Many forward thinkers have agreed that the challenges of the next half-century will be great ones, and they will likely center on a couple of critical areas. Of course, food is always an issue for the greater fraction of people on the planet, but clean unpolluted water is about to become a very problematic – and expensive – issue as well. A third area about which I have heard little from the scientific community is ‘staying warm’ – and since one of the basic necessities of life is ‘staying warm and dry,’ I am concerned that not enough brain-power is being put into keeping people warm without further warming the planet.
Long ago, I wanted to get people interested in bringing troubling societal issues to the members of Mensa, the high-IQ society. I thought – and still think – that those eggheads could help us find elegant solutions to some of our toughest problems. I mean, they have all that knowledge, right? Problem was, the men and women of Mensa didn’t seem to want to tackle hard problems like feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, or saving the planet. Like tired and lonely people everywhere, they were more interested in connecting with other smart people socially, as in dating or in special interest groups (which they called SIGs).
So I wandered away from Mensa, leaving them to their puzzlers and parties. But I still think about trying to save the planet, save our culture, save our way of life, save the lives of those unfortunate enough to need our help. To do any of those things, we need some innovative thinking – we need to approach the same old problem in a brand-new way. And a collection of brilliant minds is a crucial prerequisite to removing the obstacles to the creative development of innovative thinking. And, of course, I can’t do it all alone. So I turn to you, the filmmakers on the cutting edge, to be part of that collection of minds – since filmmakers always have been (and continue to be) innovators, inventors, and visionaries.
And maybe just focusing a camera on a problem is a good start at getting people to think about that problem. We can't fix what we haven’t identified, and we can’t identify what we don’t know about. So for some of us, at least, there is just the work of pointing the issues out to others, so that they can learn about those situations that can harm us or those like us. Also, people want to know that there is hope, and documentaries serve that function, among many others.
Docs can inform, educate, and persuade. They can mean the difference between a deep understanding and the indifference of ignorance. Perhaps most important, documentaries can inspire. So here are some thoughts for documentaries, in case any of you filmmaking geniuses have run out of challenging and engaging ideas:
1. Innovative thinking about Energy Conservation: Why do we have every one of those city lights on all night long? Civic lighting expends more than half of the energy used in the US, and we could get buy with a lot fewer lights. I’m not talking about making the streets dark and unsafe, but we could install switches on about half the lights in any string, and alternate them all night long – or at least in the wee hours of the morning when most people are in bed.
2. Innovative thinking about Intended-waste Products: Why do we have bright white paper napkins, cups, bowls, and plates? The bleaching of paper accounts for a huge percentage of toxic waste going into rivers and our oceans, and we really don’t need bright white items that we are going to use once and then throw away. What are the biases against grey or tan disposable napery and plates? And those awful disposable diapers (though the rumor is that disposables are actually more planet-friendly than washing cloth diapers) – why are they white? For that matter, why is toilet paper white?
3. Innovative thinking about the Ramifications of Oil Drilling: How about getting groups of university students in different disciplines to deal with the deleterious effects of oil drilling – both to the land and to the very fragile ecosystems of the oceans. Big Oil drills for oil in the middle of farmland, if that’s where the oil is – and oil drilling is a dirty business. They (and we) hardly consider the effect of the runoff into the water table and into the soil in which farmers grow our food. How is all that oil affecting our health? And how can it be stopped? And while we’re talking oil fields, how can we stop those flares of flame that burn continually in the fields? It’s called the burn-off
4. Innovative thinking about Staying Warm and Dry: It seems that everyone is talking about global warming, but a much greater problem is how to keep people warm – heating is probably the major issue confronting us in the 21st Century. This is perhaps the most profound need of the entire human race, no matter where they live (even hot climates get cold sometimes). The whole of history has included the continual attempt to mitigate weather, creating warm and dry conditions in which to thrive. For atmospheric reasons, several long-time answers must now be discarded: wood fires, coal, and oil. Natural gas is much cleaner, but it will last only so long. Going underground, though costly and unattractive to most folks, that may be the answer – issues to be addressed include heating, leakage of surface water, disposal of waste, recycling air and gas byproducts, lack of windows and light, mass-transit elevators and logistics of moving people to the surface and back.
5. More innovative thinking about Staying Warm: Deep-strata mines may provide a solution, since the earth’s crust gets hotter by one degree for every thousand feet that you descend – by opening up large enough vents, we may be able to use the earth’s heat to replace much of the surface burning that we are doing.
6. Innovative thinking about Water and Water Rights: Water shortages and pollution will be major themes in the coming decades. Who is working on the potential of using seawater for most uses? And are there projects for reclaiming seawater (desalinization)? What new products are on the horizon to shift consumer water usage? And who owns the water anyway? That’s a question to which most of us won’t like the answer.
So there you have it – some ideas about coming up with ideas. A list of things that need addressing, and perhaps we can point a camera at them and thus put them in front of an audience or two. If you can do something with these ideas (and have the wit and strength to chase them with camera), you have my blessings.
David Hakim is an assistant director, producer, and publicity expert who developed campaigns for every major Hollywood studio and handled publicity for the Motion Picture Academy. Find him in the Reel Directory online: www.reeldirectory.com.
All material copyright 2008 David Hakim and may not be duplicated - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta movie. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta movie. Mostrar todas las entradas
sábado, 28 de marzo de 2009
Using Knowledge & Compelling Images to Create the Narrative
One of the problems with human perception is that it is tied to our already-existing store of knowledge. So if a person says, for instance, ‘big man,’ one might picture a man of one’s own race or ethnicity – when in fact the truth might be just the opposite. And this characteristic of perception becomes more pronounced in dealing with qualitative descriptors rather than quantitative ones – intangibles, concepts and ideas. What is ‘good,’ or ‘competent,’ or ‘intelligent’?
This is what makes film (and especially the documentary or historical re-creation forms so compelling and valuable) – you can show an image, establishing quite quickly (and definitely) the physical qualities of the person or situation at hand. Of course, in documentary, persons can dissemble (or just get it wrong), making the task more difficult, but the filmmaker still has more impact on the audience’s view of things than one does when writing a book. (And this aspect of filmmaking is what keeps writers writing – most would rather have the ability to use and exploit their readers’ imaginations than to delineate clearly who is doing what.)
So in more ways than one, a picture is worth a thousand words – and often many more than that. One example of this situation might be taken from the study of history. When the average person hears about ‘the Crusades,’ for example, he or she might think of a single picture – Richard Lionheart leading a host into battle against ‘the infidel.’ But that is an image that’s been built on many misconceptions, not the least is that the Crusades were holy wars waged by clean and honorable men against a backward and uncivilised race of heathens.
In truth, both sides saw the other as ‘infidels,’ and both sides saw themselves as the righteous upholders of ‘God’s Way’ (sound familiar?). To understand the breadth and depth of this misunderstanding, one must know about what was going on in the world at that time. The sciences as we know them had not yet been invented: medicine was in a sorry state, and hygiene was worse. People did not much understand the relationship between cleanliness and good health, and lives were on average much shorter and lived with much less robust health. ‘Muslim’ scientists were faring a bit better than Europeans, having come up with mapmaking, algebra, astrology, medical treatments, and other important fields – but many of these sciences were still in their infancies – and without the tradition of rich communication between scholars, advances were understandably slow in coming.
In addition, politics as we know it did not exist – money was relatively new to most people, and the internal politics of Europe had shrunk to what most people call ‘the feudal system’ without much understanding of what that might entail. Governments and towns had shrunk to vast landed estates in the hands of the ‘wealthy’ – lands which were the only places that people could survive. There was no industry as we think of it, since the economics of the times – barons and dukes used what riches there were (often not in the form of ‘money’ but in much more valuable commodities) to wage wars or to protect their estates, keeping the common people tied to what were in effect ‘plantations’ where almost all the necessities of life were grown or made by local labor. Trade was rare, and was used mostly for things that could not be made or grown locally.
The lords of this system were not the clean, well-scrubbed pictures of health that we see in most films. The warriors of that time had more in common with the Vikings than with the cavaliers of later times – in fact, many of them were only a step or two removed from Vikings themselves. Picture a system of government (actually a series of tenuous truces and wartime alliances-of-convenience, paid for by tribute taken at sword-point) run by uncouth and dangerous bikers – for that is the closest we can come to drawing a fair image of who the barons and dukes were. While earlier kings were ‘men of the strong arm’ – men who could best others in battle, who were accustomed to taking what they wanted and washing away the pain with wine or other euphorics – the barons and dukes ran things under the eye of kings who were often men less able in battle. None of these were the leaders that Washington and Jefferson later sought to become – the warriors of old were men who killed without much feeling and took the women left behind without much grace. They were the Hell’s Angels of their day, except that they led armies and adopted the pretense of being descended from (or granted immunity by) God.
Europe was filled with these petty barons and dukes – a nasty lot almost every single one of them, each fighting for a share of the spoils and each defending his own ground against neighbors who would take it from him by force (and ‘by force’ generally meant the most indelicate of violence). Of course, there were some among them who aspired to higher morals and ethics; but many, as well as being paid killers in wartime, were murderers in peacetime – if a noble wanted something, he might simply kill the owner in order to get it. And often, what was wanted by the ruling class was in the hands of the church.
The first Crusade (1095 CE) became a way that the weaker kings and the Church (long a victim of the warring nobles) could rid Europe of these gangs of marauders. The bishops sent word around that any person who went to kill infidels in the Holy Land (to take back the sacred ground upon which the Savior had walked) would be granted a place in heaven, no matter what crimes had been committed before. And a madness swept through Europe that is difficult to imagine but easy to understand: the serfs had little happiness on earth (so the everlasting reward of heaven looked pretty good), and the barons and dukes were greedy for spoils, as well as having a fair interest in expiating their numerous beastly sins.
And off these eager ‘penitents’ went, to kill an enemy they did not know and could not understand, because education had been closely guarded for centuries – kept within a relatively small group of ‘chosen elite’ (chronicles of travelers of the time were rare and expensive, and most learning came by word of mouth, relating mostly to the daily needs of life: farming, tanning, food preservation, carpentry, metal-working, weaving, and the knowledge of other skills based on what was needed to survive). Most of them had never seen a ‘Saracen’ or a ‘Turk,’ a ‘Paynim’or a ‘Persian.’ A ‘heathen’ is defined as one who does not believe in God, but the Muslims had a strong belief in God – and, in fact, in the same God that demanded sacrifice of Abraham: the Jewish line came from Abraham’s son Isaac and the Muslim line came from Isaac’s brother Ishmael. So ‘heathens’ these people were clearly not.
Most had no idea what lay ahead of them during the first Crusade, but they tramped through Italy and Hungary to get to the Holy Land. In Hungary they fared worst, their huge hordes (hundreds of thousands of starving and ragged souls) were cut down by local residents weary of their depredations. Tens of thousands were killed or died along the way, before even getting out of Europe. Many more were lost at sea, and the ones who did arrive in the Holy Land saw many of their number cut down by prime fighting forces of Kerbogha of Mosul and other skilled warrior-chieftains. All in all, a violent and unpleasant business, as wars always are.
So that’s the layout of our story, thus far – and how can the narrative deal with the deviation from actual fact, a deviation that ‘history’ has persuaded us to accept as truth? First, consider that ‘narrative’ is either causal or cumulative – that is, it is either an argument laid out in a series of incidents or events that each create or cause the next, or it is a collection of (possibly) unrelated facts or events that is presented that add up to a conclusion. So, by carefully studying the time period and the manners and culture operating at that time, the filmmaker is presumed to be able to bring an immediate and pervasive sense of factuality to the proceedings, taking care to consider language and social protocols when deciding what to show and what not to show. And by explaining (either through exposition or carefully-wrought action) the background explicitly, the filmmaker can build an almost-instinctual knowledge into the audience, so that when one sees a specific action or object, one knows (more or less) precisely what it means.
This is the job of the filmmaker, to vivify a story – to enliven ‘mere words’ with pictures and to bring a deeper truth to the audience. And by educating oneself completely in the ways and manners of the persons who will people the story and drive the action (whether fictional narrative or documentary review of facts), the filmmaker can hope to have an audience that possesses enough of the idea of things to understand the new data that the filmmaker hopes to elucidate.
As filmmakers, we are not the warrior barons and dukes, forcing ourselves and our ideas on an unwilling enemy (though to hear the use of music in some films, one would definitely think otherwise), nor are we at our best when following the ways of others in unfamiliar territory. And we are not the single-minded ideologues who would have the whole world believe as we do, nor are we ignorant of the world around us.
No, we strive to learn more about that world, in order to better tell our stories, and – at our best – we are persons of vision, persons who have a definite idea how to make the world a better place, persons who have the strength of conviction and a taste for repeated stumbled, but who will always get up and go for another shot. And we are able to convince – by our vision, but also by our powers of persuasion (storytelling) – a crowd of very talented people to come along with us in the making of something special, something unique, something perhaps historic.
David Hakim is an assistant director, producer, and publicity expert who developed campaigns for every major Hollywood studio and handled publicity for the Motion Picture Academy. Find him in the Reel Directory online: www.reeldirectory.com.
All material copyright 2008 David Hakim and may not be duplicated - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This is what makes film (and especially the documentary or historical re-creation forms so compelling and valuable) – you can show an image, establishing quite quickly (and definitely) the physical qualities of the person or situation at hand. Of course, in documentary, persons can dissemble (or just get it wrong), making the task more difficult, but the filmmaker still has more impact on the audience’s view of things than one does when writing a book. (And this aspect of filmmaking is what keeps writers writing – most would rather have the ability to use and exploit their readers’ imaginations than to delineate clearly who is doing what.)
So in more ways than one, a picture is worth a thousand words – and often many more than that. One example of this situation might be taken from the study of history. When the average person hears about ‘the Crusades,’ for example, he or she might think of a single picture – Richard Lionheart leading a host into battle against ‘the infidel.’ But that is an image that’s been built on many misconceptions, not the least is that the Crusades were holy wars waged by clean and honorable men against a backward and uncivilised race of heathens.
In truth, both sides saw the other as ‘infidels,’ and both sides saw themselves as the righteous upholders of ‘God’s Way’ (sound familiar?). To understand the breadth and depth of this misunderstanding, one must know about what was going on in the world at that time. The sciences as we know them had not yet been invented: medicine was in a sorry state, and hygiene was worse. People did not much understand the relationship between cleanliness and good health, and lives were on average much shorter and lived with much less robust health. ‘Muslim’ scientists were faring a bit better than Europeans, having come up with mapmaking, algebra, astrology, medical treatments, and other important fields – but many of these sciences were still in their infancies – and without the tradition of rich communication between scholars, advances were understandably slow in coming.
In addition, politics as we know it did not exist – money was relatively new to most people, and the internal politics of Europe had shrunk to what most people call ‘the feudal system’ without much understanding of what that might entail. Governments and towns had shrunk to vast landed estates in the hands of the ‘wealthy’ – lands which were the only places that people could survive. There was no industry as we think of it, since the economics of the times – barons and dukes used what riches there were (often not in the form of ‘money’ but in much more valuable commodities) to wage wars or to protect their estates, keeping the common people tied to what were in effect ‘plantations’ where almost all the necessities of life were grown or made by local labor. Trade was rare, and was used mostly for things that could not be made or grown locally.
The lords of this system were not the clean, well-scrubbed pictures of health that we see in most films. The warriors of that time had more in common with the Vikings than with the cavaliers of later times – in fact, many of them were only a step or two removed from Vikings themselves. Picture a system of government (actually a series of tenuous truces and wartime alliances-of-convenience, paid for by tribute taken at sword-point) run by uncouth and dangerous bikers – for that is the closest we can come to drawing a fair image of who the barons and dukes were. While earlier kings were ‘men of the strong arm’ – men who could best others in battle, who were accustomed to taking what they wanted and washing away the pain with wine or other euphorics – the barons and dukes ran things under the eye of kings who were often men less able in battle. None of these were the leaders that Washington and Jefferson later sought to become – the warriors of old were men who killed without much feeling and took the women left behind without much grace. They were the Hell’s Angels of their day, except that they led armies and adopted the pretense of being descended from (or granted immunity by) God.
Europe was filled with these petty barons and dukes – a nasty lot almost every single one of them, each fighting for a share of the spoils and each defending his own ground against neighbors who would take it from him by force (and ‘by force’ generally meant the most indelicate of violence). Of course, there were some among them who aspired to higher morals and ethics; but many, as well as being paid killers in wartime, were murderers in peacetime – if a noble wanted something, he might simply kill the owner in order to get it. And often, what was wanted by the ruling class was in the hands of the church.
The first Crusade (1095 CE) became a way that the weaker kings and the Church (long a victim of the warring nobles) could rid Europe of these gangs of marauders. The bishops sent word around that any person who went to kill infidels in the Holy Land (to take back the sacred ground upon which the Savior had walked) would be granted a place in heaven, no matter what crimes had been committed before. And a madness swept through Europe that is difficult to imagine but easy to understand: the serfs had little happiness on earth (so the everlasting reward of heaven looked pretty good), and the barons and dukes were greedy for spoils, as well as having a fair interest in expiating their numerous beastly sins.
And off these eager ‘penitents’ went, to kill an enemy they did not know and could not understand, because education had been closely guarded for centuries – kept within a relatively small group of ‘chosen elite’ (chronicles of travelers of the time were rare and expensive, and most learning came by word of mouth, relating mostly to the daily needs of life: farming, tanning, food preservation, carpentry, metal-working, weaving, and the knowledge of other skills based on what was needed to survive). Most of them had never seen a ‘Saracen’ or a ‘Turk,’ a ‘Paynim’or a ‘Persian.’ A ‘heathen’ is defined as one who does not believe in God, but the Muslims had a strong belief in God – and, in fact, in the same God that demanded sacrifice of Abraham: the Jewish line came from Abraham’s son Isaac and the Muslim line came from Isaac’s brother Ishmael. So ‘heathens’ these people were clearly not.
Most had no idea what lay ahead of them during the first Crusade, but they tramped through Italy and Hungary to get to the Holy Land. In Hungary they fared worst, their huge hordes (hundreds of thousands of starving and ragged souls) were cut down by local residents weary of their depredations. Tens of thousands were killed or died along the way, before even getting out of Europe. Many more were lost at sea, and the ones who did arrive in the Holy Land saw many of their number cut down by prime fighting forces of Kerbogha of Mosul and other skilled warrior-chieftains. All in all, a violent and unpleasant business, as wars always are.
So that’s the layout of our story, thus far – and how can the narrative deal with the deviation from actual fact, a deviation that ‘history’ has persuaded us to accept as truth? First, consider that ‘narrative’ is either causal or cumulative – that is, it is either an argument laid out in a series of incidents or events that each create or cause the next, or it is a collection of (possibly) unrelated facts or events that is presented that add up to a conclusion. So, by carefully studying the time period and the manners and culture operating at that time, the filmmaker is presumed to be able to bring an immediate and pervasive sense of factuality to the proceedings, taking care to consider language and social protocols when deciding what to show and what not to show. And by explaining (either through exposition or carefully-wrought action) the background explicitly, the filmmaker can build an almost-instinctual knowledge into the audience, so that when one sees a specific action or object, one knows (more or less) precisely what it means.
This is the job of the filmmaker, to vivify a story – to enliven ‘mere words’ with pictures and to bring a deeper truth to the audience. And by educating oneself completely in the ways and manners of the persons who will people the story and drive the action (whether fictional narrative or documentary review of facts), the filmmaker can hope to have an audience that possesses enough of the idea of things to understand the new data that the filmmaker hopes to elucidate.
As filmmakers, we are not the warrior barons and dukes, forcing ourselves and our ideas on an unwilling enemy (though to hear the use of music in some films, one would definitely think otherwise), nor are we at our best when following the ways of others in unfamiliar territory. And we are not the single-minded ideologues who would have the whole world believe as we do, nor are we ignorant of the world around us.
No, we strive to learn more about that world, in order to better tell our stories, and – at our best – we are persons of vision, persons who have a definite idea how to make the world a better place, persons who have the strength of conviction and a taste for repeated stumbled, but who will always get up and go for another shot. And we are able to convince – by our vision, but also by our powers of persuasion (storytelling) – a crowd of very talented people to come along with us in the making of something special, something unique, something perhaps historic.
David Hakim is an assistant director, producer, and publicity expert who developed campaigns for every major Hollywood studio and handled publicity for the Motion Picture Academy. Find him in the Reel Directory online: www.reeldirectory.com.
All material copyright 2008 David Hakim and may not be duplicated - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Of Doctors, Grips & Poets – Making Films to Change the World
I am getting sick of doctors and their incompetence and narrow-minded views of the world. The problem with more medicos, as I see it, is that they lack imagination. The medical profession should be filled with jazz enthusiasts and artists, with men and women who are not afraid – no, even better, who are enthralled by the ability – to take chances. Society – and each of us – profoundly needs in doctors (and in politicians, lawyers, judges, etc etc) the kind of people who are creative and imaginative problem solvers, and most of the people in the profession are definitely not that.
After my last little excursion to the emergency room, during which I was kept waiting for over six hours with a fish bone lodged in my throat (only to be released without receiving any care whatever), I decided that the right thing to do would be to get a pile of money and start a social experiment.
What would that experiment entail? Well, before I get into that, let me discuss for a few moments the power of the medium we know as ‘film,’ as well as a bit of background from a long time ago.
The power of film is starting to be tapped in some interesting ways, as we find that audiences are more attuned to documentaries than at any time in the history of film – except perhaps at its very beginning, when in fact most early films were ‘documentaries’ of one kind or another.
Panoramas of famous places and strapping cameras to the fronts of Alpine trains (‘phantom rides’) cannot be categorised in any other way but as docs (or more precisely, as ‘actualities’), and it wasn’t until a while later that fictional narrative got off the ground. Other films were ‘vignettes,’ meaning imagined scenes of real or imagined happenings – The Bad Boy and the Gardener (1896), Awakening of Rip (1896), The Arrest of a Bookmaker (1896), Santa Claus (1899) – though at 25 seconds to one minute, they can hardly be considered ‘narratives.’
The first fiction films, like the early actualities and panoramas, were only a minute or so long, and it took time for the audience and the makers to move toward longer films.
So… today we are seeing a renaissance of the non-narrative nonfiction film (and, indeed, of the narrative nonfiction film), and there is a vast power for collective good in that rebirth. But there is also a power in taking an ideal – or theme, or situation, or the potential subject of a doc – and building a story around it. Many true stories, taken from the slowly-turning wheel of human history, reach a mass audience not through documentaries, but through docudramas or even through fictional ‘exploitation’ of their central idea. Silkwood and Erin Brockovich are two films that followed the stories of real women, while Traffic and Blood Diamond are two films that used fictional stories to relate adverse social events and the negative situations surrounding them.
A standard technique of storytelling is to lay out the issues between central characters against the backdrop of profound social changes or historic events. Some call this playing ‘the little story against the larger backdrop’: Homer’s Illiad and Don Quixote, on down to Casablanca – and even Phantom of the Opera opens with a reference to the first sound recordings of the Paris opera being sealed in a vault below the old opera house. One such story of particular interest to filmmakers is Dreamers, in which the central action is set against the protests of the closing of the Cinémathèque Française in February of 1968.
So what does all this have to do with a recalcitrant fishbone? Well, while I was gnawing on my lip in order to keep from turning into a berserker in a wretchedly backwoods hospital (which sported hopelessly outdated equipment and a languidly incompetent staff – a Tijuana dentist has more state-of-the-art equipment than that joint), I conceived of a plan to literally change the face of the medical practice in America today. I figured, Hell, more of us than ever before are needing doctors, so why not start re-indoctrinating them?
So who would the New Doctors be? Well, poets would be a good start, since they have imagination coupled with an intellect that prizes rules and uniformity. And I know that any grip crew worth its salt could create true art out of whatever they could find, if a director up in the hills, away from all resources, wanted to build a certain kind of background for a commercial. Grips have a knowledge of working systems and a can-do attitude that gets things done. There are no doubt others who would be equally able to create change (and equally astonishing to include in the list, but let’s not get too far afield for the first visualisation of the project).
The deal would be this: take a group of six poets and a group of six grips, and send them all to medical school to see what kind of doctors they would make. My take on it is that they would make excellent doctors (unless medical schools could train out of them all their spark, in which case we’d have a crowd of lousy poets and stumbling grips (tragic, but highly unlikely).
Sure, the experiment would be expensive, but it would be worth the cost to prove to the AMA and others that they’re currently testing for the wrong kind of intelligence, and that they should start skewing their classes (not the instructional periods, but the groups of students – ‘class of 2008) toward more imagination, more creativity, and more risk. Look, medicine is of necessity an area of adverse events, so why be risk averse as well?
OK, so I thought up this grand plan – one which would cost a couple million bucks (not counting the time spent finding grips willing to become doctors) and take years of hard effort to mount. Then I got the idea that this could be written into a script (see where I’m going with this now?) and turned into a movie – not even a hit movie, since with NetFlix you can build an audience through word of mouth. And just as movies today often mirror headlines, many real-life situations are mirroring movies. Who knows – we might be able to start a trend, and in ten years we’d see the first IA doctors practicing in ERs… using their specific knowledge to ‘defeat the wind.’
Just sayin’….
David Hakim is an assistant director, producer, and publicity expert who developed campaigns for every major Hollywood studio and handled publicity for the Motion Picture Academy. Find him in the Reel Directory online: www.reeldirectory.com.
All material copyright 2008 David Hakim and may not be duplicated - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
After my last little excursion to the emergency room, during which I was kept waiting for over six hours with a fish bone lodged in my throat (only to be released without receiving any care whatever), I decided that the right thing to do would be to get a pile of money and start a social experiment.
What would that experiment entail? Well, before I get into that, let me discuss for a few moments the power of the medium we know as ‘film,’ as well as a bit of background from a long time ago.
The power of film is starting to be tapped in some interesting ways, as we find that audiences are more attuned to documentaries than at any time in the history of film – except perhaps at its very beginning, when in fact most early films were ‘documentaries’ of one kind or another.
Panoramas of famous places and strapping cameras to the fronts of Alpine trains (‘phantom rides’) cannot be categorised in any other way but as docs (or more precisely, as ‘actualities’), and it wasn’t until a while later that fictional narrative got off the ground. Other films were ‘vignettes,’ meaning imagined scenes of real or imagined happenings – The Bad Boy and the Gardener (1896), Awakening of Rip (1896), The Arrest of a Bookmaker (1896), Santa Claus (1899) – though at 25 seconds to one minute, they can hardly be considered ‘narratives.’
The first fiction films, like the early actualities and panoramas, were only a minute or so long, and it took time for the audience and the makers to move toward longer films.
So… today we are seeing a renaissance of the non-narrative nonfiction film (and, indeed, of the narrative nonfiction film), and there is a vast power for collective good in that rebirth. But there is also a power in taking an ideal – or theme, or situation, or the potential subject of a doc – and building a story around it. Many true stories, taken from the slowly-turning wheel of human history, reach a mass audience not through documentaries, but through docudramas or even through fictional ‘exploitation’ of their central idea. Silkwood and Erin Brockovich are two films that followed the stories of real women, while Traffic and Blood Diamond are two films that used fictional stories to relate adverse social events and the negative situations surrounding them.
A standard technique of storytelling is to lay out the issues between central characters against the backdrop of profound social changes or historic events. Some call this playing ‘the little story against the larger backdrop’: Homer’s Illiad and Don Quixote, on down to Casablanca – and even Phantom of the Opera opens with a reference to the first sound recordings of the Paris opera being sealed in a vault below the old opera house. One such story of particular interest to filmmakers is Dreamers, in which the central action is set against the protests of the closing of the Cinémathèque Française in February of 1968.
So what does all this have to do with a recalcitrant fishbone? Well, while I was gnawing on my lip in order to keep from turning into a berserker in a wretchedly backwoods hospital (which sported hopelessly outdated equipment and a languidly incompetent staff – a Tijuana dentist has more state-of-the-art equipment than that joint), I conceived of a plan to literally change the face of the medical practice in America today. I figured, Hell, more of us than ever before are needing doctors, so why not start re-indoctrinating them?
So who would the New Doctors be? Well, poets would be a good start, since they have imagination coupled with an intellect that prizes rules and uniformity. And I know that any grip crew worth its salt could create true art out of whatever they could find, if a director up in the hills, away from all resources, wanted to build a certain kind of background for a commercial. Grips have a knowledge of working systems and a can-do attitude that gets things done. There are no doubt others who would be equally able to create change (and equally astonishing to include in the list, but let’s not get too far afield for the first visualisation of the project).
The deal would be this: take a group of six poets and a group of six grips, and send them all to medical school to see what kind of doctors they would make. My take on it is that they would make excellent doctors (unless medical schools could train out of them all their spark, in which case we’d have a crowd of lousy poets and stumbling grips (tragic, but highly unlikely).
Sure, the experiment would be expensive, but it would be worth the cost to prove to the AMA and others that they’re currently testing for the wrong kind of intelligence, and that they should start skewing their classes (not the instructional periods, but the groups of students – ‘class of 2008) toward more imagination, more creativity, and more risk. Look, medicine is of necessity an area of adverse events, so why be risk averse as well?
OK, so I thought up this grand plan – one which would cost a couple million bucks (not counting the time spent finding grips willing to become doctors) and take years of hard effort to mount. Then I got the idea that this could be written into a script (see where I’m going with this now?) and turned into a movie – not even a hit movie, since with NetFlix you can build an audience through word of mouth. And just as movies today often mirror headlines, many real-life situations are mirroring movies. Who knows – we might be able to start a trend, and in ten years we’d see the first IA doctors practicing in ERs… using their specific knowledge to ‘defeat the wind.’
Just sayin’….
David Hakim is an assistant director, producer, and publicity expert who developed campaigns for every major Hollywood studio and handled publicity for the Motion Picture Academy. Find him in the Reel Directory online: www.reeldirectory.com.
All material copyright 2008 David Hakim and may not be duplicated - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
sábado, 21 de marzo de 2009
The Pied Piper of the Cinémathèque
In a case of the arts as precursor to life, the demonstration against the French government’s sacking of Henri Langlois in February of 1968 led to a small riot that would be the first of many riots in that year famous for civil unrest. The protest and general strike of May 1968 (leading to the election of a new parliament to replace the DeGaulle government in June) were outgrowths of that first protest over the Cinémathèque Française in February.
Not the first cinémathèque in the world, nor the largest, still Langlois’ creation was singular in its depth and breadth – Langlois collected everything (especially early fragile silent films), and saved thousands of films from the Nazis by numerous wily schemes. He has never really been accorded the honor that such a feat deserves, though the protests in the gardens of the Palais de Chaillot were a good start.
The protests over Langlois weren’t limited to the streets – the French press, as well as many famous and influential people, supported Langlois in scathing letters and telegrams to the civil government (Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin, among many others). But the fact that the first people to take to the streets were cineastes is, I feel, significant, for in those days, filmmakers were truly perceived as artists, and indeed many were artists and poets as well as writers and intellectuals.
The intersection of politics and cinema – what conservative types have been afraid of for years – had a brief bright moment in 1968, and then failed to ignite, as the entertainment value of film took over the collective consciousness.
No matter what anyone says about political or social uses of film today – Michael Moore and Al Gore notwithstanding – that early hope for political motion has not been fulfilled as many hoped it would be. The intellectual power of film has faded into the background, minimized by an attitude that film ‘artists’ – along with ‘intellectuals’ – are ‘quaint.
But an interesting thing happened… in an odd way, films continued to morph into TV, which took on a role remarkable in its simplicity.
In the seminal work The Art of the Moving Picture, Vachel Lindsay drew a clear comparison between movie houses and saloons, noting that the tone and tenor of public thought is drawn by the gathering-places of people. In Lindsay’s view, the moral tone of a saloon was suspect, while films that showed ‘social ideals’ could have a salutary effect on the body politic:
Today’s bars tend to be places dominated by TV sets – often a dozen or more, even in the chain restaurants that line our suburbs. And while sports seems to be the main topic of interest related to these TV screens, still the screens will focus on certain issues that capture the attention of the voracious media. The democratization of TV has come in the form not of programming but of topicality: what the people are talking about is what stays on the screen… until the fickle public chooses another topic to chase. Still, a case of euthanasia in Florida or an uxorcide in our own backyard will capture the national imagination and spawn a host of imitative shows, from magazine-style exposés to movies-of-the-week.
Recommended works on Langlois & the Cinémathèque:
Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinémathèque by Serge Toubiana, Georges Goldfayn, Françoise Foucault, and Pascal Rogard (DVD - Aug 15, 2006)
A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois & the Cinémathèque Française by Richard Roud and François Truffaut (Paperback - Jun 17, 1999)
The Dreamers (NC-17 Edition) by Bernardo Bertolucci (DVD - Jul 13, 2004)
David Hakim is an assistant director, producer, and publicity expert who developed campaigns for every major Hollywood studio and handled publicity for the Motion Picture Academy. Find him in the Reel Directory online: www.reeldirectory.com.
All material copyright 2008 David Hakim and may not be duplicated - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Not the first cinémathèque in the world, nor the largest, still Langlois’ creation was singular in its depth and breadth – Langlois collected everything (especially early fragile silent films), and saved thousands of films from the Nazis by numerous wily schemes. He has never really been accorded the honor that such a feat deserves, though the protests in the gardens of the Palais de Chaillot were a good start.
The protests over Langlois weren’t limited to the streets – the French press, as well as many famous and influential people, supported Langlois in scathing letters and telegrams to the civil government (Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin, among many others). But the fact that the first people to take to the streets were cineastes is, I feel, significant, for in those days, filmmakers were truly perceived as artists, and indeed many were artists and poets as well as writers and intellectuals.
The intersection of politics and cinema – what conservative types have been afraid of for years – had a brief bright moment in 1968, and then failed to ignite, as the entertainment value of film took over the collective consciousness.
No matter what anyone says about political or social uses of film today – Michael Moore and Al Gore notwithstanding – that early hope for political motion has not been fulfilled as many hoped it would be. The intellectual power of film has faded into the background, minimized by an attitude that film ‘artists’ – along with ‘intellectuals’ – are ‘quaint.
But an interesting thing happened… in an odd way, films continued to morph into TV, which took on a role remarkable in its simplicity.
In the seminal work The Art of the Moving Picture, Vachel Lindsay drew a clear comparison between movie houses and saloons, noting that the tone and tenor of public thought is drawn by the gathering-places of people. In Lindsay’s view, the moral tone of a saloon was suspect, while films that showed ‘social ideals’ could have a salutary effect on the body politic:
The shame of the American drinking place is the bar-tender who dominates its thinking. His cynical and hardened soul wipes out a portion of the influence of the public school, the library, the self-respecting newspaper. A stream rises no higher than its source, and through his dead-fish eye and dead-fish brain the group of tired men look upon all the statesmen and wise ones of the land. Though he says worse than nothing, his furry tongue, by endless reiteration, is the American slum oracle. At the present the bar-tender handles the neighborhood group, the ultimate unit in city politics….
So, good citizen, welcome the coming of the moving picture man as a local social force. Whatever his private character, the mere formula of his activities makes him a better type. He may not at first sway his group in a directly political way, but he will make himself the centre of more social ideals than the bar-tender ever entertained. And he is beginning to have as intimate a relation to his public as the bar-tender. In many cases he stands under his arch in the sheltered lobby and is on conversing terms with his habitual customers, the length of the afternoon and evening.
While very few influential producers or directors stand ‘in the sheltered lobby’ greeting audience members, they still hold a certain influence over the thoughts and motivations of those who follow their films. And Lindsay goes farther in his comparison, by alluding to the drain of one on the other: “Often when a moving picture house is set up, the saloon on the right hand or the left declares bankruptcy…”
Today’s bars tend to be places dominated by TV sets – often a dozen or more, even in the chain restaurants that line our suburbs. And while sports seems to be the main topic of interest related to these TV screens, still the screens will focus on certain issues that capture the attention of the voracious media. The democratization of TV has come in the form not of programming but of topicality: what the people are talking about is what stays on the screen… until the fickle public chooses another topic to chase. Still, a case of euthanasia in Florida or an uxorcide in our own backyard will capture the national imagination and spawn a host of imitative shows, from magazine-style exposés to movies-of-the-week.
Recommended works on Langlois & the Cinémathèque:
Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinémathèque by Serge Toubiana, Georges Goldfayn, Françoise Foucault, and Pascal Rogard (DVD - Aug 15, 2006)
A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois & the Cinémathèque Française by Richard Roud and François Truffaut (Paperback - Jun 17, 1999)
The Dreamers (NC-17 Edition) by Bernardo Bertolucci (DVD - Jul 13, 2004)
David Hakim is an assistant director, producer, and publicity expert who developed campaigns for every major Hollywood studio and handled publicity for the Motion Picture Academy. Find him in the Reel Directory online: www.reeldirectory.com.
All material copyright 2008 David Hakim and may not be duplicated - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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