Teacher as student

Just back from an all-day class in the aesthetics of editing (film and video). A two-hour drive each way to SF, and seven hours of class time, but it was worth it. The teacher, Matthew Levie, was wonderfully articulate and interesting, as were many of the class members, so we had lively, intelligent discussions, and watched examples of films and videos that illustrated various points.

He also gave us an overview of the history and development of film, from the very first pioneers, Edison in America and the Lumiere brothers in France to MTV, and how people built on the innovations of others and added their own to gradually get to where we are today, step-by-step.

One particular facet that emerged for me was that in the US, early films, in the form of one-minute nickelodeons, so called because they cost one nickel, were really entertainment for the working classes. Wealthier people went to the theater or opera. I hadn't thought of early movie viewing being confined to any particular class.

In France, early movies were projected on the walls of cafes, and several short movies were shown together to form a montage. Their audience tended to be intellectuals rather than workers. There weren't story lines, they were movies of things like a train arriving at a station. The novelty of seeing moving pictures was enough to sustain interest.

Another huge difference was that the camera Edison invented and used weighed 500 pounds, while the Lumiere brothers' camera weighed about twenty pounds, so they could be portable, while Edison was confined to doing studio shoots.

Edison owned all the patents for film and movie cameras in the US, and when D.W. Griffith wanted to make a longer film with a story, which hadn't been done, Edison wouldn't let him, so Griffith made his movies with film and equipment smuggled in from France.

All this just in the first half-hour or so, so you can imagine how packed seven hours was. We saw a huge variety of film examples and analyzed them, looking at all sorts of clever ways movies can manipulate viewers to tell a story and evoke complex and subtle emotions.

Matt used another great example as a starting point for discussion, the beginning of Orson Welles' "A Touch of Evil." As the opening credits roll we see a city street at night. A man in front of the camera sets some sort of timer on what looks like a bomb. We hear laughter as a group of people leave a bar, and the man runs to a convertible and quickly tosses the bomb into the trunk just before the boisterous group rounds the corner, gets into the car and begins to wend their way through the city streets. They stop at several intersections, and all the while the bomb is in the trunk, and we viewers know it and keep waiting for it to go off. Will it go off now, just as a vendor crosses the street in front of them, with his cart? Now, just as a woman and child walk beside it? Now as a small herd of goats passes? (Now we know it's South America.)

They arrive at a border crossing. The camera has not yet blinked. This is all done in a very smooth, seamless three-minute shot with no edits and we are getting very tense waiting for the inevitable. There is a brief exchange of pleasantries at the guard house between the people in the car, the sentry and another couple on foot. In just a few sentences; "You'll have to call me MRS. now you know.: and "Hey, congratulations on catching so-and so (a criminal)." " Unfortunately, he's just one member of a big family.", we discover that the couple on foot are newlyweds, and the groom has just brought one member of a criminal family to justice.

Now the sentry can get back to business and let the car of revelers pass, and the newlyweds, discovering that they haven't kissed in over an hour, embrace tenderly. Just as they do—BLAM!—the unseen car finally explodes, and we have our first cut of the movie, to the fireball that now engulfs what we naturally (and correctly) assume to be the car. And that first cut, right in the middle of a kiss, lets us feel keenly that the sweetness of romance has been rent asunder by this event, and the smooth continuity of life as they knew it will also be interrupted. We pretty much know who blew up the car (the crime family) and who will now have to go out and get them (the groom). If the car had blown up before or after the kiss it would have had a totally different effect, but because it was during the kiss it set up the scene to be a complete microcosm of the movie, telling you what the hero needs to do, why, and what effect it will have on his marriage. With one edit. I can't wait to rent the movie and look at what other decisions Welles made in telling the story.

I only hope I can get my students a tenth as excited as I was about such revelations. It will take time, and I'm thinking it will be more effective if I use contemporary examples that they can relate to more directly, but if I teach video long enough, I'm hoping to really open some eyes to the cool, intelligent artistry and subtle manipulation possible in filmmaking, and then hope that they use this knowledge to promote the forces of light, not Pepsi Lite or Marlboro Lites.