By Matt Zoller Seitz
Today we launch another semi-regular feature: "From the short stack," which consists of offerings from the three dozen or so film and TV-related books that I never tire of reading.
Today's short stack selection is David Mamet's "On Directing Film." Originally published in 1991, when Mamet had only three credits as a movie director, it's a concise, forceful but not totally closed-off work, at once philosophical and technical. Essentially, it's kind of a notebook by a filmmaker who's still struggling with a new medium, and who wishes to construct a set of general principles that will help him get out of his own way and make reasonably intelligent, watchable films -- films that honor Mamet the screenwriter without necessarily being a slave to him.
Mamet's introduction begins with some caveats: the book, he says, came out of a Columbia University course in film direction that he undertook after having directed two pictures, "House of Games" and "Things Change." "Like a pilot with two hundred hours of flight time, I was the most dangerous thing around," he admits. "I had unquestionably progressed beyond the neophyte stage but was not experienced enough to realize the extent of my ignorance." Having thus framed the book as a manifesto-in-progress, Mamet then proceeds to work up a set of rules that will enable a person with scant experience to direct a halfway decent movie that serves the narrative and its characters, and that makes simplicity a virtue.
I'll leave it up to House Next Door readers to say whether Mamet the filmmaker practices what Mamet the manifesto-writer preaches, or if Mamet the filmmaker ever became the equal of Mamet the playwright, or if his plays were ever such great shakes to start with. For now, I'll concentrate on one aspect of the book that continues to obsess me: Mamet's feelings on the Steadicam.
As readers of this thoroughly geeked-out blog probably know already, the Steadicam is a stabilized handheld camera rig created by cinematographer and inventor Garrett Brown. It effectively fuses a camera operator to the camera via an elaborate body harness system that displaces the camera's weight across the armature and the operator's body, allowing for smooth shots in virtually any sort of terrain, without having to install dolly tracks, a crane or anything else.
To name just a few examples, the Steadicam was employed on the Copacabana tracking shot in "Goodfellas," Rocky Balboa's jog up the Philadelphia Art Museum steps in "Rocky," the opening nightclub scene in "Boogie Nights," and almost all of "The Shining." It's become an industry workhorse -- a miracle of modern science, no doubt. But in 1991, Mamet distrusted it -- not because he was any sort of Luddite, but because he thought the Steadicam encouraged lazy filmmaking.
""What should film schools teach?" Mamet asks, then answers, "An understanding of the technique of the juxtaposition of uninflected images to create in the mind of the viewer the progression of the story."
Then he launches into the following screed: "The Steadicam, like many another technological miracle, has done injury; it has injured American movies, because it makes it so easy to follow the protagonist around, one no longer has to think, 'What is the shot?' or "Where should I put the camera this morning?' but if you love that morning's work at dailies, you'll hate it when you're in the editing room. Because what you're seeing in dailies is not for your amusement; it should not be 'little plays.' it should be uninflected shots that can eventually cut, one to the other, to tell the story."
Elsewhere, in a transcript of a Columbia film school workshop session where the students try to come up with a shot list that will work through a short dramatic scene, Mamet warns his class to "...tell the story in cuts. We're going to adopt this as our motto."
He goes on to say, "Obviously, there are some times when when you are going to need to follow the protagonist around for a bit; but only when it is the best way to tell the story; which, if we are dedicated in the happy application of these criteria, we will find is very seldom the case. See, while we have the luxury of time, here in class or at home making up the storyboard, we have the capacity to tell the story the best way. We can then go on the set and film it....When we're on the set, we don't have the luxury. Then we HAVE to follow the protagonist around, and we'd better have ourselves a Steadicam."
The word "Steadicam" is asterisked. The footnote bashes on the Steadicam further: "The Steadicam is no more capable of aiding in the creation of a good movie than the computer is in the writing of a good novel--both are labor-saving devices which simplify and make more attractive the mindless aspects of a creative endeavor."
Since the publication of "On Directing Film," Mamet seems to have softened his anti-Steadicam stance, as evidenced by some elaborate and (to my eye) aesthetically justifiable Steadicam work in his films "Heist" and "Spartan." But he hasn't softened that much. he is still no Oliver Stone or Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson (all Steadicam fiends), and he's certainly not as Steadicam-addicted as, say, TV producer John Wells ("ER," "The West Wing") or the directors of the "CSI" franchise. Mamet seems to view the Steadicam as the equivalent of an fire axe hanging in a glass case; he only busts it out when he feels he really, really needs it.
All in all, Mamet's judicious, even (cough, cough) Spartan use of the Steadicam still sets him apart from 90 percent of film and TV directors with budgets, who often seem to treat Steadicams as a device of first rather than last resort, and do in fact seem to view the camera as a means of letting them "cover" action, then piece it together later in the editing room, as opposed to Mamet's old school fondness for the carefully storyboarded shot list.
Although I've never had the chance to meet Mamet and query him on Steadicam theory, I suspect he'd agree that certain Steadicam shots are both spectacular and dramatically justifiable. I think when he warns that easy access to a Steadicam breeds lazy filmmaking, he's not talking about "Punch-Drunk Love" or "Russian Ark," where the Steadicam is used heavily, to achieve very specific effects. Rather, he's saying that all things considered, it's better to decide on a particular shot, put the camera on a tripod and roll film -- the Filmmaking 101 approach -- rather than covering the action with a Steadicam from multiple angles (or moving through an ensemble in wide shot with a Steadicam).
I've discussed Mamet's Steadicam theory with everyone from directors and cinematographers to regular film fans to Garrett Brown himself. There doesn't seem to be much middleground; either people think the camera is a tool like any other -- no no more or less likely to be misused than, say, crane shots or slow motion or CGI -- or else they agree with Mamet and think Steadicams are a godsend for lazy filmmakers and are used way too much.
My feelings on the subject change from day to day, so I open the floor to you. Does Mamet have a point? Or is he just old fashioned?
Thursday, January 19, 2006
From the short stack: David Mamet on the Steadicam
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
23 comments:
He absolutely has a point - a point emphasized by his own limited use of the device. And although contextually he's being very specific in his condemnation of the Steadicam, I think he really sees it as both a root of lazy filmmaking and, more generally, an avatar for it. As you posit, a crane or CGI could be substituted, although they're somewhat unwieldy examples; no filmmaker, first time or others, faces much temptation to film an entire movie on a crane.
On Directing really changed the way I looked at film (both the making and viewing of it) way back when I first read it. Mamet really helped me appreciate the logic of juxtaposition in a way I hadn't before (this was way back before I discovered Eisenstein). and the importance of concise visual information.
And of course, as always, he's a hell of a lot of fun to read.
Incidentally, I first picked up Mamet's book not too long after I had spent a month saving up for a Steadicam JR for my camcorder. Suffice to say, I never ended up using the thing all that much.
In a way, there are two kinds of directors: Writers and photographers.
For some directors the camera must always be subservient to the story, but for some the story(or so it seems to me) is subservient to the camera.
Mamet, naturally, would fall into the first category and might resent (or perhaps feel threatened by?) flamboyant camera techniques.
The trick of course is to achieve your effect without the viewer thinking 'gee, what great camera work.'
That's what Mamet seems to be struggling with.
steven t, you raise an excellent point: "In a way, there are two kinds of directors: Writers and photographers."
But I wouldn't say it's an either/or proposition. More like a sliding scale, with Stan Brakhage at one end of the continuum and, say, Kevin Smith at the other, and various significant filmmakers scattered at points in between. Occasionally you find an anomaly who cannot be accounted for on this scale -- say, Scorsese, whose movies exist simultaneously at the extreme ends of the scale, at once overpoweringly visual and hopelessly verbal. But not that often. Usually you can fix directors pretty well this way.
DVD: Glad to see I'm not the only one who still thinks about this book. In fact, I think about it pretty much every time I sit down to write about filmmaking. I am sure some semotic theorists may find Mamet's ruminations a tad primitive, but that's what I like about them -- he is writing about the essence of cinema, and definitively saying that he thinks that functionality is the same thing as artistry, in such severe tones that you want to jump into the book and start arguing with him. The argument never ends. Mamet gets in your head and stays there.
I've read On Directing, and like many theorists on many different topics, I think that while it's obvious Mamet is thinking intelligently about the issue and has very valid points, he often misappropriates his theories. His true beef isn't with the steadicam any more than it is with the camera itself. While it's true that certain inventions do more damage than good in the long term while still appearing to make lives easier in the present, it doesn't apply to all things that could possibly inspire laziness.
I think if you questioned Mamet about it he would appear less harsh than he did in the book. As you pointed it out in the last few sentences of your reply, the very reason philosophers, theorists, & Mamet adopt such harsh tones is to inspire discussion and debate. If he were to soften his tone and explain it out it would deaden the argument somewhat and quite possibly not acheive his goal: to make sure one is moving the story along with the most effective and least inflected shots possible.
I think Mamet's point was not against the stedicam so much as it was against lazy filmmaking. Thinking through the shot (but making sure not to over-think it) and providing the most visually complementary shots to the story is much more important than which device you use.
Ultimately, though, i think your question is one that can't really be answered until a bit of perspective from hindsight becomes available. Plenty of things that people thought would bring about ruin have not. I think it has so much more to do with the artist, and how much dedication and wisdom he or she has, than it does with his tools.
Alexander MacKendrick, in his book on filmmaking, makes a point -- the person in the introduction does (I don't have the book to hand) -- that you may as well make your point forcefully, regardless of whether you truly believe in such an extreme position, as students are only going to take away 10 or 20% of what you say anyway. I think Mamet's Steadicam comments probably fall in to that category.
Better to remember that opinionated idea about Steadicam and justify why you are using it use than to remember that Dave is OK with Steadicam if it's needed
The notion of Steadicam as labor-saving device is really pivotal. In the eight years I've been covering TV as a columnist, I've had the opportunity to visit maybe 200 TV productions, and of the non-sitcoms, I'd say probably three-quarters had not one Steadicam, but two in use at all times. If the place is lit for maximum flexibility of camera placement, they can plough through their pages much faster with a Steadicam than if they were doing single-camera, one setup at a time. Big Hollywood movies adopt the same approach; Stone often has at least two, sometimes three or four Steadicams going simultaneously.
The question though, is, does the mere presence of multiple Steadicams, and the apparent decision to shoot the movie in a somewhat loose, almost on-the-fly manner, automatically mean that the finished product is less artistically interesting, less worthy of analysis, less a conscious artistic product, than a movie that was meticulously produced from a shot list, then cut together in more or less the order determined during preproduction?
"...tell the story in cuts. We're going to adopt this as our motto." - Mamet
"The pictures these days are all MTV -- cut, cut, cut, cut. The opening shot of Welles' Touch of Evil was six and a half minutes long!" - Fred Ward in "The Player"
One could create an equally compelling argument that telling the story "in cuts" has been taken to such a ridiculous degree in modern studio filmmaking that storytelling is rendered incoherent. I was baffled by what was happening onscreen during entire sequences of, say, "Master and Commander" and "Black Hawk Down". A major character gets killed off in "Armageddon" and it is edited so sloppily one could easily miss it.
Just the other day, Matt, I was watching "Andersonville" again, directed by your hero John Frankenheimer. He made use not only of the long take, but also artful and insightful use of the Steadicam -- not only for shots of the main character walking through the prison camp, but also to film dialogue scenes between one group of men and another or to seamlessly move from a close-up of, say, a soldier lighting a cigar to a reveal of the entire camp. (I haven't seen "Ronin" in a while, but wonder if Frankenheimer made use of Steadicam there too. I like to think it made Mamet's head spin -- or at least inspired him to eat his words and try new cinematic techniques with "Spartan".)
To me, the Frankenheimer example illustrates the short-sightedness of Mamet's argument. He states his case very forcefully, but it seems like a rabid case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
As usual, Mamet and Seitz clear away the crap. This debate over the Steadicam promises to be the central issue around which the new cinematic philosophy coalesces: the phallic chutzpah of brats like De Palma and Spielberg, having dominated movie discourse for far too long, is giving way to the (as per this site's fearless commentator) "kickass," cut-happy, contrapuntal logic of genre masters like Carpenter, Cronenberg, and Campion. These filmmakers' subversions of the horror genre, the action genre, and the sexist thriller, respectively, use edits to make contrapuntal points regarding Hollywood conventions, as opposed to giving free rein to the macho or sentimental fantasies of a Scorsese. Imagine the opening wankoff of Bonfire of the Vanities downloaded onto an iPod! DePalma the Dinosaur's fossilized Steadicam sexism is being replaced by the more vibrant, technologically adaptable genre-alism (if I may coin a term) of a more enlightened consciousness.
I agree Matt that it's a sliding scale but my point was that Mamet starts off near one end of that scale and the excerpt you cite (I haven't read the book) strikes me as a very conscious effort on his part to get closer to the center.
Stevent: Right, I get it. And I do agree that all filmmakers start from one end of that scale.
Jeremiah Kipp: One could create an equally compelling argument that telling the story "in cuts" has been taken to such a ridiculous degree in modern studio filmmaking that storytelling is rendered incoherent. I was baffled by what was happening onscreen during entire sequences of, say, "Master and Commander" and "Black Hawk Down". A major character gets killed off in "Armageddon" and it is edited so sloppily one could easily miss it.
But surely, in the case of Bay and Scott, that's an argument in favor of Mamet -- I never get the sense that these directors actually plan anything (which is what Mamet is talking about with "telling the story in cuts") and just shoot away and hope to find what they need in the editing room -- resulting in muddled storytelling. Mamet, in his book, suggests looking at animation and how animators tell a story visually -- not by throwing a bunch of stuff on the screen but planning out what is in each shot and how that is going to play with the shots immediately preceding and succeeding it.
Yeah, I'm rolling with kza here. Frankenheimer's amazingly propulsive but always functional Steadicam work and Mamet's judicious storyboarded compositions aren't that far apart on the sliding scale I've been alluding to in my back and forth with DVD. They're more functional than expressive, and whatever beauty they generate is a byproduct of their functionality, their purposefulness.
I'm not talking about Paul Thomas Anderson following people around a TV studio in MAGNOLIA for 4 minutes for no discernible reason (go ahead, PTA fans -- leap to his defense!) I'm talking about Spielberg's mostly unheralded Steadicam shot in THE LOST WORLD, which gets us through much of the dual T-Rex assault in a single unbroken take, simultaneously making the scene feel more real (continuity of time and space) and making you think less about the dinosaurs' CGI fakeness. (I know some pretty hardcore Steadicam buffs who've seen that sequence more than once, but never thought about the fact that it was all one take.)
Like I said in the original post, I go back and forth on cuts vs. long takes, tripod vs. Steadicam, literary vs. visual values. But I like this discussion. It's pushing me to clarify my thinking.
Here's a note from that other 24Lies guy. I'm enjoying your blog very much, Matt!
You asked:
"Does the mere presence of multiple Steadicams, and the apparent decision to shoot the movie in a somewhat loose, almost on-the-fly manner, automatically mean that the finished product is less artistically interesting, less worthy of analysis, less a conscious artistic product, than a movie that was meticulously produced from a shot list, then cut together in more or less the order determined during preproduction?"
Yes, but only if you strictly rely on the Steadicam for labor-saving reasons. Some of the good examples mentioned above prove that the exact same device can be used in a very meticulous and conscious fashion. If done thoughtfully, shooting with the Steadicam is nothing less than cutting in-camera.
Mamet's argument isn't so different from the whole CGI-debate. In fact, people used to frown upon zoom-lenses in very much the same way, until Kubrick showed how to make delicate use of them in BARRY LYNDON. There's always a danger of overusing fashionable techniques - and it's good when people like Mamet remind us of the danger - but these tools are only as good or bad as their application.
There's something unique about the effect of a Steadicam shot. And not just because it allows a filmmaker to capture very long, complicated takes. I'm in the middle of preparing a short film in which I want to shoot the protagonist with a Steadicam and the antagonist with a handheld camera, simply because this will help for them to leave a different impression on the viewer. Manipulative, yes, but I sure hope that doesn't automatically make my product less artistically interesting ;-)
Mamet's forceful way of stating made me a big fan of GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, but I feel Mamet is less inventive with the camera than he is with the pen. If you ask me, the best kind of cinema can be found right in the middle of that sliding scale, where you can't tell if you're looking at the work of a writer or a photographer, because the camera is the pen.
Wow, Peet, thanks for that link. I read that article when you posted it, and I should have linked to it myself -- it's totally on-point.
While I have a couple minutes left at the library (my modem crashed on me) ... anybody remember Jim Muro's STREET TRASH? Terrible movie in many ways, but also the pioneering original Steadicam movie. There's a reason why James Cameron hired him to Steadicam TITANIC. (I'd go as usual into more detail but fear I have no more minutes. Later pals.)
Dan: As a Steadicam junkie, I am ashamed to say I don't recall ever seeing that movie, although I've certainly heard a lot of people sing its praises. (Technically, anyway.)
Another great Steadicam movie: SNAKE EYES. In fact, I like the camerawork better than the movie.
Matt,
You could at least credit the source for the image instead of just hijacking our bandwidth.
Philip Hodgetts
Chief BuZZmeister
Creative Planet's Digital Production BuZZ.
philip@digitalproductionbuzz.com
Hi, Philip:
Sorry, I'm new at this and am still learning the rules. I thought the TotalRocky.com logo WAS the credit? What acknowledgment would you like, or would you prefer I just remove the image?
Re-linking is too complicated at Blogspot. I just took the image down. Sorry!
Even fewer minutes left than usual, but I had to laugh (in the good way) at the mention of SNAKE EYES. Oh, I remember that one too. Way to top BONFIRE, Mr. De Palma. (What is he going to do next, just make one movie in a single take? You kind of get the sense that he wants to.)
(Strange thing to type isn't it, "way to top BONFIRE," as though anyone had been begging to do so, but you guys know what I mean.)
P.S. As long as we're on about SNAKE EYES, what the hell was that last shot supposed to be about? i mean at the end of the end credits. (God bless and protect every filmmaker who remembers to bother that we can do stuff with the titles, both front and back.)
Hey, Dan: Come on up to the recent entries, I'm losing you down here, buddy!
Post a Comment