As I developed the idea for my short film, I researched some of the influences behind the idea – including inspirational directors, cinematographers and artistic visual styles that I would like to pay homage to.
These include:
- Director Christopher Nolan
- Director Ken Loach
- Social Realism and it’s relationship with British New Wave drama
- Realism art
- What influenced these filmmakers?
British-American director Christopher Nolan began his early film career with his fathers Super8 camera; Nolan found an interest in botany (the study of plants) early on until he found his father's camera. Nolan began film-making at the tender age of seven using the camera and his toy action figures.
"I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. Alien, Blade Runner just blew me away because they created these extraodinary worlds that were just completely emersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.”
Despite what Nolan went onto achieve in the world of film (such as the box-office hit ‘The Dark Knight’), he started off from a relatively humble background. While studying English Literature at University College London, he shot his first short film titled ‘Doodlebug’.
The influence behind Doodlebug was to “…show the preoccupation with narrative boundaries” which Nolan would later explore in his feature films such as ‘Insomnia’ and one of his most popular feature films, ‘Memento. Nolan is quoted to have said "I've always loved films…I never really thought about doing anything else. What I love are films that create their own particular geography, a particular world and emerse you in it for a couple of hours.”
Kitchen sink drama director Ken Loach was influenced by social taboos portrayed in day-to-life.
Many of these became the pinnacles of some of his key work, which exposed the reality of socialistic problems such as homelessness, poverty and the exclusion of the working class. After studying law at St Peter's College,
Diary of a Young Man also used non-naturalistic elements, such as stills sequences, cut to music with narration, in its attempt to achieve a new kind of narrative structure.
Later, Loach made his debut kitchen-sink drama documentary Cathy Come Home, portraying neglected subjects such as homelessness and unemployment, both of which were prevalent in 1960’s
The outcome presented a powerful and influential expose of the workings of the Social Services within the United Kingdown which lead to Cathy Come Home to being hailed with critical acclaim.
- What filmmaking techniques are being used and why?
Leading on from Loach’s development into a socially-aware documentary director, the inclusion of naturalistic elements became a feature of all of his works – ranging from film, TV drama and plays. His film work is characterised by a particular view of realism, in which he strives in every area of filmmaking to portray genuine interaction between actors, to the point where some scenes in his films are completely unscripted. To further the realism element of interplay, Loach commonly casts unknown talent than method actors, as he prefers unknown talents who have had some of the actual life experience of the characters they portray, or subject they are exploring through the film’s narrative.
Examples of how this is used include in his film Bread and Roses, where he cast the two leading actors because of their background of living as an immigrant to the
Loach commonly tells only some of the actors will know what is going to happen in a scene – in a bid to encourage the others to express genuine surprise or sadness because they really are affected by the events of the scene.
Two examples of this include in Kes, where the boy actor discovers bird at the end, believed that the director had actually killed the bird that he had become quite close to during the filming, where in fact he had used a dead bird found elsewhere – and in Raining Stones one of the actresses visited at her house by a loan shark had no idea that he was going to force her to take off her wedding ring and give it to him as part payment. This style of emotional manipulation means that the characters are believable and are more easily connected to their cast and in turn, the viewing audience.
Christopher Nolan’s early beginnings in cinema allowed him to learn conventional film techniques. However, Nolan’s use of technique really shines in his use of unconventional narrative structure. An example of this is in Memento, which shows Nolan presenting events in reverse-chronological order and then in chronological order. Using this technique, Nolan forces viewers into the mentally-impaired, skewed protagonist's position – which also encounters disoriented events. Nolan had developed this cutting technique in Following, by presenting the structure in which the three acts are cut together, whereas Memento presents two linear timelines — the primary one running backwards, and an entirely previous timeline running forwards — which are cut together and which meet at the end. This crossing-over is signified by the transition from black and white film to color as the timeline transitions from forwards to backwards.
“I try to tell a story the way a conversation naturally unfolds. Or the way newspaper stories are written. It's not chronological. It takes about 20 minutes to get into a story. I attempt to teach the audience the structure, even with "Batman Begins." For me, you need to give people time to find their footing before you start jumping around”
British New Wave is the name given to a trend in filmmaking among directors in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s which had a direct link to social realism and kitchen-sink drama.
The trend is a transposition of French New Wave, the term first applied to the films of directors such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard amongst others. There is considerable overlap with the so-called "Angry Young Men" movement, such as John Osborne and director Tony Richardson, who challenged the social status quo with their dramas about working class life. Their political views were initially labeled as radical and sometimes even anarchic, and they described social alienation of different kind.
- What visual style does the work have (quality of light, colour and texture, composition and movement)?
This involved art being non-superficial and a complete contrast from, for example, classic Hollywood style cinema – as social realism portrayed real life situations and the underbelly of some of those situations, where as traditional cinema would shy away from such negative attributes. This movement would then later transpose and develop because of artists such as John Bratby, who founded the ‘kitchen sink’ style. Bratby's expressionistic style became known as "kitchen sink realism" after a painting of his which depicted a kitchen sink.
David Sylvester, a British critic wrote an article in 1954 about trends in recent British art and Sylvester argued that there was a new interest among modern painters in domestic scenes, with stress on the triviality of life.
Bratby went onto paint several kitchen subjects, often turning practical utensils such as sieves and spoons into semi-abstract shapes.
Other artists associated with the "kitchen sink" style include Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith. Kitchen-sink drama is drama that relates to the art form and depicts the real side of life and is usually political and socially motivated. They illustrate the writer’s view of society’s downturn and often these dramas use the working class as characters in their stories, acting as working class heroes. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the United Kingdom's working class were often depicted stereotypically and kitchen sink dramas emphasized the lives of the urban working class.
British filmmakers such as Ken Loach channelled their anger into film using relatively less expensive 16mm cine-cameras.
Christopher Nolan’s visual style is somewhat more conventional, using classic cinematic devices; a number of Nolan’s early films were shot in black and white, and because of his colour-blindness, he found them very visually appealing. “Yes, I'm colorblind, so that would be nice. Actually, I think it has to be the right story. If you do some color and some black and white, I think your appreciation for black and white is always being refreshed. “
