Events in real life can have many points of view. Physically something viewed from a different angle and distance looks different. If a viewer could move from one viewpoint to others and view an event from different places at the same time, how much would it change the viewer’s understanding and interpretation of what was happening?
Not quite the same but as close as our present can get, an event can be filmed from several different positions. This is often how a face-to-face interview is shot with two cameras. Without the other camera, there is an after session with reaction shots from the other angle edited in.
In filmmaking and television production, having more cameras allows for more simultaneous takes from different angles, but having only one camera does not limit the production to single points of view. The same scene just needs to be reshot from a different camera position. Even with two actors in a scene facing each other, this is more usual, with each part being the focus of the different shots. The takes are not shot simultaneously but subsequently in real time.
Not to get into how the sausage is made too much (for I am anything but an expert on these production points), having more film available, if one is actually using film and not digital photography, and having more time to do the work, are more valuable than having many cameras. Many cameras can help with the time factor. But the costs are about having all these resources at hand, and the money meter is running, even when the camera is not.
Timing in the creation of complex production of fiction is very important. Making a film can seem a choppy business with scenes being shot in a crazy out-of-order sequence but someone is always watching the clock.
In addition to the storyboarding and outlining, one level of confusion, let’s not forget the physical logistics of getting people and things to places, and then maintaining them there. Even if the production is on a set, people and things have to get there and every little thing has to be organized meticulously for ready deployment. Ask the person who keeps track of the costumes, or the props. It’s like having a filing cabinet but the files are racks of clothes, or warehouses of things.
A live performance has other challenges, especially for the performers, but nothing is more complicated in the world of fiction creation than making a big production film. It requires an orientation to time which is already very unusual and alien to our experience of real events.
The finished product is very much like an illusion sausage, which is why sometimes when we watch something these little gritty bits and chunks of something not quite right get stuck in our teeth or craw, and we cannot suspend disbelief. These discontinuities and inconsistencies are caused by the complexity of the production process.
Most experienced audience members are familiar with the mistakes in a shot that turn up in the final cut. A cigar is longer instead of shorter in a moment immediately after the last moment in the illusory scene, or a coffee cup goes missing. People involved in the production tend to be more sensitive to these mistakes, like a musician who flubs in the middle of a music set. No one in the audience catches it or cares but the band members all know who blew that one.
Of course, in production it is also possible to do multiple takes, providing time allows and you have the budget, which is especially important for the actors, as well as for complex action sequences involving practical stunts. But while the filmmakers may be focused on “getting it right” so the illusion looks like real-time sequencing, the elements often neglected like in real life are those with the most impact on the audience, the psychological verisimilitude, and even the sense of what is being portrayed in terms of its rhetorical effectiveness.
While the director may believe what goes in the can works towards the purpose for impacting the audience just right, audiences, especially over time, catch the fact that something is off.
For example, say the appropriate psychology for the situation is not in the performance. No one in that social context would behave that way at this point in a sequence of events in real life. This happens all the time in our entertainment. The characters just change. Real people do not get over things or move on that quickly after what just happened.
There are of course conventions audiences for particular kinds of entertainment buy into. We know John Wayne is a super soldier. A wound that would incapacitate an ordinary person does not stop him from continuing the fight. We accept that for the sake of our emotional rollercoaster ride; the trauma of fictional events is like so much water off a duck’s back. We just want to see what happens next, and if the characters need to be a little unlike an ordinary person, that’s okay with us. If it waddles like a duck, it’s a duck, or a commie.
The creators of fiction do try to get these things right more than anything else. The actors are the salespeople for the psychological verisimilitude. Again, it is the shared attraction to and focus on certain concepts and imagined events which brings the performers and the audience together. The psychological space they have in common is what defines what works, what they share emotionally, and what goes off the rails.
However, not everyone in front of or behind the camera shares the vision. Not everyone involved with a production of a complex illusion necessarily shares the fascination with the couple at dinner having an argument or the obsession one character has with another. In some cases, everyone making a horror movie may believe the finished product is sick or ridiculous, and they have come together to give the target audience what it wants and make money.
There is a lot to think about. Maybe not enough time. In real life, multitasking is an illusion. The human attention can only focus on one thing at a time, even if that focus can shift from one sensory input to another in fractions of a second.
While I’m typing, this I am also aware of the ambient sounds and the feeling of the leather chair on the back of my bare thigh, and I occasionally flash to the curious fact my new upstairs neighbors are almost constantly cleaning their floors with what sounds like a Zamboni machine or doing other loud things that seem from my point of view to be focused on disturbing me.
In the midst of real life events our minds cannot look at something from multiple points of view simultaneously. We can shift quickly if we try in our minds to imagine, but if we really need to pay attention to something in front of us, like a referee at a sporting event, we cannot let our view shift to our mind’s eye view from the cheap seats. Even when we review a scene shot from several camera angles, we must focus on each view at any moment in our attention.
Producers of live TV can get very confident and good at watching many screens. Consider in sports how this is very important, not just at the moment of the action, but in quickly being able to select replays to show what just happened from the angle that shows the player’s toe was inbounds, and the refs on field were not able to see accurately what just occurred in front of them.
What we are reviewing here are all relatively new ways of understanding our world and events and time. The capacity to do what we, as producers and audiences, existed in the physiology of ancient and prehistoric of humans, but it was not something they did to the extent we do today, because they did not have the technology to experience it and internalize the experiences as concepts. Even in the last century people were not as practiced at these ways of viewing and understanding real events and fictional portrayals.
There’s a line in Faust, I think, about a carriage being drawn by horses; it’s a hypothetical used to make a point about understanding an experience and how it changes the person who experiences it. Before a person rides at the speed made possible by the horses pulling the carriage along, he cannot conceive of the experience in the same way he can thereafter, the way the world looks at that speed.
Infants learning how their senses work, toddlers learning to move, we all get a crash course in real world interpretation and conceptualization, and those of us who are lucky enough to have enough leisure and access move quickly from oral stories, to written, to plays and opera, and TV and film. We experience both non-fiction and fictional narratives across a spectrum of media.
Only after we have done something many times does it become relatively common in the way we conceptualize, and it changes us in many ways we are not consciously aware of. The changes just show up in a subsequent moment, sometimes a long time later after many experiences we didn’t think much about, but we just know things and how something works even if we did not see that aspect of it the first few times through.
At a subsequent moment, we are suddenly able to think in ways we could not previously.
I’ll have to come up with some examples, I know but time is a factor right now.
Similarly, ideas and beliefs can slip into our minds. Something we believed earlier in life can become something we see as silly later. Something we found exciting because it was new can lose its appeal.
Because of the complexity of engagement with fiction, these changes occur in ways it is almost impossible to follow. As if real life were not problematic enough, fiction adds a whole set of wrinkles. We buy into the illusion of the fiction sausage of TV and movie productions for unexamined reasons, and it can wind up later as having more of an impact on our real-life perspectives than we are aware.
But before we let our notions run away or go off the rails, let us remember the recursive nature of how these changes happen. Analogous to the making of fiction, the many drafts, the takes in a complex production not necessarily shot in sequence, but later recompiled in a composite of a momentarily finished yet still inchoate understanding, what happens to the audience members over time is a production constantly under revision.
Let’s get back to real life events and fiction, and time. As a placeholder, consider that there are few if any movies about going into a fictionally created universe or world, already made, and changing the events in the finished fiction, through time travel. There may be within a series such things. I think of Back to the Future, where the universe itself is a kind of a running joke on this idea.
But no one goes back to shows like I Love Lucy, and says, let’s have someone from the future go there and change the outcomes. I bring this up because it indicates another difference between how we look at real life and history, and how we engage with fictional settings. The depth of fiction does not invite that kind of re-visitation.
There are these peculiar developments in created universes of shows, where the two sets of characters crossover in special episodes, not just in comic books, but TV shows, which is something like that, but not quite as quirky. This shows a direction of the imagination, a shared longing in both the audiences and the creators, to put that character from that lousy melodrama in a scene with those characters from elsewhere. Or to pit that superhero against that other one in a fight.
People like to do this historically, too, both in their heads and in fiction. Star Trek even has that episode where Lincoln shows up with other real and fictional historical characters. But with history some people go further. Would Alexander the Great have been able to beat Julius Caesar in battle? What if a tank had appeared to help Custer at Little Big Horn?
But the concept for revising old shows and movies is something further. The audience would have to know the previous fiction as an experience and recall it with the knowledge of its creator. The new revised production would have other characters and a diverged set of events introduced to change the outcome.
There may be audiences for that, and it may yet become a genre in the future. Clever technicians and new ways to alter old TV shows and movies could result in a kind of game. You start with the originals and then start making your own story, throwing the Seinfeld cast into Gone with the Wind, for instance.
The more I think about it, the less crazy it seems. I mean, if they can do Shakespeare in a swimming pool, why not?
I Dwell In Possibility 