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From: jay@umd5.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: Re: Should technique be invisible?
Message-ID: <454@umd5.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 29-Mar-85 14:15:42 EST
Article-I.D.: umd5.454
Posted: Fri Mar 29 14:15:42 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 2-Apr-85 05:25:04 EST
References: <167@ISM780.UUCP> <4407@ucla-cs.ARPA> <543@lsuc.UUCP>
Reply-To: jay@umd5.UUCP (Jay Elvove)
Organization: U of Md, CSC, College Park, Md
Lines: 45
Summary: 

I think that this is one of the most interesting topics to come up in this
newsgroup in quite some time.  If you take a look at traditional American
film you will find that almost all of it has one thing in common; it
pretends it's not there.  Through the years, ingenious techniques have
been perfected for hiding the fact that you are watching a movie, techniques
that cause you instead to experience it.  One should not make a value
judgement regarding the pros and cons of the Hollywood style because it does
what it's supposed to do and does it better than any other country in the
world.  But film, like all art forms, does not exist to satisfy any one
school of criticism.  It's there not only to entertain but to broaden us in
ways not possible in other media.

Foregrounding technique in and of itself it neither good nor bad.  Composers,
writers and artists all do it for reasons they deem necessary or desirable.
Why then shouldn't a filmmaker do the same?  When Woody Allen steps out of
the narrative of one of his films to address the audience we are immediately
ripped out of the action and reminded that we are indeed watching a film.
When filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock use abrupt editing, extreme angles
or curious camera movements, the force of the narrative is intentionally
broken, often to let us know that the filmmaker is not so much interested
in what's going on in the film as he or she is in showing us that we've
been taken in by it all.  (When filmmakers such as Brian DePalma do these
same things the reasons are not so obvious, at least to me.)

No aspect of filmmaking should be subject to arbitrary guidelines that
regulate whether or not it should call attention to itself.  As much as
anything else, this maxim applies to scoring a film, the topic that brought
about this discussion in the first place.  There are times when attention
to the soundtrack is totally appropriate, such as at a comic moment where
a wrong note may be sounded to punctuate the event.  The film "King Kong"
is full of Max Steiner's mickeymoused orchestrations which are used in
similar fashion.  Films that are creatively scored with popular music of 
the day often enhance the scenes in which they are used simply because
of their cultural association.  John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath" uses
the song "Red River Valley" in lieu of a score written explicitly for the
film and it works so well because we recognize the song.  To a lesser 
degree, this same principal applies to "The Big Chill".  John Williams'
bombastic scores for the "Star Wars" films are appropriate to the
bombastic films for which they were created.

In short, if it's done well, you can do anything you want to in a film.
If all you remember about a film is the fact that it had a good score,
maybe that's all there was to the film to begin with!
-- 
Jay Elvove       ..!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!umd5!jay