Steven Soderbergh is giving us a glimpse into his head and the way he thinks as a filmmaker and as a viewer as he has taken Steven Spielberg‘s Raiders of the Lost Ark and dropped the soundtrack, converted it to black-and-white and laid over top of it Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross‘ scores from David Fincher‘s The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The result? Well… here’s Soderbergh’s reasoning for doing it:
I’m assuming the phrase “staging” came out of the theatre world, but it’s equally at home (and useful) in the movie world, since the term (roughly defined) refers to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated. In movies the role of editing adds something unique: the opportunity to extend and/or expand a visual (or narrative) idea to the limits of one’s imagination–a crazy idea that works today is tomorrow’s normal.
I value the ability to stage something well because when it’s done well its pleasures are huge, and most people don’t do it well, which indicates it must not be easy to master (it’s frightening how many opportunities there are to do something wrong in a sequence or a group of scenes. Minefields EVERYWHERE. Fincher said it: there’s potentially a hundred different ways to shoot something but at the end of the day there’s really only two, and one of them is wrong). Of course understanding story, character, and performance are crucial to directing well, but I operate under the theory a movie should work with the sound off, and under that theory, staging becomes paramount (the adjective, not the studio. although their logo DOES appear on the front of this…).
So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot–whether short or long–held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are–that’s high level visual math shit).
The video can’t be embedded here so you’ll have to click here to give it a watch. I doubt anyone will watch the whole thing (or maybe they will), but it’s an interesting experiment and would be made even more interesting had intertitles been added to make it a complete silent. Would today’s audiences go for such a thing?
via The Playlist
