What is technical competence in film

Directing and Style 9

Somebody said if you give a script to five different famous directors, you’d get five

different pictures. And I believe that. —Vincent Minnelli

Photograph from the set of Precious (2009). ©Lions Gate/courtesy Everett Collection

What Is a Director? Chapter 9

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following: • Discuss the features of the director’s job. • Describe the concept of a director’s style and stylistic movements. • Summarize the auteur theory of directing. • Describe the relationship among the director, the actors, and the writer. • Identify some influential but non-traditional filmmaking styles. • Name several pace-setting directors and their major works.

9.1 What Is a Director? Making a movie is a genuinely collaborative effort. Large films employ hundreds of people who work together to create the finished product. Yet as with any endeavor that enlists the labor of so many people, there must be one person with the power and the overall vision to make sure that all the pieces come together as they should. In the case of a construction crew building a skyscraper, that person would be the foreman, who must translate the architect’s plans so that workers can carry them out. Otherwise, what should be a building would be an incomprehen- sible mess. As with buildings, musical compositions, paintings, and other works of art, films are constructed according to certain plans using certain techniques and patterns that their creator believes will be both effective and expressive of something of his or her own personality.

In making a movie, that person is usually the director. His or her role is often simi- lar to that of the foreman, translating the screenwriter’s story so that the actors and crew can carry it out. And like the foreman, it’s up to the director to turn the elements he or she builds with—words, images, and sound—into something not just coherent but entertaining, even moving. It’s no acci- dent that when films are described, they’re often talked about as the possession of the director—Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and the like. Of the many people who create a commer- cial movie, and it would be difficult to make one without all of them, the director is the most crucial. Much like the quarterback of a football team, he or she often receives an

outsize measure of credit—or blame. While the director may not personally operate the camera or set the lighting or run the editing machine (though some do), he or she is still the boss in rehearsals, on the set, in the editing room, and wherever else the movie is made.

This is all the more remarkable when one considers that, beyond yelling “Action!” and “Cut!” at the beginning and end of scenes, there is no clear set of rules or regulations that all directors fol- low. Some are hands on, micromanaging almost every aspect of making the movie. Others are delegators, allowing more freedom among the actors and crewmembers. Some dictate entirely

Courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ As a director, Bob Fosse brings his exuberance and energy to signature musicals such as Cabaret (shown here) and All That Jazz.

The Director as Facilitator Chapter 9

what they want their actors to do, allowing for no improvisation. Others simply offer a loose set of parameters for a scene and let the actors go where they will with it. Some even shoot or edit their films themselves, while others prefer to work primarily with the actors and leave the technical details to specialists they trust. But whether you are talking about Alfred Hitchcock, a practitioner of the first type of directing described, or Mike Leigh, who uses the second method, or someone in between, the fact remains that the director is in charge of the production and is responsible for the final film. In this chapter, we will look at some of the methods directors use in their many roles, how they shape the film, and how central they are to the overall process.

9.2 The Director as Facilitator While the director plays many roles in the production of a film, as we will see, perhaps the most important is that of the facilitator—the person who makes the trains run on time, so to speak. Overseeing every aspect of the production is, of course, a massively complicated job, one that requires a detailed level of planning and execution at every level. This is important because, unless studio executives meddle too much and take over the project, the film we see in the theater is largely the film that the director wanted us to see—the director’s vision, interpretation, and take. In skilled hands, the director makes a film that takes us out of our world for two hours and into another—a world of the director’s imagining.

The Director and Style

We have discussed such cinematic ele- ments as narrative plot structure, mise en scène, cinematography, editing, and sound in previous chapters. Although individual specialists perform the necessary duties in each category, often with their own per- sonal preferences and styles, the director makes sure they work together to create a coherent and appropriate vision of the story on the screen. Each director tends to have favorite ways of arranging actors and props on the set, favorite types of camera angles and lighting schemes, favorite patterns of editing long or short takes into scenes, and favorite habits of using sound and image to reinforce or clash with each other. When we can recognize similar uses of techniques from one film to another, we are recognizing a style. That style may be associated with the screenwriter or head technicians such as the cinematographer or the editor, or even with some actors, but it is up to the director to approve of the major talents working on a particular project and to mold their visions to his or her own.

How the director achieves this varies from person to person and from film to film (and we’ll dis- cuss style in more detail shortly). It’s also sometimes a function of the studio or a powerful pro- ducer, for example a David O. Selznick or a Jerry Bruckheimer. In early films, the director often truly served as a facilitator, and not much else. But visionary directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Erich von Stroheim, and especially D. W. Griffith brought an artistic sensibility to the job that moved it far beyond that of a technical functionary. They and others helped establish the director

©Paramount Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a prime example of his work, which is steeped in film history. Scorsese has cre- ated a distinctive body of films examining the psychology of men confronting their true selves through waves of excess and criminality.

The Director as Facilitator Chapter 9

as not only an equal partner to the on-screen (and behind-the-executive-desk) talent but also the true author of a film.

D. W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation

No discussion of directors—indeed, of film itself—is possible without Griffith. Enormously gifted as well as hugely controversial, he in many ways set the stage for what we think of as the mod- ern film director, as well as the modern film itself. Griffith started making movies in 1908 and directed more than 400 short films over the next five years, experimenting with a wide variety of story content and developing different filmmaking techniques that made his work stand out from that of most other filmmakers, especially those in America. Gradually telling longer and more complex stories on the screen, he finally left the fiscally conservative Biograph Company, which preferred the more economical 10-minute to 30-minute shorts, so that he could make feature-length movies on his own. His three-hour epic The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, had a huge impact on film production and styles of cinematic storytelling, as well as on distribution and exhibition. Countless film historians agree that the popular and critical success of this film changed the industry forever. Citizen Kane inspired filmmakers with its exuberant technical style, but during its day The Birth of a Nation did much more. It told a story full of action, romance, suspense, terror, and heroism, as other films had done, but Griffith’s mastery of cinematography and editing was able to captivate audiences of all social statuses for an entire evening’s entertain- ment. Indeed, before The Birth of a Nation, movies typically lasted about an hour or less and appealed primarily to lower-income audiences who could not afford live theater. Griffith’s ability in cinematic storytelling and his attention to historical detail struck a public nerve that made the film a “must-see” event, the first box-office blockbuster. Upon seeing the film, President Woodrow

Wilson is said to have remarked, “It is like writing history with lightning.” Whether or not this statement did in fact come from President Wilson, Griffith was able to manipulate audience emotions, rather than treating audience members as mere passive observers. He showed the immense power a director could wield over a film. In short, he turned it from simple entertainment (film’s typical role in the culture up to this point) into cinematic art, while simultane- ously demonstrating that it could be highly inflammatory propaganda.

Indeed today, while still considered proba- bly the most influential film ever made, The Birth of a Nation is largely reviled because of the provocative way in which Griffith depicts the subject matter, even though he greatly diluted the extreme racism of its original source to make it more palatable for

mainstream audiences of the time. Based on Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman, deal- ing with the Civil War and Reconstruction, the film portrays black Americans in a condescend- ing, negative light, while treating members of the Ku Klux Klan with sympathy and depicting them heroically. Riots broke out in the North when it was shown there, while Klansmen marched

Courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation portrayed the battles of the Civil War with a level of detail never seen before. Hundreds of extras were mobilized and shot to convey the impression of thousands at war.

Auteur Theory Chapter 9

in support of the film in the South—an immediate and instructive example of the effectiveness of cinema as a new and powerful form of storytelling. Its combination of elements engaged the senses of sight and sound simultaneously, providing a transportive experience the audiences were not accustomed to. For better or worse, Griffith had shown just what power a director could have, and movies would never be the same.

Sadly, today Griffith is remembered primarily for the hurtful racial controversy created by The Birth of a Nation (due largely to its overwhelming financial success—itself an indication of main- stream racial attitudes when the film was made). Few people seem aware that most of the contro- versial topics Griffith treated in his films were pioneering calls for progressive reforms and social justice, dramatically scathing condemnations of hypocrisy. His next major film was Intolerance, an experimental epic examining religious bigotry throughout the ages in three historical sto- ries, all intercut with a parallel modern story about exploited laborers, self-serving reformers, and the injustice of capital punishment. Later, his Broken Blossoms treated child abuse, religious and racial bigotry, and interracial romance in the London slums. Sexual double standards and women’s rights are at the root of Way Down East, whose heroine was an unwed mother trying to survive in a narrow-minded and hostile community. His epic action-adventure film Orphans of the Storm contrasted economic injustices and political scheming against the background of the French Revolution, with implicit (and some explicit) comparisons to the American Revolution and the then-recent Russian revolution. All of these films drew audiences into the lives of their central characters, using cinematic techniques to influence viewers’ understanding that these potentially controversial issues were affecting individuals they’d grown to care about. Griffith understood that it took effective entertainment to make audiences see and think about deeper subjects they might otherwise ignore.

Other directors would follow Griffith’s course. Orson Welles would write, direct, and act simulta- neously in Citizen Kane, taking the role of facilitator about as far as one could. He was neither the first nor the last to tackle three or more creative roles in a single film (just look at Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Clint Eastwood, to name a few), but there may be no greater exam- ple than Welles, and some believe no greater movie than Citizen Kane. After Griffith, directors from Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock to Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Tim Burton have established their own names as far more important than their films’ stars and titles in the mind of the public. However, it was Griffith who set the standard for imposing his personal style on every movie he directed and many others he merely supervised. As may be gathered from the discussion so far, directing has been traditionally a male profession. However, female directors with strong personal visions have emerged throughout film history (such as Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, and Ida Lupino) and have become more common in recent years (includ- ing Julie Dash, Andrea Arnold, Julie Taymor, Kathryn Bigelow, and others). There would still be, and still are, hack directors, of course, men and women who simply piece bits of the language of cinema together without much thought beyond 90 minutes of running time and a paycheck. But D. W. Griffith showed that the director could make the film his own, an artistic statement as personal as a novel, a poem, a painting, or a symphony. This concept gave rise to a theory of film criticism that focused heavily on the director.

9.3 Auteur Theory Given the importance of the director’s role in the making of a movie and how easily identifiable certain cinematic styles can be throughout the work of some directors, it is often convenient to discuss a film as though the director was the sole creator, like the author of a book. “Auteur” is

Auteur Theory Chapter 9

the French word for author, and therein lies the meaning of auteur theory. When applied to film directing, auteur theory posits that the director is indeed the author of the film, imprinting it with his personal vision. This can be an excellent starting point for analyzing certain films, both thematically and stylistically, and is in fact exactly how the auteur theory got started. Film critic and future director François Truffaut put forth the theory in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (Notebooks on Cinema) in 1954. The theory gives enormous, almost total, responsibility for a film’s success or failure (artistically, not at the box office) to the director. The theory was not, and is not, universally accepted. Film critics Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris kept a running feud going in various magazines about the validity of the theory; Sarris championed it (he is, in fact,

credited with popularizing it in the United States), while Kael, always opposed to the over-intellectualization of movies, attacked it, writing in Film Quarterly in 1963, “How was one to guess what art was and was not based on a logic that seemed hidden to all other critics? . . . Interior meaning seems to be what those in the know, know. It’s a mys- tique—and a mistake” (1963). (It is quaint, and somewhat romantic, to think back to a time when film critics were such an important part of the conversation regard- ing movies and their cultural impact.) See Table 9.1 for examples of some directors who can be considered auteurs.

Despite the misgivings of Kael, one of the most influential American critics of the 20th century, the auteur theory is still a generally accepted way of critiquing films.

Its greatest American supporter, Andrew Sarris, defined it in specific ways that we will use here, as well (see Table 9.2), which others may or may not apply to their own understanding of what makes an auteur.

Table 9.1 Notable auteur directors and key films

D. W. Griffith The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Trueheart Susie, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, America, Isn’t Life Wonderful?, The Battle of the Sexes, The Struggle

Frank Capra American Madness, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, It’s a Wonderful Life

Alfred Hitchcock The Lodger, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Family Plot

John Ford The Iron Horse, Hangman’s House, Pilgrimage, The Informer, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, They Were Expendable, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Raymond Cauchetier/courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ French New Wave directors such as François Truffaut, whose film Jules and Jim is pictured here, began as critics who cham- pioned the director as the author (auteur) of the film.