Showing us how it’s done

Alexander MACKENDRICK in “On Film-making” defines the movie director as “the Invisible Imaginary Ubiquitous Winged Witness” of a film’s creation. By this he means, putting the point less colorfully, that the director is already “a member of the audience for his as yet unmade film ... feeling what the future spectators of his work might feel and reacting as they might react.”

The crucial difference between this first critical viewer of a work still in progress and the crowd that will see the finished film in a theater is, obviously, that the director is not passive. He is still capable of shaping (or reshaping) the movie. This quite remarkable book -- I know of nothing in print that is quite like it -- records in painstaking yet fascinating detail the options available to the director as he prepares to shoot and as he does so.

And who, you may well ask, is Mackendrick to tell us both firmly and modestly how to go about this task? Some background -- especially for younger, non-cinephile readers -- is in order. American born but raised in Scotland, “Sandy” Mackendrick worked in advertising, drifted into filmmaking for the British government during World War II, started writing scripts after the war and then began directing. He was a key creator of the beloved Ealing Studios comic tradition (“Tight Little Island,” “The Man in the White Suit,” “The Ladykillers”) before coming to America, where he made the immortally savage “Sweet Smell of Success.”

In the ‘60s, his career stalled, doubtless because he was one of those craftsmen who preferred the warmth and continuity of the studio system to the uncertainties of selling his projects on the open market. He retreated into (or perhaps one should say, embraced) teaching. He became dean of the film school at the California Institute of the Arts in 1969, two years before the first students arrived. He continued teaching at CalArts for 25 years. His widow (Mackendrick died in 1993, at 81) believes that in teaching he found his true metier, and “On Film-making” is a sampling of the handouts, often illustrated by his own sketches, that he presented to students over the years.

Using these papers, as coherently edited by Paul Cronin, the attentive student could, I think, make quite a respectable film -- well-structured and technically proficient. To make a movie as good or better than Mackendrick’s best, all he would have to supply would be talent, or in a best-case scenario, genius, neither of which, as Mackendrick well knew, can be taught. One foresees that this book will have a long and useful life in film schools. As for the rest of us, members of the general audience, not much interested in technique, we too can profit from “On Film-making.” For the book has the salutary effect of demystifying the art of film direction.

It is, Mackendrick insists, an interpretive rather than a creative art. The job, as he refreshingly saw it, is to place a sensitive and sensible version of a script -- in the creation of which the director will have participated to a large degree (whether or not he is a credited writer) -- before the public. The great difference between him and, say, a concert pianist, is that in so doing he has to enlist large and often-enough recalcitrant forces in his vision. There are the actors, of course, all of whom have their needs and insecurities. Beyond them he also has a great deal of machinery and its operators to mobilize -- the camera, with its infinite variety of lenses and possible placements, the best boy with his lights, the editor at his bench, the composer at his piano, the foley artists on their stage, the sound mixers at their consoles. Looking at this mess of conflicting agendas from the outside, most people assume that the director must have the heart of a lion and the soul of a lion-tamer. How else could he possibly get all those people and all that stuff marching to the beat he alone is hearing in his head?

This impression has been enhanced, over the last 40 years, by the dominance of the auteur theory in film criticism and, indeed, in film chat. Bookstores are full of biographies and book-length interviews with directors, and magazines are forever profiling them as their new pictures are released. And since it is difficult and often boring to the common reader to explain why, say, a tracking shot might serve a scene better than a pan, or why the director chose to cover a scene in a single shot rather than a series of cuts (or vice versa), these books and articles tend toward the vague -- and occasionally the grandiose. Which, of course, further enhances the air of mystery surrounding the auteur.

Mackendrick will have none of that. There is nothing leonine about the way he discusses his craft. He came up in the day when directors were still -- with a few exceptions -- regarded more as construction crew foremen than as artists of high and singular vision. Moreover, he was a Scotsman, a breed known for their practical engineering skills. In our fictions, whether they be about steamships or spaceships, it is usually someone called Scotty, portly and speaking in a reassuring burr, who is in charge of the engine room, keeping his pistons polished and supplying warp speed as needed.

Such men know their blueprints so well that they are translated into instinct, and so it was with Mackendrick. His habit, he says, was to laboriously copy his scripts out by hand to gain an intimate, tactile sense of them. And something like two-thirds of this book is devoted not to advice on shooting but to advice on shaping the director’s blueprint, the script. He offers a wonderful chapter on how Clifford Odets, hired to rewrite the ailing Ernest Lehman’s early draft of “Sweet Smell,” would deliberately overwrite the scenes, including everything -- the good, the bad, the indifferent -- as he searched for their brief, but enriched, essence.

This was very much to Mackendrick’s taste, for there is something slightly paradoxical about his concern for script. He was familiar with the dramatic theorists, from Aristotle to William Archer; he drew examples to buttress his arguments from a huge range of films, from “North by Northwest” to “The Bicycle Thief”; but he believed in the primacy of images. Early in his career, he made his screenwriting reputation by editing down a 12-page scene to four lines of dialogue, three of which were sub-verbal “Mm-mms.” He also took great pride in the fact that he and screenwriter William Rose were able to make the characters and setting of “The Ladykillers” into a metaphor for postwar England (brutalized working class, disillusioned upper class, collapsed intellectual community) without once discussing these matters on screen (or, it seems, between themselves). In short, for all his literacy, and for all film’s capacity to “reproduce reams of dialogue,” he believed cinema to be “a pre-verbal” (as opposed to a nonverbal) medium, and he gives many instructive examples of how meaning can be fully conveyed through action, not dialogue, shortening running time and enlivening our visual pleasure.

I don’t mean to imply that Mackendrick’s eye was narrowly focused on dialogue and structure. For instance, a student once asked him how a director gets an actor to do what he needs him to do. His reply: “You don’t. What you try to do is get the actor to want what you need.” And here he is on editing: “Once the audience understands what is about to happen, when the impulse to act is clear, it’s time to make your cut.”

Simple -- when you say it simply. Not so easy, when ideas of your own brilliance and self-importance obscure the point. Yes, I suppose “On Film-making” -- already available in England, due here shortly -- is primarily a textbook for the aspiring auteur. But reading it will make you a more alert and intelligently responsive moviegoer -- and me a better reviewer. Widely taken to heart, it might even make movies a little bit better too. *