Book Review Talking Pictures How to Watch Movies
An esteemed motion-picture show critic examines the story behind the camera.
Ann Hornaday's new volume about watching movies is perfectly titled. Hornaday, film critic for the Washington Post, talks usa through what happens behind the scenes in the writing, acting, designing, filming, editing, audio-tracking, and directing of a motion-picture show. She lets us hear screenwriter and director Kenneth Lonergan'southward thoughts nigh writing dialogue, Jack Lemmon's reflections on Marilyn Monroe's acting instincts, Elia Kazan'due south insights on production design, Fasten Lee's opinions about cinematography — and the tour'south just getting started.
In her introduction, Hornaday says she hopes her book will assist united states savour the huge range of details that goes into making a movie. The book is necessary, she repeatedly notes, considering the detailed, behind-the-scenes work of filmmaking isn't visible in the final production.
"We don't need to know how much research actors have done to create the worlds they inhabit on screen. Nosotros just need to enter it with them." Or, "The best visual furnishings are those you don't notice at all." And over again, "Production design should exist invisible."
To pull the curtain back, the writer gives usa an insider's expect at what usually goes unnoticed. She begins her exploration with a chapter on the screenplay because, she says, "The screenplay serves equally the founding certificate of every film."
Equally an example of skillful writing, she points to the commencement information-packed sequence in Francis Ford Coppola's screenplay for "The Godfather." The script moves back and forth from subdued conversations in the Don'south dim office to lively churr at a sunlit nuptials reception, where Michael arrives with his new girlfriend, Kay, and must explicate the peculiarity of his family unit's business, saying at one point, "That's my family, Kay. That's non me."
Hornaday says Coppola introduces the Corleones so conspicuously and economically that he's "made sure we'll eagerly tag along on whatsoever journey they take."
Each affiliate in Talking Pictures is broken into curt sections kicked off by a few elementary questions. Some of Hornaday's answers seem obvious: "For a movie to work, we must believe it." But most of her insights are enlightening. For case, when she learns from screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga that he pays little attending to backstories for his characters, and realizes, "This lack of particular has resulted in a lack of credibility in his films."
She quotes the pithy opinions of other film greats to convey her insights. Near acting: "You come to piece of work on time, know your lines and don't bump into the piece of furniture" (Spencer Tracy); "To have a career in the movies, the wisest affair was to practice absolutely nothing at all. And that is more or less what I've done" (Alec Guinness).
Near bad cinematography: "pictures of people talking!" (Alfred Hitchcock). About directing: "For some strange reason, I always expect the near talented when I'yard working with the nigh talented people" (Alan J. Pakula).
Hornaday is clear in describing which artistic choices work and which don't. Director Christopher Nolan's reputation for obscuring dialogue with an overlay of sound effects gives a final result that is "provocative at best and unintelligible at worst." In contrast, managing director Robert Altman is a principal "of realism in sound" for designing a technique that keeps overlapping dialogue from beingness garbled.
Occasionally, she piles upwards names in lists that clamber past in a blur, like final credits. Only most of her lists work every bit helpful hints, as if to say: "Notice how these people work; now compare that to the methods of this other bunch."
Hornaday doesn't skimp on technical details (nosotros acquire nearly double-dolly shots, a "Dutch angle," and the Steadicam), but she folds such data into anecdotes most individuals piddling with these technical elements.
She besides stresses non-technical skills, such as improvisation, and she gives good luck its due. She tells usa that a famous tracking shot (following the main graphic symbol in "Goodfellas" entering a side door of a nightclub) was the result of Martin Scorsese's improvising when he was suddenly told he couldn't film at the guild'southward front entrance.
And a "Field of Dreams" shot of a graphic symbol disappearing into a mist-shrouded cornfield came about because "an actual, shelf-like fogbank rolled in all of a sudden and unexpectedly" — a bit of luck that proves an opinion she'd earlier cited from Orson Welles: a film director's role is to "preside over accidents."
In her epilogue, Hornaday says that appreciating a movie comes down to ane question: Was the film worth making? I can't yet tell if her book has sharpened my power to ask and reply that question. But I'm ready to find out the next fourth dimension I get to the movies.
Paul J. McCarren, S.J., lives in southern Maryland, where he continues to piece of work on a serial of Simple Guides to the Bible. He occasionally leaves the serenity of the boondocks to teach in DC at the Dog Tag/1000.U. concern plan for veterans.
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