On Film-making
by Alexander Mackendrick
Faber, £25, 0 571 21561 0
Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids
Thames & Hudson, £15.95, 0 500 54289 9
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THE US-born, Scots-raised, Ealing-employed director Alexander Mackendrick retired from making films in 1969 in exasperation at the amount of his time spent striking deals. He came to see his period at Ealing Studios — which produced some of the firm’s sharpest movies, including The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers — as having afforded blessed protection from the commercial winds which later dispersed his interest in the business. But the art of film remained a consuming passion, and for 25 years after his “retirement” Mackendrick inspired students at the California Institute of the Arts. His class hand-outs apparently became treasured possessions, and some are now collected in an indispensable volume.
Some students apparently found Mackendrick rather dusty and old-fashioned, and a section in On Film-making describes what the teacher was up against in those revolutionary days around the turn of the Seventies.
“Do you agree with any of the following?” Mackendrick asked, listing “1. Plots are old-fashioned. A story with a plot is contrived, artificial and boring,” before running through a list of then-popular aesthetic stances and ending: “I like to play with scenes of fantasy rather than reality. I like dream sequences and flashbacks. It’s more interesting when you can play around with time.” Mackendrick then patiently addressed these brave new sentiments and explained why it was still worth learning what Aristotle had to say about dramatic construction, and how it might improve screenplays.
And Aristotle they were expected to know, as well as scientific theories about persistence of vision and how to draw a moderately convincing human figure so that they could construct storyboards.
He summarised his teaching in a series of “Slogans for the Screenwriter’s Wall” (“Passivity is a capital crime in drama”, “Ambiguity does not mean lack of clarity”, “Two elements of suspense are half as suspenseful as one”), but like all sensible teachers Mackendrick demanded that his precepts be challenged. Or as he put it: “Remember: no ‘rule’ is worth anything until you have discovered it afresh for yourself.”
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Such a discovery could hardly be undertaken more pleasurably than by reading On Film-making. Mackendrick had a gift for lucidity of thought and language that helped to demystify film-making while retaining a sense of its magic and wonder; this book is as vital and enjoyable for the watcher of films as their potential maker. Now where did I put that camcorder?
Andrey Tarkovsky had what Mackendrick doubted could be taught: an imagination allied to an acute eye — qualities as apparent in a collection of Tarkovsky’s Polaroids as in his films. A first group was taken at home in Russia, of Tarkovsky’s son, of the family dog and the bleached browns of parched grass, fields, trees. A second group was made in Italy during the director’s painful exile.
“Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death,” Tarkovsky wrote, and 18 years after his own death, this poignant and illuminating volume would seem to echo his words.