Quentin Tarantino Interviewed on "The Treatment"

Elvis Mitchell is an American film critic and host of The Treatment, KCRW's film interview program. On January 9, 2013, Mitchell interviewed renowned writer/director, and sometimes actor Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is best known for his tremendous love of film and his very unique movies including Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and most recently Django Unchained. 

Quentin Tarantino, The Film Lover

I actually listened to all three of Quentin Tarantino's interviews available on The Treatment, but I will base my assignment on the most recent one which took place a couple weeks after Django Unchained premiered. Although the interview was supposed to be about Django, I noticed that most of the time Tarantino would reference his previous films like Inglorious Bastards and Pulp Fiction, particularly when he and Mitchell discussed practice of using food to convey power. 

"...I think I just always associated the getting to know somebody, trading back and forth information, finding out if you're compatible, anything like that always happens over restaurants and dinners.. and some of the rituals are about the balance of power shifting or being established..." Tarantino says about his effective use of food in all of his films. I find this fascinating because as Mitchell was first introducing the subject, I found myself thinking back to scenes ins Django where one of the villains is always eating, no matter what he is doing whether it be just walking around or actually sitting at the dinner table. Then as Tarantino went on to explain that he incorporates scenes where actors actually eat the food as it is shown in the movie, I thought about other movies of different genres and how it is only in restaurant or dinner table scenes that we see actors eating, or at least sitting in front of food. I admire Tarantino's desire to genuinely depict a scene, to the extent that we can walk out of watching one of his films craving the food we see his characters devouring.

Jules in Pulp Fiction, eating a Big Kahuna Burger

Calvin Candie in Django Unchained, having a Pina Colada

Another notable comment Quentin Tarantino made is about how he likes to be different when telling his stories, and even admits only working with actors who love language and are intelligent enough to understand his wordy scripts. He says "I hate to have like expositional sequences and so I always try to overload them with other stuff so you don't quite realize you're having the story told to you." Something I really enjoy about watching Tarantino's films is trying to keep up with the dialogue and the plot that may jump around because I become an active viewer. Also, because any sequence in any Tarantino film is always loaded with many interesting visual and auditory element, I am able to enjoy watching his movies over and over again.

Pulp Fiction 'Mexican Standoff' at the diner 

   Quentin Tarantino also talks about how "there is an aspect of Inglorious Bastards.. there's a whole plethora of Holocaust movies and World War II action adventure movies that have done the work for [him] so [he doesn't] have to show all that you've seen in the other movies... [He] can just hint to that and get down to [his] deconstruction." Then he goes on to explain that for Django Unchained, he had to take the time to provide us the back story and actually give us an idea of what it was like in the South during that period of time. His comments made me wonder about how hard it must be for a director or writer to want to tell his or her story but beforehand have to decide what must be provided to the audience.

Schultz teaches Django how to be a gunfighter in Django Unchained

Personally, I really enjoy watching Quentin Tarantino's films and look forward to his future projects. I think that through his direction and writing her created movies that originate in genres familiar to movie lovers, but transcend into works all his own. I learned a lot about some of Tarantino's movie-making process, including the lengthy auditions he casts and the long writing and creating periods it takes to produce his films. To the film world, Quentin Tarantino shares a very fresh and unique perspective other film maker's have tired, and he also gives his audience a full experience!

The Man Who Speaks in Silence

OVERALL LOOK:

This film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" strives to be a motion picture adaptation of a man who authored his own experience as a captive of locked-in syndrome after suffering a stroke. The depiction of Jean-Dominique Bauby's personal experience through the use first-person point of view, visually oblique perspective and relatively long takes serves as a method of engrossing the viewer into the very personal and arduous process of learning to communicate effectively enough to write a book without speaking.

Jean-Do's perspective

IMAGES:

Although most of the moving pictures of this film follow along with the Jean-Do's narration of an event-by-event account of his learning and acceptance process, sometimes there are images in the film that denote an accompanying meaning to the literal story being told. For instance, the recurring scene of Jean-Dominique submerged in water, restricted in movement by the diving bell, symbolizes his drowning desperation. 

Image of drowning desperation

Sometimes uplifting the overwhelming world under the diving bell, the themes of hope and inspiration are represented by the use of pictures and scenes that constantly remind us of Jean-Dominique's full life as a father and editor of Elle Magazine. 

Inspiration in Family

SHOT LENGTHS:

In an attempt to give the viewer a sense of the patience it took to learn to communicate by spelling out every word with the dictation of the frequency-ordered alphabet, lengthy shots of the process were incorporated into the film and served to show Jean-Do's progress as the shots became progressively shorter.

"uh, ess, ah, air, ee..."

SHOT TYPES:

Extreme close-ups were constantly used in this film with the intention of providing the viewer an up-close and personal account of Jean-Do's life. When any person in the film invaded Jean-Dominique's personal space, as a necessity mostly, we can feel the uneasiness of his helplessness because the characters are fairly large within the frame.  

ECU = invasion, powerless

Extreme long shots are in turn used to highlight the thoughts Jean does have control over, like when he pictures vast landscapes to insert himself in a pleasant openness. 

ELS = control, freedom

CAMERA ANGLES:

Most of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is filmed in an an oblique angle, also known as dutch angle, so that the viewer sees the life of Jean through his personal physically skewed point of view. In addition to being skewed, Jean-Do's perspective is represented through the use of low-angle, especially when he encounters those in his life not trained to meet his eye level.

Looking up at Celine

The only scene where we "look up" at Jean-Do Bauby is when he reminisces about his life as the editor of Elle.

Successful editor of Elle Magazine

COMPOSITION:

Scenes in this film depict the life of a paralyzed man with no control of barely anything but his left eye, and because he does not have the power to position himself to see the world in symmetry and balance, neither does the viewer of his story. The rule of thirds is generally ignored, and instead shots with characters' heads cut off the frame are recorded in the film.

Jean-Dominique's range of vision

CAMERA MOVEMENT:

Especially at the beginning, the camera moves a lot during this film because the world of Jean Dominique causes him confusion and he must pay close attention to everything in his narrow line of vision which results in jerky movement of his one good eye. 

Jean-Do can only move one eye to communicate with doctors

CINEMATOGRAPHY STYLE:

The film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" truly expresses itself most effectively through the use of cinematographic elements that very clearly represent Jean-Dominique's point-of-view. The film's focus on presenting to the viewer a first-person account of the anguish and degree of self-pondering experienced by Bauby's locked-in syndrome is poetically executed through cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's language as described above.

The French call it Black Film

Film Noir: An American genre of film prevalent from the early 1940s to the late 1950s, marked by a dark mood and stylized lighting.

American Cinema's episode Film Noir is a documentary in which film makers describe the genre and provide examples from various movies to support their opinions. Within the first ten minutes, actor John Lithgow described the film noir movies: "They were black and white, they were dark, and they were often raw. In this breed of film, the only law was rule of fate; the only order, a moral restitution where everybody dies at the end. But these films were always seductive." His description of Film Noir applies to the 1944 film Double Indemnity about an insurance representative who is seduced by a client's wife and eventually commits murder with her.

Also in the documentary, scholar Janey Place describes femme fatale's as "extremely driven, selfish, ambitious characters"  which identifies Phyllis from Double Indemnity. Phyllis had already killed her husband's former wife just because she could, and in the movie she wants to kill her husband and does not stop until she gets what she wants. In this still she is even filmed from  a low-angle shot to give the viewer a sense of her power.

Welcome to my blog for Rio Hondo College's course titled The Art of Film! I am very much looking forward to learning how to look at movies, and so I shall begin:

For me, an interesting movie is one that takes me to another world during its duration, but also provides me something to take with me. I am compelled by films that I watch and cannot stop thinking about for days, because I know that I have been moved by something I have seen. Noteworthy movies are ones that I can see a lot of people relating to or enjoying because they communicate a universal theme in a unique way, or a new topic in a comprehensive manner.

One of the movies assigned this week, title "Le voyage dans la lune" (A Trip to the Moon), directed by Georges Melies in 1902 is certainly noteworthy. A couple minutes into watching the silent short I realized I had already watched it in an English class a few years ago. 

Also, the iconic scene where the shell hits the moon's eye was in the movie Hugo (2011),  which features Georges Melies as one of the central characters. Watch a scene from Martin Scorsese's Hugo: http://youtu.be/oNFpTsbUR0k

I appreciated the fact that since this film was silent, the actors had to communicate to the viewer with the use of constant movement. Just having read the first chapter of Looking at Movies, I have already been introduced to a few cinematic techniques that help portray a movie maker's vision into a captured motion picture and I can definitely notice the motion picture's evolution. It was interesting to be taken back to a time when different angle shots were not being employed, but instead only the focus characters moved differently than the people in the background.

In contrast, the other silent short assigned for this unit titled "The Great Train Ride" did not thoroughly amuse me. I recognize that its an important piece of movie-making history, but I found myself lost about halfway. I have realized I, like many people, have become accustomed to the manipulation invisibly present in movies of today. Nowadays, you can be doing chores while periodically glancing at movies and still have an idea of what is going on in the story and how you should be feeling about the particular scene; soundtracks and various shooting techniques play major roles in manipulating films into exactly what their respective makers want to present to viewers.