Fairness in the Frame

“Without mercy, man is not a human being.”

So Governor Masauji Taira tells his son Zushio near the beginning of Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff, a wonderful film that I can’t believe I saw for the first time only a few days ago. It’s the kind of movie that is so emotionally involving during the initial viewing that I know I’ll need to see it many more times to fully appreciate it. I know there are many themes that I didn’t pick up on (a terrific essay by Jim Emerson gives some direction on that). But I did notice that I’ve never seen another film where the technique and style so completely supported its central creed.

“Mercy” probably isn’t the best word to use when describing a filmmaking style, so I’ll try to find another that approximates it. Let’s try “fairness.” The essence of the Governor’s teaching to his son is that he should be fair to all people: to the wealthy and the peasants, to the largest and smallest people in society. Without fairness, without compassion for the smallest things, people have no humanity.

Mizoguchi’s compositions echo this belief. He shoots in wide and medium deep-focus shots, letting our eyes move across the screen, giving us the freedom to focus on anything in the frame: trees, rocks, water, and maybe the people walking through the setting. The first shot of the film (after an opening close up of stones beneath title cards) lingers on a forest clearing while a family slowly walks through. He gives equal opportunity to everything we can see. Ultimately, our attention will be drawn to the people, but mainly because they are moving and we are conditioned to think that the humans are the subjects of the shot. But there is reason enough to spend the entire shot focusing on the sunlight drifting through the leaves or the tree trunk lying across a creek.

It’s interesting that I watched Sansho the Bailiff only a day after watching Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a film with a similar visual style. Like Mizoguchi, Tati uses wide, deep-focus compositions filled with a lot of information. In Tati’s case, he usually fills the screen with people without using focus to tell us which ones we should notice. All people in the frame have an equal chance of being the center of the audience’s attention, especially during the restaurant scene that dominates the second half of the picture.

But wait a minute. If Mizoguchi and Tati are being “fair” (my word) to everything in the frame, what about everything outside of the frame? I thought about this issue while watching Sansho the Bailiff during an establishing shot of Kyoto. Zushio stands on top of a hill overlooking Kyoto, looks at a sign, then heads toward the city; the camera cranes up and tilts down to show Zushio running down the other side of the hill. This hill highlights something that is present throughout the film (any film, really): the boundaries of the frame.

A movie screen cannot show everything. Something is always hidden, whether it is on the other side of a hill or outside the edge of the frame. Does this undermine what I’ve been talking about in regards to fairness? Absolutely not. There is a danger when talking about the styles of directors like Mizoguchi and Tati in that it sometimes suggests that they are not in control of their films, that they just let things happen. On the contrary, every frame of a movie reflects a conscious decision by the director. Mizoguchi made a deliberate choice to put his camera on that side of the hill, to point the camera at that tree or that side of the bay. Tati made deliberate choices to point the camera at the bar or at the stage, just as he made a deliberate choice to use the sound of a falling umbrella to direct our attention to the entrance of Mr. Hulot (Tati’s use of sound in that film is worth an entire blog post of its own). Not to mention that they decide how the characters move through the frame (even if they don’t give specific instructions).

As awkward as my uses of the words “mercy” and “fairness” have been, they reflect the conscious decisions made by the hand of the director. Martin Scorsese said, “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” What the director decides to leave out of the frame is not necessarily better or worse than what the director decides to put in the frame. What matters is how fair directors are in their decisions. Why is this on screen? Why is this not on screen? Every director has to answer these questions: Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow and Michael Bay. This is the heart of cinema. Movies have the ability to go anywhere and see anything, to transport us to different times and places, places that might not concern us. Directors have to understand what we are seeing and why we are seeing it.

In Sansho the Bailiff, a character laments that he has “found that humans have little sympathy for things that don’t directly concern them.” If people had greater understanding of things that don’t concern them, we would have that much more humanity. I can think of no greater function for cinema than to provide just that.

The Golden Age of the Action Picture

Anyone who truly loves film wants Guillermo del Toro to make his dream project At the Mountains of Madness. Del Toro is one of the best filmmakers working today, a true visionary whose work will stand for generations as a testament to human imagination. And even if (for some strange reason), you don’t like his films, you should at least be excited about a major director getting the chance to pursue a passion project. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does (Inception, Children of Men, Apocalypse Now), it’s always great to see a filmmaker swinging for the fences and pushing himself to his limits to make something he really loves.

Film nerds worldwide have been eagerly awaiting del Toro’s long-planned adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. A recent New Yorker profile of del Toro and the support of James Cameron have added to the anticipation. But this week was marked by the Internet-shattering news that the project has fallen apart. Universal Studios reportedly balked at the proposed $150 million budget and possible R-rating for the intense, Sci-fi horror epic. Del Toro is reportedly moving on to a monster movie called Pacific Rim until he gets another opportunity for Madness. While this is not as exciting a prospect as Mountains of Madness, his masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth or even his Hellboy films, the worst-case scenario is that it will probably lead to another Blade 2 (a good, imaginative film that feels like it was mostly made to pay the bills).

As we wait for del Toro to get behind the camera again and inevitably make At the Mountains of Madness (it’s going to happen at some point), this is as good a time as any to examine the history of the big studio action picture. What got me thinking about this was the reason for Universal putting the kibosh on the project: not the budget issue (which happens all the time), but the rating. An R-rated big budget action-oriented film is too big of a risk in Hollywood these days. This makes sense from a marketing standpoint. An R-rating all but eliminates the all-important teen demographic. Of course, teenagers see R-rated movies, but they usually end up sneaking in, and studios don’t make money off of that (that money usually ends up going to whatever family movie happens to be playing around the same showtime).

But wait a minute. Haven’t there been a lot of successful R-rated action pictures? What about Aliens, Terminator 2, Die Hard, Predator and a host of other ultra-violent action movies? They belong to a period in cinema that has long-since past. And even though this era of Stallone and Schwarzenegger must have seemed interminable while it was occurring, I have come to call it The Golden Age of the Action Picture.

Since this is a specific period in filmmaking, we should fix some dates to it. Let’s say it lasted from 1977 to 1999. Now, we all know what epoch-defining film event occurred in 1977. For those who don’t know, 1977 must have been too long of a time ago in a galaxy way too far, far away. Star Wars is usually blamed (along with Jaws) for ending the New Hollywood, and though this is not entirely fair, it is correct that the enormous success of Star Wars turned studios away from adult fare and showed them that they could make money by catering to young audiences with high concept action-adventure stories. This mentality has guided the studios ever since. The only change since 1977 has been in the films themselves.

Even though these action pictures are guided by the same studio mentality, there is a noticeable shift between the Golden Action Age and modern action movies. One of the big differences has to do with the ratings. While some major successes of this era such as Superman, the Indiana Jones films, the Jurassic Park films and Independence Day were not rated R, many others were. Think about the Alien, Rambo, Die Hard and Terminator franchises. Think of nearly Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson film. These were big, violent, bloody action movies. The last really successful R-rated action movie was The Matrix (and now you see where I’m going with this).

The Matrix is the film that marks the divide between the 80s/90s style action pictures and the modern era. The Golden Age films were made with very traditional Hollywood techniques. They used a lot of practical effects. Even a CGI-heavy movie like Independence Day feels almost like a David Lean film in terms of its style (not in terms of its quality; I’m not that crazy). The easiest way to describe this is in comparison with post-Matrix action movies. The Matrix was revolutionary not for its ideas (Dark City is much more interesting in this regard), but for the way it used CGI to free itself from gravity, embracing even more so than earlier films the traditions of Hong Kong martial arts movies. Movies since then have felt somewhat lighter by comparison. An even better visual demonstration of this is to compare modern action heroes with the heroes of the 80s and 90s. Actors like Schwarzenegger and Stallone dominated the Golden Age. The most famous modern action heroes are guys like Neo, Spider-Man and Jason Bourne. The difference between the modern era and the Golden Age is best described as Tobey Maguire vs. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Even though The Matrix was an original screenplay, it was the film that signaled the era of the comic book movie. There had been comic movies before to be sure (Superman and Batman), but The Matrix showed the way that they would be made. Spider-Man could not be made in the same way that Tim Burton made Batman. But when Neo flew up to the camera in the final shot of The Matrix, movie executives must have known that this was the way to bring Spider-Man out of development hell. From this came not only Spider-Man, but also X-Men, the Quidditch scenes in Harry Potter, Iron Man, the desire to reboot Batman, maybe even the Nazgul scenes in Lord of the Rings, and pretty much any action movie you can think of (1999 was also the year of The Blair Witch Project, which wildly popularized that now ubiquitous action movie technique: the shakycam).

And what does all this mean to us, to film, to Guillermo del Toro? Does it mean that my Golden Age of Action Pictures was better? Not necessarily. I call it “the Golden Age” because I have a certain fondness for it. I do think that it produced more great action films than the modern era, which has been rather lackluster save for Inception, The Bourne Supremacy, superb superhero films like The Dark Knight, Batman Begins and Spider-Man 2, good superhero films like X2 and the Hellboy series and fantasy films that could be considered action pictures like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (I don’t really consider the other LOTR and HP films to be action pictures). But was this “Golden Age” superior? Was it more adult?

The whole ratings issue might be the deciding factor in this question. Action movies have always catered to teenagers, but studios in the 80s and 90s seemed more willing to take a risk on projects that could cut off a large part of their target demographic. They don’t seem willing to do that any more. Part of that may have to do with the emphasis on comic book adaptations with younger heroes. It’s certainly an enormous risk to make an R-rated comic book movie (notice the difference in box office receipts between 300 and Watchmen). The idea of a comic book movie for adults might seem absurd to a lot of people. And when the action movie marketplace (if not the entire movie marketplace) is dominated by comic book movies, it’s hard to get in anything that is different.

Filmmaking technology has progressed enough for Guillermo del Toro to be able to fully realize his vision for At the Mountains of Madness, but the mentality in Hollywood has not worked to his advantage. He might have had an easier time getting a studio to approve it back when there were big R-rated action movies opening every week. That’s not the way things work these days. Were things better in the old days of violence and R-ratings? Maybe. Maybe not. Ratings don’t always have an effect on quality. Maybe I’m looking too nostalgically at an era that I didn’t even experience. Maybe people will look back nostalgically on an era dominated by comic books and not, say, video games. But at least in our little Golden Age there was more variety between PG-13 and R, more willingness to gamble on more intense, more challenging, possibly more adult films. Today, action directors have to make their films with 13-year-olds in mind. I remember when I was 13. I was pretty movie-literate (how many 13-year-olds have seen Seven Samurai?). But soon I was 14, then 15, and now I’m 18. Not everyone who watches movies is 13 years old. Can the rest of us have some movies, too?

Brief Encounters: Fate and Chance in The Adjustment Bureau

Possible spoilers ahead.

“I’ve been riding this bus every day for three years hoping that I’d see you again,” says David Norris (Matt Damon) to Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt).

How many people can honestly say that they haven’t done something similar: frequented a place where we’ve had a chance meeting with someone we’d like to see again? Maybe she rides this bus every day or every week or at least very often. Maybe he goes to that CVS a lot. Maybe she regularly eats at the restaurant. Maybe we can accidentally meet there again. Maybe it’s a little stalkerish, but who can say they haven’t at least thought this? The Adjustment Bureau tackles a lot of big issues, proposes some very intriguing scenarios and ultimately, like many other science-fiction stories, sets itself up for disappointment, but it perfectly captures the euphoria of chance meetings and our questions about fate and choice (or as Robert Frost would say: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”).

What if I had left home 5 minutes earlier? Or five minutes later? What if I had gone somewhere else for lunch? If I had done anything different, would things have turned out the same? Is there a reason why we met? Can I even make my own decisions? Is life a road map or a blank page?

The Adjustment Bureau is based on a story (which I haven’t read) by the great science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and its ideas about choice bear some resemblance to other movies such as Minority Report (also based on a Dick story) and Dark City, which is visually quoted in the strange hat-wearing men and a scene where the mysterious team of men freezes workers in an office building. But The Adjustment Bureau proposes a fascinating concept of its own: a company (of sorts) that monitors human activities to make sure that they go according to a Plan written by “the Chairman.”

The biggest problem for the bureau is that the Plan can’t account for human nature and emotion. The smallest events can have an enormous influence on a person’s emotions, which can completely change the way that they act. The characters in the film call these “ripples.” I loved the scene where the Adjusters see a kiss in the immediate future for David and Elise and desperately try to prevent it because of the enormous ripples that it will spread. Like Dark City, The Adjustment Bureau features non-human figures that are completely baffled by the ways that feelings dictate people’s actions. Humans are irrational creatures. Even if we know that one path will lead to a better outcome than another, we might choose the worse path, letting our emotions decide rather than our reason. This is the dilemma facing David Norris: he can either achieve political success or be with the woman he loves.

Unfortunately, the ending of the film is rather problematic (Seriously, major spoilers ahead). The build-up to the climax is brilliant: David learns how to take on the powers of the Adjusters so that he can move quickly through New York City and find Elise. So far, the movie has done a great job of dealing with its dramatic structure: if you introduce a concept (particularly in science-fiction) you cannot let it go unexplored. Let’s call it Chekov’s Hat and Doorknob. This leads to a rather wonderful chase sequence.

But the movie steps out onto dangerous ground when David decides that he wants to meet the Chairman and talk about the Plan. It had to head in this direction, but it’s a dangerous one. The movie could either show the characters essentially meeting God (which could go horribly wrong), or it could figure out some reason why the characters cannot reach that point. Instead of going the more ambitious route, the movie plays it safe. If I understood correctly, they cannot meet the Chairman because “he takes on many forms.” This does not ruin the entire movie, but it simply is not compatible with the film’s original premise that portrays God as something like the head of a corporation. The chairman of a corporation should not be that mysterious (maybe the movie should have been called Chairman & Me). The brilliance of this concept is that it is a tangible visualization of fate, in the same way that Inception uses architecture to visualize the subconscious. The problem with The Adjustment Bureau is that it might have stuck its neck out a little too far. A meeting with God would probably be far too literal, but once the possibility of that had been raised, it was impossible for me to forget it. Few science-fiction films have gone all the way with their ideas and most of them have not seen great critical and commercial success (see Knowing), so the film tries to pull back and ends up just being rather disappointing.

However, the movie closes with a very interesting idea: that if we are going to have free will, we need to own it, come what may. We need to understand what it is to have free will and what it is to not have it. We need to make our choices and own the consequences. We can look back on a choice, an important decision or a chance meeting and wonder what would have happened if we had done something different, but we made that choice, “and that has made all the difference.”