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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Compressed story telling

19:50 / 25.03.07

There is an old adage in filming about how it is always best to enter a scene at the last possible moment. There are so many ways of tripping up a film, of over-loading it with exposition and un-neccessary explaination that simply rings untrue when spoken as dialogue, or killing all pace. There is, of course, a certain amount of catering for the lowest common denominator (something that I completely disagree with). There is a certain amount of guilt in this that falls onto the Bond films (with Tomorrow Never Dies being the worst for this, constant explainations of what three letter acronyms mean in a completely unrealistic way, the latest Bond film explaining gambling in the most tension killing moments of the film).

There are of course some established ways of speeding up storytelling, the old "Seven Years Later..." moments.

Compare also, from another medium, the complaints of many readers on this board of the drawn out Batman gets dressed moment in a Justic League Classified issue penned by Warren Ellis with the 1960's Batman television series in which a simple slide down a pole was all that was needed for the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder to get dressed.

I think that the credit sequence to Soylent Green is one of the best and most well crafted examples of compressed story telling that I have seen in film ;

Soylent Green credits, YouTube

So. How do you like your story telling played out? How slow is too slow? Does a story told too quickly lose atmosphere?

21:42 / 25.03.07

Sorry this'll be such a quick, shit post....

The 2001 bone to sattelite cut has to be the ultimate expression of this though, right?

23:59 / 25.03.07

The ultimate in compressed storytelling.

01:25 / 26.03.07

I thought about 2001's cut as well, but I think it might leave many people behind on it (and the fact that there is so many diverging views on it and on what it was trying to "actually say" might prove that it's not such a state-of-the-art "a thousand concrete information on one pill").

I always wanted to see someone telling a film with the same ability of a trailer, but without making it superficial, low info etc. Michael Bay's films might actually have always tried to do a super-cut-to-the-chase in his films, but always come off as a superficial ad. I always felt Superman should be made already in that vein (on the opposite of doing a "bullet on the eye!" scene, that no one who hasn't lived on mars on the last 50 years wouldn't already know the end to that scene), since so much of it's information are already shared knowledge (see "A.S.S." for great use of that).

I thought Rodriguez made a good job in a fast storytelling in Sin City (no matter how much I dislike it for Millerisms, I still think Rodriguez made it satirical), but that might be because I read the comic before and knew the in-between things, and felt tiny things were packed with info, but actually might have been just me, or readers in general.

I see City Of God in that vein as well, but might have more to do with the fact that many signs are common and known to me already because I'm Brazilian (so, for instance, a little sentence like "no one from São Paulo can be a nice dude enough that'll make me not want to rob him" packs a shit load of comedic value in super-compressed packed information).

And for another one from memory, I think the television show Arrested Development. It manages sometimes to pull an entire motif (sometimes a whole vein in television history, or storyline, or genre, or a character's entire profile, or some tv/storytelling structure) in just a one-liner set-up for a joke. But much from it as well might be so not "hand fed" to the point it might seem like it's not really there and what the creators intended.

06:46 / 26.03.07

Stone K, I thought about the 30 second bunny things as well. They kind of fit in with most parodies and spoof films, in that they rely on a back knowledge of story/character to deliver a joke (films like Epic Movie (going by the trailer here!) which use motives, character designs and the like to push a punch line along.

Good call on the 2001, funnily enough when I was writing this I was thinking of that as an example of slow story telling, the sense that the journey in space is almost in real-time sometimes, using pace to create a mood of lonliness - completely forgot about the bone-cut!

19:01 / 26.03.07

I felt like the much maligned Domino managed to capture the energy of a trailer, and maintain it throughout, even if it wasn't actually serving much of a narrative. As for compressed storytelling, there's two sequences that really stand out for me.

One is the opening of The Royal Tenenbaums, set to a string version of Hey Jude, it compresses thirty years of history into roughly seven minutes, doing so in such an entertaining and even emotional way that the rest of the film feels almost unnecessary. Wes Anderson's greatest strength is as a creator of little worlds, and this sequence allows him to cram many wildly different environments into a short amount of screentime. It's really astonishing.

But even better is the introductory sequence to Magnolia, which over the course of roughly four minutes, gives us nine fully developed characters. PT Anderson uses music, voiceover and energetic camera movement to illuminate what's going on in these peoples' lives, who they are and what they want. The film works because we already know these people after this one sequence, and from there, it's not a long journey to caring about them.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

01:56 / 27.03.07

Watching Guy Maddin's adaptation of the Mark Godden ballet about Dracula, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary - does a lot of ridiculously good stuff with inverting timeline and compressing whole swathes of character into thirty seconds of dance. Harker's story - his time in Castle Dracula, is compressed down into snippets of action with intertitles, maybe five minutes long, nested within the larger narrative.

10:45 / 27.03.07

Speaking of opening credits, the intro to Point Blank is utterly without fault: a series of artfully shot stills and brief snatches of movement which spin together in a lip-smacking two minutes, Lee Marvin's escape from Alcatraz after being left for dead in a botched heist.

Annoyingly, this clip leaves out the very beginning, Marvin's shooting, but there's plenty to think about if you follow the Chris petit line: that the whole plot emerges as a kind of death dream in the character's final moments.

19:30 / 27.03.07

Not sure if this is completely applicable (but maybe kind of):
If you look at some early silents there's very little elipsis of time (movie-goers weren't as cine-literate as we are today). If a narrative requried forty men to jump over a wall you'd pretty much have to see every person do it or it wouldn't carry with the contemporary audience. Similarly, things like cross-cutting between disparate scenes (to either increase tension or as a tool to condense lengthy narrative) wasn't in regular use.
Err.. point being that as we're a reasonably cine-literate society compressed story telling is a given, easily understandable and sometimes (although unfortunately not all of the time) leaves room for the real meat of the story.
It has to do with pace, frequently, I suppose, like aforementioned. If you look at Yasujiro Ozu's films alot of their appeal lies in the lack of compression, their lack of need for exposition. They're pretty much wholly concerned with daily plod and undramatic emotion, which isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Good Examples of compressed storytelling?

Series 7: The Contenders. The reality tv format, practically bullet point character information via voice-over, previous episode snippets, set the scene perfectly. (But once again it only works for the cine-(or in this case tv )-literate. (And in a similar vein you have Battle Royale).

Tarnation (seems another obvious example).
Lots of exposition there. Gives you a haze of truth from a hotchpotch of different medias. Literal bullet points in this one.

How fast can I stand a story to be told?
As fast or as slow as the story needs without negating the story's main point of interest really (Be-it flashy action scenes, beautiful aesthetics, emotional peaks/lows, goretastic gun battles whatever).

Mebbe I'm not getting to the issues core, though.