My Filmic Awakening

In the early-to-mid 70's I began to fall in love with movies, and in the spring of 1976 I enrolled in the filmmaking course at Los Angeles City College.  Though I dropped out after one semester, I learned quite a lot about all types of movies and saw many classics for the first time.

Below are my notes about three of these movies.  I think they're funny because I'm struggling to understand why these films spoke to me, and obviously I'm mostly drawn to their visual style. Most of these notes could apply to Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" which had just been released and was a favorite of mine, even while it was trashed by my film school teachers.

Though I was never a great filmmaker, I definitely began incorporating these stylistic options into my own movies.

Truffaut's "Two English Women"

To approximate the style and general effect of French Films:

Focus slightly fogged (spray?)

Smooth pans, slow

Lush backgrounds, greenery, blue skies against a "rural" foreground

Many, many different locations, even within a small area

Each sequence is only as long as need be; some are static and lengthy for a specific effect

Rich Classical music, as if written especially for the movie

Aways impeccably "Beautiful" women, even in disarray

Many tracking shots

Laughing faces of two young girls, after prayers, to depict a sexual awakening.  "it was our secret."

"Soft Skin" (Black & White)

Soft, out of focus backgrounds, as opposed to much depth of field in a far-away telephoto lens.

Actions are given extreme fluidity by constant cuts between two different points of the action with longer-than-actual-time cuts (example: man pulling nylon stocking off his girlfriend.)

Repeated use of a quick cut showing one action (turning ignition key.)

Fellini's "8 & 1/2"

Radical points-of-view changes, from way up to way down.

Long pans back and forth, each bringing life to the section it covers.

People walking toward camera.