Poetics of Cinema: On Filmmaker's Method

The direction of a film implies not a specialization, but a poly-functionality (Morin, 2005, p. 346), that is, a multifaceted view of the integral and copulating interrelations in and through whose the poetics of the cinema is immersed. This means that the author deals with the subsystems – art direction, cinematography, acting, editing, visual effects etc., knowing how to trigger them in the way that he/she wants, not being a specialist of one of these, but having the ability to sew them, to envelop them, and especially to connect them.

Therefore, its virtue is to establish and develop a systemic connectivity, that is, immersed in diversity, to be able to explore, to foresee and to articulate the links between these subsystems, promoting complementarities and associations that are built and consolidated in and by the whole, the film. Thus, the history of the system – the making of the film – becomes supported, determined or biased in accordance with the director (see VIEIRA, 2007, p.110). As François Truffaut (2004, p. 27) observes:

"Cinema is an art especially difficult to master because of the multiplicity of gifts – sometimes contradictory – it demands. If so many very intelligent people or many artists failed as directors, it was because they did not possess at the same time the analytical spirit and the synthetic spirit, the only ones that, simultaneously kept on alert, allow to avoid the numerous traps created by the fragmentation of the shooting film and edition of the shots. In fact, the most serious danger a director faces is losing control of his/her movie in the middle of the road, which happens more often than you think".

The role of the method becomes crucial, because to this are associated two important concepts: strategy and program (see MORIN, 2008, 250-252). An eco-organization, such as that found in filmmaking, demands a command that provides both a program to control the production and execution of the film, and strategy that deals with uncertainties and unforeseen obstacles. Thus, the program deals with the planning, schedule and scales stipulated to each stage of the filmmaking. Therefore, it is responsible for establishing a vigilant control of the progress of the film. It can be said that the program is always linked to the figure of the executive producer and the producer, those responsible to maintaining the control of the production itself (see RABIGER, 2007, p. 246-248).

In fact, a good production, while protecting and providing the resources – human, financial and logistical – necessary for the filmmaker to develop his films, also takes on the role of following exactly what was previously determined. Those guidelines, taken as rules (MORIN, ibid., p. 253), guide the terms of each stage of production: pre-production-production-post-production. Because they are general, they often do not anticipate eventualities, adversities and accidents, only operations and sequences stipulated. Thus, the program is a predetermined organization of action (MORIN, ibid., P.252), because the film, whatever its source of funding, has an end, a premiere, an economic return etc.

On the other hand, the strategy involves improvisation and innovations, therefore, it removes from the risks, obstacles and errors, its own improvement. While the program, with deadlines and guidelines, gives little scope to unforeseen and uncertainties, the strategy takes advantage of eventualities and makes from those things its art. As Morin explains, "Strategy presupposes the ability to undertake action on uncertainty and to integrate uncertainty into the conduct of action. It means that the strategy needs competence and initiative "(MORIN, 2005, P.250).

However zealous and judicious a film production is, there is always the risk of unexpected events occurring, whether with an actor, with a team member, with locations, with scenarios, with equipment, with pre-established shots that do not work when these are put into practice, with the way the material is being edited, or even the need to re-create an unforeseen scene, even after the filming has been completed. Thus, it is through the entropic processes that escape from the planning that the filmmaker has to demonstrate his/her competence and inventiveness by reversing and inverting in the direction of his/her action(MORIN, 2008, p.254) those eventualities.

The strategy does not eliminate the program, because whenever it is necessary, the strategy re-uses the automated nature of the program. In terms of economy and reliability, it would be wise not to travel at all times for uncertainty, when you have public and / or private money at stake in the film. In this way, both processes are important to the film eco-organization and are part of what François Truffaut sees as the ability to have at the same time an "analytical spirit" and a "synthetic spirit" in action.

Morin is emphatic in saying that the challenge of adversity stimulates intelligence, learning, and knowledge, not merely an adjustment to circumstances but, above all, a transformation of circumstances (see MORIN, ibid., 256 and 257). Thus, under the axis of the development of intelligence and learning, and not of the pure answer to adversity, Morin (ibid., 255) coined the concept of cognitive strategy:

"It is toward the outside world that neuro-cerebral appliances exert their strategic aptitude. Action strategy needs a cognitive strategy. Action requires, at every instant, of discernment and discrimination, to review / correct the knowledge of a situation that is transformed. The two strategies are in constant interaction".

This role of mediator, made by the cognitive strategy between program - rational purpose - and the circumstances that reality often presents in reverse of what is expected and that demand inventiveness and reformulations - strategy - is what Peirce will call Pragmatism. In fact, Peirce (2000, p.237) clarifies that the function of pragmatism: "(...) first of all we should get rid of all the essentially obscure ideas. Secondly, it should support, and help make distinct, essentially clear ideas, but whose apprehension is more or less difficult (...) ".

The reflections of the two authors coincide on that, and they both perceive that between rational program / purpose and strategy / abduction there is a need for a method that allows the mediation between the two poles, having reality - the facts and eventualities - as the pivot of this process. This is evident in Morin's (ibid .: 257-258) explanation of the need for a flexible and ready method of self-correction:

"When the program tends to command, diminish, suppress strategies, mechanical and myopic obedience becomes a model of behavior. At the human level, the strategy needs lucidity in the elaboration and conduct, play of initiatives and responsibilities, full employment of the individual competences, that is, full employment of the qualities of the subject. That is why the Method sought here will never be a program, that is, a pre-established recipe, but an invitation and an incitement to the strategy of thought".

In fact, a filmmaker is an experimentalist who learns from every film he/she makes and launches himself/herself into a new challenge every time that a work is finished. It is through this process that this complex authorship will develop dominance before the cinematographic language. Such domain - knowledge - implies managing, promoting and directing the connections between the subsystems that compose the filmic sign.

Thus, giving concreteness to a film demands a mental effort, a reasoning conductor, whose discerns every choice, decision, mistake and success. This reasoning conductor is the responsible to forging and polishing his/her method. In fact, such mental effort - mediator between program and strategy - becomes the process that leads the filmmaker to the concretization of his/her film, and, above all, to the consolidation of his/her discourse and style.

References

MORIN, Edgar. O Método 1 – a natureza da natureza. Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina, 2008.

_____________ O Método 2 – a vida da vida. Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina, 2005.

VIEIRA, Jorge de Albuquerque. Ciência – Formas de Conhecimento: Arte e Ciência uma visão a partir da complexidade. Fortaleza: Gráfica e Editora, 2007.

__________________________ Teoria do conhecimento e arte – Formas de Conhecimento: Arte e Ciência uma visão a partir da complexidade. 2° edição. Fortaleza: Gráfica e Editora,, 2008.

__________________________ Ontologia – Formas de Conhecimento: Arte e Ciência uma visão a partir da complexidade. Fortaleza: Expressão Gráfica e Editora, 2008. 

Poetics of Cinema: The Collaborative Authorship

Among the most common problems found in movie making, are the mistakes during the course during the production of a movie, the loss of harmony of the parts and elements that make up the film, the loss, therefore, of its signic unity. In fact, Cinema is an art made by various professionals, each one with a specific function. That mixture, which is inherent to it, given its intersemiotic nature, depends on a tuning that leads them all toward the same target to the extent that that which is targeted as concept, idea, aesthetics, theme and argument of the film, is externalized in each part, producing a whole, a unity.

The theory of the author, debated in the Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960 decade, brought some contribution to that question, but unfortunately reserved to the director or the movie maker the laurels of the analogy with the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the writer, etc., leaving aside the authorial co-participation of the other components in the realization of the work. The confrontation is between the movie director, as the thinking agent, on the one hand, and the scriptwriter, the director of photography, the director of art, musical composer, etc., on the other hand, as agents of technical profile.

The fact that the movie director has to make the crucial decisions in the making of the film does not eliminate the co-authorship of the other agents, nor the poetical character of their functions regarding the making of the filmic sign. Following this perspective, what one realizes is that the intersemioses of the filmic unity configures itself as systemic, that is, there is a set of semiotic agents with specific abilities that interact and integrate themselves in the making of the work. This ontological complexity, made up of creators working together, in a clear dialogic exchange between their functions and specializations, and supports the adoption of the general theory of systems and its main theoreticians – Mário Bunge, Edgar Morin and Jorge Vieira –, in an articulation with Peircean semiotics, with the aim of understanding the collective authorship leading to intersemiotic unity.

According to Vieira (2008: 89), there are three fundamental classification parameters to observe the system: its capacity of permanence, its environment, and its autonomy. Still within this perspective, for a system to consolidate itself as such, there are so called hierarchical or evolving parameters outlined as such: composition, connectivity, structure, integrality, functionality and organization, all of them pervaded by a parameter that can appear from the first stage: complexity. Thus, a system is characterized by its temporal process and its capacity to grow. The complexity of such movement occurs through the diversity of connections that are brought about toward the survival of the system.

In the case of Cinema, a similar process can be seen in the realization and production of the filmic sign. Given the need for specialized agents, who are grouped together so as to work toward the making of a film, what there is in this environment is a temporal process that demands one to evolve through each hierarchical parameter indicated above, which reflects in the capacity of permanence, that is, in the capacity to reach a regularity in filmic construction, which can be seen in the finished film. For, after all, the film has to present an autonomy, wherein everything connects cohesively and coherently:  art direction, direction of photography, costumes, script, direction, shots, montage, etc.

By the way, the parameters of cohesion and coherence are also parameters of consolidation of a system. Cohesion deals with the syntax between elements, their articulation and effectiveness. Coherence, like semantics, evolves in an intersemiotic diology of its elements for the construction of meaning between themselves, into an integrated, complex, and meaningful whole.

There is still another pertinent issue regarding the systemic complexity which is important for an ontological cinematographic analysis, that is, nucleation. According to Vieira (2007: 109), nucleation is a kind of process that is more common in psychosocial relations, where the figure of a leader interposes itself over a group. In Cinema this nucleation is brought about by the figure of the director and his responsibility falls upon the orchestration of those specialized agents, many times from dissimilar areas, integrating them, though each one keeps his/her functions.

What one observes is that such signic unity, which is necessary for the construction of the parts into a whole, will reflect itself both in the process of the realization of the film and in the process of its interpretation. There is, to a large or minor degree, the risk of that combination between agents and specialties to enter into a process of dissipation, losing thus its synthetic cohesion and its semantic coherence, jeopardizing the interfaces and intersemiotic interchanges between its various layers of meaning. Such layers of meaning are coined and entwined by the integrality and organization of the scriptwriter, director of photography, production designer, art director, music composer, director, etc., within a whole, the film. The result of an intersemiotic untimeliness, if it indeed occurs, seems to affect the potentiality of interpretation and communication of a work.

In this context, what one ought to observe are the organizational principles operating within such heterogeneity marked by specific and dissimilar areas, but which operate together within the cinematographic art in a kind of synergy, a diology amid the parts in both intersemiotic and systemic levels.

The filmic unity, therefore, has to be seen as an organizing parameter of the ontological and signic complexity of the language of the Cinema.

References

Vieira, Jorge de Albuquerque. (2007), Science – Means of Knowledge: Art and Science – A Vision From Complexity. Fortaleza: Gráfica e Editora.

__________________________ (2008), Theory of Knowledge and Art – Forms of Knowledge: Art and Science – A Vision From Complexity. 2nd edition. Fortaleza: Gráfica e Editora.