Ayn Rand said, “If you see a beautiful woman with a pimple on her face you would think nothing of it... but if an aritist draws a painting of that same woman without removing the pimple it will seem offensive.”
Likewise in cinema, when a director uses style, dialogue, background score, characterisations and more to capture reality, he will be just trying to enhance and beautify what could be very ordinary in real life. He will be showing what is, in a way what it could be and should be. That would be his view of life.
That is where his personal art will arise from. Whether his art is good or bad is subjective, depending on who’s perceiving it from which perspective.
It’s nothing but a film-aker’s interpretation and presentation of an emotion which affects the viewer sitting in the cinema hall. What a filmmaker is really saying is, “This is how I want to see things. Read it as. This is what life means to me.” And since cinema involves commerce and various people’s time and effort, he has no choice but to bring it down to communicable terms unlike a true painter who would never think of what will make people buy his painting.
In cinema, it’s my conviction that more than the story it is the style in which it is told which is its most creative and most beautiful element. A story is given and a scene is given and a character is played by an actor which is a physical quantity, but how they are amalgamated by the director in his style, creates the emotional catharsis in a viewer’s mind. Of course it goes without saying that style cannot stand in for lack of content. At the same time, without the application of style there can be no cinema. Like a corporate executive once asked me about a certain film, “It’s quite a nice story but if the director did not apply cinema to it why did he make a film out of it?”
I completely agree because style is really where a director comes in. He might have other talents such as writing but primarily by definition the director is the link between the performing and the primary arts. He is a performer in relation to the primary work of others like the actors, music director, cameraman and other technicians in the sense that they are a means to what he is designing with his style towards a specific end.
But to integrate the primary arts, he or she requires a sound understanding of all the arts applicable to cinema. Only then will he have a very individualistic view combined with the power of abstract thought, aided by cinematic imagination.
Directors with this kind of sense and sensibility are rare, of course. Most of us directors most of the time ride on the talents of others and merely put the actors and technicians through randomly thought motions. These may accidentally result at times in a great movie. Mostly though, the result is movie with clashing intentions of all concerned — due to the lack of a central thought to guide the film towards its emotional finale. Among those films which have been important to me, in this context, are the ones I saw as an impressionable viewer. Among them I still salute The Guns of Navarone, Lost in the Desert and Mackenna’s Gold.
If I saw them for the first time today, I don’t know how I would react to them. All I can say is that they have been essential in the course of my growing up years. And although, I have never laughed out loud, I succumbed to the howlarious antics of Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther.
Ultimately, a film is an emotional experience. It can make you cry, it can make you laugh or it can thrill you. A strong story gives the director a means to heighten that emotion with his artistry. For example, if the script says, “She is very beautiful”, the director can make the audience feel that, “She is verrrryy beeeauttifull.”
In written language this will come across as wrong grammar but in cinematic language the girl will come across verrrryy beeeauttifull . That is why I love cinematic EXAGGERATION!