ABSTRACT
I recently had the opportunity to attend the screening of a short film by a beginning filmmaker. The first scene started with a shot of a young married couple sitting on a couch, having an increasingly heated argument. The shot was wide enough to include most of the room, which was littered with magazines, empty beer cans, a collection of sneakers stashed under the couch, and movie posters on every wall (obviously the young director’s apartment). A small table could also be seen in the foreground of the shot, with a game console and a stack of video games prominently displayed on it. After the film ended, there was a Q&A session with the director, who looked very proud of his work and eager to answer questions. A man in the audience asked: “Was the guy on the couch trying to act like Travis Bickle?” The filmmaker look puzzled, and asked him why he was asking about Travis Bickle. The man answered he thought the large Taxi Driver poster right behind the actor was part of the story. “No, that poster just happened to be there,” the filmmaker replied. Another audience member asked: “Was he trying to scam money from her to buy more video games?” The director look confused. “Was she upset with him because he doesn’t clean up?” Someone else asked. The filmmaker, obviously frustrated by now, stopped the Q&A to explain that the scene in question was really about the young couple trying to avoid having their first argument since they had just gotten married, and that he thought this should have been obvious by the way the young man’s hand was nervously twitching as he held his wife’s hand. The movie posters, video games, and the messy room were not really meant to be important parts of the scene and the story. The director was, however, pleased when someone asked him if a shot from the end of his film, where the couple was shown walking towards the camera in slow-motion, was an homage to a similar shot from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. “Yes!” He replied. “I’m glad you caught that.” When asked about the significance of that reference to his story, he answered: “I thought it’d look cool,” to a still puzzled audience. The rest of his film had the same issues the opening shot and his homage shot had; there was a complete disconnection between the composition of his shots and their function within the narrative.
