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Thanks to Joshua Frankel, who worked closely with director Phillip Noyce and stunt coordinator/director Vic Armstrong on the animated storyboards for the sequence I examined in "In the Cut Part II: A Dash of Salt," for sending me his previsualization sequence, above. As he explains on his site:

created previsualization animation for several major sequences in Salt. The film was not based on a book or other pre-existing property and the director, Phillip Noyce, had a lot of freedom to craft the story. Phillip worked with our team in previs to experiment with story options and push every moment in the film to be as unexpected and exciting as possible....

What is previsualization animation?

We build scale versions of the characters and sets inside the computer and create virtual cameras with lenses that match exactly the lenses being used by the cinematographer. I then work with the director to block in the actions, design camera moves and cut together a rough edit. We are able to do quite a bit of experimentation before anyone walks on set. The previs becomes a foundation for the sequence that the director can then build upon throughout the rest of the filmmaking process.

Compare with the sequence in the finished film, below:

In "In the Cut Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight)," I sought to pinpoint any and all possible reasons for the confusion I've always felt while watching part of an action sequence in "The Dark Knight." Some dismissed it as nitpicking (which is their prerogative), that criticism should be limited to looking at a movie in real time. But I felt I should go beyond the familiar critical generalizations ("Adjective!" "Adverbly adjective!") and try to locate precisely what I found disorienting and understand why I found it that way.

A few others, unfortunately, became confused about what I actually said or did not say in the 19-and-a-half-minute video, so I thought, for the record, I should publish a transcript to make it easier to reference. (Then I can just send links to those who misunderstand or misrepresent.) I don't write out a script for these essays -- I watch the movie, record what I want to say and then edit my remarks. So this, to the best of my ability, is an annotated transcription (with certain passages in bold for emphasis) of the narration in the finished video:

TITLE: "It's quite easy to over-cut a sequence: make it visually exciting and lose track of what is happening and who the characters are....

-- Lee Smith, editor ("The Dark Knight," "Inception"), interviewed in The Australian, October 30, 2010

[More from that interview here.]

NARRATION: The thing is, what he's talking about there is, I think, one of "The Dark Knight"'s most painfully obvious shortcomings. Its visual grammar is a mess and sometimes that results in scenes that are just incoherent.

So, when I saw that quote about action from the editor of "The Dark Knight," I thought maybe I should go back and take a close look at one of the movie's most famous action sequences and look at it like an editor, and try to figure out what information was being conveyed, shot by shot, and what it was that maybe I was missing...

In the Cut: Piecing together the action sequence
Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight)
Part II: A Dash of Salt

The third part of my series of video essays about action sequences is called "I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco," because it delves into two great car chases shot on the twisted streets and roller-coaster hills of the City by the Bay -- one famous (Peter Yates' 1968 "Bullitt") and one not-so-famous (Don Siegel's 1958 "The Lineup"). There's also a taste of the celebrated chase from William Friedkin's 1971 "The French Connection" -- and a very brief recap of the techniques examined in Part I ("The Dark Knight") and Part II ("Salt").

As I say in my intro over at Press Play:

In response to the first two parts, some have complained that "nobody looks at movies this way" -- which is demonstrably untrue, since the evidence is right here in front of you. What they are really saying is that they don't want to look at how action sequences are put together this way, and that's fine. Nobody is forcing them to. (In addition to pressing PLAY, you can press PAUSE or go to another page.) Far worse are the movie-nannies who are saying: "I don't want to look at filmmaking this way and neither should you," an attitude that's as insufferably arrogant as it is absurd.

To reverse the old "forest-for-the-trees" metaphor, if you always looked at the forest from a distance, you'd never discover all the different kinds of trees it's composed of. You don't examine the individual trees exclusively, or every single time you behold the forest, but you can learn from examining the elements up close. As I've said before, studying film is like studying literature or music or painting: it's helpful to look at words, sentences, paragraphs; notes, bars, passages, movements; brush strokes, colors, compositions... and how the pieces relate to one another.

Can a bad movie have some good filmmaking in it -- or vice-versa? If you have to ask that question, you haven't seen very many movies. In the Cut focuses on one thing and one thing only: the construction of action sequences. Those sequences were chosen not because these are the greatest (or worst) movies ever made, but because these specific sequences offer opportunities for illustration and discussion.

Fasten your seatbelts. It's gonna be a bumpy and exhilarating ride....

"In the Cut" is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com. Part I (on "The Dark Knight") is here. Part II (on "Salt") is here.

Click here to watch larger video on Vimeo.

In the Cut: Piecing together the action sequence
Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight)
Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco (Bullitt, The Lineup, The French Connection)

From the introduction to my latest deconstruction of a modern action sequence over at Press Play:

In Part I of In the Cut we looked at part of an action sequence from "The Dark Knight" and examined many questions, ambiguities and incongruities raised by the ways shots were composed and cut together. In Part II, we delve into a chase sequence from Phillip Noyce's Salt (2010) that uses a lot of today's trendy "snatch-and-grab" techniques (quick cutting, shaky-cam, but very few abstract-action cutaways -- I spotted one doozy, but I didn't mention it; see if you notice it).  And yet, there's very little that isn't perfectly understandable in the moment.

There are certain directors I think of as "one-thing-at-a-time" filmmakers. That is, they seem to be incapable of composing shots that have more than one piece of information in them at a time. This makes for a very flat, rather plodding style. You see what the camera is pointed at in each shot, but you get very little sense of perspective when it comes to relating it to other elements in the scene. Noyce's technique is much more fluid, organic and sophisticated. He keeps things from one shot visible in the next, even when shifting perspective -- whether it's only a few feet or clear across several lanes of traffic.

In Part I: A Shot in the Dark (Knight) I asked (rhetorically) whether the techniques used made the action more exciting or just more confusing. I left the question unanswered because it's something viewers are going to have to decide for themselves. And, as usual in criticism, the goal is not to find the "right" answers but to raise the relevant questions. Noyce himself raised a good one when he said he thinks viewers are not looking for coherence but for visceral experiences. And yet, his filmmaking is quite coherent (grammatically, if not "realistically"). "Visceral," like "realism," is in the eye of the beholder....

"In the Cut" is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com. Part I is here. Part III will examine a classic San Francisco car chase from "The Lineup" (1958), directed by Don Siegel ("Dirty Harry," "Escape from Alcatraz," "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Charley Varrick"...).

Click here to watch larger video on Vimeo.

Annotated full transcript of the video here, for easy reference.

In the Cut: Piecing together the action sequence
Part II: A Dash of Salt
Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco (Bullitt, The Lineup, The French Connection)

The first of a three-part video series on action sequences at Press Play is a really detailed, shot-by-shot analysis of a famous chase in "The Dark Knight" that has always confused me. Others told me they had no problems following it, but the closer I looked at it, the better I understood what puzzled me.

As I say in the introduction over at Press Play:

When, for example, we're shown someone gazing intently offscreen and there's a cutaway to something else (that appears to be in the vicinity), we assume (having familiarized ourselves with basic cinematic grammar over the years) that we are seeing what they are looking at.  But that's not always the case. Why? I don't know. I find many directorial choices in contemporary commercial movies to be sloppy, random, incomprehensible--and indefensible.

This essay takes a long, hard look at roughly the first half of the big car and truck chase sequence from Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," set on the lower level streets by the Chicago River.  It stops, starts, reverses, repeats, slows down... taking the sequence apart (and putting it back together) shot by shot. The idea is to look at it the way an editor would--but also as a moviegoer does. We notice lapses in visual logic whether our brains register them consciously or not. I found this sequence utterly baffling the first time I saw it, and every subsequent time.  At last, I now know exactly why.

"In the Cut" is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com.

UPDATE: 9/12/11): Part II is now here. This quotation comes near the beginning:

Realism, as usual, is simply a fig leaf for doing what you want. Virtually any technique can be justified as realistic according to some conception of what's important in the scene. If you shoot the action cogently, with all the moves evident, that's realistic because it shows you what's 'really' happening. If you shoot it awkwardly, that presentation is 'realistically' reflecting what a participant perceives or feels. If you shoot it as 'chaos' (another description that Nobles applies to the Expendables action scenes)--well, action feels chaotic when you're in it, right? Forget the realist alibi. What do you want your sequence to do to the viewer?

--David Bordwell, Observations on film art (September 15, 2010)

The other night, I had dinner with some film-critic friends -- people I've known for much or most of my life -- and the subject circled around to 2010 ten-best list obligations. Two of us immediately said we'd rank episodes of "Mad Men" on our lists. I did not see (m)any theatrically released motion pictures this year that I thought were superior to, say, "The Rejected," "The Suitcase," "The Beautiful Girls," "Tomorrowland"... In fact, out of the 13 episodes shown between July and October, I could list ten titles and not feel terribly guilty about the feature films I'd be leaving off.

This video essay, "The Ladies and the Boxes," draws upon several episodes from Season 4, culminating with the final one, "Tomorrowland." Sally Draper says she gets upset when she thinks about "forever" -- the concept of death that most troubles her, but also the promise (if not the reality) of marriage. Sitting outdoors in a vacant lot, with the remnants of a old, overgrown shed behind her -- as unlike the rigid, rectilinear architecture of SCDP as possible -- she likens it to the Indian girl on the Land o' Lakes butter box, holding a box with her picture on it, holding a box...

Part 1

Claude Chabrol's "La Rupture" (1970) begins in what could be a cave, with the quotation: "What utter darkness suddenly surrounds me?" The camera abruptly dollies to the right a short distance and the "cave" is revealed to have been a close-up of the bark of a tree. The movement pulls in a rustic-looking apartment building (which the DVD commentary explains is a fake French farmhouse, a suburban style popular at the time). The lens has been focused on the building in the distance the whole time; the camera has just moved around the obstacle of the old tree to show us what was "hidden" behind it. And that's what the movie's about, looking into the darkness beneath middle-class suburban life. This opening is, in its way, a less overtly surrealistic forerunner of the first sequence of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," 16 years later. (Yet there's still something disturbingly surreal about it, don't you think?)

"Mad Men" Season 4, Episode 9 -- "The Beautiful Girls" -- was another of the series' killer movies. Like "The Rejected" (which I wrote and vuddeoed about a few weeks ago), it made superb use of office space -- the hallways, windows, corners and doors that those familiar with the sky-high digs of Sterling Cooper Draper Price have become part of the "Mad Men" memory-architecture. I wanted to pay tribute to that aspect of the series in this little essay about the ghosts on the 37th floor. Please take a look (it opens with a montage of portraits) and then read below for some notes...

I wanted to begin with an appreciation of these women, young and old, whose lives intersect at various angles throughout the episode -- written by Dahvi Waller and Matthew Weiner and directed by Michael Uppendahl (who also shot Episode 2 this season, "Christmas Comes But Once a Year"). So, I decided to start with some faded film portraits (OK, Photoshopped frame grabs), with a semi-ironic nod to feminist film theory that would soon become popular (since politics and civil rights actually play a dramatic part in this episode). Each of the "girls" in the montage is the object of another's gaze -- usually a man's, and usually the one who is her most receptive audience, or at least her most important, at SCDP. Faye is seen doing what she does best, giving a presentation; Joan stands up for/to Roger; exception: Peggy and her friend Joyce (seen by Stan, who Peggy outplayed in "Waldorf Stories," and for whom they are both performing here); Miss Blankenship is talking to her boss, Don Draper (commenting that his daughter Sally looks much chubbier in photos); Sally is sitting on the couch in her father's office, while he is on the phone with her mother; Betty is on the other end of the line -- the only woman in this sequence who isn't being watched; Megan, SCDP's receptionist, is seen from Sally's POV, because Sally has a sympathetic connection with her; now we switch to another female-female perspective: Joyce (love her Bacall-like pocket pose affectation) in Peggy's office; and Peggy, in conversation with Joyce, but not beholden to her gaze (as you know, it is my contention that Peggy is the strongest character on the show). The overall movement of the sequence has brought us closer, from medium shot to Peggy's close-up. And, finally, almost all of the women in the preceding portraits, surrounding Don and bearing witness to the handover of Sally to Betty. This is an amazing shot -- the power of all those eyes. And for some reason it breaks my heart when Joyce enters that glass door (a significant location for her and Peggy) just as Betty and Sally are exiting. These three are strangers to one another, but everyone in the lobby is connected in some way, whether they know it or not.

Eyes, frames, lenses, doorways, windows, photographs, mirrors, smoke, hands, flesh, water, power...

There are movies I count among my best friends, with whom I have loved, learned, and grown. This is one I treasure most. (Only for those who know their way around "Chinatown.")

[notes to come]

a labor of deepest love, for Mrs. Mulwray and Gina Namkung (1937, 1974, and counting...)

... and, of course, for Matt Zoller Seitz, Kevin B. Lee, Steven Boone...

We tend to remember long takes that call attention to themselves as such: the opening shots of "Touch of Evil" or "The Player"; the entrance to the Copacabana in "GoodFellas"; all those shots in Romanian movies, and pictures directed by Bela Tarr and Jia Zhangke... And then there are the ones you barely notice because your eyes have been guided so effortlessly around the frame, or you've been given the freedom to explore it on your own, or you've simply gotten so involved in the rhythms of the scene, the interplay between the characters, that you didn't notice how long the shot had been going on.

For this compilation, "Deep Focus," I've chosen eight shots I treasure (the last two I regard as among the finest in all of cinema). They're not all strictly "deep focus" shots, but they do emphasize three-dimensionality in their compositions. I've presented them with only minimal identifications so you can simply watch them and see what happens without distraction or interruption. Instead, I've decided to write about them below. Feel free to watch the clips and then re-watch (freeze-frame, rewind, replay) the clips to see what you can see. To say they repay re-viewing is an understatement.

The first time I made a year-end list for Scanners, I did it by suggesting double-bills of 2006 films with older films (much like what contributors to The Auteurs did this year). In 2007, I made my first year-end movie, inspired by "L'Eclisse," as a tribute to the late Michelangelo Antonioni and a commentary on the WGA strike that was happening at the time. Last year, the concept was based on a shot of Hannah Schygulla, Goddess of Cinema, waking up, looking into the camera (in Fatih Akin's "The Edge of Heaven") and dreaming fragments of the films on my list.

This year, I'm not quite sure how it came together (see opening title), but I took my cue from my favorite movie of the year, the Coens' "A Serious Man." I knew I didn't want to adhere to any rigid countdown hierarchy this time, but to let the movies converse with themselves through images. I chose the word "conversation" knowing there would be no dialog except at the very beginning and the very end, with the Jefferson Airplane song "Somebody to Love" (recurring element in "A Serious Man") in between. That gave me approximately 2 minutes and 58 seconds for the montage....

Once again, my favorite movies of the year engage in overlapping cinematic conversation with one another, blurring stylistic, thematic, national, linguistic, philosophical, theological and proprietary boundaries. No one is playing the blame game here. Happy new year!

(list and links after the jump...)

This is my favorite of my own video pieces so far because it's the most personal and spontaneous -- really a stream-of-consciousness memory-movie captured and strung together over a weekend for the House Next Door's Close-Up Blogathon. I pretend I now know what every image, every sound "means" here (though much of that was discovered just in the act of dreaming it up and putting it together -- or didn't occur to me until I actually saw it), but that's not the point: Just let it sink in and see what dreamy associations it might conjure for you...

Original illustrated notes on "a free-association dream sequence" here. Originally posted here.

Ten years after its release, there are still plenty of people who will not get David Fincher's "Fight Club" because they refuse to see what is in front of their eyes. They think it's about a cult of men who get together to punch each other, which is like saying "Citizen Kane" is about a sled. Fundamentally, it's an uncannily accurate depiction of depression and delusion -- capturing a uniquely (post-?)modern strain of anomie to which perhaps older baby boomers and their seniors find it difficult to connect because it's beyond their frame of reference. (I don't know -- that's just a hunch.)

"People get scared, not just of violence and mortality, but viewers are terrified of how they can no longer relate to the evolving culture," "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk told Dennis Lim recently in the New York Times:

Some older audiences prefer darker material in conventional forms; they "really truly want nothing more than to watch Hilary Swank strive and suffer and eventually die -- beaten to a pulp, riddled with cancer, or smashed in a plane crash."

In that Times piece, Lim dubbed "Fight Club" "the defining cult movie of our time."

Back in 1999, I described it as "a grim fairy tale for adults, a consumerist revenge fantasy, a portrait of a disintegrating personality, and, for all its hyper-active stylization, an astonishingly vivid portrait of the berserk materialist wasteland in which (like it or not) billions of city dwellers live today." (It can also be seen, in retrospect, as a prescient 9/11 nightmare.)

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. This one was originally published here.)

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. This one was originally published ,here.)

AMC's re-do of the classic British TV series "The Prisoner" gets under way Sunday night, following the conclusion of "Mad Men"'s third season last week. The new version stars Jim Caviezel as Number Six and Ian McKellen as Number Two. (The great Leo McKern played Number Two a couple times in the original series, and there were some other repeats as I recall, but generally there was a new Number Two each week.)

From the teasers it appears that the new version (tagline: "You Only Think You're Free") takes place in a desert suburb of Dubai rather than a quaint seaside village. (Actually, the new "Prisoner" was shot in Cape Town, South Africa, and Swakopmund, Namibia.) The big white bouncy billowy security devices are back. But I'm most interested in the opening credits sequence, because I became so enamored with the ritualistic nature of the earlier one, as you can see from the following obsessive video analysis originally published in 2008:

(Rescued and reposted months after the death of iKlipz caused all my video essays to disappear from the web. Originally published -- with more on "The Prisoner" here.)

WGA strike / Antonioni edition. (No dialog, no actors except the quick mug shots of Dylan personae from "I'm Not There.")

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. This one was originally published here.)

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. This one was originally published here.)

Another in a series of video essays that disappeared from the web earlier this year when iKlipz went under. I'm in the process of finding them in old backups, uploading and restoring them to their proper places on scanners. This one, an x-ray of the Coens' "Miller's Crossing," was originally posted (with commentary, dialog, frame grabs) here.

I'm in the process of tracking down, rescuing and reposting all my video essays that disappeared along with iKlipz when the latter died unexpectedly earlier this year. This one, about M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable," came to mind when posting Richard T. Jameson's comments on framing and John Carpenter's "Halloween."