00:13My suggestion would be, if you're starting to make a film or you want to express yourself
00:17on some sort of visual narrative, I don't know if you have to be conscious of your style.
00:23I mean, you can use a sense of an aspect of some style that you think you might have,
00:31but be aware that it might reveal itself to be something else and that's what's more
00:37important and that's the essential of who you are and what you're trying to say and
00:42how you're expressing it, using the tools to express it, because ultimately, if you take
00:47away all the equipment, you still have to be able to tell the story.
00:49Can't talk about my own style.
00:51I don't know what that is really, so other people could do it if they want, but I don't
00:58know how to, so I'm trying to make the pictures feel the need at times to really make these
01:04pictures for whatever that means.
01:09To me it means that you can't, it means that you, it's hard for you to continue your daily
01:16life unless you work on this particular story or work out making a film, so to speak.
01:23So I'm just making the pictures, telling the stories, trying to capture the emotions, the
01:30ideas, and really try to provoke to the best of my ability what's left of my time and what's
01:38left of the capacity for my brain basically going further into the mystery of filmmaking.
01:53We now agree that verbal literacy is necessary and we take that for granted.
01:58But a couple of thousand years ago, Socrates actually disagreed.
02:03His argument was almost the very same identical to the arguments of people today who object
02:08to the internet or to, or the people back in the 60s and 70s who warned about the evils
02:14of television.
02:15Socrates worried that writing and reading would actually lead to not truly knowing it.
02:22He believed that if people were to stop memorizing, start writing and reading, they'd be in danger
02:29of cultivating the appearance of wisdom as opposed to the real thing.
02:33He was afraid that reading it would take away the actual knowledge and the understanding
02:39of the text.
02:40So the same kinds of questions still come up around moving images.
02:44They're too literal, they leave nothing to the imagination, and they're inferior to the
02:49written word.
02:50So now if you're taking this class, I'm going to take it for granted that you don't agree
02:55with those ideas.
02:57But if you're going to make films, I promise you that you're going to encounter them.
03:02Because words and images have a common source.
03:06When you look at ancient writing, you see that words and images are almost indistinguishable.
03:12In fact, words are images, they're symbols, written in Chinese and Japanese, still actually
03:17look like pictographic languages.
03:20The written word is not superior to the moving image.
03:25They are both ways, they are both modes of communication and expression of equal value.
03:31So to me, when people talk about visual literacy, I think that in the end there's just literacy,
03:39period.
03:40The most important thing is to understand the difference between certain images, or to be
03:44more precise, certain sequences of images.
03:46Some are meant to sell something, some are meant to just entertain, and some are meant to inform.
03:54And some, this is what we're talking about here, are meant to tell stories, and in so doing,
04:01pursue and discover something surprising and mysterious.
04:06Not all images are there to be, you know, eaten, consumed, like fast food and forgotten, that's
04:12important to remember.
04:13We're not mass manufacturers, we're trying to be filmmakers.
04:22The world of movie making, where these remarkable images came from, the stories and the worlds
04:29I depicted, this felt very, very distant.
04:33I mean, if I even, I did have the dreams of maybe putting something together, like what
04:38would become a movie, but these were purely dreams, there was no way to actually implement
04:43this in any way, and no way we really thought that such a thing could happen to us, to be
04:49able to make a film, it was like a place that you had to conquer in a way, you had
04:54to overtake
04:55and be able to do your own thing.
04:59So the next best thing I was able to do, since it was a working class family, didn't have
05:04cameras and that sort of thing, it was too expensive, so I was able to, the only way I
05:08could express this desire, this impulse I should say, was to draw imaginary movies in a small,
05:15small room that I was in, in the tenements living downtown on Elizabeth Street.
05:21And these were different genres.
05:25Some were based on television shows I saw, some were water colored, some were just black
05:33and white with ebony pencils, some were even sepia, a lot of those don't exist.
05:37What does exist now is the beginnings of an ancient Roman epic, which I never finished, which allowed
05:43me to play with aspect ratios, or what I now know is an aspect ratio, in a 65mm or 70mm
05:51aspect
05:51ratio.
05:52And so this was a way of trying to tell the stories from frame to frame, I'd show it to
05:57a few friends, but they felt that they were just stills, drawings, and I explained to them
06:05that in between the frames that were drawn, there was movement, or you have to imagine the
06:10movement, you see.
06:11The only way I could try to come up with the visual narrative, or make a movie, quote unquote,
06:16was to draw these pictures within frames.
06:19And sometimes it'd be a strip of paper and maybe divide it into three frames.
06:24And the difference between each frame, sometimes I found myself editing, telling the story with
06:31medium shots, close ups, wide shots, that sort of thing.
06:34Very rarely were the frames from frame one to two or frame two to three wide shots, simply
06:40wide shots, sort of like in the first films that were made.
06:43I was just finding my way based upon what I saw in the movie theater and on television.
06:49And so in some cases, the frames would be cuts from one to the other.
06:54In others, there would be frames which represented three or four parts of the same shot.
07:00I imagined camera movement, and I also imagined that when the cuts were made, that there was
07:05some sort of movement in the film, in a way, when we have to use your imagination.
07:10So when I was able to start to actually put a film together, the only thing I could relate
07:20to really was to go back to those drawings and design the whole picture on paper, which
07:25is what I did in my first short films, and pretty much subsequently most of the films I made.
07:30On a practical level, it gives you an idea of exactly what you want to get that particular
07:38day of shooting, or for the entire schedule of the picture, so that you can utilize the
07:46time properly.
07:47You don't make it up as you go along on set and waste that time and energy of everyone,
07:54and money.
07:56So it was meant as a, not just a blueprint, but actual, an actualization of the shots I
08:05wanted to get, exactly how they go.
08:13I think the documentaries I've been trying to do over the years, or the non-fiction films,
08:19are really for me projects that have no rules, in a sense.
08:26And if they have no rules, it gets tougher, you know?
08:29So, what that means, they're ripe places for experimenting, or finding another way to tell
08:39a story, whether it's through a piece of music, or whether the editing itself becomes music,
08:44meaning rhythm and pace.
08:49And telling stories elliptically, I tend to want to continue making these non-fiction films
08:56because they, I'd hoped, or at times feel that should inform the narrative structure
09:02of the fictional films I make.
09:04And there's a freedom in making these documentaries, or these music films, so to speak.
09:09There's a freedom of form that loosens me up, in a way.
09:14Everything's included in the shooting of it.
09:16If you are shooting certain scenes, sometimes it's the footage that already exists.
09:22The shooting of it, and particularly in the editing, there is no such thing as editing,
09:27it's writing.
09:28Writing, editing.
09:29You're making the film there in that room, you know?
09:32And so, you can go many different ways.
09:34It's infinite.
09:35And so, it's really a challenge, as they say.
09:39It's also true of the documentary I made about my parents called Italian American.
09:42In fact, I learned a lot from that by letting them exist, I should say, within the frame
09:51and tell the stories without intercutting or finding obvious cinematic techniques to push
10:02time forward or backwards.
10:04It didn't matter.
10:04Jump cuts, putting 12 frames of black leader slugs in the middle of a story, just to get
10:11to another point.
10:13Just holding on the person, really, it was something that was a great lesson.
10:17And the pictures I've made, that are set within the world where I grew up, or related to that
10:22world, like Mean Streets or Raging Bullock, Goodfellas, so and so, I think, for example,
10:28one aspect of it that's really important is the body language, it's very important.
10:31The way that people relate to each other physically, I suppose it was that fact which let it take
10:39center stage and didn't complicate it with cutting or anything superficially cinematic in
10:45the creation of certain kinds of stories.
10:48In many cases, it's when to hold the shot, when to let the people speak, when to just watch
10:53them, you know, and not move the camera, not cut.
10:57But you find what's there and that, in a sense, they inhabit the film.
11:07The use of voiceover is very important to me.
11:10It was just a natural element in making movies.
11:13I appreciated so much over the years seeing films with voiceover, particularly Kind Hearts
11:19and Coronets, with that wonderfully restrained humor of the voiceover, the irony, which put
11:28me in the mind thereof, so to speak, of using ironic voiceover in Goodfellas.
11:36The inherent humor in some of the voiceover in that film is sparked from Kind Hearts and
11:43Coronets or other films at the time.
11:48Particularly, there was also a wonderful use of voiceover in Shoot the Piano Player, Truffaut,
11:53and Jules and Jim.
11:54I like that very much.
11:55It goes back and forth through time and space, building up the relationship of the two men
12:01and their friends and the world of the left bank at that time.
12:07And for me, yes, it has a lot of exposition, meaning explaining what you're seeing.
12:13But somehow the words are not needed to fully explain it, what you're seeing.
12:23In other words, the narration itself is not expository in a dull sense, in a didactic way.
12:29It somehow expresses the joy and the warmth and the love between these characters.
12:36And also the freewheeling aspect of this kind of thinking.
12:41You know, this life that they're living.
12:43Or the life they'd like to live, too.
12:46And so I thought, what about a whole movie that way?
12:48And that became Goodfellas.
12:50And so there was a spark there.
12:53Barry Lyndon's another good example of voiceover.
12:55The language of the voiceover in that particular film.
13:01The language itself.
13:02And so that led to, of course, the use of the voiceover in Age of Innocence.
13:07When we were about to make the film, there were those who were in the production
13:11who turned to me and said, who's talking?
13:14I didn't realize people took it that literally.
13:18Who's talking?
13:18The storyteller.
13:20I don't know.
13:22The person telling you the story.
13:24Or the person living the story.
13:28And so I never took it that literal.
13:31In many cases, I believe.
13:34So Age of Innocence, we had the opportunity there to play with voiceover from the book,
13:40Bradeth Wharton, using her language.
13:43In very much the same way.
13:44Not the same way, but very much inspired by the use of language in Barry Lyndon
13:48and a number of other films in voiceover.
13:51The whole point is that when I found narration, the use of narration in voiceover as part of the storytelling,
14:00as natural to me in the very first film I made, the very short film, the very first short film
14:04I made,
14:04it's covered with voiceover.
14:06It's an element of the storytelling in film, not a literary device.
14:12In the case of Age of Innocence, we're able to take advantage of the literary
14:17because we could take the voiceover directly from what was written in the book, in the novel by Gith Wharton.
14:23But for me, it was one of the cinematic elements in the film, not a literary element at all,
14:29and not something to just give you exposition as to what's happening in the film.
14:34Piano Source
14:34Piano Source
14:34Piano Source
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