Landscape Artist

A Question of Aesthetics?

Unicórnio [Eduardo Nunes, 2017]:

I saw a couple of the above images – taken here from the Eduardo Nunes directed film Unicórnio (2017) – posted in a movie-related discussion group on Facebook and was inspired enough to seek out a copy of the original trailer. Surprisingly, I'd never heard anything about the film previously, and have so far been unable to find a copy of it to watch, either through the usual streaming platforms, or conventional physical media.

I could probably live without the bespoke aspect ratio, which, without context, seems like a gimmick, however, the command and presentation of the landscape is extraordinary, finding an affinity for both the romantic imagery of Caspar David Friedrich, whose famous painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), shows a similar contrast between human figures left awed and overwhelmed by the majesty of nature, and the dream landscapes found in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, such as The Mirror (1975), or Nostalghia (1983).

It's increasingly rare that I find myself enticed by film trailers, but this was a good one. Even watching it in un-subtitled Portuguese, and not entirely grasping what the film is even about, the imagery spoke, and seems especially captivating at a time when so many new films are entirely monoform in presentation, as if produced to fit a pre-existing template.

Sans Soleil

The Image of Happiness

or: 'the black leader'

"The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: One day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader. If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black."

Chris Marker begins his film Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983) with the above quotation. It is accompanied first by the image itself: three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. A second image, unremarked upon by the narrator, shows fighter planes on a naval ship undergoing maintenance. The first image, and Marker’s characterization of it as "the image of happiness", seems like a provocation; one of several that occur throughout the film. Is the filmmaker challenging the audience to find happiness in the image? Or is he challenging us to find what signifies this as an image of happiness in the context of the film, or indeed, in the life of his fictionalized avatar, the photographer Sandor Krasna?

Admittedly, I've never seen happiness in the image itself. The image for me looks like one of fear and discomfort; three children reacting to the intrusive appearance of a stranger, who films them without permission. As they move through the frame, their pale skin and blonde hair turned silvery by the low sun, they seem incongruous against the green of the surrounding landscape; out of place and out of time. Marker's camera dehumanizes his subjects throughout Sans Soleil, as he studies objects and individuals with the detached curiosity of an alien anthropologist trying to make sense of a culture and its customs beyond his understanding. As the children move, they do so like trapped animals, retreating, clinging to the edge of the road, unsure of the intentions of this photographer, who records them without consent.

Sans Soleil [Chris Marker, 1983]:

While it's perhaps irresponsible if not ableist to force a developmental diagnosis onto someone based only on a slim understanding of their personality, I do speculate whether there was something almost autistic about Marker. It would explain his way of bending the world to meet his various interests and obsessions, his ability to find meanings and connections in signs and symbols, the unerring gaze of his camera and the need to make sense of actions and interactions, as if straining to understand the deeper nuances of a glance, a stare, a gesture. Of course, it's possible that this was simply a result of his background in journalism, which had perhaps conditioned an approach to people as subject-matter, rather than as individuals. For Marker, people and places pose questions to be probed and explored. In turning his camera against them, he finds different ways of telling his own story, but never theirs.

The approach presents a barrier for many viewers. While Sans Soleil remains an acclaimed and singular work, feted and debated by film scholars the world over, there are many critics, especially on social media, that have found Marker's depiction and discussions surrounding other cultures and people to be both racist and colonialist in nature. The argument being that the filmmaker speaks on behalf of his subjects; that he denies them a voice; that he takes their images without consent and uses them in a context they could never agree to.

Throughout Sans Soleil we see people flinch at the sight of Marker and his camera. We see them pull away, turn, cover their faces. The images Marker captures are often of people showing discomfort, made anxious by the presence of the camera and the intrusion of the lens. On one level this creates an inherent truth, revealing personal and private moments that are authentic and real, but it does so at the expense of individuals who didn't agree to this exploitation. It presents a moral conundrum for many viewers more sympathetic to invasions of privacy and the loss of personal agency, especially those we now face with our own images in the age of the internet and social media.

Sans Soleil [Chris Marker, 1983]:

In discussing Marker's later film, Tokyo Days (1988) – a work that functions on some levels as a postscript to the film in question – I remarked upon the voyeuristic nature of Marker's cinema. How life, once viewed through a lens that both records but transforms its true reality, becomes a spectacle of performance, to be viewed and interpreted in the same way that we interpret a photograph or film. There's an element of this present in Sans Soleil, which moves between ethnological studies of modern Japan and the islands of Cape Verde, but also the phantom studies of the imagined San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo (1958) or the cultural footprints left by writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

There is a sense that for Marker there is no clear delineation between the reality of the modern Japan and the unreality of Vertigo's San Francisco; that there's no line between his observations, both of and on the dock workers at Guinea-Bissau (recorded here by the filmmaker Sana Na N'Hada) and his later observations on the fictional characters of Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster from the aforementioned Hitchcock film; that everything is part of a more intricate system of memory and human consciousness (or even subconscious), which, like a foreign territory, is there to be explored.

Personally, I find Sans Soleil to be a remarkable, genuinely profound work that defies categorization. Many have called it a documentary, or cinema essay, and yet I feel both terms misrepresent the film and only worsen the problematic nature of some of Marker's observations, or the charges of Orientalism. The film is as much a documentary as "Alice in Wonderland", operating instead on a level of fantasy, or science-fiction. It's a film that demands the viewer to adjust their perceptions and understandings of the world and its people to the same wavelength of Marker, where an obsession with cats and TV commercials, sleeping commuters and the realities of Kamikaze pilots, entwine with the influences of Jules Verne, Hitchcockian mystery, computer systems, natural disasters and the supposition that there is a layer of hidden reality that exists between all things and all times. For Marker, this hidden layer is called "the Zone"; an elevated state of being named in tribute to the metaphysical, extraterrestrial territory seen in the film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Stalker [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979]:

Sans Soleil [Chris Marker, 1983]:

Like the image at the beginning of the film, of the three children on a road in Iceland, we end the film with another provocation, and another admission of happiness. When Marker asks us to find "happiness" in the picture, it's a personal challenge. But are we seeing a depiction of happiness in the conventional sense, of smiling faces and arms outstretched, or are we being asked to find happiness in our own reading of the image, in the projection of our own personal thoughts and experiences upon it? Perhaps we find happiness in the memories and associations of our own childhood innocence, in the relationship between siblings, in the landscape, or the sense of home? Perhaps the real answer is in the Zone?

The "Zone" for Marker is not the sentient, metaphysical space that it is for Tarkovsky, but the space between images, between past, present and future, between reality and memory. Here, Marker shows us the same images we've seen before, only this time they've been run through a video synthesizer. This transforms the image into a second image. One that exists between reality and something else; not pictorial, nor documentary in nature, but a kind of projection, a phantom image, an image in decay. This brings us back to the implication of the first sequences of images and the significance of the black leader.

When Marker, via his female narrator, challenges us to see happiness in the picture of the three children, or be satisfied with only seeing the black, he's effectively asking us, in retrospect, to see the layers between images: the "zone" itself. In showing the two images concurrently, he isn't creating a juxtaposition: it's not an either/or. It's about seeing both pictures at the same time, one on top of the other, and finding the image that lives in-between. The image that exists in the blackness, and the blackness as an image itself. It's in these distinctions and the images between images that the secrets of Sans Soleil are revealed.

The Wild Boys

Projections on the (unmade) film by Russell Mulcahy

It's one of the most curious 'what if's in pop cinema history. Russell Mulcahy, the Australian director who, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, pioneered the art of the music video, approached his frequent collaborators, English new-wave band Duran Duran, with a unique proposition. Mulcahy was looking to expand his range into the mainstream cinema and had set his heart on an adaptation of the cult 1971 novel "The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead" by William S. Burroughs. Mulcahy was keen to have the group provide a soundtrack for this potential film adaptation and asked them to create a kind of anthem to help promote the idea. Suitably energized, the band went off and recorded their title song, The Wild Boys, which was released to huge success in July of 1984.

Despite Mulcahy's ambition and the enthusiasm of the group, the planned film adaptation never came to fruition. However, a music video did, and it provides a rare and fascinating insight into what might or could've been.

Duran Duran: The Wild Boys [Russell Mulcahy, 1984]:

Produced on a then unprecedented budget of £1million, with both elaborate robot and monster effects, wirework and acrobatics, all filmed on an enormous purpose-built industrial set covering the vast 007 soundstage at Pinewood Studios, the music video for The Wild Boys interprets the surreal text of Burroughs's dark dystopia through a combination of the post-apocalyptic horrors of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), the rag-tag pirate band of outlaws found in the portrayal of Peter Pan and The Lost Boys, and the balletic, ultra-physical, dancing-as-fighting stylizations of the musical West Side Story (1961). In the process, the clip redefined the possibilities of the music video at a pivotal moment in its development, and ushered in a new era of artists being given enormous budgets to create promotional films that in many ways overwhelmed the creative merits of the song itself.

The Wild Boys was a far cry from the kind of videos Mulcahy had previously shot for Duran Duran, or indeed any other group from the same period. Most music videos, then and now, are about promotion. On one level, they're selling the song, but what they're really selling is the artist, their image, and the general aesthetic they're trying to convey. This was most apparent in the earlier videos Mulcahy had directed for the group, where the look and style was defined by exotic locations, icons of affluence and decadence, and the image of the band itself as handsome, fashionable, and upwardly mobile. They were a proper band, as proficient with their musicianship and instrumentation as U2, or as committed to the art of song-craft as The Pet Shop Boys or Roxy Music, but too often discredited as a lightweight boy band because they put the celebration of the surface, fun and fashion, at the forefront of what they did.

You only have to compare The Wild Boys to Mulcahy's still dazzling video for Duran Duran's earlier song, Rio, to see what a marked contrast the director had brought about in this later work. By introducing the influence of Burroughs and the intention to create something that stood outside of their own work and interests, the director pushed the band's style and image to strange new places, creating a work that attempted to sell, not their own vision, but the vision of the subject matter; this phantom film.

Duran Duran: Rio [Russell Mulcahy, 1982]:

From quick-cuts and canted angles, from sharp suits and peroxide hair, from pastel shades and body paint, we leave the exotic shorelines and romantic misadventures of Rio and arrive instead at this pop video "Interzone", with schoolboys wrecking a classroom in syncopated cuts, horror footage played out on Orwellian TV monitors, half-naked figures locked in combat by firelight, and a stranger emerging from the shadows like a gunslinger from an Italian Western, albeit one transposed onto this post-apocalyptic scene.

While much of The Wild Boys is steeped in 1980s silliness, including the "Starlight Express" style choreography of Arlene Philips, the belching fire motif, the bad video effects work and lead singer Simon Le Bon pouting his way through the lyrics as he's tortured on a giant water wheel, the visceral nature of the video, the physicality of the background performers and the syncopation between the choreography and the cutting, creates some incredibly compelling moments. The earlier sequences in particular help to draw the viewer into the world that Mulcahy and his collaborators are both creating, but also to a large extent adapting from the lyrics of the group. As Le Bon sings: "The wild boys are calling, on their way back from the fire. In August moon's surrender to, a dust cloud on the rise", it's matched by the image of the stranger emerging, silhouetted, from the dusty, desolate planes of the soundstage.

It's in these moments that the audience gets a sense of what Mulcahy's vision for his film of The Wild Boys might have been, with the mix of iconography, ripped as it is from westerns and post-apocalyptic science-fiction cinema, and the greater emphasis on the relationship between physical performance, sound, music and the cutting between shots, creating an aesthetic that was very much characteristic of the period and the influence of films like The Warriors (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Liquid Sky (also 1982) and the aforementioned Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.

Had the film been released, it could've been a disaster; pilloried and lampooned as an example of the MTV aesthetic infiltrating the mainstream cinema. Conversely, it might have proven to be a singular work. One, which following in the wake of films like those aforementioned, could have provided a key example of the new cult cinema of the 1980s. We'll never know. However, there are further hints and relics to Mulcahy's never-realized film in his subsequent and analogous works, with the markedly more surreal, homoerotic, Cocteau-inspired video for the Bonnie Tyler song, "Total Eclipse of the Heart", perhaps providing some of the missing pieces to The Wild Boys puzzle.

Bonnie Tyler: Total Eclipse of the Heart [Russell Mulcahy, 1983]:

While a full adaptation of The Wild Boys would fail to materialize, Mulcahy would nonetheless go on to make his mark on the cinema with two back-to-back cult films produced during the 1980s. Razorback (1984), an "Ozploitation" horror film about a murderous pig terrorizing the Outback, and Highlander (1986), a high-concept fantasy about warring immortals battling for supremacy. Highlander remains perhaps the most highly regarded and well recognized of the director's filmography, popular with fans of the actors Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery, as well as devotees to the rock band Queen, who provided the soundtrack. Highlander would go on to spawn several sequels and television spin-offs since its initial release, including Mulcahy's own ill-fated sequel, Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)

From here, Mulcahy's film career is spotty and inconsistent. Of the other films of his that I've seen, The Shadow (1994), an Art-Deco influenced comic book fantasy, is one that carries a large degree of childhood nostalgia for me, as does his cult horror film, Tale of the Mummy (1998). Less successful was the serial killer drama, Resurrection (1999), which reunited Mulcahy with his Highlander star Christopher Lambert and featured a supporting role for the cult filmmaker David Cronenberg. The film has an interesting directorial aesthetic that places it squarely in the late 1990s, but it's horribly written and hugely derivative of David Fincher's superior psychological horror film Seven (1995). Mulcahy also directed the third Resident Evil film, Extinction (2007), which is the best of the first three installments, and features some visual throwbacks to the iconography and post-apocalyptic world-building of The Wild Boys video.

Resident Evil: Extinction [Russell Mulcahy, 2007]:

Mulcahy has also directed several well-received films outside of the fantasy and action movie genres, including On the Beach (2000), The Lost Battalion (2001), Swimming Upstream (2003), Prayers for Bobby (2009) and several episodes of the American remake of the Russel T. Davies series Queer as Folk (2000-2005). His most recent film, In Like Flynn (2018), about the early life and adventures of the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, is currently available on Netflix.

Ultimately, The Wild Boys would prove to have a definite legacy. Along with the video for Thriller (1983) by John Landis and Michael Jackson, its scope and ambition would change the way filmmakers and record companies approached the idea of the music video as both a promotional tool and as a way of generating conversation. From here, budgets would become bigger, the subject matter would become more cinematic, more provocative in nature, and the success of the video became entangled with the potential chart success of the songs themselves. Other directors, like Mary Lambert, Bernard Rose, Tim Pope, Steve Barron, David Fincher and Jean-Baptiste Mondino to name a few, would continue to push the limits, injecting eccentricity, provocation or glamour into their respective videos, and inspiring the generations of music video filmmakers that followed in their wake. The Wild Boys may never have become a movie in its own right, but it endures as a strange piece of 80s pop-culture.

The Film Director as Superstar

Or: The death of the author auteur

The title here refers to the 1970 book by Joseph Gelmis. I haven't read it, but I saw the cover used on another blog site, where it was being discussed in relation to a quote by Bernardo Bertolucci, and the image captured my attention immediately. The book, as I understand it, is a collection of recorded interviews with a number of high-profile filmmakers that had emerged during the post-war period. Brian de Palma, Robert Downey, Andy Warhol, John Cassavetes, Lindsay Anderson, Arthur Penn, Roger Corman, Richard Lester, Mike Nichols and Stanley Kubrick, among others.

The cover is fascinating because I can't tell if it's a painting or a sculpted model. I want to assume it's the latter, but I'm probably wrong. Chalk it up to my waning eyesight. However, certain elements of the image, the lighting on the hands, the texture of the jeans, the weight of the viewfinder and the perspective of the little director's chair, all have something more tactile and physical about them than a two-dimensional painting.

The Film Director as Superstar [Joseph Gelmis, 1970]:

I think there's something inherently arresting and exciting about the book covers from this particular period. Books published by Penguin and Pelican, specifically during the late 1960s and early 1970s, are always interesting and evocative in their design and illustration. I remember when I went to university, I'd spend hours in the library browsing the shelves of old books that had been collected from the decades before I was born. Books that had lived, that had been enjoyed, that had notes penciled into the margins by previous generations; books that in every sense of the word had a story to tell, their covers barely held together by sellotape yellowed by age.

To this day, if I'm looking for book recommendations, I'll browse old cover art online and become captivated by the presentation of a particular book, then find myself intensely disappointed when I find its more generic looking, modern-day incarnation.

Collage of old Penguin publications [John Greenaway, flickr.com, 2010]:

Many of these covers, and others, speak to me. Every one of these books looks like a must-read.

The cover and, I assume, to a large extent, the subject matter of Gelmis's book, mark it out as a relic to another time. On one level, its cover, no matter how captivating or "cute" it might appear, is a reminder that the history and legacy of the cinema was in many ways colonized by white men. White-male critics elevating the work of white-male filmmakers, often to the detriment of marginalized filmmakers from other backgrounds and persuasions. The director on the cover could have been modeled on Gordon Parks, Satyajit Ray, Agnès Varda, Ousmane Sembène, Marguerite Duras or Akira Kurosawa, all of whom were either superstars or on the road to becoming one.

However, a certain image, epitomizing what a film director looks like, had already been established during the early silent cinema, with figures like Erich von Stroheim, D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, King Vidor, Charlie Chaplin, Josef von Sternberg, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, many of whom continued their respective careers into the post-war cinema, adding to a collective shorthand for what a director was, looked like, or did. For the film culture of the 1970s, still enlivened by the then-recent innovations and provocations of Stanley Kubrick, John Cassavetes, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and others, it must have been a difficult legacy to break away from.

And yet the book is also a relic in the sense that the director, at least as far as the mainstream cinema is concerned, is no longer a superstar. On the contrary, if directors during the post-war years were elevated via an engagement with the auteur theory into cultural "brand names" that could sell a movie to an audience as sufficiently as any Hollywood star, then the modern cinema, existing as it is side-by-side with serialized content, short videos and so-called "prestige" TV, is more preoccupied with companies and studios, be it Disney and Marvel, Netflix and Amazon, Warner Bros. and A24.

The franchise mentality that now infects all discourse surrounding the cinema means that the corporate brand has been elevated above the individual. Nobody cares who directs the latest Marvel superhero movie, or the next Fast & Furious sequel, or the next Star Wars or Jurassic Park spin-offs. This is because the vision of the director is no longer that important. When safeguarding the integrity and fandom of the IP and delivering content that will satisfy the largest number of viewers without causing offence or disappointment, the director becomes little more than a franchise custodian. A brand-guardian that exists to follow the instructions of the studio bosses, the test audiences, and the major theatre owners. They work to translate the studio-approved text into studio-approved images.

Fellini Satyricon (1969) vs. Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

[comparative collage created by the blog author]:

The director as superstar, as brand, as "auteur", replaced by the studio as brand, as author. Can you imagine a modern-day filmmaker being afforded such a level of cultural reverence that their name features not just above the title, but a part of it?

Tenet (2020) vs. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

[comparative collage created by the blog author]:

Christopher Nolan is one of the most acclaimed and successful "auteur" filmmakers currently working, but even after generating billions at the box-office, his name barely carries the same promotional weight as Kubrick's.

Perhaps a sequel to Gelmis's book could be called "The Film Director as Dependable Journeyman", or perhaps less sympathetically, "The Film Director as Cog in the Corporate Machine." Something that would express explicitly how undervalued the role of the director, not as superstar, but as artist, has become in the twenty-first century.

It's a shame too, as we're now at a point in the history of the medium where the diversity of voices working in the English-language cinema is becoming richer every year. There are directors as varied as Steve McQueen, Dee Reese, Barry Jenkins, Jordan Peele, M. Night Shyamalan, Cate Shortland, Andrea Arnold, Ava DuVernay, Jon M. Chu, Greta Gerwig, Melina Matsoukas and Ryan Coogler among others, but in most cases these directors aren't dominating the discussion the way Hitchcock, Spielberg and Tarantino did. Instead, they've been forced to either sell out, to assimilate, to become subservient to the brands and the studios, or their work gets released onto Amazon or Netflix and becomes just another bit of product to be discovered.

Categorizing the Directorial Debut

A Question of Language

Recently, I stumbled across a post on another blog site in which the author was discussing the film Shallow Grave (1994); the first collaboration between director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge and producer Andrew McDonald; the team behind later works like Trainspotting (1996), The Beach (2000) and T2: Trainspotting (2017). There, the writer introduced Shallow Grave as "Boyle's 1994 debut film."

This struck me as somewhat peculiar, as even a cursory glance at Boyle's listing on the IMDb sees him credited with directing no less than eight films prior to the release of Shallow Grave, each running 50-minutes to an hour in length, as well as two feature-length episodes of the television detective series "Inspector Morse" (which, at 1 hour 44 minutes each, both run longer than Shallow Grave and even Trainspotting), and a four-hour long miniseries, Mr. Wroe's Virgins (1993), starring Jonathan Pryce, Kathy Burke and Minnie Driver, which was nominated for several BAFTA awards. How then would Shallow Grave, in any strict sense of the term, qualify as Boyle's debut film?

Shallow Grave [Danny Boyle, 1994]:

The review in question goes on to argue that Boyle "came straight out of the starting gate a success." I guess it's always helpful when crafting that perfect debut to have already directed actual films with professional actors and technicians for a seven-year period.

Boyle's actual debut as director came as early as 1987, with the made for television film The Venus de Milo Instead. Written by the Northern Irish screenwriter Anne Devlin, who would go on to adapt the 1992 version of Wuthering Heights, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, as well as adapting later films, Titanic Town (1998) for director Roger Michell, and Vigo: A Passion for Life (also 1998) for Julian Temple. The Venus de Milo Instead stars Irish character actor Lorcan Cranitch, who would later become a fixture on TV drama serials like "The Bill", "Cracker" and "Rome", and it runs for a total of 60 minutes, only 28 minutes shorter than Shallow Grave.

After this, Boyle would direct Scout (1987), written by Frank McGuiness and starring Ray McAnally and Stephen Rea, The Nightwatch (1989) written by Ray Brennan, and Monkeys (also 1989), based on the book 'The DeLorean Tapes' by Ivan Fallon. Like his mentor, the British filmmaker Alan Clarke, whose famous non-narrative film, Elephant (1989), about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, was produced by Boyle, the director would go on to contribute to the drama anthology series "Screenplay", directing the films The Hen House (1989), again scripted by McGuiness and starring Sinéad Cusack, Arise and Go Now (1991), written by the Irish actor Owen O'Neill, and finally Not Even God (1993), written by the Nigerian playwright, novelist and filmmaker Biyi Bandele. With this in mind, how do we arrive at a point where Shallow Grave could possibly be considered Boyle's "debut film?"

The Hen House [Danny Boyle, 1989]:

It's possible that when the author of the blog in question said "debut film" they really meant cinema debut, which would be fair. Boyle's earlier work was produced for television, but directors as varied and esteemed as Spike Lee, Ingmar Bergman, Michael Haneke, Werner Herzog, David Lynch and others, have all produced works that are technically "TV movies" or movies that clock in under the accepted 90 minutes, and yet they remain very much a part of their directorial "canon." No one would discount the validity of long-form, produced for television works like "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1980), "Dekalog" (1989), "The Kingdom" (1994) or "Top of the Lake" (2013) from the career retrospectives of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Lars von Trier and Jane Campion respectively, so why draw the line here?

We've seen similar instances of this in the past. Often, it's the dismissal of any work that clocks in at under 70 minutes in duration as somewhat inferior or invalid to films that run over 90 minutes in length. Case in point, The Hunger (1983) is often categorized as the directorial debut of Tony Scott. Scott had directed three films prior to this; One of the Missing (1969), which runs 25 minutes, Loving Memory (1970), which runs 52 minutes and is one of the director's best and most interesting works, and The Author of Beltraffio (1974), which also runs 52 minutes. Early films by Peter Watkins, such as The War Game (1966), or Ken Russell, such as Elgar (1962), have similar running times to these early films by Scott, but while their works are considered canon, Scott's are seen as little more than rough drafts or practice work before his more commercial films produced in Hollywood.

Loving Memory [Tony Scott, 1970]:

The Hunger [Tony Scott, 1983]:

In most cases, short films are rarely discussed in the context of certain filmmakers. Often, they're seen as surplus to their feature-length work, rather than a continuation of it. Similarly, when we talk about the work of directors, we tend to discount discussions around music videos, corporate films and TV commercials, as if these works are somehow separate entities from their feature-length endeavors.

In talking about a director like David Fincher for instance, many would say he made his directorial debut with Alien 3 (1993). But Fincher had been directing high-profile music videos and TV commercials since the early 1980s, all of which required a level of ability and technical comprehension for which he would've been paid generously. They weren't made for practice, they were genuine assignments, no different in their intentions than the aforementioned Alien 3. IMDb lists Fincher's first directing credit as a 1984 music video for Rick Springfield titled "Bop 'Til You Drop." Barring any unknown student films, corporate videos or TV commercials, "Bop 'Til You Drop" is technically Fincher's directorial debut and as such deserves to be included in any discussions relating to his life and work.

Rick Springfield: Bop 'Til You Drop [David Fincher, 1984]:

Bop 'Til You Drop is already characteristic of Fincher's work from an auteurist perspective, as he takes the implication of the title and envisions it as a joyless dystopia in which enslaved masses are forced to work themselves to death for a race of alien overlords. Already we can recognise the designer misery of works like Seven (1995), Fight Club (1999) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011).

American Cancer Society - Smoking Fetus [David Fincher, 1984]:

Fincher's other big credit for 1984 was this 30 second commercial for the American Cancer Society. Since I'm not sure which he made first, it's possible that this represents his first known directorial credit and is once again a work of critical/auteurist interest in the context of Fincher's career.

While it may be a pedantic line of argument on my part, a directorial debut should, presumably, be the first time a person took on the role of director, in any capacity. For instance, in discussing the work of the English director Sam Mendes, it would be fair to call American Beauty (1999) his "debut film for cinema", but it's not, by any stretch of the imagination, his directorial debut. Mendes had been directing theatre for a decade prior to American Beauty, including a successful production of "Cabaret", which was broadcast on television in 1993, a new production of Lionel Bart's "Oliver!" produced by Cameron Mackintosh, and a production of David Hare's 1998 play "The Blue Room", starring the Hollywood actor Nicole Kidman in the lead. To call American Beauty a directorial debut considering such credentials is not only factually incorrect, it's genuinely absurd.

Cabaret [Sam Mendes, 1993]:

When does a filmed play become an actual film? Surely once something is recorded, with framed shots and cutting for emphasis, the theatrical becomes the cinematic? What makes Cabaret less valid than concert films like The Last Waltz (1978) by Martin Scorsese, or Stop Making Sense (1984) by Jonathan Demme?

At a time when the future of cinema is in jeopardy post-Covid-19, when high-profile films are going straight to streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+, and when the discussion around visual media is moving further away from standalone feature films to focus on long-form series like "Fleabag" (2016), "Killing Eve" (2018) and "Normal People" (2020), there's no need to diminish or erase the existence of Boyle's early television films as somehow being separate to his later works, such as Shallow Grave or 28 Days Later (2002), just as there's no reason to separate the music videos of directors like David Fincher, or the TV commercials of Jonathan Glazer, from their no less corporate or commercial work in the cinema.

In a post-content world, in which an epic like The Irishman (2019) can be streamed back-to-back with an entire season of "Game of Thrones", a TikTok video or live music clips on YouTube, or where acclaimed filmmakers like the aforementioned Spike Lee, Woody Allen and Ava DuVernay make long-form serials that can only be seen on Netflix or Amazon, the notion of clinging to the "cinema debut" or the "feature-length debut" as something significant or qualitative in nature, seems positively archaic. Whether a work is short or long, made for television or released to cinemas, streamed online, or sold as physical media, it's all just content. A film is a film, regardless of the unnecessary qualifications that have been forced upon us.

The Watermelon Woman

Or: Sex, Lies and Videotape

There's a quote, often attributed to Orson Welles, that states: "Cinema is a lie, but a lie to tell the truth." I thought about this recently in the context of the film in question. In The Watermelon Woman (1996), filmmaker Cheryl Dunye blurs the dividing line between fiction and reality; creating in the process a film that blends elements of documentary, video diary, film essay and scripted relationship drama.

In the film, Dunye plays a version of herself. Her character, an aspiring filmmaker who supports herself financially by working at a local video store, attempts to make a documentary on the actor Fae Richards; a black performer working in the early Hollywood cinema, often credited vaguely as "the watermelon woman." As Cheryl the character documents the making of her own film – creating in the process a clever, self-reflexive mirroring between the work being made and the work we're currently seeing – she begins a sexual relationship with one of the customers that frequents the store.

The Watermelon Woman [Cheryl Dunye, 1996]:

Already we get into several questions regarding this blurring of fact and fiction. Firstly, how close is the character "Cheryl Dunye" to the filmmaker appearing on-screen? Are her dialogues and discussions about the project – delivered straight to camera, in a proto-"vlog" style – her own reflections on the making of The Watermelon Woman, both the film and the film-within-the-film, or are they scripted in order to provide moments of drama or narrative commentary? Secondly, are the attempts to document the life of Richards real or fake; and if so, how authentic is the relationship that provides both a sub-plot and a further mirroring of the relationship between Dunye and her subject?

A title card at the end of the film will answer at least one of these questions and will bring us back to that Welles-ian hypothesis: "...a lie to tell the truth."

This is why a more appropriate title for the film could've been Sex, Lies and Videotape, with full deference to the 1989 film by Steven Soderbergh. More so than "The Watermelon Woman", this title unites the three distinct (but complimentary) proponents of Dunye's film. Sex, in the sense of the relationship between Cheryl and her customer Diana, and its self-reflexive parallels with the romantic relationship between Fae Richards and her own director Martha Page. Lies, in relation to the inherent manipulation of the cinematic form and the obscuring of fact and fiction. And Videotape, as both a means of cinematic discovery and rediscovery, as well as a once modern motion-picture format that allowed Dunye to pursue her own work, independently.

The Watermelon Woman [Cheryl Dunye, 1996]:

Unlike the film by Soderbergh, the real difference here is that the "lie" Dunye tells is not an act of deceit perpetuated between characters, but a provocation from the filmmaker to their audience. For Dunye, the personal is political, and the two strands of the narrative – the focus on Richards and her role as "The Watermelon Woman" in early Hollywood cinema, and Cheryl's relationship with the customer Diana, played by Guinevere Turner – speak both to the representation of black women in cinema, both old and new, her own role and responsibilities as a filmmaker and the stories she chooses to tell, and the everyday minutiae of her life as both a lesbian and a black woman in then-contemporary 90s America.

The contrivances constructed here are done so as a way to bring attention to the way race and racism were weaponized by early filmmakers, and how portrayals of strong black women, or depictions of love and desire between two women, were erased or censored by history. The film, in this sense, becomes an attempt to right the wrongs of previous generations and to suggest that these stories existed. As Dunye herself says, in character, towards the end of the film, "Sometimes you have to create your own history"; another lie to tell the truth.