Henry wrote:
> deep-focus/deep staging requires far MORE directorial control than would be the case with analytical editing.
For some reason, Henry's words prompted Mike to launch a gratuitous attack on Alfred Hitchcock:
>hitchcock’s directorial control – of which he was zealous and for which he was famous/notorious – required that actors be treated like cattle, and that only through his putting the pieces together would the meaning emerge [classic kuleshow --- there are many instances in which the actors themselves did not know what a specific required gesture was supposed to represent or mean]
First, surely the above IGNORES the spirit and logic of Henry's observation (which is about deep-focus/deep staging AS OPPOSED TO analytical, Kuleshov-type editing)?
But worse, Mike's statement represents a populist view of Hitchcock that is far from the truth. (More on that in a moment.)
Worse still, Mike couldn't resist a final ad hominem, un-sourced put-down of Hitchcock (note his parenthesis in the following):
>the kind of control henry alludes to in his comment thus has to include control over the actors – or more faith in them [something of which hitchcock had virtually none]
Well I'm sorry, Mike, but it's my understanding that Hitchcock had enormous respect for the majority of the actors with whom he worked. He treated them as professionals - had faith in them - and gave them parameters within which they were free to be and invent their characters, including improvising bits of business that he, Hitchcock, might happily incorporate in his mise-en-scene. There were many far more despotic and far less pleasant directors than Hitchcock, and his ability to pre-conceive an entire film in his head (while still leaving the actors the freedom I have indicated) was a mark of genius, and a valid cinematic methodology. (Read Bill Krohn's 'Hitchcock at Work', for starters.) To my mind, Robert Bresson was just as much or more of a 'tyrant' than Hitchcock.
What does Mike make of this from Bresson about film performers:
'Models who have become automatic (everything weighed, measured, timed, repeated ten, twenty times) and are then dropped in the medium of the events of your film - their relations with the objects and persons around them will be RIGHT, because they will not be THOUGHT.' (Bresson, 'Notes on the Cinematographer', p. 32)
- KM
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