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scurrilous film director Aug 2024
Film directors were a pinnacle of the arts and intellectual life in my view.
That view was from a classroom admittedly, but also on the Saturday night settee, with memories of the Friday night Western. And the chats with mates on new releases - oh the poster on the dark walk home from long teenage shifts. Mystery and impact reaching out to me in my world.
And finally I am here. Sort of. Some kind of indie maker who can claim “festival-winning” and “award-winning”. With my own festival that shows and promotes my methods now on its way. And a PhD about cinema and my eye movement discoveries in it. One a year is what I make - one feature film a year with little micro-budgets, No Crew sensibilities, where I get to play out the fantasy of being an esteemed writer-director. But I’m not one.
A few people are and always were. The classroom squashed 70 years of movie into one gestalt of attention and expression and masterpiece. TV kept them all relevant and busy. But then new releases began to show how not all movies were reputable. To join this world was a hard climb, an impossible journey, even if a useful ambition that brought gentle careers in community work and lecturing and media businesses. Back then, actual making of films was Super 8, 16mm, VHS or Betamax video - all with various levels of financial impossibility. So the films had to stay in my head and in the future. Not for my real life. But you know with the tap-tap-tap on the screenplay and take some photographs… I’ll get there.
How did the few people get there? Art? Excellence? Maybe. Or luck? Made by being in the right place. Work and talent too. But the advantages I got from creative entrepreneurship, an education, sheltered living standards with good friends - also trapped the nonsense in my head. The other few had money. Family and family friends and the backing to live and spend in the right cities. Contacts. An in. Knowing where the in was. Being there. Luck of birthright. And like all the popstars, someone had to be there at the top of the tree and the system did not care who.
I still thought it did care and that people at the top were worthy. Some are. But mostly the Hollywood mainstream was and is corrupt and malevolent as a social impact, whilst the funded arts was another world of insider dealing with all the doors closed too. Now in the final third of my life I find the tech is amazing - digitally cheap and effective. So I look again at these directors, the best of the world’s arts, with all their ideas and contributions, their thinking and their production skill, the craft and the personal commitment to art. Stunning.
Only now I realise, after a few years of festival-touting, social media marketing and a few movies that make me feel good - well, it is a shameful profession. Still a victim of commercial trending, systemic manipulation and essentially a right-wing ambition to entertain the masses. Where is the art?
Today a film director is a chancer, a fraud, a hobbyist, a fool, an influencer, a dickhead, an arrogant unimportant swindler of cultural audiences. Claiming laurels is a marketing strategy and about buying the right ticket to the right festival with the right film. Partly I can agree that it probably always was and my naive-tinted shades hid that from me, and that there is always work to do in the promotion of an artistic product, and that the few who are at the top never actually provide a model of how to get there.
But film directors today are like therapy gurus - touting nonsense to bolster social status. Or digital success stories no different from other business projects like sharing memes to help out any range of manufacturung and service industries. Some are commercially busy of course - either as a genre specialist or a round-the-corner advertising service.
But I thought film as the pinnacle of art. The combination of word and image and sound, place and people, reality and expression that can then reach into every high street and be welcomed in every home. But when I look now it is just another pretend-role in a disintegrating society.
Maybe my films are crap. Sure they are. Not wanted, not enjoyed, not shared, not talked about, not important. One a year against a hundred thousand or a few million of those now made. And I would probably be very happy if they were shared, so not ever having these unwelcome insights to enlighten me. Maybe I should stick to the original values I craved and be the version of a film director I used to believe in? Without the trimmings of fame, the connections of budget providers and the skills of marketers I can never take a place amongst them - yet I can still hold those values and for all other aspects pretend I am one of them. Pretend I am a noteworthy creative force, offering ideas and concepts that help cultures thrive. Better than pretending to be a film director? For that brand is disreputable now, beaten to laughability by the digital distribution promises and the camera industry.
Exactly how though, can a person be an artistic and philosophical phenonemenon through their film-making work? This is going to be a long article.
The Four Ignoble Truths:
1 - writing and planning, editing and devising, skill-learning is a daily pleasure
2 - engaging in everyday life is always an observational and reflective activity
3 - networking is exclusively for art, money and finding people to help
4 - watching and reading and listening is about soaking up cultural positions
Ignoble Eight-Fold Path:
1 - others’ art is not as good as yours
2 - social media is full of tiny movies that poison
3 - friends are cast members
4 - places are locations
5 - holidays are for showing off
6 - laurels are tinny badges
7 - loving relationships are distractions
8 - everything else is also film-making
The Five Precepts:
1 - irregular exercise is needed to be strong enough to make films
2 - health is the only wealth you can access
3 - jobs are chores that you can do without but can’t do without
4 - party to build resilience
5 - only steal other people’s ideas if you can forget that you have
The Three Jewels:
1 - there is no best film director to learn from
2 - every film made is teaching you something
3 - be suspicious of other film-makers
The Three Universal Lies:
1 - the film industry is changing into your ideal opportunity
2 - keep making films and you will be happy
3 - you are a brand
What a shameful damnation of the film director I always wanted to be. But it’s not their fault. It’s the continual misery of being unsuccessful. Mal Williamson 2024.
Exploring professional human brand identity through culturaland social capital: a typology of film director identities
Journal of marketing Management
camille Pluntz & bernard pras
2020
Change Cinema: a no-crew approach to film directing march 2022
Can a director have the same autonomy as a painter? A composer? Playwright? Poet? These people traditionally work alone - with their audiences expecting they are looking at the work of a single person. An artist.
The digital advances in my lifetime have made this technically possible. It seems like we can fix it in the mix - as musicians always said we couldn't. Reverb can be removed! AI plug-ins remove noise better with each new release. The RAW files accessible on modern hobby cameras are forever flexible.
Of course, film-makers will say to get it right first time rather than relying on what we call "fix in post". I suspect this has moved these days from a technical reality to an administrative one - that it is unfair to colleagues and disruptive to budgets to kick any particular can down the road. The control an artist can show by "getting it right" is central to the nature of what a film director can be today.
There is no "right". There is only what you did.
All technical mistakes reveal the means of production. Mainstream aesthetics are political because they do move with the times, yet are always about fooling an audience so we believe in the emotions and narratives which are backed up by mirror neurons, psychologies of light and the container metaphor. For info and observations on the solo directing experience, read my article for Top 10 global film page Raindance - which followed the release of "Under the Weather".
My Fine Art undergrad was led by Rob Gawthrop - proper 60s post-structuralist art experimenter and deliverer. His work is still amongst the most cohesive, intrinsic I have been near. I do not like it for the thrill or revelation but its ethical centre and thorough honesty is so good to be around. When I saw him during the Re:Rooted filming he was still keen to reveal the means of production, with a projector's clatter an intrinsic part of the show. It is important. Let the real be real.
But I am not sure I go that far - into such an overt political expression through the arts. Except when I mess up then it is a good excuse to keep it in.
Sometimes, my point is, there is no choice. Hollywood blockbusters are full of "mistakes" too. But I think a solo film-making practice is one that audiences can relate to in a different way. Rather than escaping to Yippee Ki-Yay explosions a solo film-maker would run closer to McClane's mind and body, searching for intimate truths. Well I would. And use those to explain the story and meanings.
By the way - the original novel for the Die Hard movies was inspired by a dream... after author Roderick Thorp had watched the movie Towering Inferno. Round and round it goes.
So add self-referential metaphors to the means of production. And we will be getting closer to the integrated, holistic, embodied approach of solo film-making.
Emotions may become thoughts instead, thoughts can be stillness, assumptions become self-evident in-the-room facts. There is only me and the performers to make this movie - and I will carry it forward to the edit stage too.
There are no sound crew to affect moods or space. No gaffers to harumph. No set dressers to fuss. Only me and them to make magic. (Modern cinema was at first a tool of the magicians like Georges Méliès, Walter R. Booth and David Devant.)
`Tis not theatre - for that is seen and heard live with real physical spaces rather than the container metaphor of the screen - brilliantly discovered by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson.
`Tis not literature - for the novel was invented in the 11th Century and has a beginning, middle and end dating from Aristotle days, creating a false meaning to life and times.
Cinema has structure - but not necessarily in that order. (RIP Jean-Luc Godard)
Cinema is creation and capture together - simultaneously reflecting and speculating (read more on these with Creator Coach perhaps or my short-lived journal Neurocreator).
I heard recently Eric Rohmer saying that cinema has no content as such - the camera captures what is there but that is not the intrinsic art (Parlons Cinéma Eric Rohmer,1977). This resonates. If cinema can now be a pursuit by a single artist then yes - there is nothing in the room. It is empty of meaning at best. Yet when we add people to that lens/camera combo we get a different consideration for the artist - people are important and need relating to and looking after.
The wonderful metaphor and reality for this situation from my other work is person-centred therapy. In this approach, developed in the 1950s by Carl Rogers, we give space and time to the person's utterance and presentation. He tended to allow clients to sit for ages - years literally.
However, research from my PhD has shown that Carl Rogers loved the techniques of changework therapy and in particular the Provocative Changeworks of Frank Farelly. WIth these techniques the person-centred counsellor can now intervene. No longer waiting for the client to realise enlightenments, we have the verbal and embodied technology to awaken the client with koan-like twists of some sort: re-frames, timelines and eye movement therapy.
So my improvisation approach is enabled and structured to reveal real utterance and presentation - avoiding the pretending involved in acting.
Change Cinema is a work in progress... as every film, every artwork should be. Mal Williamson 2022
