Tony Scott

The style of Tony Scott is one of the most consistent and striking in cinema of the last decades. His eye, his vision, has been a constant source of pleasure for me at least since I saw Beverly Hills Cop 2 (1987) in my early teens, when I was immediately struck but the vibrant colours, rhythmic editing and smoke-filled interiors. It is actually possible that Beverly Hills Cop 2 was the first time I became conscious of style (not just story and actors) and possible the first time that I wanted to re-watch a film because of the way it was shot. Scott was my guide into the realm of aesthetics. So since then I have kept up with his work, and seen almost all of his films. He has his weaknesses for sure, and a lot of the early films are of dubious quality. But he did improve.

True Romance (1993) is often highlighted as Tony Scott's best film (he himself has said that it is his favourite) and although I like it a lot I still have some problems with it and the main one is its authorial schizophrenia. I am not sure that is an expression but what I mean is that it sounds like a film by Quentin Tarantino (who wrote the script) but looks like a film by Tony Scott. The characters and what they are talking about (such as Sonny Chiba kung fu movies) are Tarantinoesque, but the smoky, colourful, cluttered visuals are all Scott.

For me it was with Enemy of the State (1998) that Scott really came into his own as a major filmmaker. It is a thrilling ride, with a wonderful sense of pacing and great acting, whilst being both clever and focused. It also made screens, reflections and surveillance the central aspect of the story and the frame, and it remained so for the rest of Scott's career. He became more than just an image maker, he became an image-in-image maker. Here style and theme combine to make great films that also capture the moment, our moment in an era where reality-TV, cop shows, CCTV, NSA and social media makes everyday life a public spectacle and privacy a thing of the past. Surveillance is what Enemy of the State is about, and Déjà Vu (2006) too, but it is there in other films as well. (The influence of Tony Scott on the Bourne films is something worth pondering.).

Scott also often used live TV reporting as a way of telling his stories, very cleverly interweaving multiple modes of storytelling, which adds urgency and excitement but also is connected to the ideas of surveillance and loss of privacy, and loss of privilege. In Scott's last film Unstoppable (2010) this use of TV as an integrated part of the narrative is particularly pronounced. There is even a point when a railroad executive frustrated wonders why it is that he is getting all the information from TV and not from his crew.

"Scott's cinema in its current iteration is always one of perception and points of view.  All collide, overlap, coalesce and part; one of the challenges both inside the movies (for their heroes) and out (for us) is making a coherent sense of all these points of view." wrote Daniel Kasman on Mubi, and this is very true.

Another thing about Scott is his love of the real. This can be seen in two ways. One is his penchant for doing films "based on true stories" and for doing extensive research. Of course his films are not documentaries, but it was important for him that he had done the reading and before he made a film he wanted to talk to the men and women who had been there and done that. He was proud that parts of Man on Fire (2004) was shot in the houses were actual drug lords had previously lived.

The other way in which the wish of keeping in real can be seen is more relevant for the films, and that is Scott's disregard for CGI and the digital. When the ferry is blown up in the beginning of Déjà Vu it is not a digital trick, it is a real ferry and real explosives, captured by a set of cameras around the river. This visceral quality of Scott's films make them feel extra urgent and thrilling (and dangerous), and there is a dimension there that (as I have written about before) gets lost in the digital world.

Scott was also committed to his characters, and he seems to have had a big emotional investment in all the films that he made, at least the later ones, and this comes across in them. They are works of passion. Just look at Man on Fire for example. The first hour, slow and very moving, carefully builds the characters and their relationships, and then when the explosion of revenge and violence comes in the second half it has been carefully integrated, and made believable. But it is the ending that is the most impressive part of the film. Scott fought for that, because he felt it was the only honest ending, and it is good. All the rage has gone, and instead it is the happy acceptance of sacrifice, to give yourself up for what (who) you love. Denzel Washington is magnificent in the film, as he is in his other films with Scott. They were a great team.

The film has not many fans it would seem, and it has been criticised a lot for its theme of revenge and its portrait of Mexico City as a hell-hole, but I think it is unfair. There is no glory in the film, both Denzel Washington and Christopher Walken's characters are marked by death, they live in shame and, at least in the case of Washington, self-hatred. When Washington goes on his rampage he is like a robot. He does not come back to life until the very end, at which point he stops killing and instead chose sacrifice. He comes back to life in order for him to die in peace.

Another thing about Scott's films is how immersed in film history they are. They draw thematic and visual inspiration from earlier films, just think of the self-evident connections between Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Enemy of the State. Both Preminger's Laura (1944) and Vertigo comes to mind in Déjà Vu and in Crimson Tide (1995) they have discussions about submarine films. In Man on Fire you can feel both Hawks and Sam Peckinpah in the background, and likewise in Unstoppable. And Scott seems indebted to paranoid films of the 1960s and early 1970s, besides The Conversation. A filmmaker like John Frankenheimer looms large.

But above all the films all look great. It can be an autumn landscape, an interior shot on a submarine, or something as simple as Denzel Washington sitting in front of a blue wall in Man on Fire. Iit is obvious that Scott put a lot of effort in every shot. And using reflections in particular, of people looking at themselves while looking at others, to great effect. Style and theme in perfect harmony.

A final word on Unstoppable. It is a disarmingly unpretentious and single-minded film but man, it makes you feel alive! It does not feel like a film by a 66 year old man who has made films for decades, it feels like a film made by somebody who has just been told what you can do with film and now wants to play with it, and use it to its full potential. The force and enthusiasm, the powerful sense of the trains, of them being real, has me jumping up and down in my seat, like seeing a film for the first time. With digital cinema taking over almost completely and now with Tony Scott no longer with us, it is as if  a part of cinema history has come to an end. It began with the Lumière brothers showing a film of a train arriving at a station, it ended with Tony Scott making a film about a runaway train.

The passing of polyester

One of the things that appealed to me when I was working as a projectionist was the fact that if one of the Lumière brothers had made an unexpected visit to my cinema, they would have been able to load the projector and screen the film. The central parts of the projector was the same as it had been since the very beginnings of film projection. Now this is no longer the case. Today, not only is the equipment different, but everything around it too. There is not even a need for a projectionist any more. In the more advanced systems, a computer in the basement of the multiplex will be enough. The computer might not even be in the cinema but at the main office of the cinema owner. Instead of a person in a small (and hot) room at the back of the screening room putting the film through the projector, and pushing the proper buttons and switches, somebody is just readjusting some software, or inserting a flash drive. I am glad that I no longer work as a projectionist because, besides being demoted to a popcorn pusher, I would not have any personal investment in the screening. When I worked at the cinema, it was my fault if something went wrong, but I could take a lot of pride in a successful screening, when I had dimmed the lights and opened the curtains at the exact right moment, for example having the UIP trademark appearing at the very moment that the curtains were so far apart that the logo fit perfectly between them. 

But it is not only in the projection room that the physical film strip was your's to touch. In all stages of the filmmaking process, it was there. You shot on it, you edited on it, you screened on it, and you stored the film on it, in the archives. You could hold it and touch it, making the material of the art form almost sensual, a haptic experience. Many filmmakers loved the sensation of having "their" film strip in their hands, Ingmar Bergman being one of them.

I love it too. I have spent many hours in various archives, in different parts of the world, investigating, cataloguing, cleaning, editing film, and it is always with the same kind of excitement. (Here is a photo of me at a visit to the Georgian National Film Center in Tbilisi.)

A lot has been written about the dangers involved in the conversion from analog to digital, such as analog cinemas difficulties in getting films that are released digitally only or the danger of films not being preserved in a long-term perspective (This article from LA Weekly highlights some of these dangers). What I here today is concerned with is the lack of physicality, and the immediate connection between film and hand, between object and subject if you like. Is there not a danger that when the film strip is gone, film gets devalued, possibly even as an art form?

The advantages with digital film are many, but considering that film has been alive and well for over 100 years, it is not like it was in desperate need for a change of costume, or a power boost. When excited filmmakers, cinematographers and other converts sing the praise of the new possibilities with digital filmmaking you sometimes get the impression that film was just awaiting the arrival of the digital era in order to release its full potential. But a film like Casque d'Or (Jacques Becker 1952) is pure perfection, and the fact that it was made in a analog world is not a problem, there is more to cinema than visual effects and portable equipment. But that is of little consequence, people in general have a tendency to get carried away, and is more annoying than alarming. What I find more disturbing is a certain laziness. When everything can be made, and remade, in the computer, the art of shooting sometimes get lost. If you always have the ability to say "Oh, it doesn't matter, we can fix that later." does this not run the risk of making you sloppy, less involved, evolved, as an artist. (This leads to an interesting question, of where the artistry lies in a digital film. In production or post-production? Come to think of it, it even raises questions of what is production and what is post-production.)

Another thing that gets lost with computer-generated imagery (CGI) is a sense of awe. When you watch a film like Intolerance (D.W. Griffith 1916) or a later film by David Lean, it is the sheer scope and richness of the images and all that the images contain, the number of people and horses for example, that is part of the magic. At the end of the The Avengers (Joss Whedon 2012), New York is attacked by hordes of faceless creatures from another world, but it has not the same effect because I know that some programmer made one creature on his computer and then copied it, and what is awe-inspiring about that? There is a legendary quote from Michael Curtiz, "Bring on the empty horses.", which he said when he was making Charge of the Light Brigade (1936). Today the director would more likely say (if s/he had Curtiz's poetic relationship with the English language) "Bring on the empty software.", which is not quite the same thing.

Of course, when Terminator 2 (James Cameron 1991) and Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1993) came out, a sense of awe and wonder was there, not despite them having fantastic digital effects, but because they had them. Because it was new and amazing. But today, that sense of wonder of something new is long gone. How will cinema reinvent itself this time? The studios have tried with 3D but that has not (yet) really worked, and besides, 3D is not something new. 

There are amazing films being made out there, and technical progress is inevitable, and often-times a good thing. The likes of Michael Mann, Abbas Kiarostami and Zhang Ke Jia make wonderful use of the digital possibilities. But that does not mean that some things will not be lost on the way, or that people can succumb to irrational exuberance.

Among the more iconic still images from the world of cinema are the shots of Jean-Luc Godard holding up a piece of film strip, like this one:

Many a cineaste have had themselves photographed in a similar way (myself included). But will such an image be understood by future generations? With the rapid disappearance of analog film, nowadays usually made out of polyester, when will the very idea of the touchable film strip be a thing of the past? The final question is this, what will a future Godard be photographed holding up? 

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Last year I gave a lecture on digital cinema and realism (with some ethical concerns thrown in for good measure) and I might some day publish it here.

Some recommended readings (1)

The autumn semester has begun (or will soon begin, depending on where you are in the world) so this might be a good opportunity to suggest some film books that are well worth reading, and even to own, for students as well as anybody else. The five books I've chosen today are in different ways introductory overviews of cinema, history as well as theory, but they're more than that. They are inquisitive, informative and intelligent, in short, indispensable.

The World in a Frame by Leo Braudy
Poetics of Cinema by David Bordwell
The Story of Film by Mark Cousins
Film as Film by V.F. Perkins
Cinemas of the Mind by Nicolas Tredell

Then I'd like to recommend a book which isn't about cinema but is in keeping with the previous post on westerns and the West. A poignant, funny and sincere book: Sacagawea's Nickname - Essays on the American West by Larry McMurtry

Here's are also links to three good essays about various aspects of cinema. 

Stephen Prince's early attempt to formulate a theory about digital cinema:

http://fdm.ucsc.edu/~landrews/film178w09/Film_178_THE_RECONSTRUCTED_IMAGE_files/True%20Lies-%20Perceptual%20Realism.pdf

Luc Moullet's critic of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema Book 1 and 2:

http://www.rouge.com.au/6/deleuze.html

David Kalat about Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946):

http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/03/26/where-are-the-nazis-in-cluny-brown/#more-32940

Happy readings!