Manipulation in film

There’s something fundamentally wrong with the current state of cinema. It’s kind of in vogue at this point to lament the sea of remakes and sequels in our story-deprived culture, but I think that’s only a symptom of a deeper issue. The problem lies in our very concept of film—what a movie is and why we watch it. The problem with American film is that filmmakers are still using the D.W. Griffith model.

D.W. Griffith is widely considered to be one of the most influential film directors of all time. He pioneered many of the techniques that are now taken for granted in narrative filmmaking—continuity editing, camera angles, and the very concept of lighting for mood. Basically, D. W. Griffith was the first director to really understand how to manipulate an audience’s emotions and suspend their disbelief.

And therein lies the problem: the Griffith model is inherently dishonest. It’s excellent for deceiving an audience, and many cases it’s fun to be deceived. We like to be hypnotized, to have our disbelief suspended. We walk into a theater and suddenly we’re no longer individuals—if it’s a well-made movie, everybody in the theater is united in their fear, sadness, joy, or whatever emotion the filmmakers are programming into them. It’s groupthink, brainwashing, bread and circuses.

This is not very harmful when the movie is something like Jurassic Park. All it’s doing is creating an entertaining sensory diversion. But the concept can enter some very problematic territory. Griffith exposed his invention’s own worst tendencies when he made his most famous tour-de-force: a film called Birth of a Nation. He used every tool in the book to deceive audiences into subscribing to his distorted worldview. Watching Birth of a Nation, we’re transported into a world with some very different realities from our own. In this fever dream universe, black people are the root of all evil and Southern land-owners were courageous underdogs during the post-Civil War reconstruction period. The film does not expose truth; it propagates deception. And it does it alarmingly well.

First Blog Post

I’m going to make a movie. With no money and no experience, I’m going to write and direct a feature film.

I’m about to be a sophomore film major at Emerson College, and I’ve reached a crisis point. For years I firmly believed that filmmaking was my calling—that it was what I was meant to do. Please believe me, I’m not one of those brain-dead film students who enrolls in film because I’ve watched a dozen movies and said, “Hey, I can do that.” I didn’t apply to film school on a whim and I didn’t do it because it looked like fun. In fact, filmmaking is agonizing for me. If you’re reading this I’m going to need you to take a leap of faith and go with me on this—I’m not one of those “film kids.”

I applied to film school because I really, truly, deeply believed that it was my calling. I looked deep inside myself and researched every possible option and came to the ultimate conclusion that I was supposed to make movies. I might be a film school brat, but at least I took the decision seriously.[1]

I’d say that 75% of the Emerson film demographic is air-head trust-fund slackers who thought it would be fun to make movies. Unfortunately, the other 15% is the opposite extreme. They’re the grizzled tech snobs. They’re dedicated to their craft, and they’re going to have jobs in Hollywood laying dolly rigs or flipping fuse boards or whatever. These people don’t have any artistic aspirations—they’d be quite happy PAing Jennifer Anniston comedies for the rest of their lives. And more power to them, I guess.

My problem is, I hate that stuff. I hate gaffing other people’s movies, I hate being a PA, and I could care less about the millions of different kinds of camera lenses and diffusion paper.  Every time I work on a major student film set, I walk away knowing that this is NOT what I want to do with my life.