Once again, the notion of ‘achievability’ in the Understanding Cinema process, led me to think about what sort of stories should we be encouraging students to tell with their films? How can we make the best of limited resources, to tell stories that translate across cultural boundaries when they are shown to UC participants elsewhere…
When shooting my Lumiere Minutes, I tried to think about how I could achieve the greatest ‘pregnancy’ of meaning, given the framework. With the first two in particular, I tried to think about how I could use offscreen space, and depth of field, to create the most dynamic frames. I also wanted to counter the…
We constantly encounter a core sense of duality in films. Events, places, characters, entire storylines are both literal – in that they represent a representation of reality, of something that we are told is happening in a ‘real’ space and time- and metaphorical, in that they are simultaneously expressive, poetic, and play a role in…
As an artistic medium, cinema is like a musical instrument: it allows us access to some modes of expression, but not all. A violin allows us to play with the bow, to play pizzicato without the bow, to play with vibrato, to play spiccato, col legno etc. However, a violin can never truly play like…
One of the big issues facing participants in the Understanding Cinema project is the question of achievability. Faced with some of the most astounding feats in cinema – the opening of Touch of Evil, the dizzying thrills of Cuaron, the fluid cinema of Bela Tarr, the Altman-inspired bravado of Paul Thomas Anderson – how can…
Understanding Cinema 