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March 06, 2007

More Zodiac

Instead of working on my Creative Capital application the other night, I decided to be characteristically irresponsible and (uncharacteristically) go see Zodiac again. It's not often that a film can sustain its hold on me over two consecutive viewings - generally, when I watch something a second time, especially in such short order, it's to zero in on particular sequences or details; whatever sense of chronological surprise the film might have had is gone. But James Vanderbilt's script is so rich with information, and so beautifully constructed around that information, that I literally forgot where it was going, forgot that, of all the facts in the film's neverending stream of them, the most important one would remain missing.

Larry Gross hones in on this structural phenomenon in his appreciation of the film at Movie City News:

...knowledge has become pure form, stretched out precariously as an abstract “story” across the abyss of the lives that have been swallowed up in the failure to become its content. The haunting final scene exquisitely utilizing characters we barely know and can identify, “completes” the abstract search for truth.

Gross pinpoints just about everything that makes this such an extraordinary thriller, including my own favorite element: the fluid role of the protagonist. Each character essentially serves as a host for the transient obsession that, in the constantly shifting flow of time and personae, is the film's singular, haunting constant.

Gross also points out that "the fact that it was shot on video and exists immaterially as digital information is thus not a merely decorative issue but crucial to its meaning." I think that it's definitely ancillary, but I don't know that it's crucial, partially because it's so formally invisible as a creative choice (unlike another film Gross cites, Inland Empire). The first time I saw the film, it scarcely crossed my mind that I was seeing a digital image transferred to 35mm. Of course, prior to Zodiac's release, the fact that it was being shot digitally, and immaterially, was the most interesting thing about it. The tapeless workflow was outlined in this article in Millimeter Magazine last year.

There's a telling paragraph in which Fincher "laments" that we "live in a world where we still have to exhibit on film, at least for now." My second viewing of the film, though was via a Christie digital projector, which every now and then, in the more brightly lit scenes, betrayed the film's true medium. The most interesting thing about looking at the HD image was that I recognized it. Sure, the color sampling is a bit higher and the 1080 resolution less compressed than what my own camera can produce, but it still looked familiar, approachable - an affect which made the film more realistic and immediate, and also slightly less surreal. It was slightly disconcerting, actually; I'm a proponent of digital exhibition, but at this point, I still sort of prefer the alchemical aesthetics of the 35mm transfer, where those sharp lines decay a bit, and the blacks are just a little bit more crushed.

* * *

I went back and looked at some of Fincher's earlier work last week, including his first film, Alien 3. I'd seen the film years ago and didn't think it was quite the disaster so many think it is, but it didn't really make too much of an impression. What I watched this time, though, was the extended cut, culled from various workprints and editing logs, that was included on the DVD released a few years back. This restored cut is shockingly good - great, even - and it makes an absolute travesty of the original theatrical version (and fools of the studio executives who released it when such a wonderful film was already shot). Fincher's direction is restrained and mature, and ripe with terrible, beautiful imagery that predicates the grungy religiosity that would follow a few years later in Seven. And the script actually (shockingly) turns out to be pretty well-written; the scene with the alien birth, as it was originally conceived, is brilliant.

* * *

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Edward Norton had this to say about his Fight Club director:

Probably pound for pound, he's the most comprehensively talented film-maker I've worked with. He is a better photographer than the DP, a better writer than the screenwriter, a better actor than you are - he's just an amazing renaissance technician of film. And he could be your shrink and he's got a great grasp of it all. I can't explain it, he's really got a facility with the medium, it's like film becomes more fluid in his hands. I don't think he sees it as literally as other people, and his sense of how to juxtapose imagery is really wild.

The interviewer responds by saying that Fincher is "the closest we have to Stanley Kubrick." I see where he's coming from, but I think it's a somewhat limiting comparison. They're amazing directors, both of them, and yeah, they both are (or were, in Kubrick's case) exacting and demanding and quick to do dozens if not hundreds of takes to get a shot right. But while they're means are the same, their ends are separated by generations. I think Kubrick was shooting for - and achieved- high art, but Fincher's after something different. He said in an interview around the time of Panic Room that "I think the movies I make are trifles. They're footnote movies." Maybe these trifles aren't art in and of themselves, but they are, undoubtedly, utter exemplifications of artistry. And with Zodiac, I think he may in fact have overshot his own workmanlike goals and come up with something classic.

Posted by David Lowery at March 6, 2007 11:46 AM

Comments

Posted by: anon at March 7, 2007 05:36 PM

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