Sidney Lumet once asked Kurosawa about a particular exterior shot in Ran. "It's such a striking way to frame it, why did you shoot it that way?" Kurosawa said "If we went any further right, there was a mall, if we went any further left, there was a Sony factory."
—Tweeted by Andrew Jackson Lynch, via OG, original source unknown
[CORRECTION: The above is the "folk" version and isn't quite accurate. Reader Scott Kirkpatrick found the real source and the exact quote. Please see the "Update" at the bottom of the post. —Ed.]
I laughed when Oren passed this along. Is there any more persistent necessity in photography than the constant editorializing our minds are engaged with as we continually frame the picture field? For all my persistence in experimenting, I've never really been able to just forget about framing and shoot, as if instinctively. And I'm always puzzled at the persistent urge I have to editorialize reality by excising certain "unwanted" things from the frame. In this picture, which I drove up to take this morning so I could show you the weather today, I can't get rid of the trees in the foreground, but I would if I could.
Even clouds. I'm always trying to arrange the clouds to make them more...cloud-like?! Where do these ideas come from? It's no wonder Plato/Socrates was fascinated by the question, in the ideas about the world of ideal forms that I never quite understood in The Republic. I'm always striving to make reality look more like the shadow on the cave wall...to make the clouds look like an idea of "cloudishness" that somehow exists independently in my head.
At least Kurosawa had a solid reason to exclude the mall and the Sony factory—because he was filming historical dramas to create the illusion of a time before malls and factories. What's my excuse?
Maybe the idealized notion I carry around is somehow just the cumulative aggregation of all the clouds I've ever seen, blended in memory. Anyway my persnickety tendency to be fastidious about framing is something I've fought with all my life.
I think I'd better go lie down now, my brain hurts. :-)
Sky-show
There was a real show in the sky today, and for a few precious minutes we got our first rain in weeks, complete with thunder. It's been painfully dry here. The farmers are hurting. I'm working on part three of the "working hard" series, and the revamped GX9 impressions.
No post tomorrow, so have a great weekend wherever you are.
And Happiest of Juneteenths to celebrants! May the wishes of every peaceful demonstrator come true before the next Juneteenth rolls around.
Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)
UPDATE Saturday afternoon: Our friend Scott Kirkpatrick, a Professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem who I wrote about when he chartered a plane to come out to the hinterlands for a visit, found the source. It wasn't in Kurosawa's Something Like An Autobiography, he relates, which stops at 1950 with Rashomon; wasn't in the liner notes of the Criterion Collection edition of Ran; and he couldn't find it in The Warrior's Camera, Stephen Prince's survey of Kurosawa's oeuvre and accomplishment.
"But Sidney Lumet wrote a book on Making Movies that is recommended to film students like my son, Tom," Scott writes—and, sure enough, the preface begins with:
I once asked Akira Kurosawa why he had chosen to frame a shot in Ran in a particular way. His answer was that if he'd panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed, and if he'd panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport....
Many thanks to Scott for his good sleuthing! —MJ
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Featured Comments from:
Tex Andrews: "Re 'It's no wonder Plato/Socrates was fascinated by the question, in the ideas about the world of ideal forms that I never quite understood in The Republic. I'm always striving to make reality look more like the shadow on the cave wall...to make the clouds look like an idea of "cloudishness" that somehow exists independently in my head....What's my excuse?'
"I think this is what separates 'capital P' Photographers from the rest of the visual arts—an inability to accept that the thing you are making, a photograph, bears as much relation to reality as a dream does...or a painting. It is not that reality! It's not a record of reality. Reality is holistic and infinitely changing, and a 'moment' isn't a moment at all, but a fluid river of time-space. A photograph is just a slice out of that, like a slice of brain from a CAT scan—that's not a brain!
"So, you are so right to invoke Plato and the cave here. When we make art (and things that could be art if they were contextualized as such, see Duchamp, or for a photographic example Atget), we're really making shadows. Shadows are pretty cool, no ding on them. Shadows are their own reality,they are things, part of the Big Reality, and a photograph,once manifest, then is its own reality, like other objects. So, be free and don't worry about your totally correct impulses—you need no excuse.
"Thanks for bringing this up, and your photograph was a great starting point, as was the great lead in from Lumet and Kurosawa."
Bill Poole: "Re 'I can't get rid of the trees in the foreground, but I would if I could.' I'm not sure why you would want to do that, as the tops of the trees almost exactly duplicate tops of the clouds. Looks like compositional genius to me."
Mike replies: I like you, Bill, I like you. You are far above average in intelligence and most probably good-looking too.
Mike Chisholm: "I expect you'll be inundated by comments from us ancient philosophers, but: other way round. What we see and perceive are the shadows on the cave wall. Reality (the 'ideal forms' of which those shadows are flickering distortions) is behind us. Which is the Great Teaching of the British Christmas pantomime, where children are encouraged to scream hysterically, 'It's behind you!' when the hero persistently fails to perceive the menacing Ideal Form. Best wishes, Heraclitus."
Mike replies: You are correct. So then when a flower photographer rejects twenty or a hundred blossoms as imperfect and finds one which suits his ideas, and jockeys to find a position which shows that one paragon to proper advantage, the true reality is the ideal of the 'Flower' in his mind which all the other actual blossoms do not live up to. Is that correct Sir? This is why Plato's cave always flummoxed me, because it seemed to my unschooled brain that he had it backwards!
Mike Chisholm: "No, that's not it. Reaching into my bag of photographic metaphors, the best I can do is: 'reality' is this one massively awesome raw file, out of which our risibly inadequate processors make our own individual pathetic-but-adequate conversions, inside which we live our deluded little lives. That's right, reality is a Fuji X-Trans file. The truth is out there. Heraclitus."
Mike: That I can wrap my head around. BTW, did you know some people call you "The Obscure One"? (According to the Wikipedia article on Heraclitus.)
Bill Tyler: "If you have any interest in what goes into making a movie, the Lumet book is excellent. As a photographer, I especially enjoyed his discussion of lens focal lengths with Twelve Angry Men as an example. Many of the other choices he discusses are also applicable to still photography."
Mike replies: I'm halfway through it. Started reading it yesterday when Scott found the reference.