Talking Films
Martina Drago
Talking Films is Martina Drago’s new eight-episode podcast. The production started in September 2021 at the 海角社区 (England), taking place during the challenging Covid-19 pandemic and lasting seven months.
In the first season, Martina investigated eight revolutionary movies that introduced outstanding technical developments, and/or explored and highlighted controversial social topics. From masterpieces like Citizen Kane and box-office triumphs like The Lord of the Rings to the very discussed Harry Potter saga, each of these films has made an impact on cinema and/or society.
Each episode explores different themes and genres giving space to Martina’s thoughts and her professional and engaging analysis. The vibrant and dynamic style of Talking Films is supported by the precious contributions of five scholars and/or filmmakers: Frank Krutnik (episodes one and two), Frances Smith (episodes three and five), Catalina Balan (episodes six and seven), Andy Nall-Cain (episode four), and Irene Fubara-Manuel (episode eight).
- Transcript
Speaker 1 (Martina Drago)
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Talking Films, the podcast which investigates revolutionary films. [music] I'm Martina Drago, and each week I'll take you with me on a quest for eight outstanding films exploring why these movies have influenced the cinematic industry and society through their stories, themes and techniques. Last week, Catalina Balan joined us to discuss how Chronicle of a Summer challenged documentary conventions.
And if you missed any of our previous six episodes, you can find them on Spotify, Anchor or on our Web page at talkingfilmspodcast.wixsite.com. This week, unfortunately, we're going to explore our final film. But you know, life is really unpredictable so a new season of Talking films could be not that far away.
Anyway, let's stay focussed because in this episode we are going to approach something new. A different kind of filmmaking that is highly connected to technological developments and that we all experience in life – Animation. Specifically today we're going to explore a groundbreaking movie in the history of cinema, a motion picture that must be considered revolutionary because it changed the game, becoming the first entirely computer animated feature film ever made. Opening up animation filmmaking to endless opportunities and proving that computer animation could be used to create engaging stories and narratives, a theme that was considered impossible before this. Today, we're going to explore Toy Story.
[excerpt from Toy Story]
Speaker 1
A few weeks ago, I was scrolling down Instagram, and I came across this interview by the promising young actor Timo Tichelman. And he was talking about the experience of growing up and creating a personality. And his speech just hit me completely because he said that you know, when you grow up, you kinda you kind of shopping for your personality. So you try different characters, different personalities, different outfits on. And, for example, when you are in high school, you could try, you know, a personality and you can find out that maybe that personality, that character is not who you really are. So you you try another one and then another one and then another one and so on. And when you finally find your personality, when you finally find who you really are, that's the moment when you become an adult.
Well, in Moonlight, Sharon does basically the same. He tries to find who he really is. But what the film highlights perfectly is the way society pushes people towards something they are not to when they don't fit into specific categories created by the society itself. I like to pick on that. What you mean.
[excerpt from Moonlight]
Speaker 1
In this context, Moonlight is revolutionary because of its exploration of their relationship between external persona and internal self. And because of the techniques employed in its cinematography and sound design, which empower and underline these relationship even more.
In Episode four, filmmaker Andy Nall-Cain and I discuss the groundbreaking techniques using the saga of The Lord of the Rings.
If you're a huge fan of the saga, you know that there is a strong difference in height amongst the characters. And to be able to create this kind of effects, Peter Jackson used three main techniques, which are the changing scale, the perspective and the scene composition. Would you be able to explain the techniques or provide some kind of examples of them in connection to either the saga or other kind of productions?
Speaker 2 (Andy Nall-Cain)
Yes. So the use of perspective is another way that Peter Jackson and his very large crew of talented people was able to really immerse the audience in the story and, kind of go above and beyond what was expected or what was really needed of them in the pursuit of making this film as realistic as possible. So the method that I think was most surprising that the crew used was called, well they called it, at least, this moving force perspective where they would create differences in perspective. So between the heights of the characters. So you'd have a hobbit, which was meant to be very small, and for example, a wizard that was meant to be very, very tall. And you juxtapose them by having the hobbit far away and the wizard closer. But to do this, you'd have to maintain the camera angles at a single position so as to show that that wizard is taller and the Hobbit is smaller because it's further away.
But what they figured out was a way to be able to move the camera and maintain the perspective, and to do that, they would create these incredibly complicated sets where you'd have the smaller character on a dolly, which is kind of like a moving thing, essentially, maybe some of the props around them on a moving thing as well so that as the camera moved, the actor moved, keeping the perspective exactly the same which is remarkable. And the kind of attention to detail that this film had and it also, again, meant that they didn't have to rely on CGI, well where they could rely as little on CGI as they could to try and make the effect of the film as realistic as possible.
[Excerpt from The Lord of the Rings]
Speaker 1 (Martina Drago)
The trilogy was technically astonishing, but its narrative is likewise revolutionary.
The Lord of the Rings completely changed the fantasy genre we were used to experience before it. This genre has been defined for a very long time as a way to escape from reality and in many films and books, we can literally see this escape. For instance, in The Chronicles of Narnia, in Alice in Wonderland, in The Wizard of Oz, all the characters escape reality to enter a fantasy world. But in the end, they all come back to reality and confront responsibilities.
The target audience for these films were children, and the worlds created in the stories weren't supposed to make sense. They were used to communicate a team important for what the characters needed to learn for when they would have come back to reality. The fact that these worlds were created to support a team instead of existing for their own sake provokes a strong sense of fable, which is a childish world, inaccessible to adults.
And this is what the Lord of the Rings changed Tolkein created a secondary world with tradition, history, language and culture, allowing the story to avoid the childish unreality of previous fantasy works and establishing a world that exists independently by a team. Moreover, unlike traditional fantasy films, the main characters are not children, but adults, and a timelessness, which is typical of old fantasy stories doesn't exist in The Lord of the Rings. And this happens because the Lord of the Rings is not for children.
Speaker 1
In episode six, lecturer and filmmaker Catalina Balan joined me to explore how the French documentary Chronicle of a Summer challenged conventions of traditional ethnographic filmmaking. This film tries to make the audience aware of the presence of the camera, and it claims that the camera can interfere with the truth of an event simply being present when that event happens.
Jean Rouch decided to do a Chronicle of a Summer without any script, but developed a story and narrative, starting from simple questions like, What is your life? Or Are you happy? Spontaneity was the key element of this movie but because of the presence of the camera, we are left with doubts and a huge unanswered question. Are the protagonists performing or not?
[excerpt from A Chronicle of a Summer]
Speaker 3 (Catalina Balan)
I think the reason the film didn't have a script per se and it was quite left open was to allow people to express freely, to not give a structure, to allow it to just sort of go wherever it flows. I'm not sure whether they knew where it was it was going to go and what they're going to make with it. And I think them showing the film at the end and asking, what would you think? It's very much a film as much as it's a study about, you know, human behaviour, everyone coming together. And one thing that's really beautiful, though, is they have her. So they start with asking what is happiness? Or Are you happy?
Speaker 1
Are you happy?
Speaker 3
Are you happy? Yes. Are you happy? And they ask. So Marceline asked this to people sort of walking up and down the street to strangers and it's interesting to see their reaction to the camera to her, too. And then we move a bit closer, you know, to the people that the director knows and they follow those. But it's almost to say that we're all part of the same, that same city, the same type of people who are interviewed at the beginning which I think is interesting, that this really starts with that premise “Are you happy?” And I think the sort of characters answer that don’t they.
Speaker 1
Yes. And it's crazy because I think that during, you know, our life, we ask ourselves that question a lot. But we never take the courage to actually asking someone else or nobody asks us, are you happy? So it's just something that hits you completely when I don't know when you see that.
Catalina Balan also joined me in episode seven where we discussed The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
[excerpt from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind]
Speaker 1
Could you also tell us about the film's linear editing style?
Speaker 3
It's really fragmented. But then again and time is fragmented, right? It moves really quickly. It's difficult to make sense of what is when, who is where but I think that's a way, that’s in a way, that's how memory works. If we're if we close our eyes and we're thinking, okay, tell me what's happened to you last year. You're not going to be able to, you know, to do a linear description of that. It's going to be fragmented. There's going to be bits you remember, things that in between that are actually maybe a desire of yours from the future and so on. I was talking to a friend of mine and her mum, I think her mum was a psychiatrist, and she explained how memory works and she said, that we've got all of these things sort of on the back of our mind and the moment you actually access a memory and you start talking about it, you sort of say it out loud, you tell it to people and so on, it becomes altered.
Speaker 1
Wow.
Speaker 3
So actually the, the purest, most precious memories are the ones that you would never talk about that you sort of like keep there. It’s scary at the same time, but also it's precious. Yes. I think the way the, the way we refer to certain things if we talk about an event, we might talk differently about it to, you know, to different people. We might.
Speaker 1
Impact it.
Speaker 3
Yes. These again, there's like studies that say if you look at a traumatic event from your past and talk about it in a positive way, in a sort of empowering way, it will change the way you feel about it. For if you feel, you know, defeat defeated So there's a lot of that in that film and I think it comes across to that editing style.
Speaker 1
From a narrative point of view. The film explores several themes like Destiny, Memories, Regret, conscious versus unconscious, denial and communication. But let's see them a little bit more in detail.
If we discuss destiny, the film demonstrates that the cancellation procedure only functions on a superficial level. It erases concrete memories, but it fails to address the basic tendencies of the characters who for history seems to repeat itself. The characters are drawn to each other after it, and they both emerge from the procedure feeling lonely.
The implication is that by erasing these painful memories, the procedures also removes the potential for these characters to learn from their mistakes.
[excerpt from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind]
Speaker 1
Regret is another strong theme in the film where we see the two characters regretting many of their past wrong decisions. However, the main idea here is that the wrong decisions that we made can help us to grow and improve. For instance, the character of Clementine is extremely impulsive and she often makes random choices, which she regrets immediately. However, her decision to erase her memory left her unable to learn anything from her relationship with Joel.
The director has always said that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about memories and about the huge role that memories play in the person's identity and character. The film teaches us the importance of remembering our past, even if painful, because it is part of who we are. Memory is fundamental for the creation of personal identity.
[music]
The big problem started for me from the very beginning because the story Lasseter came up with was completely altered by Disney supervisors and this resulted in a very unlikeable story in characters. So at some point, Disney decided to shut the production of Toy Story down, but Lasseter convinced them to give the team two more weeks to create a new story. And after those two weeks after pitching to Disney, the real film they wanted to make, the project was approved, and the production started.
[excerpt from Toy Story]
Speaker 1
Toy Story took three years to be written, and not just because animation filmmaking is a long process, which by the way it is, but mainly because having an engaging and passionate story to tell was the most important aspect. Ralph Guggenheim, a producer of the film, argued that the technology they use in the movie was just secondary to the story they wanted to tell.
And Ralph Eggleston, the director of the film, said that what is revolutionary, what advanced computer animation is that they used it to tell a story. Lasseter has always claimed that computer animation wasn't a new type of medium, but just, you know, a new tool in the world of animation. So the rules, the grammar of traditional animation in filmmaking and cinema in general still work with this new technology. Characters and stories had to remain the most important thing.
Generally speaking, this film looks really good, and this means that it's pleasing to watch and that Sharon's story unfolds really nicely in front of us.
But the crucial point behind is to look in film is that every single camera movement or take or shot is chosen with the purpose of explaining the protagonist inner world. When I first started studying screenwriting, the first thing my professor told me was that in a film, you must ‘show’ never ‘tell’. And this could seem easy, but it's not, especially when it comes to representing a character's emotions. You can’t just make Sharon say, “I'm sad” because it doesn't work. What works, though, is combining all the technical elements you have, like sound, like light, camera movements to create meaning. In Moonlight, Barry Jenkins was a master at this.
[music]
Both Jenkins and the director of cinematography were able to establish the personality of the two main characters within the first scene. When we first encountered the character performed by Mahershala Ali, his confidence and dominance is established immediately by the use of smooth camera movements and soft sounds. On the other hand, the insecurity, the chaos and discomfort of Sharon are presented in the next scene with the use of a shaky handheld camera that creates confusion following the running protagonist and by the use of loud and disturbing sounds. Later in the film, when these two characters finally met, we can see the camera moving smoothly between them without any kind of cuts. And this establishes a connexion between them.
Another interesting camera’s choice are the shots from behind, which show our willingness to chase and explore the inner state of Sharon. Even if both we and he result unsuccessful in doing so. Moreover, Jenkins choice of placing the camera in between characters allows the audience to face them and become part of the scene instead of just looking from outside.
[excerpt from Harry Potter]
Speaker 1
The Harry Potter saga is revolutionary, not because of its techniques or story, but because of the way it has become part of our everyday life. Because of the way it has influenced generations over generations and because of the way it has impacted the global economy as no other movie or saga has ever done before or after it.
[music]
This is all for today, but we will be back soon with a new revolutionary film.
Next week, we are going to explore A Chronicle of a Summer. Thanks to Francis Smith and to you all for joining me today. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Twitter and have a look at our Web page at talkingfilmspodcast.wixsite.com. I'm Martina Drago and this was Talking Films, the podcast which investigates revolutionary films.
[music]