Paweł Pawlikowski Edit

"The film I was after would be made of strong graphic images and sounds. It would work through suggestion rather than explanation. It would mainly consist of self-contained scenes, done from one angle, in one continuous take, with no informational dialogue, no functional shots, no plot devices or any of the usual tricks cinema uses to suggest or elicit emotion. A film in which form, emotion, idea would be one."

" I was more convinced the story could tell itself without coverage and exposition. It was enough to put strong moments in strong shots, side by side, and leave things to the imagination. The film would work as a meditation as much as a story. The key was to choose one angle, the most effective shot, and then to work and rework all the elements: framing, light, dialogue, movement, gesture. Adding, taking away, refining from take to take, until the thing had the right life and rhythm. This meant forgetting the script and treating each scene and each shot as a thing in its own right."

CMENTARZ from Media 12345 on Vimeo.
This is some experimental editing and filming during a visit to the graveyard in Szydlowiec. I created the sequence in the style of Pawlikowski's film Ida, the framing, Polish culture, religious character and suggestive narrative. The film focuses on identity which is one of the key themes in my short film. The song I included is sung by a Polish man (Paweł Prokopieni) in the late 1930s but is singing a Russian song (Веровочка), this is because my grandmother is a fan of his music.

Ida (2013)

Ida (2013) Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski

In 1962, Anna is about to take vows as a nun when she learns from her only relative that she is Jewish. Both women embark on a journey to discover their family story and where they belong.

Framing the Faith of Ida from Steven Vredenburgh on Vimeo.

The Guardian

How we made Ida: Paweł Pawlikowski on the journey from script to film

• The accepted logic of most film producers is this: you buy a book or an idea, then hire a screenwriter – in Britain, usually a converted playwright – who then turns it into a three-act structure, puts in some twists and lots of dialogue, and hands you a 90-page script. Next, you hire a director, who brings in his “vision”, attracts some cool actors, and breaks scenes into shots; and then you get a DP who photographs the thing as artfully as the story will allow. Then comes the editor to speed things up or slow them down, cover up holes, and sort out loose ends. The product at the end is more or less what was planned at the start – and with the right cast, soundtrack, journalistic hook and promotion it should make money.
• I’ve always had a problem with this approach. I never went to film school, never learned the rules, and started out by making documentaries, which I usually shot and moulded as I went along. I began with an idea, a character, a situation; then threw all sorts of things into the mix – scenes, images; some found, others invented. Then I shook it all up – complicated, simplified – until I found the film. These films were neither documentaries nor fictions; they were strange hybrids that felt like the best and the simplest way I could express a complicated truth.
• With genre films, where the audiences enjoy familiar mechanics and conventions, it was obviously another matter. But those kind of films have never interested me. Not as a film-maker, anyway. What excited me was the journey into the unknown – or, rather, to some place you know and intuit, but you don’t yet quite know how to get to. After all, this is how art works in every other area, and nobody objects. If you’re a novelist, poet, painter or composer, you just lock yourself away and work on the thing, for a week, for a month, for a year – put the thing aside if you need to – and finish when you think it’s ready
• It was the sort of script you could raise the money on, but definitely not the film I wanted to make. Not just because of our over-written dialogue, dodgy plotting and dramatic wishful thinking, but because what I was after was a different kind of film altogether, one for which it would have been much more difficult to attract any funding. The film I was after would be made of strong graphic images and sounds. It would work through suggestion rather than explanation. It would mainly consist of self-contained scenes, done from one angle, in one continuous take, with no informational dialogue, no functional shots, no plot devices or any of the usual tricks cinema uses to suggest or elicit emotion. A film in which form, emotion, idea would be one.
• In the “financier” script for Ida, the film opened with a scene of three nuns making a scarecrow in a field and a series of generic dialogue scenes, setting up the situation and the characters. It was OK as beginnings go, but it was clear we needed something stronger. A day before filming in the monastery, I noticed our art director, Jagna Dobesz, a woman with an angelic face and character, touching up Christ’s face with her brush. There was such tension and love in her face as she was doing it that I knew I had a much better scene right there in front of me.
• In fact, I had a whole sequence of scenes. This is how the sculpture of Christ, which started out as one of several props in the monastery, became the key image. It was much better for Ida and for the film than the business with the scarecrow we had contrived in the script. The unexpected snow was another bonus. It gave me the idea for two graphic top shots and the quiet moment of prayer around the fountain.
• This way, pages of dialogue scenes and fluffy non-events were replaced by a series of shots that were simple, powerful and set up the tone of the whole film perfectly. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against good dialogue. But I can’t bring myself to film dialogue that’s there merely to colour in the characters, give information, and has no music to it.
• In the financier script, there were five scenes showing Ida’s first encounter with the big city. They included her getting lost; talking to a policeman; going into a shop; listening to music; observing hip young people; couples kissing. These four pages of generic script shrank into these two shots.
• With each day of filming, I was more convinced the story could tell itself without coverage and exposition. It was enough to put strong moments in strong shots, side by side, and leave things to the imagination. The film would work as a meditation as much as a story. The key was to choose one angle, the most effective shot, and then to work and rework all the elements: framing, light, dialogue, movement, gesture. Adding, taking away, refining from take to take, until the thing had the right life and rhythm. This meant forgetting the script and treating each scene and each shot as a thing in its own right. Ewa, who was in the trenches with me, joked that I was writing the script with the camera. She didn’t seem to mind and clearly liked the results.
• I wanted to make the viewer enter the film in a different way, experience it as a kind of permanent present that unfolds in front of them. I was aware, of course, that most viewers might not enter this kind of film at all and leave the cinema after five minutes.
• Putting static shots side by side and stripping things down forces the viewer to watch and listen differently; it asks them to fill in the gaps and not to expect to have things explained. It allowed me to drop dud scenes and lines without damaging the story. On the contrary, the method actually helped me find the story, or rather to home in on its best, its only possible shape.

Chantal Akerman

"Akerman's cinema focuses our attention on her smallest gestures, gestures that reveal character but would be lost in a more flamboyant film: a knife that almost slips when a potato is peeled, a light turned off unnecessarily, a facial expression of disquiet or of frustration, the curious act of making coffee in a thermos in the morning for drinking at lunchtime. The effect of such details, repeated and ritualized, is cumulative. Slowly the portrait is pieced together." Jayne Loader

Andrei Tarkovsky Theory

"People tend to think that an effective mise en scene is simply one that expresses the idea, the point, of the scene and its subtext. That is supposed to ensure that the scene will be given the depths that the meaning requires.

Such an attitude is simplistic. It is given rise to a good many irrelevant conventions with do violence to the living texture of the artistic image.

The point is that no good by-passing the difficulties and bringing everything down to a simplistic level; therefore it is crucial that mise ene scene, rather than illustrating some idea, should follow life - the personalities of the characters and their psychological state." - Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

The ideology of Tarkovsky's theory of mise en scene is something I will by applying for when I film in Poland. Creating, through the screen, a non-artificial depiction of the character. Which equals to a more realistic depiction of personality and the psychological state.

Sample Pictures

Subtitles

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES SUBTITLED from Media 12345 on Vimeo.


 I made this to experiment with subtitles and having a narrator. I also experimented with footage editing the style more towards Tarkovsky's way of representing memories, childhood and time. In Tarkovsky's film Mirror, there is a scene where the narrator talks about dreams and memories over a slow long take. The shot then finishes with more slow long takes in black and white. Although my footage are not long takes, I tried to connect the footage with slow motions to portray that flow that Tarkovsky has.





I asked my mother to talk about a few memories in Szydlowiec where she was born and raised. I recorded them and then added clips I had taken in England in a garden and the rest in Poland. I separated clips with colourisation of either a warm sepia tone representing the past or a black and white tone representing the present. Light piano music called 'Kyiv Blues' was also added in the background to create a sense of nostalgia, rather than noticeable music that could be too distracting when reading subtitles.
I do have more narrating recordings and would like to experiment with them more. I will also be taking new experimental footage as I don't want to repeat the footage I took in Poland. This time, although in England, I will be trying to recreate locations as if in Poland. A preparation of experimenting with camera techniques before taking the real footage when I go in Christmas time to Szydlowiec.
With editing, I will try to create two different pieces, one with Tarkovsky's and one with Coppola's stylisation to see what works best as a short film.

Sofia Coppola Openings

The Virgin Suicides

The opening of Coppola's Virgin Suicides introduces one of the main characters Lux, eating a lollipop on the street on the right hand side of the screen, she stands around for a moment and then disappears walking of the screen. The following shots are simple and peaceful as the camera sets onto the neighbourhood watering plants, taking dogs for walks and children playing. Its summertime and  heavily reflected with warm tones almost turning sepia. The sound of birds increase and soft music begins to play with a sound of an ambulance getting louder in the background. The music then stops to drips of water with a shot of cold blues contrasting to the heavenly warmth shown outside.
The contrast represents the darkness within what seems to be a paradise of a happy neighbourhood. Its almost an illusion as the four girls are really suppressed with rules, religion and purity by their parents, unable to grow and experience. This is a piece of detail carried throughout the film through characteristics, mise-ene-scene and cinematography as they are forever innocent and young, failing adolescence.
There is a narrator talking about the family (main characters) from an outside perspective of his memories, which goes with the footage as the camera surrounds rather than following with an inside perspective. The audience and camera are treated as a neighbour, not really knowing their thoughts but hearing from others. The film almost acts as a documentary to the neighbourhood, focusing on one family. What is noticeable is that it is narrated in past tense, equally showing the past in a dreamscape style.
The ending of The Virgin Suicides is in opposition to the opening with colours de-saturated and lifeless, showing more of a realistic colourisation. Empty rooms and its left over neighbourhood in silence. The narrator comes back the same age as when the Lisbon girls died which then establishes the present tense.

        =inspiration for my short film

Storyboard

Storyboard Opening from Media 12345 on Vimeo.