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tags: Film
rel: Watching Animals in Film - Artifice Automatism Limits, Detecting an Edit
Fragment of an idea here.
I was watching Rohmer’s A Tale of Autumn. Immediately prior I had watched Snow on Tha Bluff which feels documentarian (you’ll see people online being confused) because it seems authentic in performance (though there clear elements of fiction).
Aside
You can go broader here in what it means to be “based on a true story” and the degrees to which that is true. Maybe a possible Datasets - Shoes through the years to evaluate? Degree of truth.
A film is based on experiences. Even if “Snow on Tha Bluff” is a work of fiction, the experience rings true to some.
Once again these are just fragments of a thought, and I’m not ever really keen on why this interests me.
In A Tale of Autumn there’s a moment when Marie Rivière’s character is at a table. While reaching across the table she knocks over something. It seems a really authentic mistake. I know from Rohmer’s The Green Ray that there is precedence for improvisation in the script, but I hadn’t read about it being present in this film.
How can I know if this was an actual clumsy mistake?
This is what struck me. The degree which something in a film can be real. Aspects of artifice, fiction and reality intermingle on the screen.
Say someone actually loves their co-star, or the scene calls for you to love your co-star when you do not. Say there’s an intimate scene on the screen. Say the sun shines in their eyes in a particular way. The wind blows in their hair obscuring their face. Food is placed on a table and saliva is produced in response after a day of hard acting working.
She knocks something over, “Sorry, I’m clumsy.”
Then I think also to an animated film. In a 3D film there might be a physics engine underlying the scene. But in a traditionally illustrated film, the arm is moved because it was willed by the animator. All objects exist in the scene because the animator put them in place there. The only way for Mickey Mouse to be clumsy it for the animator to make him clumsy.
But still there is an aspect of chance to the paintbrush of the animator. The individual strokes of the bristles on the page are uncontrolled. They might just control a macro level trend, sway movement of the bristles in one direction and approve of it.