| | | | | | have resisted such influence. Their presence alone will electrify your project. It may even force you to reevaluate not only your direction but your entire filmmaking practice. | | | | | | | | | Staging involves not only the actors in a space but the view from the camera, the light that shines on the scene, the sounds we hear, etc. The conventional manner of conceptualizing this grand ensemble is to assume that all these elements build on each other. The camera's job is to support the actors' confrontation from that angle and that height. The light's purpose is to reveal the protagonist's expression, to tell us what kind of day it is and the general mood of the scene. The sound's goal is to make sure we hear what is being said over the noises of the world and the music. In effect, this way of directing the film adopts what Richard Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk, the working together of the different components of the work. 66 Staging a performance of the Walk re, Eisenstein described what it was like: "Men, music, light, landscape, color, and motion brought into one integral whole by a single piercing emotion."67 Despite their belonging to entirely different aesthetic domains, the realms combine in providing a single overall tone to the piece. One could say that they relate to one another as different voices in a harmonic composition. The work as a result achieves formal unity. | | | | | | | | | There is another way, however, of imagining the overall operation of staging, and that is to construe it dialogically. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian formalist thinker, introduced the notion of dialogism as an alternative to the usual situation present in the novel wherein the author conveniently dominates his characters as God its creation. In such texts, individuals are allowed only so much independence. Their entrances and exits from the narrative, what they do or say, all is carefully orchestrated so as not to upset the overall balance of the text. These characters then are not really on their own. They have little opportunity to air their full views or let out their complete personality. Although they act and talk in the narrative, their comportment and conversation are let in only insofar as they do not do damage to the main thesis expounded by the author. Using the work of Dostoevski as an example, Bakhtin presented an entirely different way of handling things. In Dostoevski, he said, each character is given the entire stage to present his or her views so that it becomes more difficult | | | | |
