Film Noir and the Maltese Falcon

At the current time we have been looking at film noir and the 1941 film of the Maltese Facon staring Humphrey Bogart. Looking at elements of film noir such as its style, conventions and content, we are beginning to look at how we could reflect this into theatre.

Playing with the idea of camera frames, in particualar the angles and what they contain. We can look at how film is hugely different to theatre through what we can hide on film, that we may not be able to hide so much on stage.  Different angles can suggest different things, such as an upward shot would give a character more status and a downward shot would be-little the character. An over the shoulder shot would present a view from the characters perspective. A wide shot would suggest more about the environment/setting than that of an extreme close up, which would create greater focus on something perhaps key to story.

Clown and Comedy continued…

Further looking at that of clown and comedy we have touched on a further number of ideas and techniques.

Taking the sinario of a double/multiple act we consider how multiple clowns or characters may contrast to one another to gain a bigger comic effect on the audience. Looking at a straight, more serious character working with a dumb clown that doesn’t follow the rules. The straight guy is used in order to provoke the comedy and keep the plot of the situation going. The clown is used in order to disobey the straight guy, reacting perhaps to the environment and objects around them.  I found that a balance is needed in order to keep the piece funny, and that both characters are as important as eachother to keep the piece funny. An example of when we used this would be a ventriloquism piece we did. In the ventriloquism performance the straight guy (Ventriloquist) kept the piece going, while the puppet disobeyed the expectations of the ventriloquist. This was done by using ideas such as the puppet interupting with a crude comment about what was being discussed or the puppet taking physical actions that weren’t controlled by the ventriloquist.

For this piece we looked at how comedy can be offensive. We found that in a lot of comedy minorities such as different races, gender or sexuality can be touched upon in a derogotive way. This perhaps suggesting that some comedy is for the greater majority. An idea we also touched on is that offensive comedy can be used as long as it isn’t clearly intended to directly attack, and it is not the actual view of the person giving the comedy. Offensive comedy perhaps these days being used as a celebration that we now have true freedom of speech, where we can mention “issues which must not be spoken of”. That we can perhaps represent really controversial or discriminatory ideas and make comedy of them, by not agreeing with the view but laughing at how wrong or far fetched the view is.  In my ventriloquism piece for example we looked at the holocaust and Jewish people. The puppet shown great hate for Jews using the line “NO JEWS!”. While the audience know that this view is not right, we can laugh at the abserdity and the fact that we know the puppet shouldn’t be saying this.

From this, we touched on bathos and pathos. Bathos being where a situation contains an anti-climax, such as a President slipping on a banana skin. Then we looked at pathos in which we take a sypathetic situation, yet the character always remains optimistic. Through this juxtaposition putting light on a situation without taking away from the significance of what is being displayed. For example we did a performance in which we have a baby and we deal and treat the baby with no care and eventually the baby dies. Throughout the performance we had to show no sign of sadness and always had to remain upbeat and optimistic. While the situation being shown was really disturbing, the way the piece is intended to be percieved is to highlight the “wrongness” of what is being shown through the way the characters contrast the idea of the real world.

Moving on to the use of a screen we then looked at how a screen can be used to cut action effectivly. The screen perhaps resembling the cut on a film from one scene or shot to another. We found that action must always take place in front of the screen so that the audience stay engadged. To test this use of a screen we performed a piece based on a film, in which we performed the film in 3 minutes. Using a more well known film we found was to be an advantage, as the audience can familiarise with what takes place and can fill in anything that is missed. We used the stroy of Mary Poppins. One aim was to be experimental with the use of the screen, playing around with levels, sounds and the opportunities the screen had to offer. For example action took place above the screen to show that Mary Poppins was flying. The pace needed to be fast and punchy in order to remain interesting. With this performance we also further looked at parody. We took the characters of the story and emphisised them and the situations for a more comedic effect. Also, the screen allowed us to act multiple characters, going from one character, behind the screen to another. This being shown throught he use of key props and physicality and voice. Perhaps a way to suggest this in our piece was the way Mary Poppins swapped between three of the actors yet to make it clear we always used a specific hat and took on the “perfect” mannerisms of Mary’s character.

The Package

Recently a few friends of mine created a film as part of their project for the ITV workshop film group. The short film was filmed in a day at a number of various locations. While the full film hasn’t been fully edited and compleated yet… a trailer has been produced. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYR5meNPegY

Please check it out and feel free to leave feedback.