so that the film would be fluid and
no one would get bored. The film features a character faced by obstacles,
which gives the viewer a sense of classical drama, and I combined that
overall rhythm with the rhythm of each of the scenes. A good example
of combining two rhythms is the scene in the locker room where Marie
says to Florianne, “I’m going to do what you asked me to do”—deflower
her. The scene is long, there’s a lot of silence; but after she says “I’m
going to do it,” there’s a cut, and then the viewer is in the bedroom as
they’re doing it.

Anne Le Ny
Rhythm is almost everything in a film, and it’s an element where you feel
the director most because it’s one of the most organic elements of a film. I
was impressed by François Truffaut’s La peau douce (Soft Skin, 1964), where
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there are lots of shots of doors opening and closing and keys turning—let’s
say, shots that are not of extraordinary interest but that make you feel the
rhythm of the director’s heartbeat.
I didn’t know about editing at all when I made Those Who Remain
(2007), because actors are not invited to the edit. Maybe that’s one reason
there are not many shots in my film, but it’s also my reaction against this
fashion of editing films with shots that last no more than five seconds. And
it was also my way to control the rhythm. So although I could say I don’t
think of the rhythm, it’s intuitive. Right or wrong, you have the feeling
when you are right with the shot.

Mia Hansen-Love
Film is about the language of acting, like theater, but the incarnation comes
not only from how the actor performs the dialogue and action but also from
the way you are looking at the actor—how you filmed him, how you cut the
scene—and the wardrobe. And it’s not only that, it’s the whole film. So film
language is special, and it also has to do with some kind of invisible music.
When I talk about the truth of a film, I don’t mean the truth in terms of right
or wrong, but the feeling that it’s true, which has to do with this invisible
music. This music results from the work with actors, with editing, and with
music itself.
The music or rhythm of a film is hard to explain in words because it’s
so intuitive and therefore has to do with personal feelings. You see the
film after you’ve done the first cut, and you try to sense if it’s the right
rhythm, if it goes too quickly or too slowly. But because the rhythm is an
ensemble of different things, it’s hard to describe. So although I tried to
find a rhythm with All Is Forgiven (2007), I didn’t want to insist on that,
because for me, when the style of a film is obvious, it’s too emphatic.

Teona Strugar Mitevska

Rhythm is essential, one of the most important things in film. It’s the music
of a film in a way, how the film breathes. As much as we need to breathe,
the film also needs to breathe, and the rhythm is its breathing. I really find
that in the screenplay. Sometimes I make a mistake and have to fix it in
the editing, but I create this rhythm, this breathing, when I read the final
version of the script. I imagine everything about the film in my head, so I
edit the film long before I get into the editing room.
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Olivier Assayas
It’s difficult to describe the actual pace of a film because, obviously, when
you make a film, you have an instinct for these things. It’s like music—it
feels right—and it’s hard to elaborate on that. I write basic screenplays:
I have a structure and dialogue, and I know where each scene is taking
me. Some scenes can evolve—I add things, actors add things. Some parts
shrink—because you have to follow your instincts on the shoot. I am
constantly reinventing the film on the shoot and also reinventing it in the
editing room.

Agnès Jaoui
Rhythm is everywhere. First, it’s in the script. Jean-Pierre Bacri and I write
the script like a musical score—a play of dialogue and silence. This is abso-
lutely concise, and we are very conscious of it. That’s why the text is exactly
what we want, and no actor improvises, including Jean and I when we act on
set. Eugène Marin Labiche [1815–1888], a comedy dramatist, wrote musical
notations under the dialogue lines for the actors to follow. Of course, that
was crazy, but it was also a little like slapstick or vaudeville. You have to be
a genius actor to play that, and if you notice, all male actors who are comics
are also musicians—it’s a question of rhythm.

Sergei Dvortsevoy
If you are able to discover uniqueness in life, and you are able to show
this, you should, even if it’s a simple uniqueness. Then you can relate
something without telling; you show it, and it goes directly to the soul and
heart of the audience without need for explanations. One reason I shot
such long takes for Tulpan (2008) was so people would feel the atmosphere,
a precious, important thing, because when they feel the atmosphere and
the story—everything you are relating to them—that goes straight to their
hearts. They not only feel the director’s brain but they feel the breathing
of the characters and the breathing of nature. Catching this breathing, the
rhythms of nature and people’s inner breathing, was very important.

Claire Denis
Of course, I feel the rhythm of a film in the screenwriting. The reason is
inside. For me, White Material (2009) was shaped like a spiral or when you
smoke a cigarette, and the rhythm was like when the smoke drifts up. Of
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course, the editing is important, but I never expect editing to shape or give
rhythm to the film. It’s too late then for me.

Jia Zhangke
I try not to have any prescribed rhythm or tempo with my films. Everything
depends on the space and the individuals I’m shooting, so I want to capture
those rhythms. But of course, at the end, during the editing process, I take
into consideration two aspects. One is the objective subject matter I’m
dealing with, and I will somehow select a rhythm for that. But at the same
time, I somehow incorporate my own subjective rhythm. So it’s a combina-
tion during the editing process of the subject matter and my own preference
as a filmmaker.
In my films it’s most important to get a sense of the accumulation of
time. I try to express that theme, the sense of time passing, through the
shots and rhythms of all my films. I chose to use only a single camera for my
interviews in 24 Hour City (2009), instead of having two or three cameras
running at the same time, which would have been easier to edit; but I
wanted the limitation of a single camera to convey that sense, again, of the
weight of time passing. The portrait shots are also about the accumulation
of time. You can see time passing in front of you during these shots, and
your emotions accumulate along with it.
Spaces have become an increasingly important part of my movies,
and I want to capture each space’s character and rhythm, for example,
the Beijing train station. Depending on when you are there, you see totally
different characters and feel different rhythms. In the morning you see a
highly dense population, with everybody rushing around trying to get to
their destinations. In the afternoon, you see people enjoying the sun and
the day, just casual and leisurely. In the evening, there’s a sense of loneli-
ness as a lot of people from Russia and Mongolia are waiting for their trains
to go back home, so the space becomes surreal and lonely. Again, not only
are individuals and characters important to set the tone and the pace of a
film, but space is another component of the movie’s rhythm and tone.

Pedro Costa
Most of the actors in my films are not professionals, so they move differently.
I’m not saying they are closer to real life or that they are naturalistic. But I
have to respect their rhythms. Some guys are slow and they speak slowly,
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and I tend to see if they go together and let it happen more or less. Then
there’s my rhythm that’s constructed, and I have to think about that a lot,
mainly when I’m editing the film.
This world creates more and more dispersion or fragmentation, so
everything is partial, and some artists work toward that. The work I’m doing
is slow and small in a way, and it’s about very small things. The ambition
is big, but it’s really about things that happen between when you wake up
and turn on your coffee machine—there’s an explosion, there’s despera-
tion, there’s joy—and how can you do that? I do it over this long time that
stretches a bit. I let the words come from the actors and don’t impose my
thing. I bring less imagination into the thing and let her or his imagination
be the tone, the rhythm of the film. They give me the direction.

Brillante Mendoza
Rhythm or velocity in terms of direction or editing is of key importance and
even more so in the writing process of the screenplay. I work consciously to
ensure my films have a rhythm, even if the camera lingers on one angle for
two or three minutes or there’s a series of rapid cuts lasting only seconds in
the editing. At the end of the day, rhythm should be dictated by the material
or concept so the filmmaker can translate his or her story effectively.

Shamim Sarif
I’m conscious of rhythm when I’m writing because that’s an important part
of my writing as a novelist and, now, as a screenwriter. There’s the rhythm
of the story, how you build the elements of the story and move it forward.
You want to intersperse moments of languor and artistry for their own sake
with scenes that move the plot forward. There’s also the underlying rhythm
of the story. It also has to do with the rhythm of the culture in which a film
is set. With The World Unseen (2007), we all got into the sense that we were
living in that time of the past and things moved a lot more slowly.

Tomas Alfredson
I edit myself, and for Let the Right One In (2008) I worked with another editor.
When I was young, I played drums for ten years and dreamed of a career
as a pop artist. It was a one-way love affair with the drums, but it helps a
lot when I edit. Playing with the rhythm is about when and where to put
the cut and where not to put the cut. Rhythm is all around us, everywhere
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in our lives and in our way of talking. Also, the Scandinavian culture has a
specific way of communicating in silence, so silence is important when you
talk about rhythm. Camera movements and editing are the same thing to
me—this rhythm of how long a track should be, when the tracking starts and
when it ends. You could say it’s a part of the same rhythmical body, and it’s
totally instinctive. I wouldn’t want to intellectualize that.

Paul Schrader
There are two approaches to shooting a scene: one is mise-en-scène and
the other is montage. Mise-en-scène is the sense of blocking, and montage
is the sense of editing, but both affect a film’s rhythms. A guy like Orson
Welles was a master of mise-en-scène, and Sergei Eisenstein was a master
of montage. Mise-en-scène is stage craft, not just the physical look of a film.
Take that famous scene in the motel room in Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958),
where the camera goes up and down a track as the actors keep reblocking
themselves. You get your overhead shots, your single shots, your insert
shots—that to me is mise-en-scène.
Mishima (1985) and Adam Resurrected (2008) are designed, and neither
is terribly real. The minute you see that hospital in Adam in the middle of
the desert, you know this is not quite real and it’s a kind of metaphorical
hospital. The fact that it doesn’t feel entirely real helps the film because a
lot of the action is not entirely real either. In Mishima, the Tokyo University
riots with the kids throwing stuff around was the only pre-existing footage
in the film. That film has a character with a sense of the hidden, so you
have to let the architecture of the film express that. He can’t really come
out at you—he’s too hidden, too contradictory—so you try to make the
architecture emotional. That’s hard, because architecture by nature isn’t
an emotional art. But that’s what you try to do through the juxtaposition
of elements, in the same way that elements in certain graphic arts interact
with each other. Every artist from Piet Mondrian to David Salle deals with
how objects exist in a space together as a way to create emotion, awareness,
and insight, through the juxtaposition of elements, rather than through
more traditional and powerful tools of empathy and identification. It’s
always easier to do empathy and identification: “Those poor parents; they
just lost their child.” You can hammer somebody over the head with that.
But with Mishima, there’s no real empathy. It’s all about ideas, and so it’s a
much harder road to navigate.
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Özcan Alper
The rhythm of a film is its own flow. You construct the story, and then it
starts to find its own rhythm. Rhythm is not really about intellect; it’s about
how you approach the visuals, the daily routines. It’s about how you want
to portray that world, which has its own rhythms. Also, Autumn (2008) has
many layers, not just one. I borrowed that from Akira Kurosawa, whose films
have this amazing sense of rhythm. So someone from the Black Sea region
who sees Autumn enjoys it, while someone who lives in America can also
relate to it by sensing another layer. That means rhythm is an integral part
of the narrative tools.
The mise-en-scène was definitely the major part of this film in that it
has this continuous feel, and the cuts didn’t feel like cuts. I maintained that
flow through mise-en-scène, so there’s definitely a relationship between
the editing and the mise-en-scène. I maintained the feeling of continuity
and flow in the way we shot the location.

Andrew Bujalski
When I was in college, you could “shop” classes before deciding whether
or not to take one. I went to a class that sounded interesting, but the
professor’s delivery was totally monotone and interspersed with “um’s.”
So he’d go “duh, duh, duh, duh” and then he’d say, “um.” I’m sure he was
brilliant, but I couldn’t take it because all I could hear was the rhythm of
the “um’s.”
Rhythm is the most important thing in a film. I don’t have musical
scores in my films, but I’ve realized that the score is the dialogue and sound
design, which are not just a series of events, so that music directs you like
an opera. The rhythms of the dialogue have to direct everything, and that’s
hard to articulate because it’s intuitive.
The challenge of putting Beeswax (2009) together was that so much
exposition and information are delivered in every scene. We shot a couple
of days of pickups on this film, which I had never done before. We managed
to get through the two previous films with just the footage we had from
the shoot. But I ran into a little exposition problem during the Beeswax
editing with the footage we had, and I just needed to get this one piece of
information across. I was so nervous about getting this information across
during those two days of pickups that we shot about five different ideas
on how to convey this so I could mix and match pieces and get it done.
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My instinct about the best way to do it was the one that crammed in the
most information. So I cut it into the film and showed it to someone. But
it didn’t work—the person still didn’t get what I was looking for him to get,
even though I felt like, “Well, she just said it!” Then I tried another option,
which worked fine. There was less information there, but it made so much
more sense rhythmically. That was an interesting lesson. I felt stupid for
not realizing it at first, but it’s hard to calculate that.