For our third week with London Nautical, we used Saskia van Roomen’s ‘frame within a frame’ activity. Starting with discussion of Wes Anderson’s compositional style – unique, like his handwriting, he says – we looked at a neat little three-minute montage of frame within a frame shots in Grand Budapest Hotel. – all in the padlet for secondary schools in an earlier post.
Here are a few of the boys’ frame wihin a frame shots. In the first one, Andres and Carlos improvised this furtive exchange framed by the concrete of the South Bank Centre’s staircase. And then were interrupted by reality in the form of a visitng student group that they made great use of on the spur of the moment…
Alid, Abubakar and Daniel (who took the shots) took two shots, which had the benefit of being able to be linked. Both framed by spaces or doorways in theNatonal Theatre.
Bobby, Thomas framed a pratfall in the stairway, disrupting the behaviour of passers-by..
After 6 or 7 years away, London Nautical, the nearest secondary school to BFI Southbank, have decided to let us host their film club. Miss Jewitt and Miss Schuil brought 11 boys tonight, and we launched Centred/ Decentred by making Lumiere Minutes. We started by watching No Escape, from 2013 (also on this blog) – same school, same classrooms and library, same uniforms.
I’ll put the 5 Lumiere Minutes below, with a little comment.
Dylan took this; he shot about four or five very busy shots, then found this one, absolutely empty, silent, still, like a film set – or a space ‘where someone had recently died’ (ok, or just vacated..). He braced his elbows against his body for maximum stability. The lighting, the pillar (who’s behind it?)….
This was Bobby’s shot, a bit wobbly, but lots of handheld shots these days mimic the movement of people, or rather signify or signal it – it’s always manufactured. Another shot with an absent centre, and peripheral activity and busyness. And a frame within a frame.
Shot by Othniel, and we all wanted know – who just left the empty chair/ who is about to sit down? We hadn’t talked about Centred/ Decentred yet – but here’s a decentred/ centred shot simultaneously! Their friend who pratfalls a couple of times reminded me of Chaplin’s Kid Auto Races. And there’s a blond woman who walks across the frame who is in three or more of the shots the other boys took..
Alid took this. The composition, along the z axis; the low hanging ceiling, a third of the way down; the column, two thirds of the way across; then wait for the last 5 seconds..
A cheeky additional shot from Alid. 10 years ago a group of students shot this Lumiere Minute; https://youtu.be/RwVHY3Yy0ts. We watched it, and Alid went and found (nearly) the exact shooting point and did it again! See below for reference..
Saskia from London Film School, and David from BFI, have combined to set out a valuable route through ‘Centred/ Decentred’ for Primary Schools this year – Secondary version to come. They have sourced clips that aren’t going to alarm anyone, and suggested new and additional exercises to scaffold childen’s learning a little more explicitly. They start with a couple of weeks of general overview about filmmaking and filmmaking language.
You can make a padlet by using the free version – in fact, you can make three a year. If you want to build on this one, you can ask me for permission to edit, then remake it with more of your own content – and add your children’s work. it’s a great resource!
In the second year of the newly independent Cinema Cent Ans de Jeunesse, the chosen theme looks at how filmmakers centre, decentre, and recentre, their shots, scenes, and stories.
Partners went to Cine104 in Pantin, on the outskirts of Paris, in early October, to take down notes. Because of our partnership with Documentaires sur grand ecran, we now look at documentaries as well as fiction. And Laia from A Bao A Qu in Barcelona, showed us how to introduce the theme using paintings and photos.
Back in the UK this week (2nd Nov), I shared some of the extracts, the exercises, and images, with a group of teachers and filmmakers from all over – east coast of Scotland down to the eastern reaches of London, via Lincolnshire.
24th June and 4 schools (and one virtually) came to BFI Southbank to screen their Motifs films. Five very varied takes on the brief for this year:
Make a short film – with or without a story – with 2 or 3 recurring motifs, which evolve during the film. The filming of these motifs, their structured repetition in the film, must create meaning and emotion. Two of the motifs must be chosen from the list below:
staircase, shadow, tree, window, mirror, store window, swing, umbrella, hair.
Glendale Primary in Glasgow made Amaryllis, in which two children, one coded white, the other red, vie for power using a paper flower. The motifs are colour coded – flowers, dress, paint, balls – and there is extensive use of stairs and mirrors. At the screening we picked up on the tradition of Sleeping Beauty, and the children referenced Alice Through the Looking Glass.
William Ransom Primary in Hitchin took the looser, less narrative approach, building their motifs (stairs, mirrors, trees, shadows) into a dense interweaving of images, allowing, as the brief puts it ‘evolution through the film’, as well as creating ‘meaning and emotion’.
Oldhill Primary, in east London, made an ambitious multi-layered piece, creating two separate story world – one in a computer game – as well as a series of scary characters, one of whom wears the mask of a Greek tragedian. ‘Levels’ refers to the primary motif – stairs and ladders – as well as the levels of a game. Spot the reference to Bergman’s Seventh Seal! And the ending is genuinely chilling..
St. Margaret’s in Withern in Lincolnshire gave us the gorgeously photographed big Lincolnshire skies and wide empty beaches. And also a story built around twins, which as they pointed out onstage in their Q&A is effectively a ‘mirroring’ device. They chose not to record dialogue, instead communicating through shadows and gestures.
Finally, Year 8 pupils at Hayes School in Kent gave us ‘Overlooked’ which amongst many other things is an evocative portrayal of how it must feel to arrive at a new school. Using windows, reflections, and framing, we get to see glimpses of classes until a fellow pupil reaches out to the new boy. And a wonderful credit sequence at the end!
It opens with Exercises 1 and 2 from (checks notes..) a French school, that use a guitar as a motif. The two are linked, nicely. A girl in a classroom types on a computer; the shot is framed to reveal a tiny figure on a balcony, visible through a window in the top left of the shot. The girl is typing something, which she undoes. She goes to open the window, and the girl with the guitar, still tiny in shot, starts singing. The first girl goes back to her computer and retypes her original lines. If you then rewatch Exervcise 1, the way the guitar is shot, and caressed, suddenly looks quite different..
Second Exercises, from Guadeloupe, feature a powerful, vivid, use of the colour blue, and a paintbrush dipped in a jar of water the stirs up clouds.
And then a fountain. And fourth, two Japanese pieces – one featuring shoes and feet, on steps and stairs, and one using mirrors that pulls out and revelas itself being filmed. Very cheeky. The boy acting is using multiple mirrors to create a conversation, and friends, for himself.
Bergala quotes Jean-Marie Straub, filmmaker, asking that something ‘burns in the shot’. Look through these pieces for ‘what burns’. We also wondered, at length, about how a thing, or an idea, becomes a ‘motif’ in a piece of film. It’s not just a question of filming a thing; there has to be some intention, some emphasis, behind the choice.
I was lucky to be speaking on behalf of Ivor and James from St. Margaret’s Withern at our mid-term meeting in Berlin at the weekend. I’ve uploaded the short compilation of their Exercises 1, 2, and 3 below: the first Exercise is to choose a personal object, and shoot it ‘like a motif’; the second is to find a place and film motifs on location; and third Exercise is to create a situation with mirrors.
We had quite a long look at these. Silke from the EYE didn’t notice the book at all in Ex 1: she thought the motif was all about the number three! We talked about how looking for motifs changes our attention as viewers – suddenly, everything has meaning. Motifs that weren’t put in the shot suddenly appear. And we liked the way the book moved from foreground object to functional prop – oscillating between visible and invisible, use and ornament. We talked about how motifs can be an ‘idea’, as well as an ‘object’. ‘Motifs that take cinematic form’, as Tomii put it.
People had questions about the photos in Ex 2: the move from abstract distribution, on the floor, to chldren looking at them, to the more experimental notion of hanging them on trees; is the latter a real game, or one they invented?
We liked the piano exercise – the camera hard up on the keyboard, and the sound jarring and harsh. violent, aggressive, supporting the drama. Not many groups made use of their own music, and this film uses musical tunes to signal conflict, and to associate with specific characters.
And the mirrors in Ex 3: people loved the framing, with the constant juggling of atttention from mirror, to real life, not knowing what was live and what reflected – a really complex mise en scene.
We talked about the energy, bordering on violence, that we see in some of the films – tensions, conflict. Is it a response to coming out of the daytime curriculum, which is maybe more repressive? Is it just a feature of English classrooms? Bettina from Germany asked whether it is a challenge to contain all that energy in a frame – does it spill out, over? Do they need a discipline to stay in the frame?
We wanted to know which clips they had been watching, where they took inspiration from. And noted how great they lookd projected on a big screen (sorry you missed that!)
A friend and I, separately, saw Dune this weekend. Unlike me, he lasted to the end. When I asked him what he thought, he offered ‘Big canvas, tiny conventonal story.. lots of mandatory giant door-clanging’. ‘Giant door-clanging’ I thought sums up the hour and three quarters I saw pretty succinctly; I thought of all those scenes where small characters are overwhelmed by spectacle, usually in sci-fi/ fantasy (or SF) films, very few of which, it has to be said, I’ve actually seen… The giant door-clanging trope functions as a metonym (is it? Or synecdoche, part standing for the whole?) for all those films.
But it led me to think about the difference between a trope in a genre, and a motif in a film (or a novel for that matter). Aren’t they the same? The sandstone structures of Monument Valley are motifs in John Ford films, but also tropes in Westerns. So what is the difference? I wonder whether because a genre film doesn’t have an auteur in the same way as an arthouse films, means its constituent parts are graded of lower cultural value. But also whether the motif in cinema is somehow smaller, more intimate in scale, more personal; I can’t imagine an auteur like Sirk, Godard, Truffaut, Kiarostami – any of the favourites of Cinema Cent Ans de Jeunesse – using the trope of ‘giant clanging doors’ in a film. But if Denis Villeneuve uses it across more than one film, does it become part of his trademark style, and thus a motif?
And then I thought of Fritz Lang, and wonder whether Metropolis has any (silent) giant door clanging, and ditto Eisenstein.. and I bet Coppola does in his Dracula film..
Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) is unjustly overlooked I think, as I guess Campion’s work is in general. It’s the story of the love affair between English poet John Keats (the original ‘poete maudit’) and Fanny Brawne; it ends unhappily.
Watching it recently, since beginning to think about motifs in cinema, I noticed patterning around windows, light, and trees. Famny is shot always in luminous space: either seated in window seats, or lit from bright windows. The windows have a practical use: she designs and makes her own clothes, as a creative counter point to Keats’s poetry, and must be in bright sunlight to work.
Fanny is also frequently shot outside, appearing at windows or glazed doors, or crossing thresholds from outside to in; she is a creature of the brightly lit, outside world, in contrast to Keats, who lives in book-lined, gloomy studies, and is often in a ‘brown study’ (the English idiom meaning bored, depressed, or frustrated).
The story of the relationship is also told through a series of walks, through the same set of woods (meant to be Hampstead Heath, but shot in Hertfordshire I think). The relationship grows from initiation, through flirtation, to consummation and finally, loss. There is a dramatic climax in the second walk, and the summer walk carries echoes of Renoir’s Partie de Campagne. You might also notice how the number of characters reduces from scene to scene, with a kind of mathematical precision and inevitability.
Cinema cent ans de jeunesse - BFI edit 