Wednesday, May 23, 2007

The shooting style - 1

I have written some about the shooting style of Reconciliation already, but from the workshop I have had more time to think about it, and refine my understanding of it.
For the workshop I needed to not only have the actors push against what I had written, but test the shooting style (which is essentially Haneke's). In preparation I planned every shot. The day before I went through each scene, planning it out, checking it with the DV camera, and the director's viewfinder. There were practical considerations. I needed to know how much I could get into a shot. Could I shoot that scene in one shot? Would both characters fit into one shot?
I went back and examined Haneke's 71 Fragments. Perhaps this should have been obvious from my early viewings but I did not notice the significance of several things:
There is no establishing shot. Since the story is about fragments this is only right. He might provide numerous shots of a location, the scene in the armoury where the gun is stolen is an example. He shows the thief, inserts of him breaking the locks on the pistols, light coming from a ventilation shaft, from which the thief hears the sounds of someone walking by, the ammunition cabinet, and so on. But he never knits these shots together. He never shows you where this is or that is in a room. All you can know you must take from the eyeline of the actors.
A scene is generally told from one point of view. That is from one character's point of view. Sometimes he swaps points of view, but it is swap. And it never goes back.
This forced me to reconstruct certain scenes in the story. This was awkward, but I find these contrivances force you to be more creative.
Rhythm is created by jumping from one set of characters to another. I have already written about this, and come up with a practical solution: I had written certain fragments with a certain speed in mind. I even thought of writing pace into the script, like a score.
More on this...

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