When you think of the visual style, when you think of the visual language of a film there tends to be a natural separation of the visual style and the narrative elements, but with the great, whether it is Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick or Hitchcock what you’re seeing is inseparable, a vital relationship between the images and the story he’s telling. — Christopher Nolan
A college friend, who currently works as an assistant director in Tamil Film Industry, used to say that there are only 5–6 storylines in the history of Indian cinema. He postulated that these stories when tweaked at various positions yield the thousands of movies that are churned year after year.
But cinema was never about the story, it’s about storytelling.
Irrespective of the material a film-maker chooses, the sensibilities and sensitivities he brings to the subject remain unique. The cinematic interpretation of the written form stems entirely from the perspective of a director. It is incumbent on him to manipulate the material in a way that lends novelty and freshness, that infuses every shot of the film with his signature.
Consider how in a brief span of two years we had two movies on Steve Jobs that took diametrically opposite paths to tell the story. Joshua Michael Stern’s “JOBS” followed the standard template of tracing the journey of the eccentric genius from a struggling rebel to the man who inspirited the new zeitgeist.
However, Danny Boyle’s “STEVE JOBS” condensed the entire life of Jobs to just three defining highlights of his career. This brings a whole new level of gravitas and humanity to a man whose brilliance is blurred by his behavior (as Steve Wozniak says: It’s not binary. You can be decent and gifted at the same time.) Admittedly, it had an edge in that the script was based on Walter Isaacson’s biography. But, the decision to strip the superfluous, and boil it down to the three-act stage play can come only from a directorial vision.
Now, compare the narration of these movies and it becomes clear the faster pace of the latter springs from the necessity of accommodating emotion-laden dialogues at rapid speed. The former (“JOBS”) had the laid-back narrative because it had the luxury of time and situations automatically presented itself. The movie could only have ended with a motivational speech; it could be easily deduced from a mile away.
The first film where I became conscious of a force behind the screen was RGV’s “SATYA”. Gangsters in films, until that point, were irredeemably evil villains or the anti-hero melodramatic types that Amitabh Bacchan embodied. Until their portrayal as people who found themselves in that path, but were as human as their neighbors in every other aspect found a stunning expression in the characters of JD and Manoj Bajpai. “SATYA” is commended for it’s realistic characterization of gangsters; but how did people who never as much as conversed with a real-life gangster find them relatable?
Where drama begins, logic ends.
People were engrossed seeing scenes like Mhatre’s wife scolding him, witnessing Mhatre’s angst when he loses a friend, Satya experiencing fear not on account of his but his lover’s safety, etc. So much that these emotions were what they connected to. The “emotions” are the (deceptively) familiarizing winds that RGV creates to traverse a new ground. At the core, SATYA is a love story of a criminal who wants to get out only to realize it’s too late. But the unique lens through which the directors shows us the world of Satya is what made it a cult classic.
Anyhow, to get back to the point, a director orchestrates the entire unit to achieve his vision, and his fingerprints are all over the reel. In his top form, he ensures that the story springs to life on its own, full of harmony, connection and meaning. A demonstrative example of this is the SARKAR series; pause the movie at any point and a person who just walks into the room can instantly recognize which film it is (even if he has seen just one installment).
