Editing Analysis

The opening sequence of my favorite film "Once Upon a Time in the West" is truly one of cinema's most memorable scenes..despite the fact that very little happens. It's the raw simplicity which makes it so compelling, for here we have three heavily armed men at a train station in the middle of the desert..and all they do is wait. One plays with a fly, one collects water dripping from the tower on his hat brim, and the other cracks his knuckles; all to simply pass time. We go through this for about eight minutes before the shriek of a train whistle is heard and the men spring into action. When the train arrives, it is obvious they are out to get someone, but who? In fact, no one descends from the train. After waiting with nervous anticipation, they turn around to leave as the train continues down the line. That's when the wail of a harmonica is heard behind them. They turn and on the other side of the tracks is our hero. After a few harsh words, silence again, and then in the blink of an eye gunshots erupt and all four characters hit the ground. All are mortally wounded save for the protagonist.
A typical Hollywood director would trim the scene down to three minutes, perhaps opening directly with the arrival of the train. However, in Leone's cinema, the style of the film keeps our eyes glued to the screen, despite the slow pace. The editing, done by celebrated Italian editor Nino Baragli, is one of many crucial elements of the film's style. There is no quick cutting or visual montages. The only fast cuts occur during the moments which a normal editor would flesh out: the gunfight. The editor was familiar with Leone's abrupt transitions from his trademark extreme close-ups to his long shots. The editing keeps us wondering what will happen next. In one moment, we have a shot lingering on a gunman with the fly successfully captured in the gun barrel. When the train whistle is heard we abruptly cut to a shot from a low angle, track-level shot with the speeding train accelerating over the camera. The editor knew how to constantly keep a level of surprise within the film that the director, Sergio Leone, always sought to capture.

Filming The Milgram Experiment

We were recently asked in my Media Production course to write, plan, and shoot a three minute short of our own choosing. My partner, Constantin Polseski, came up with the idea of making a film about the infamous Stanley Milgram experiment. This analysis, conducted in the 1960's at Yale University, was intended to portray the effects on people who are forced to do something by an authority figure even though they personally know what they are doing is morally unjustifiable. The experiment involved a professor who would be introduced by the scientists to a "learner" who was in reality a paid actor but the professors had no knowledge of this. The two would go into separate rooms and not have any direct contact with one another. The leaner would answer a series of questions by the teacher and when the answer was wrong, which would be all the time, the professor was pressured by the scientists into pressing a switch to electrically shock the learner with a higher voltage each time. The paid actor would simulate the sound of screaming in pain, so the professors actually believed that they were shocking this man. The scientist would demand the teacher to continue on, against their own consciences, and over 60% of the time, they continued on to what would actually be a fatal voltage. The hypothesis of the experiment was used to explain why so many people followed Hitler during WWII.
Our film is a heavily dramatized version of the event. We shot the film in a small room with a single construction light beaming down on the actor portraying a professor. The actor playing the scientist was off in a corner of the room just over the professor's shoulder. The scientist was off in the shadows of the room to add a sinister feel to the character, which is what we were going for in the original script. Most of the lines uttered by the scientist were actual lines used by the scientists such as "it is absolutely essential that you continue" except they were read in a much more fierce, commanding way than the actual scientist said. The movie came out excellently, exactly as I anticipated. If we had the opportunity to do it over again, I would not change much, except the pace of the dialogue. The original cut ran 6 minutes long and that gave me quite a headache when it came time to edit. Cramming all that information into the span of three minutes was quite the challenge, and much of it was due to the pace I had directed the actors to perform.

The World I Hear

As a student of New York's Hunter College, I'm quite familiar with the hustle and bustle sounds of the city. The endless cavalcade of cars, trucks, and buses creates a harmony of noise that resonates throughout the avenues of the sprawling metropolis. Whether one defines the report as thrilling is entirely personal choice. There are those who enjoy the sights and sounds of Manhattan, and those who simply do not. I fall in the latter category, much to the surprise of those in Hunter who first meet me, not to the surprise of those who truly know me. The obnoxious, blaring, incessant racket which pounds away at my ear fills me with tension, an uneasy state where the smallest obstacle to my frantic journey home can set me over the edge.
Now despite my most humble opinion, all sounds within our daily lives can be defined as musical, even those which we wish to ignore. In the most modern sense of the word, music can be found in any rhythmic sound which follows a distinctive pattern. In this case, the many noises heard in New York surely create a grandiose philharmonic orchestration with its taxi french horns and its tire-meets-sewer cap drum beats. Each individual sound adds to the sonata of the city, a furiously notated piece conducted by some unseen maestro. Whether or not we find the piece pleasing to the ear is, once again, and I can't stress this enough, a matter of personal choice.

Mr. John Hurtado's Website

I just viewed fellow classmate John Hurtado's personal website for our final blog assignment. I found his artist statement to be very well written. It is brief, to-the-point, yet very informative of his personal background and interests. I particularly enjoyed his statement that the whole world is not just black and white but many shades of gray and other colors in between. This is an opinion that I share with him, for one of my greatest interests in human behavior is morality and from what I've seen the defining line between what's right and what's wrong is not always easy to define.

I noticed that Mr. Hurtado knows a thing or two about graphic design and it truly shows in his personalization of his website. It is also reflected in his stamp which is very intricate in its artistry. I also thought his photos were very interesting, in particular the shot entitled "One Step Closer" which was taken from a low angle perspective (the camera was positioned on the floor" and depicts the hallway going off into the distance. The one thing I must negatively comment on is the fact that I was unable to open his blog from the link he provided, but such is a trivial complaint. Overall, I though Mr. John Hurtado did a great job on his personal website.

The Design work of Frank McCarthy

In 1969, the year when my favorite film "Once Upon a Time in the West" was released in America, Frank McCarthy was one of the most prolific graphic designers for theatrical posters of major motion pictures. His impressive resume included the poster art for films such as "The Great Escape," "The Train," "The Dirty Dozen," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," to name a few. Mr. McCarthy was indeed a most suitable choice for the artwork of Leone's larger-than-life horse-opera. The poster for the film has the four central characters of the film played by Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Jason Robards emerging, in a way, from the smoke of a steam locomotive which passes through the lower half of the frame. On the far side of the track is the protagonist, Bronson, fanning his revolver and in the foreground the three pistoleros are shown being gunned down. The most interesting piece of the artwork has to be the gunman closest to the foreground, for his death is the most exaggerated of the three victims. He is depicted as reeling backward from the obvious impact of the bullet, caught in mid-air with outstretched hands and a gun which has just left his now bereft palm.

The artwork, which presents a somewhat epic feel, perfectly suits the gritty western saga. The characters in the upper half of the poster seem to rise above the worldly actions below the film's title in the center frame. This lends to the larger-than-life presentation of the film's actors. Sergio Leone was infamous for his extreme close-ups of eyes, hands, and faces, which often gave his characters a tremendous presence on-screen, a trademark the actors absolutely loved. McCarthy obviously did his homework here. Also, the tagline of the film, although unfitting, is situated nicely above the focal points of interest. The words "There were three men in her life. One to take her..one to love her-and one to kill her" do not embody what the film is truly about, but the red small font does not draw attention away from the more important details of the poster.

The original 1969 poster for Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" as illustrated by Frank McCarthy can be found here: http://chasness.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/once_upon_a_time_in_the_west.jpg

What I See

For a great deal of time, I've wanted to see the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo (1961) but have often put it off due to other priorities. When I finally sat down to watch the film, I was treated a piece of art that I have neglected from myself for so long. The movie, which stars the internationally popular Toshiro Mifune, is about a wandering samurai who wanders into a town torn apart by two rival families and sells himself out to both sides in an attempt to turn them against each others and make himself wealthy in the process. I discovered this gem from being a fan of Italian western film maker Sergio Leone who completely remade the film as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the film which launched both he and Clint Eastwood to stardom.
A great appeal to the film is the stark cinematography. Shot on black-and-white stock, the visuals are shrouded in murky shadows which contrast with the strong pale whites of the sky and ground. It sets the mood of the story which is strong and violent, the heavy presence of death surrounds the village empty of all life save for a few quirky residents and the large handfuls of gang members. The film also made good use of night time photography which in the early 60's presented a great challenge to film makers. A particular scene comes to mind, that in which one lair is torched by a rival faction forcing all inside to flee outside and mercilessly slayed by their foes. The brightness of the fire and the still, solid black of the night create flickering luminance on the faces of the villains, an almost frightening image.