Digital Filmmaking in the Age of Storytelling

 

Nobody doubts that what drives modern communications is visual imagery. What is less realized is the across the board importance of the art of storytelling in association with the creation of visuals in making the eventual difference in the success or failure of ideas.  And in most cases, that means not only preparation in the understanding of media skills but in the ability to construct meaningful and attractive narratives. A short look at the interaction between these two concepts is what follows.

Essentially, it all comes to fashioning a specific partnership, one between vocational technologies and creative thinking abilities.  In combination, this partnership is what will drive not only education but business, the arts, culture, as well as niche and mass entertainment for the foreseeable future. It is no longer feasible to separate education into mechanical training and abstract thought.

A few years ago, a prominent American university program in communication design announced that it would no longer teach software or technology. Instead, it would devote its full attention to abstract creative design. This is a mistake. It severs the creative act from its sustenance in the broader culture—which includes the culture of technology. And it is a vain attempt to reintroduce what Walter Benjamin labeled the “aura,” that sign of unique authenticity that was the defining characteristic of art during its epoch long association with religion and ritual, which was no longer applicable in an age where photography and film had altered the nature of art as an object and the role of its creative intermediaries in producing it. In his landmark essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin made clear that a new era had dawned in which politicized aesthetics and “captive” audiences would be integrated into a new art.  Thus would the tools of expression often determine the content being expressed. This has been one of the principle developments of what was the twentieth century’s predominate art form: film. And there are many examples that illustrate this fact.

Most notable of all are perhaps the early Russian filmmakers, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, both students of engineering who developed the montage school of filmmaking during the early years of the Soviet Union.  In Germany, the pioneer filmmaker Fritz Lang began as an engineering student as well. Meanwhile, in France, the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, who created the Cinématographe, came from a background in photography and technological innovation. And, of course, in the United States, early discoveries in cinema not only are associated with the inventor Thomas Edison but with other inventors involved with emerging technologies of the time, such as Edwin Porter and W.K.L. Dickson.

These first generation filmmakers, in addition to creating and furthering film technology, also developed the “grammar” of filmmaking, its basic unit, the shot. Experimentation in framing, camera movement, and composition followed, all of which evolved toward a formula that expressed an accessible visual text for the masses. It all culminated in what might be called “Hollywood Cinema,” a film style that promoted strong continuity in its visuals and storytelling.

That storytelling itself merged with the technologies most significantly in the productions pioneered by the likes of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. But the real master of storytelling in the cinema would come shortly thereafter, when the director John Ford arrived in Hollywood to begin his career in 1917. This son of Irish immigrants brought to the screen the grand tradition of Irish storytelling. He also introduced technological innovations that allowed for a different level of narrative structure to thrive: the extreme long shot of individuals against vast and rugged backgrounds, the so-called “stock company” of actors that recurred throughout his films, and the visual experimentation with expressionist forms of lighting and depth-of-field. All these figured into the telling of the tale and never fell to the level of mere ornamentation. Above all, Ford implemented the notion of the technique of invisibility, the ability to make filmgoers forget they were watching a film but were instead part of a grand drama, a story.

At the level of learning, what are the implications of this history for students of digital filmmaking?

Formula versus Innovation—whether to pursue the novel, the revolutionary, or to trust in established patterns of expression is a false choice. Neither neophilia or neophobia presents a productive path for the emergent artist/filmmaker. It is not a sign of lack of creativity to pursue stories through established conventions, tropes, and dramatic structures.

The fact is that the conventions of storytelling through film are now well established. If a filmmaker wants to communicate to large audiences through film, knowledge and manipulation of those conventions is a must. The arc of storytelling is well established: the three act drama, the urgency of the story, the exposition of character(s), the resolution. Much has been imported from the theater (that was D.W. Griffith’s special contribution to American cinema). But the form of storytelling is now also well established. Remarkably, the once revolutionary montage school developed by Eisenstein and his Soviet adherents seems to fit right in to contemporary filmmaking. What was once groundbreaking and shocking is now expected.

Where then does novelty emerge? Through the individual filmmakers’ points of view, their own experiences, their own filters. This is where innovation occurs within formula. Formula itself works. It is the proven means through which to express visual stories. Students of filmmaking, therefore, need to have a fluency in these forms of communication. Individual styles can and do thrive among them. But the established patterns of telling the story are the narrative tropes. The broader storylines are the genres, the conditions of storytelling that prepare the way for the acceptance and fulfillment of patterns of imagery.

Message and Entertainment—reflecting upon the notions associated with Walter Benjamin above, it would seem that film and television is particularly suited to the dissemination of politicized content, that the “message” will determine the degree of “entertainment.”  And, in fact, that was one of the claims Benjamin made. As the “aura” withers away, the “art object” is replaced by the “experience of exhibition.” In the case of film, that meant the shared audience experience of the darkened cinema with the mesmerizing silver screen at its head. Television certainly is a somewhat different experience, focused on narrower audiences, even individuals alone. But television broadcasting was barely beginning when Benjamin composed his article in 1936. And where it was most active, in Germany, the means of exhibition was usually through “television parlors” made available to the public. In other words, it was yet similar to the experience of cinema. Still, there is an unmistakable trend already in place: the mass cinema audience was breaking into atomized pieces. That was something that continued throughout the mid to late twentieth century, when individual homes first installed televisions and then within those homes individual television sets spread throughout several rooms.  And by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the breakdown in shared experience has intensified, as individuals transport their video with them for private exhibitions on smartphones in public spaces.

The effect? Shorter stories. More stimulating visuals. In that sense, of course, things are still following the path first explored with Eisenstein and his “montage of attractions.”  But things are often condensed. Awareness of accepted conventions and visual tropes and their manipulation is even more important. Within that knowledge so is the necessity for a creative response that can nevertheless find a space to separate from the ever crowded field of content available.  And thus the message, the story, within entertainment becomes more important than ever.

In the final analysis, then, what is important for the student of digital filmmaking is not only a sophisticated and thorough understanding of the tools of their trade but of how those tools constantly evolve to shift ever so subtly the margins of storytelling. Feature films, documentary shorts, hour long television dramas, half-hour comedies co-exist with a world of Youtube and Vimeo media platforms geared to operate most efficiently in two to five minute pulses of story time. This corresponds to visual poetry. The longer dramatic arc of film and TV, which arose out of the novel and the short story, has made poetic metaphor important to a new generation of filmmakers. And poetry, we note, has always appealed more to the senses than has prose. We are left then with acknowledging the ultimate wisdom of Benjamin in finding the importance modern art in film in the “experience of its exhibition,” an appeal to the senses.

 

—June 8, 2018