“The interaction of (these) themes in a film would be, to take a simple example, an actor saying, “I love you.” Those words by themselves convey ardent feeling. But the actor can deliver them so they hint (ever so slightly), “I don’t love you.” That’s an interesting ambiguity, a tension between the words and the attitude of the speech.
But then the director can stage the scene to insinuate, “Yes, but he does love her, really.” And the editor can assemble the scene to hint, “But he really doesn’t.” All of a sudden, you’ve got four levels, and others can be added, through production design and costumes, to get a layering of reversals around “I love you/I don’t love you/I do love you/ I really don’t/ But I really do. How those ideas cohabit will decide whether it’s a compelling film.
Again it resembles orchestration in how you state a theme, develop it, contradict it, undercut it, support it, resolve it. If all of the instruments always played the same note, the orchestra would sound like a child’s xylophone. You can barely listen to that stuff for fifteen seconds. To sustain two and half hours of concert or cinema, you need more development and elaboration.
”
— Walter Murch in Conversation With Joy Katz
Reblogged from baobab boy b.
September 19, 2009, 2:49am
