Friday

I've had the David Lean quotation below the title for a while now. As I was looking at it yesterday, I realised that I didn't really agree with it. 'Film is a dramatised reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real. An audience should not be conscious of technique'. I agree with the first part, to a degree. It is not about appearing real, as in 'like real life', but of being consistent within itself. Or, rather, the characters should be real. You can put them in whatever situation you like, as long as they are believable. It's the second part of his quote that I'm more wary of, however. Should an audience be conscious of technique? I think they almost definitely should, but perhaps it is a semi-consciousness. I think what Lean is talking about is something that takes you out of the moment of the film, that makes you think 'how did they do that?' (I think Kubrick talks about this too). There should be technique that you're aware of, camera movements, cuts, focus etc, but they should be integral to the film, built within it and incapable of removing you from it, and back into the seat you're sitting in. You might even think 'how did they do that?' (say with some of the shots in Touch of Evil) but never to the extent that you stop engaging with the characters. It's only with the 'second watch' of the film that these questions should raise themselves up to full consciousness, and this is something that Lean perhaps didn't consider.