Vashon goes to the movies

One of the first things I take into consideration when talking or writing about film is to never tell an ending. This would seem to be a fairly obvious omission to insist upon in any cinematic analysis, in print or on the street. Back in the earlier stages of growing up, a friend of mine ruined Planet of the Apes for me when it first came out. While it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, i often wonder how differently i would have viewed the whole goings on in ape world when i first got to see it if i hadn’t been told what Mr. Heston found on the beach right before the credits rolled. And then there was the reason i stopped reading the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle’s film reviews from Jack Garner, which was that in one column, way back when, he revealed not one, but three endings of three separate films in almost one sentence. That was inexcusable, but i’d already seen all the films he wrecked, so i wasn’t so inclined to dial up da boys from Buffalo to rub some sense into Mr. Garner, not that i was in any position to do so. It did however cement my resolve to never, ever let the cinema cat out of the bag. We won’t go into the whole Rosebud thing now either.

I was spurred into thinking about what might ruin a film by something said at my first filmmaking class at the Seattle Film Institute last week. In discussing our first assigment for next week, one of our two instructors mentioned how paying strict attention to the position and power of the edit in film composition might, for a time, ruin how one perceives any given movie. This brought to mind the words of one Marvin Saltzman, a printmaking instructor i had in the exploratory days of art school. He spoke of a certain German print making school where the students would gather around new work that arrived from various places, and cast intense and probing glances through handheld magnifiers at these objects of art, hoping to undertstand and perhaps adopt any new technique that their close inspection should reveal. The takeaway here was that these students were at least partly missing the point by ignoring the merits of the entire work by digging for only how it had been put on the page. The other side of that is,  if one fully understands the use and purpose of  the depth of an etch on a zinc plate or the wavering vibrato of a finger at the fret on the neck of a guitar or the subtle combination of two images in a movie timeline, then the technique disappears into what one hopes will be a more mature work of art.

That said, I thought a bit more about the trouble with edit point awareness and how it might skew a view of a film, and went a bit beyond that to a problem i sometimes have with objects inside the frame that shouldn’t be there. Probably the most notable time/ space disturbance i ever experienced from the big screen was when Peter Seller’s Chance was swept off the streets of the other Washington, as portrayed in Being There, and was taken to the fat cat’s mansion just outside of downtown D.C. I knew, however, that as soon as the limo turned down that tree-lined lane that we were not in, or closely outside, the beltway anymore, and in fact were paying a visit to the Biltmore Estate just outside of Asheville, N.C. At the time i wondered if a piece of the film had been lost somewhere on the projection room floor, since that particular overland journey was not just a jump cut away. Once the whole suspension of disbelief thing kicked in i was able to accept the fiction that this journey had indeed been brief in the context of the story. I’m now a little bit better at making these kinds of reality/film reality events go away. One that comes up with a bit more regularity is the misplaced plant syndrome. This occurs when one is just traveling along with characters and story and all of a sudden there is a shimmer off a mass of foliage on a tree of a certain shape and silhouette that really should not be growing there, if we are really in that assumed region or country. Before i shout and scream that hey, we are not in Korea, we’re in southern California, i catch myself, make a smug note of quiet recognition and then get back to the story at hand. It didn’t spoil a thing.

Off to draw stick figures in a storyboard and try to make the edits disappear.