At the Movies, Over and Over Again

We have been making steady progress on our pilot television/film festival version of life on the New Hampshire colonial frontier. We have a few final scenes to edit, a fair amount of color-balancing and sound work, and then a few transitions to engineer. I mean to make a systematic study of the "flash-back," since I haven't settled on any match of color and/or sound filtering that give it a fresh look. Even flashbacks inside a historical film still have to flash "back" somehow. We also need music, and we need some way of making up for something I didn't learn on the set. Movies need to give a character a chance to just look out across the valley and think. You need to show the militia captain polishing his musket and saying nothing. This movie has a lot of talkers. We need to show them working up to their speeches, so to, er, "speak."



I can say there is some genuinely good entertainment, and education, throughout, and I remain excited about where we might sell this. It has an adventurous, frolicsome, and yet dramatic and redeeming tone, which is more or less the target at which I was aiming.

I have come to realize that the way we watch movies is very dependent on the way in which we've been conditioned to watch movies. MTV changed our expectations abut the number of cuts-per-minute. The steady-cam made it possible to walk and talk with the characters, so we expect a camera that can glide in and out of a crowd, taking in everything the character sees. Stanley Kubrick, when he made Barry Lyndon, forever changed what we hope to see in the way of period lighting. If you watch old Hollywood epics, the 18th century is brightly, lavishly lit up like a car-dealership showroom. And even though we rarely have this perspective in life, for some reason we even want to see the top-down God-view of the action, with a camera pointing straight down from the sky by way of establishing shot.



Without having a Hollywood budget, we acknowledged some of this, but we didn't dumb down the story either. We use period language, and we focus on period realities. We hope teenage boys and girls watch this, but it wasn't made for them either. Frankly, I worry that the story's straight-forwardness, and its more or less transparent moral contours will violate another assumption we have about watching film: cynicism and nihilism snuck into our movie-going experience along with the steady-cam and the three-cut-per-second edit. We have a generation idolizing a Johnny Depp femme-pirate, instead of the royal navy that is purposely made to fail in his capture. Audiences don't expect any clear virtue anymore. Even a film I enjoyed very much--The Patriot--began with a war hero's tortured memory of his combat experience. Try as I might, I have yet to read any 18th century warrior regret at anything other than cowardice. Valor was coveted, not shamed, and the urge to disbelieve-at-any-cost would be more symptomatic of a post-Sartre film-grunt than a South Carolina militia colonel.



The American heart, and spirit, is bruised. That might explain why we fall for political snake oil so easily--and why we expect less from the characters on the big and the small screen.