All language subtitles for 6 - Developing Your Style

my suggestion would be

if you're starting to make a film

or you want to express yourself on some sort of

visual narrative

I don't know if you have to be conscious of your style

you know I mean

you can use a sense of

an aspect of some

some style that you think you might have as a but be be

be aware that it might

reveal itself to be something else

and that's what's more important

that's the essential of who you are

and what you're trying to say

and how you're expressing it

using the tools to express it

because ultimately

if they take away all the equipment

you still have to be able to tell the story

can't talk about my own style

I don't know what

I don't know what that is really so

other people could do it if they want but I

I don't know how to

so I'm trying to make the pictures

feel the need at times to really make these pictures

for whatever that

whatever that means to me

it means that you can't

it means that you

it's hard for you to continue your daily life

unless you work on this particular story or work out

making a film

so to speak

so I'm just making the pictures

telling the stories

trying to capture the emotions

uh the ideas

and really try to provoke to the best of my ability

what's left of uh

uh my time and what's left of uh

the capacity for

my my brain basically um

going further into the mystery of film making

we now agree that verbal literacy is necessary

and we take that for granted

but a couple of thousand years ago

Socrates actually disagreed

his argument was almost very same

identical to the arguments of people today

who object to the internet or to

or the people back in the 60s and 70s

warned about the evils of television

Socrates worried that writing and reading

would actually lead to not truly knowing it

he believed that if

people would have stopped memorizing

and start writing and reading

they'd be in danger

of cultivating the appearance of wisdom

as opposed the real thing

he was afraid that reading it

would take away the actual knowledge

and the understanding of the text

so the same kinds of questions still come up

around moving images

that too literal

they leave nothing to the imagination

and they're inferior to the written word

so now if you're taking this class um

I'm gonna take it for granted

that you don't agree with those ideas

but if you're gonna make films

I promise you that you're gonna encounter them

cause words and images have a common source

so when you look at ancient writing

you see that

words and images are almost indistinguishable

in fact words are images

they're symbols

written Chinese and Japanese

so actually look like pictographic languages

the written word is not superior to the moving image

they are both ways

they are both modes of communication and expression

of equal value

so to me when people talk about visual literacy

I think that in the end

there's just literacy period

the most important thing is to understand

the difference between certain images

or to be more precise

certain sequences of images

some are meant to sell something

some are meant to just entertain

and some are meant to

you know in form

and some this

what we're talking about here

are meant to tell stories

and in so doing

pursue and discover something surprising and mysterious

not all images are there to be

you know eaten

consumed like fast food and forgotten

that's important to remember when

not mass manufacturers were trying to be filmmakers

the world of movie making

where these remarkable images came from

the stories and the worlds that depicted this felt very

very distant

I mean if I even

I did have the dreams of maybe

putting something together

like what would become a movie

but these were purely dreams

there is no way to

to actually implement this in any way

and no way we really thought

that such a thing could happen to us

to be able to make a film of it was like

a place that you had to conquer in a way

you had to overtake and be able to do your own thing um

so the next best thing I was able to

do since was working class

family didn't have cameras

and that sort of thing was too expensive

so I was able to um

the only way I can express this desire

this impulse

I should say

was to draw imaginary movies in a small

small room that I was in

in the tenements

living downtown

Elizabeth Street

and these were different genres

some were based on television shows I saw

some were watercoloured

some were just black and white with Ebony pencil

some were even sepia

a lot of those don't exist

what does exist now

is the beginnings of an ancient Roman epic

which I never finished

which allowed me to play with aspect ratios

or what I now know is an aspect ratio

in 65 millimeter or 70 millimeter

aspect ratio

and so this was a way of trying to tell the stories

from frame to frame

uh I'd show it to a few friends

um but they felt that they were just stills

drawings and I explained to them that

in between the frames that were drawn

it was movement

or you have to imagine the movement

see the only way I could try to

come up with the visual narrative

or make a movie

quote unquote

was to draw these pictures within frames

and sometimes it be a strip of paper

and maybe divided into three frames and the um

difference between each frame

sometimes I found myself editing

telling the story

with medium shots

close UPS wide shots

that sort of thing

very rarely

where the frames

from frame 1 to 2

or frame 2 to 3 wide shots

simply wide shots

sort of like in the first films that were made

I was just finding my way

based upon what I saw

in the movie theater

and on television and so um

in some cases

the frames would be cuts from one to the other

and others there would be frames

which represented three or four parts of the same shot

I imagine camera movement

and I also imagine that

when the cuts were made

that there was some sort of movement

in the film

in a way that one would have to use your imagination

so when I was able to start to

actually put a film together

the only thing I could

relate to really was to go back to those drawings

and design the whole picture on paper

which is what I did in my first short films

and pretty much subsequently most of the films I made

on a practical level

it gives you an idea of exactly what you wanna get

uh that particular day of shooting

uh or for the entire schedule of the picture

so that you can utilize the time properly

you don't make it up as you go along on set

and waste that time and

energy of everyone and money

so it was meant as a

not just a blueprint

but actual actualization of the shots

I wanted to get exactly how they go

I think the documentaries I've been trying to do

over the years

or the non fiction films are

are really for me

projects that have no rules in a sense

and therefore have no rules

it gets tougher

yeah so what that means

it's their right places for experimenting or

finding another way to tell a story

whether through piece of music

or whether the editing itself becomes music

meaning rhythm and pace

and telling stories elliptically I tend to

want to continue making these non fiction films

because they

I'd hoped or at times feel

that should inform the narrative structure

of the fictional films I make

um there's a freedom in making these documentaries

or these music films

so to speak

there's a freedom of form that loosens me up in a way

everything's included in the shooting of it

if you are shooting certain scenes

sometimes it's the footage that already exists

the shooting of it

and particularly in the editing

there is no such thing as editing

it's writing

writing editing

and making the film there in that room

you know and so you can go many different ways

it's infinite

and so it's really a challenge

as they say

it's also true

the documentary I made about my parents

call Italian American

in fact I Learned a lot from that by letting them

letting them exist

I should say

within the frame

and tell the stories without intercutting

or finding obvious cinematic techniques

to push time forward or backwards

didn't matter jump cuts

putting 12 frames of black leader

slugs in the middle of a story

just to get to another point

um I'm just holding on

the person really

it was something

was a great lesson

and the pictures I've made

that are set within the world where I grew up

or related to

that were like

Mean Streets or Raging Bull of Goodfellas

so and so I

I think for example

one aspect of

that's really important

is the body language is very important

the way that people relate to each other physically

I suppose it was that fact which

let it take center stage

and didn't complicate it with cutting

or anything superficially cinematic

in the creation of certain kinds of stories

in many cases

it's when to hold the shot

when to let the people speak

when to just watch them you know

and not move the camera not cut

you find what's there

and that in a sense

they inhabit the film

use of voice over is very important to me

it was just a natural element

and making movies

I appreciate it so much over the years

seeing films with voice over

particularly kind hearts and coronates with that

wonderfully restrained humor of the voice over

the irony which put me in the mind thereof

so to speak

of using ironic voiceover

in Goodfellas

the inherent humor

and some of the voiceover in that film

comes sparked from kind hearts and coronates or

other films at the time

particularly

there was also a wonderful use of voiceover

and shoot the Piano Player

Trufo and Jules and Jim

I like that very much

it goes back and forth through time and space

building up the relationship of the two men

and their friends in that world

of the world of the Left Bank at that time

um and for me

yes it has a lot of exposition meaning

explaining what you're seeing

but somehow the words don't

necessarily

the words don't are not needed to fully explain it

what you're saying

in other words

the narration itself is not expository in a dull sense

in a didactic way

it somehow expresses the joy

and the warmth and the love between these characters

and also the free Wheeling aspect

of this kind of thinking

you know this life that they're living

with the life they like to live too

and so I thought what about

what about a whole movie that way

and that became good fellas

and so there was a spark there

Barry Linden's another good example of voiceover

um the language of the voiceover in that

and that particular film um

the language itself

and so that LED to of course

the use of the voice over

nature of innocence

that when we were about to make the film

they were those who were in the production who

turned to me and said

who's talking

I didn't realize people took that literally

who's talking the storyteller I don't know

person telling you the story

or the person living the story

um and so I didn't

I never took it that literal

in many cases

I I believe

so age of innocence

um we had the opportunity there to play with voice over

from the book rated warden

using her language

very much the same way

let's about the same way

but very much inspired by the use of language

in Barry Linden and a number of other films

and voice over

the whole point is that when I

when I found narration

the use of narration and voice over

as a part of the storytelling as natural to me

the very first film I made

the very short film

very first short film I made

cover with voice over

um it's an element of the storytelling in film

not a literary device

in the case of age of innocence

we're able to take advantage of the literary

because we could take the voice over directly from

what was written in the book

in the novel

by the Thorn but for me

was one of the cinematic elements in the film

not a literary element at all

and not for something to just

give you exposition as to what's happening in the film