Was I Wrong About The Irishman?

[Music] back in 2019 i made a video comparing the irishman and goodfellas this long steadicam tracking shot is undeniably reminiscent of two shots from goodfellas a core premise of my video was that martin scorsese is creating meaning by contrasting the way he uses long tracking shots in the two films by using the same technique to illustrate a gangster alone at the end of his life scorsese is drawing extra attention to the emptiness and fleeting nature of those benefits and to the different perspective that the irishman will be taking on its subject matter then a little while ago i was watching an interview and he says this um i knew it had to start that way and i knew people would say well that reminds me of the shop in the copacabana has nothing to do with i just have to find this guy sitting there you know um and let's just go through this um uh this retired living likes with the camera you've been revealed as a shameless comment saying you're over analyzing things are actually true to do it this video is sponsored by movie go to movie.com thomasflight for your 30-day extended free trial in the big fight scene from noah bombach's marriage story scarlett johansson's character is offered a choice between beer water and a juice box you want something to drink she chooses the juice box and eventually sets it down and it appears here in the last shot of the scene what does this juice box symbolize what does it mean we can take a guess her choice of juice box contrasts charlie's choice of beer showing she's taking a more sober approach to this conversation but how do we know this interpretation or analysis is valid david f samberg the director of annabelle creation and shazam occasionally makes youtube videos and video essays in this video he talks about how a lot of movie details can just end up being the byproduct of having to solve certain problems on set this exterior location is scheduled to shoot early on and turns out we don't have faith who plays darla because she's still on another show and at the end of the video he mentions how this has affected the way he views video essays but working with movies has kind of ruined video essays and film analysis a little bit for me because you just never know if something was part of a brilliant plan or if it just happened to turn out that way because a problem had to be solved on the day in shazam darla has a clearly defined arc early on we see her being the slowest of the foster kids which is of course the setup to the payoff of her getting super speed powers later on yeah yeah yeah yes so from that perspective we can't or maybe we shouldn't read too much into the juice box maybe the juice box doesn't symbolize anything noah bombach just wrote that there would be three options and the production department chose the first three things they could grab maybe scarlett johansson just prefers juice but then the same day i watched sandberg's video i ran across this video of noah bombach breaking down the scene the juice box initially came from the fact that i thought well okay well charlie's living here alone he doesn't have much and she ends up making her way over to this chair here and and laying it down on the floor this all leads to the final shot of the scene which is this wide shot as he falls to the ground and i felt like the juice box is henry's presence in their lives and in our lives as an audience you know that he's not in this scene he's not here but but he is there and he's really powerless in this situation so maybe we should say the juice box symbolizes henry's presence in the room or does it how do we know the correct interpretation of a scene and who gets to decide what something actually means i absolutely get david samberg's point not everything in every film is meant to have some kind of deeper subtext and sometimes critics or viewers or fans do read into stuff that wasn't intentional but simultaneously there are some directors who can and do put an incredible amount of thought into every little detail and choice they make but asking if a choice was intentional to determine if an interpretation or analysis is valid implies that the meaning of something in a film is entirely defined by the intention of the director but somebody might watch this scene from marriage story and think that her choice of a juice box is a symbol of her being childish despite what noah bombach intends so where do we draw the line does a director's intent for a creative choice matter when we're determining the meaning of a film yeah yes the answer of course is it's complicated there are some people who take the director's creative intent as the final infallible word for a film these people are essentially treating the director's word as objective truths about what a film means and if your interpretation or experience as a viewer differs from that intent well then your interpretation is wrong because of this some directors knowing that anything they say will become the de facto official interpretation to a lot of people choose to keep silent to maintain a degree of ambiguity and force the audience to interpret things for themselves believe it or not eraserhead is my most spiritual film elaborate on that no i won't but does the director if they choose to talk about it actually have the final say about what something in a film means i don't think so i don't think intent automatically equals meaning for several reasons for one thing as much as some directors want to have dictatorial control on a set they usually don't many hands go into making a film and many different people make creative choices that end up in the final film there are a lot of examples of directors and actors actually disagreeing on their own personal interpretations of a character or a scene in a film harrison ford and ridley scott famously disagree over whether deckard is a replicant in blade runner so if we as the viewer are looking at the film and trying to determine which of those is the case there's actually competing intense in the film more recently in mid-summer director ari astor and florence pugh said they disagree about what the character is experiencing in the film's final moments as the audience we don't know what the character is really thinking we have to interpret that based on what's on screen so if aster and pew both had different intentions which defines what is on screen while the director usually has the most control it doesn't really make sense to look to one person as having the final say in what every little thing in a film means but there's another reason why director's intent can't be the final word for what a film means just because a director intends something doesn't mean that's actually what comes across on screen sometimes there's a big disconnect between the intention and how a film is perceived by a lot of people a portion of the matrix resurrection is spent addressing this very issue they took your story something that meant so much to people like me and turned it into something trivial the way culture broadly interpreted and understood the original matrix didn't line up with the wachowski's intent when someone watches a film their interpretation of what that film means unless they've consumed behind the scenes content ahead of time simply comes from the film itself its relationship to other pieces of art and movies that that person has consumed and their own personal life experience and if you walk away from a film with a certain interpretation and you find out later that the director intended something entirely different does that invalidate your initial feeling and experience of the film i don't think so all that means is that you read something different from the director's intent for the film that could be because of your personal bias and experiences and perspective or it could be because the director actually did a bad job of translating their intent into the film now you might change your mind about a film after you hear other perspectives or go back and re-watch it but you can't erase the initial experience and feeling you had about the film and finally i think one of the most important reasons we can't rely on a director or author as the final say for what something means is because meaning appears in things even when people aren't trying to put it there when we talk about what a juice box means or the significance of a certain type of tracking shot we're not talking about a film's explicit meaning we're talking about implicit meaning meaning that's insinuated through abstraction and symbolism for example in parasite nobody is arguing about whether the lower class family actually lives in a semi-basement home that's part of the explicit meaning of the film but you could say that that family's position geographically as lower than the rich family is a symbol of their class that's an implicit meaning and in a lot of cases implicit meaning can actually even be pretty clear but it's much more open to debate than explicit meaning an implicit meaning can creep into a story even when the author isn't intending for it to be there maybe they didn't know why they were making a certain creative decision but it just felt right at the time or maybe cultural norms or pressures led them to craft the story in a certain way but either way there can still be reasons why certain creative decisions were made even if the author or the filmmaker wasn't explicitly conscious of them as they were making them and as a viewer sometimes we notice and pick up on these things where the filmmakers didn't sometimes critics or film scholars call this kind of meaning symptomatic meaning and it can go very deep into a film a film can tell us things about a culture a time and place or the director even when the film itself is not trying to communicate those things intentionally going back to the irishman score says he can say that he didn't mean for the use of the tracking shot in the irishman to be a callback to goodfellas but regardless of what he intended i think it literally is he's a director using the same kind of shot decades apart in two different gangster films and using the same kind of shot for different purposes highlights the difference between the two films whether scorsese likes it or not score says he might just be thinking about it as the best way to shoot the scene but to me the clear difference in how he applied that technique says a lot about the kind of story he's trying to tell in the irishman versus the story he was trying to tell in goodfellas and his evolution as a filmmaker and person between those two films at least that's what it did for me when i saw the film now i am wrong in the video where i assert that scorsese used the tracking shot intentionally to create this contrast but that's a different issue that doesn't have to do with whether or not that thing is actually meaningful just with whether or not i properly attributed why it's happening in these kinds of scenarios there's a certain amount of guesswork involved and if i think something is meaningful i'd rather accidentally attribute it to being intentional than say something was a happy accident when the director actually meant for it to be the case but does this mean that every interpretation of a film is equally valuable and that a movie can just mean whatever somebody wants it to mean well i wouldn't say that any individual's experience of a film is technically invalid that doesn't mean that that one person has the right to insinuate that their interpretation is the universally correct one i think people put forth interpretations of films and the value of a given interpretation lies in how well that interpretation resonates with other people and whether it expands people's understanding of the film then over time generally we'll develop a loose set of culturally accepted interpretations for a given film by comparing different people's experiences and interpretations and maybe taking into account what the director's intent was if they talk about it and if somebody's single individual interpretation is way off that mark will probably say they're wrong find it ridiculous or just disregard that interpretation as not valuable for example you could say that to you parasite is a celebration of capitalism but most people would just disagree with you but i'd go so far as to say that you don't personally get to choose what your interpretation of a film is you can say a film means whatever you want but if what you say a film means doesn't align with your personal experience of the film you can't force yourself to experience the film in a certain way for example if you watch bambi and you find it sad and you cry every time you can't suddenly decide that bambi is a comedy and find it really funny and i think good interpretation in large part is just being able to honestly convey your understanding of a film to other people you do analysis to try to figure out why you experienced a film in a certain way not to figure out what that experience was and a good analysis or interpretation will resonate even with somebody who disagrees with you because you'll do such a good job of explaining or arguing for why you experienced it that way but does all this mean that a director's creative intent is meaningless and that we should just look at our own experience and feelings about a film i don't think so knowing a director's creative intent and other people's interpretations helps us better understand the language of film and the process of communicating a certain intent on screen it's easy to want there to be a clear objective way of evaluating things but instead we're stuck with this messy collaborative process of putting forth our individual perspectives comparing notes and then trying to come to some kind of consensus as a group we strive to develop an idea of objective quality even though this is technically unattainable because it helps us develop a common visual language and grammar we can use to make art that resonates with other people but ultimately no one owns the final say on a given work of art not even the director you have to evaluate the work and other people's interpretations for yourself thank you so much to mubi for sponsoring this video if you want to really understand how competing in tension can exist in the same piece i definitely recommend checking out meeting the man james baldwin in paris you've veered the film off your literary work and on to what you feel it's a short little documentary but it's a fascinating look at how the directors of the documentary come into conflict with the subject of the documentary james baldwin and there's kind of a little bit of a competition over whose message is going to get across movie doesn't just have documentaries they have international indie cinema festival favorites a huge incredible selection that they hand pick for you and they add a new film every day mubi is a great place to go just to find something new inventive and interesting to watch when you sign up using my link you can get a 30-day extended free trial so you have no excuse not to try it out go to mubi.com thomasflight that's movie.com thomasflight or click the link in the description or on the screen to sign up today [Music]

Channel: Thomas Flight

Views: 257,287

Keywords: Video Essay, Thomas Flight

Id: _o5WVCCONsA

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2022