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Post by themoviesinner on Jun 5, 2019 7:55:36 GMT
I think each director has a singular unique trait (or traits) that characterizes their style and differentiates them from most other directors. This thread was made so we can discuss these directors and their characteristics, what makes them unique and one of a kind and to post movie scenes where each director's trait is presented at it's fullest.
I've been on a Theodoros Angelopoulos marathon recently and I've noticed that the way he deals with time in his works is incredibely unique and I can't think of any other director that handles it the same way. In his films months or even years can pass by in the same scene or even shot.
Here is a characteristic example from Ulysses Gaze (1995) (The scene is cut in two videos):
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 5, 2019 12:07:57 GMT
Argento I often say on some level is a GOAT filmmaker - not that he has that many great films (like DePalma he has more awful ones) but because he has a good amount of those and he literally invented things in his genre. This scene is how he introduced himself in the cinema, his first film, right at the start of it this scene and his whole sensibility is here.
It's how he conveys and links the protagonist to the audience (to us) - here Tony Musante sees a horror that he can't fully understand, his senses fail him. He can't trust his eyes actually, the sliding doors are a movie screen in a way, he can see it but (like us) is helpless to act on it. The Art in the museum deepens the closer you look at ..........is it beautiful or threatening - well like a movie itself it's static, it doesn't change but our gaze does, what we think we see changes.
So Musante is both audience and character, he's both a suspect and witness to us and others on the street side of him - the way we all are when we watch movies too (ie what's the audiences responsibility too).
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 5, 2019 14:02:46 GMT
I've also talked a lot about Polanski - for how many things are "signature" devices - from certain compositions he always does (ie things in the background always matter hugely in his films) and his worldview (unreliable narrators, shifting perspectives very often) - but also how many different ways he uses music. Very often his characters are alone with no one to help them regardless of the film - that's what makes it a Polanski device. But usually before that even there's a scene where one character relents to the will of another and sets themselves up for that being alone. This scene (again it starts with a character in the foreground and one in the background) is less than 2 minutes, it's ominous, funny, menacing, sexy, and later it's where you can pinpoint everything has changed in the film, but what makes it so special is you can pinpoint it to a split second - a darkness in the music ever so slightly creeps in for the first time, with a single note. For some fans of his work of here: Leo_The_Last, @raygittes07, Mattsby, RiverleavesElmius
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Post by themoviesinner on Jun 5, 2019 17:13:14 GMT
pacinoyes I agree with you on everything you wrote about Polanski, especially that he is a master of using music to enhance the narrative. Take this scene for instance, from The Tenant. The music is dark and ominous, foreshadowing that something is not right, but the stark changes in the volume and the tone of the music also pinpoint that what we are witnessing is ambiguous, delphic. Is there indeed something wrong or is everything only on the protagonist's imagination? There is a constant threat in the air, but it's origins are never revealed. As such, the music, combined with the gloomy cinematography really pulls you into the character's disturbed mind:
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Post by theycallmemrfish on Jun 5, 2019 17:55:39 GMT
In his prime, Stone was truly the best at using different types of cameras/editing all in the same scene.
I can't find it on youtube, but when Kevin Bacon's talking to Costner/Rooker for the first time is probably the best example of this (not the best scene in the film, however). Another good one would be where Costner is giving a statement in court detailing what they say happened vs. how it would actually happen and it cutting between present day and the two variations of the past.
The Mr. X scene kinda does this too, but not the best example for what I'm trying to say Stone's signature is.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 5, 2019 22:24:42 GMT
The great Werner Herzog sees nature as utterly indifferent to us and sometimes people misinterpret that as him "loving" nature or it being beautiful or some tree hugging BS. But it is indifferent - in the way the jungle swallows Inés when she chooses to walk into it in Aguirre or the ravages suffered by everyone in the plot (and reality) of Fitzcarraldo. What interests Herzog is how man can lose himself within his mind because man's personal nature is to devise an environment that will ironically assist it in destroying him.
In this, one of his best and most profound films, Heart of Glass, he hypnotized the cast so they appear more mad, less lucid, as the dialog grows more and more brilliantly absurd "I need a glass to contain my blood or it will trickle away!". The event that triggers this madness is mundane (the death of the town's ruby red creation/glass blower) but that's how fragile we are (glass, after all) ........and Nature itself has never appeared more overwhelming than in this film .........how a could man not go mad?
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Post by PromNightCarrie on Jun 5, 2019 23:45:56 GMT
I remember reading that Werner Herzog hypnotized his cast for a film. So it's Heart of Glass. I want to see it. Herzog is so fascinating.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 6, 2019 0:45:00 GMT
If Brian De Palma had his way he would remove dialog and narrative and shoot set pieces entirely and that's because with those tossed out he can scare you more easily.
Like (the less ambitious) Argento his Italian counterpart, he can go wrong and has but like Argento he literally invented stuff too and he has his share of great films. In this scene he uses a ton of inspired filmmaking devices - look at the angles! - the car is parked on an incline, the cake is shown from above, the knife comes out from a low angle and when he crawls away she descends on him - all of it is disorienting. The split screen at the end, his most famous "device", is sometimes used to convey more info quickly and sometimes just to provide a unique POV.
There are so many ideas in play in this scene including the switch to shadows - how it switches from the actual to a "dream" state, the way the blood and wounds are shot too - the color scheme within the actress and actor - in race they are both black and white too, so much film thematic logic and thought is involved that he makes other directors look unimaginative and lazy........or he makes them look exactly like they are. This early film, Sisters - made outside of his 1976-83 great era already heralds a guy intent on upsetting everyone and everything.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2019 5:30:12 GMT
The way Altman presents overlapping dialogue gives some of his films a very lived in vibrancy.
Sono conveying intense, repressed emotion through hyper-realistic, borderline absurd scenarios/actions (the young leads repeatedly violently abusing each other in Himizu, Yu's erections in Love Exposure, etc.) is always done in a unique way and makes for an interesting and often powerful watch because of how utterly grounded in genuine sincerity it is.
Slightly different from what you're asking, but I'll add that the way Kurosawa uses rain is really singular and amazing.
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Post by themoviesinner on Jun 6, 2019 8:27:46 GMT
I consider Raul Ruiz's surrealism as one of a kind. While other surrealist directors, like Jean Cocteau or David Lynch, give their films a dark and nightmarish feel, Ruiz creates an atmosphere that is much more melancholic and nostalgic. His use of unique camera angles, dim lightning, certain visual effects (like fog for instance), descriptive narration and vague dialogue make his films often emit a feeling of long lost memories that are trying to resurface. I think the intro to Three Crowns Of The Sailor is a good example of this:
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Post by themoviesinner on Jun 6, 2019 8:42:48 GMT
Sono conveying intense, repressed emotion through hyper-realistic, borderline absurd scenarios/actions (the young leads repeatedly violently abusing each other in Himizu, Yu's erections in Love Exposure, etc.) is always done in a unique way and makes for an interesting and often powerful watch because of how utterly grounded in genuine sincerity it is. Yeah, I agree 100% with this. Even the most absurd or outrageous scenarios in most of his films feel deep-felt and sincere. And I think the best example of this is Why Don't You Play In Hell?. The film is bizarre and extravagant for the most part, but once it ends you feel that you have experienced one of the most genuine love letters to cinema from a filmmaker that clearly has a passion for this business.
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clunkybob2
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Post by clunkybob2 on Jun 6, 2019 9:09:29 GMT
pacinoyesYeah who can forget this classic soundbite Heart of Glass- apparently they were all hypnotised except for the lead actor. I guess Herzog wanted at least one person in a normal state of mind and maybe somebody to give some direction the the interactions with the other cast. Really great and a totally weird and otherworldly film.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 6, 2019 10:21:13 GMT
How many films would you give a filmmaker before saying he "sucked"? Well what if his early films maybe - and that's a big maybe - didn't completely work, they were so full of revolutionary ideas he created a whole new genre of film? You want a filmmaker to tell you what's wrong with the world you live in, in 2019 - well David Cronenberg did it for you way in advance. His films explored mixed genres and predicted some pretty outlandish things (AIDS, the rise and fall and rise of capitalism/socialism, Donald Trump (!) (The Dead Zone but others too) the "feminization" of men (as far back as his 1st film!), abortion debate (The Brood), the weaponization of sex and violence and consuming both in an increasingly Atheist world, Body Dysmorphia, feminism and anti-feminism - one is humanist, the other as a frightening political term - in his work........... they both apply. He also mocked his audience - mercilessly too - here he cast an adult film icon as the lead where she sometimes stalks, sometimes she is stalked, but death is the same result - it isn't the person, it's the point, right? No one else would think to do that or write the scenes he does for Marilyn Chambers in this film - this is totally Cronenberg in the casting, the subconscious ways to "read" a scene and the quick juxtaposition of arousal and dread. Later he'd get bigger budgets and stars but the ideas were always there and always his own. He didn't just do horror, what he was saying about us, was always rather horrific.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 6, 2019 12:51:22 GMT
I'm not gonna lie to me Spike Lee kinda sucks - but that's ok, because you could use the trait here to express your love for him too.
The montage - a shortcut to thinking to me, but a moving and exciting device to his fans - he didn't invent it but he's expert at using it. Think of the heat montage in Do The Right Thing, one of his very best films and scenes. Here he is, using the work of others - which I ripped him for at the ending of (to me, the overrated) Blackkklansman. But again, you could argue it as working in how he pieces it together.
Love him, hate him, or in-between, the montage device be it "appropriated" from others or his own at times, is one of the things that makes Spike identifiable.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 6, 2019 17:41:00 GMT
Well if Spike uses the montage then Francis Ford Coppola, loves the Eisenstein intercutting technique and uses it not just in his Godfather films, but in the end of Apocalypse Now, Cotton Club and several times in his first (imo) great film too -"The Rain People". He used it to draw parallels, irony, underline thematic points. Most famous example below but that's not all - the fade to black screen often makes an appearance in his work too and he used the same ENDING, altered slightly, in 5 films in a row: The Rain People, Godfather 1 and 2, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now - all end with the lead character alive and then reflecting on the tragic events that just happened - you maybe don't see it at first because he rearranges some of the details but the same emotional note is in every one.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 6, 2019 19:20:30 GMT
Martin Scorsese has so many stylistic tools he's almost a joke in this category - physical violence, music cues, Catholic guilt, uniquely his own camera jumps. But I'd argue his defining characteristic was actually verbal violence - the escalation of a rhetorical fight to potentially an actual fight. With men it's almost like a slap fight that gets out of hand......with men and women it is missed connections that then increase exponentially.
This scene is echoed in everything he ever did - it looks like a Cassavetes scene in how its staged - but he never ended a scene as fatalistically as this. Scorsese revisits this so much afterwards - Pesci and De Niro in Raging Bull, Keitel and Burstyn in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Pesci coming back in the bar in Goodfellas and hopefully in The Irishman too.
Keitel loses sight of what he wants overall, he ends the argument in the moment, but she never does and ends it all - who's the misogynist here, hint, it's not Scorsese. Keitel wins/loses, it's over .......just like that and he's no wiser and understands exactly what he did before he opened his mouth.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jun 6, 2019 19:52:37 GMT
Greenaway
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Post by stinkybritches on Jun 6, 2019 20:13:19 GMT
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jun 6, 2019 21:27:49 GMT
hmmmm ok, where to begin? Let me try to explain. Peter Greenaway is the most unique filmmaker I'm aware of. I feel like every single one of his traits is idiosyncratic, starting I suppose with his influence from Renaissance and Baroque painting (he began his artistic career as a painter before turning to filmmaking), and this is demonstrated by the way his shots are composed among other things. His films also tend to be anti-narrative and heavily self-reflexive and meant to dispel the illusion of realism. They're similar to the nouvelle vague films in that way, but the viewing experience is much different because Greenaway is pulling more from artistic abstracts and concepts and less from past cinematic traditions. His films are extremely intellectual and cerebral for that reason. Simultaneously elusive and overpowering. Shot composition is an easy indicator. Wes Anderson is the only filmmaker that warrants a comparison to Greenaway because they both use shots that are flat and obsessively symmetrical, chalk full of information and meticulous set decoration, contain action both in the foreground and background often occurring concurrently, and utilize a lot of flat space camera moves like tracking left and right as if in front of a stage. Wes Anderson's films are of course more whimsical and feel more lively but the look is similar, and the closest comparison I can think of. He's an example of an especially crowded Greenaway shot from Drowning by Numbers, which is also a long take with a wealth of visual information to process. This is one of the most prop-heavy of Greenaway's films. I think the most important trait one can extrapolate from Greenaway's filmmaking is his compulsive commitment to formalism and especially symmetry, which is apparent not only in the shot compositions themselves but also in the dialogue, how Greenaway incorporates music, sometimes even the narrative itself ( Draughtman's Contract and Drowning By Numbers are excellent examples of what you might call "mathematical narratives"). You know those "Oddly Satisfying" compilations on youtube that were a thing a couple years ago. Greenaway's films are like that. The way they're meticulously composed and crafted, the way Greenaway has them shot and scored, the way he incorporates prop and set design, the way he creates these unique and strange little micro-worlds and the way his films feel like paintings in motion. Even if you don't understand what he's doing or why he's doing it or even if what you're seeing is abysmal and shocking, his films just feel so damn satisfying. There's a delightful balance and structure to them that serves as counterweight to the chaos and lack of control in our lives. All of that hardly scratches the surface of course. For anyone that's curious to read more about his style, I recommend this piece published in Postmodern Culture which articulates all of this and more much better than I ever could. you can also get a terrific sense about his approach to narrative from this recent interview he gave with BAFTA Guru, which is well worth watching. "We don't need a text-based cinema, we need an image-based cinema."
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 6, 2019 21:40:50 GMT
Obviously I love this thread and have posted a lot of filmmakers but the very first one I thought of was a personal fave (really all of the ones I posted except Lee are faves of mine), a sort of kindred spirit to Polanski, Argento, De Palma .........Claude Chabrol.......the heirs to Hitchcock.
Chabrol has many devices of his own that make him unique - a very special use of close-ups between characters either face to face or positioned oddly, people also often gazing in reflection in mirrors too and refusing to see what it captures. The rich are always condescending in a Chabrol film, he is never on the side of the upper classes and often they are casually cruel when they think they are being nice. At times he appears to side with the murderers of his rich characters even.
One thing I really love about him is he is not afraid to have his central characters be anything at all so you never know where his best films are going - he loves playing with the narrative - the central characters in a Chabrol film can kill or be killed.....love or be cheated on......steal or be stolen from and you often don't know which until the very end. His central characters can also, lose touch with reality as in the scene below:
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Post by themoviesinner on Jun 7, 2019 6:46:36 GMT
Tommen_SapersteinGreat write-up on Greenaway. His style is definitely one of a kind. I want to add that he is one of the very few directors that utilizes the production design of his films (sets, costumes, ect.) not only for it's aesthetic, but for symbolic purposes as well. The best example of this is The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover, where each room is in a different colour, representing a different cultural universal. The restaurant is red, a form of hell, where the theif has free reign to conduct his malicious business, the bathroom is white, representing light, a sanctuary in which the wife can spend time away from her evil husband, the kitchen is green, representing nature and it's neutral stance towards human activity. That is obviously the clearest example of this unique trait, but he also utilizes it on many of his other works as well (the theatre in The Baby Of Macon, the estate and costumes in The Draughtsman's Contract, ect.). I think this is also another important aspect of his unique style.
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Post by themoviesinner on Jun 7, 2019 7:09:37 GMT
He didn't just do horror, what he was saying about us, was always rather horrific. This sums up perfectly my thoughts on Cronenberg as well. His body horror was always symbolic and the most terrifing part of it wasn't the image itself, but the implications behind it. There's a scene in Videodrome (I can't find it online), where hundreds of homeless people line up and pay whatever little they have to watch television and forget about their miserable existence for a couple of hours. This is an increbile allegory on how media can make us mundane and passive. Cronenberg's cinema is full of scenes like this, which make his films more than just horror films, but cynical essays on aspects of our everyday life.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 7, 2019 9:35:38 GMT
@redhawk10 correctly mentioned Robert Altman's overlapping dialog and that of course is his big claim to fame. One of his others within that, and he uses this all the time - is the encroaching reveal closeup - it's quite unique to him actually. This scene shows it but it's throughout McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville especially - and pops up in all his work. In general, it's when the camera has been acting like the dialog - sight and sound - the camera too picks up overlapping things, and random details, and then incrementally focuses on one thing - often then the overlapping dialog stops too.
In this scene the camera starts far away or lingering but every time he cuts back to any characters whether they are in the background or not the camera gets incrementally closer to each one - so now, you listen to precisely the dialog and understand before the other characters do. Look where the camera starts, where it ends up and how deftly he goes from shot to shot. The first shot mimics the effect of last shot (body/bottle)...another director would go to that immediately without the inbetween and lose atmosphere, context, setting, themes.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 7, 2019 13:23:35 GMT
How about a filmmaker who played almost everything right down the middle - what artist does that - but a great one shouldn't know it all. I realize this applies to writing more than directing but it's in the directing choices of the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder who found equal treachery and hypocrisy is homosexual and straight society, in capitalistic and socialist society, in God and Atheism and normalcy and terrorism. Never one to assume he was ever "right" - he instead used his films to sort out his feelings.
He also used a ton of technique that he learned in the theater - cue cards, fake interviews, monologues etc. to give perspective and distance. He would often - very often do things like this - where he constructs a scene to it's simplest elements that then plays to something else. When she first enters the room the distance between her and the rest of the patrons seems immense and expressionistic in the German style. They are close, together. She's distant, alone. She acts completely rationally without guile, the bar maid is rather contemptuous. They have already defined her, she has not done so to them. That then forms the plot that quickly ........
The filming style and the scene composition matches what the words say in the text and then underlines them, subverts them, asks you to sort out what you just saw.
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coop032
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Post by coop032 on Jun 7, 2019 21:08:14 GMT
Wes Anderson
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