[과제] Response to Excerpts from "The Filmmaker's Eye"

Readings: Excerpts from the The Filmmaker’s Eye, by Gustavo Mercado.

 

I have long wondered which of the two was the case: is it that the spectacles of modern cinema influence and form the way I apprehend the world, or is it actually the other way around, and cinema is always just trying to “catch up” to the way we already perceive reality? I encountered this puzzle one day when I realized that my dreams felt very much like edited parts of a film, with perspective changes in and out of “subjective shots,” and a sequence of events unfolding with repeated imagery as if in a movie scene with a coherent image system. On one hand, I thought, it might have been the case that the movies I had seen until now configured and “set the frame,” so to say, of the way my dream narrative progressed. On the other hand, there seemed to be the possibility that our dreams were always that way, and that simply modern cinema had learned or is still learning to capture that frame in which we naturally perceive the world and simply reproduce it in films.

 

This week’s reading led me to engage deeper with this question of the primacy between cinematic storytelling and actual perception of the world. Going through some of the intricacies of visual storytelling, including the role of different shots and the significance of image systems in conveying messages, I became even more curious of what it was about visual compositions and shots that made them so effective (or ineffective, as in the case of the beginning filmmaker) in delivering its intended message. One could say that this is a question one step further in the direction of the philosophy(?) of filmmaking: beyond the question of “What composition makes a film scene effective?”, I am trying to ask, “In virtue of what are such compositions effective?”

 

Granted, answering this question was not the reading’s main goal, nor do I think there is a definitive answer to such a broad issue; nevertheless, I found the reading helpful in thinking about this question. Mercado makes an analogy between filmmaking and explaining a road rage incident to a friend. Mercado claims that what we do commonly in storytelling is employ the process of abstraction; we absolve the unnecessary, irrelevant details, and extract the essential components of a story as is judged by the storyteller. This, I think is exactly the process in which humans perceive the raw world as well. We tend to forget about irrelevant aspects of our lives and remember those facets of life that have special meaning to us. In this regard, I do think our apprehension of the world is in a lot of ways analogous to the process of filmmaking. As such, one could say perhaps that an effective film is one that resonates with the way we would capture the events as they happened in the world. The many experiments in the techniques of filmmaking, then, might be understood as attempts to more closely mimic or target how we take in reality.

 

I am not sure this view captures the full picture. For one thing, as Mercado mentions, it is not necessary that the director always follow certain preestablished norm or rule about visual composition to effectively deliver the narrative; sometimes, breaking the rules is more compelling. In this sense, it is wrong to say that cinema is only trying to replicate some facts about the way we perceive the world. Cinema, too, has its own history; it is its own evolving thing. As such, for now, I am tempted to (a bit hastily) conclude that cinema and human perception are intertwined in a two-way relationship, in which human abstraction inform filmmaking techniques, and cinematic experiences transform our intake of the world.