Direct Action Cinema
Direct Action Cinema is…
…a practice created to allow actors and technicians high freedom and deep responsibility to create memorable cinema. It is a dynamic jazz ensemble of actors, camera, sound, directors, and editors that creates and interprets together, seeking the unexpected, the extraordinary, the miracles only a well-prepared combo can play.
- Create a situation, define and develop a character. Combine the two and watch them collide, attract, and repel. Build drama from this dynamic, closer to the way life happens to us and we happen back.
- Grow a narrative with the story spine hidden, accreting like a coral reef from within and according to its own inner energies.
- Reject the ‘film as short story’ dictum promoted by Hollywood and the film schools. Smash the iron ball and chain of excessive plot. Create a poetic cinema based not on writing but on observing. Mistrust your ideas and trust your experiences. Discover, don’t prescribe.
- Build a cinema not of auteurs but of interpreters. Film is not a director’s medium. The magicians who bottle the genie are the actors. The magician who lets the genie out of the bottle is the editor.
- In acting - situations, rich discords, conflict, laughter, human dilemma, emotion.
- In editing - a scavenger hunt for the miraculous.
- Fear is the last barrier. Our path is towards our fear!
This is my Direct Action Manifesto, written 10 years before the days of Dogma. Then, as now, I ask myself where ideas, stories, and movies come from. We don’t know and yet we know. One way or the other, they just ‘occur’ to us. We look around us in the world. Something strikes a note. Then another and another and then there is a chord. And the chords and notes combine to make a pattern, which becomes a structure. And that structure works itself out and is called a poem, a song, a screenplay, a novel, a painting.
We don’t create what we know, although if the creation is going to be any good, we have to start with that. Young creators are constantly making the mistake of starting with ideas of exterior to their knowing. In this kind of creation, if it’s a movie, the movie becomes a movie about other movies, and the context is usually derivative and only occasionally interesting. The trick is to capture what we come to know as we work, dredging it up out of those mysterious swamps we usually traverse only in dreams.
Good creation always comes from the creator’s particular viewpoint, urgent hunch, or unexpected surmise, moving back and forth from inside urge to outside perception, and the end result is personal - a fingerprint - a unique, idiosyncratic statement peculiar to the creator’s mind only. And this seemingly tiny peculiarity is the thing that singles out the great from the mediocre, the unique from the commonplace.
I believe that everyone’s uniqueness, if wholly expressed, will have genius in it. My job as a filmmaker is to gather up the uniqueness of each person involved in the production and fashion it into a creation. I try to make that creation as much a reflection of my vision and taste as I can, taking into account all the critical input I can handle without losing sight of my own intentions.
Film is a great, unique gathering device, an apple barrel that holds all kind of delicious fruit. It is unique in that its gathering mechanism is random, eclectic, non-linear, intuitive, and wild, accepting of any and all input with much greater range than in theatre. In the production phase of cinema, there is almost nothing irrelevant. Anything might be used later in the cinema magician’s laboratory: the editing studio. As the early Russians pointed out, context is everything and the assembly of contexts a sort of infinite grab-baggery from the cosmos.
In my Direct Action lab the story which occurs to me, coming from God knows where, is only a starting point, a road map, a pithy suggestion of a juicy outcome. If I were writing a novel, I’d write it, edit it, worry it to death, and it would come from inside me, onto the page, and into your minds through the medium of language.
But if it’s a film, I have many more tricks up my sleeve, many more arrows in my quiver to employ, a totally different set of possibilities to explore, wider and more fertile collaborations to manage. My idea is: the more open my process in the beginning, the more options I will have for form, structure, and content in the end.
Therefore, I don’t write scripts. Most of the time. SIGNAL 7 and HEAT AND SUNLIGHT didn’t have scripts. STROKE, HUSHED, SINGING, and SCHEME, the new 9@NIGHT features, don’t have scripts. They have what I call scenarios: descriptions of a film idea, scene order, character suggestions. Rehearsals consist of improvising the character’s back story at great length, taking as much time as possible to give actors on-location experience (as opposed to intellectualized ideas) of their characters. The ideal is to do all of this out in the world in front of cameras. Then one day the back story ends and the film begins. Nothing changes, but now we’re making the movie. I have set the actors, cameras, art directors and other creators free into their cinematic world. I am still a sort of puppeteer, yes, but a puppeteer who wants to set the puppets free.
Wants to, but never quite does.
R. Nilsson
September 26th, 2007 at 8:17 am
Wow, what wonderful thoughts. Very inspiring. I hope to view some of the films that have come out of this series someday. Cheers to a fabulous movement.
Sridhar
Bombay, India
www.solarispictures.com
September 28th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Hello Sridhar,
Trying to figure out how to reply to you with this new system. If this goes through, I’ll write again.
Rob
September 28th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Hello Sridhar,
Looks like this note got posted. Maybe I’ve got it figured out. Just wanted to tell you I did show some films from this series in New Dehli (Digital Talkies)some years back. Would like to come back to India and show more films. My ex-wife is from Kashmir, and my daughter Robindira, has a “hybrid” Bengali name. She’s a successful jewelry designer who sources a lot of material in India.
One of my heroes is your filmmaker Satyajit Ray, a big inspiration to me. I assume you’re familiar with his work.
Thanks for writing. Good to hear from you.
Best,
Rob
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Dear Rob,
I applaud your philosphy and your goals and look forward to the interpretations being presented at the Mill Valley Film Festival. A great “player” expresses more with a facial expression or a gesture than many “star actors” with their words. Kudos to me for ending this note now.
Carolyn Judd
October 6th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
You are a cinematic genius on the verge of a big bang! Go with the flow. Kudos to the max.
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:21 pm
[…] New World. Prior to my knowledge or experimentation, Rob Nilsson took the concept further with Direct Action Cinema, a cinema of action. I will mix a strong visual aesthetic, experimented with in my art work and […]
November 15th, 2007 at 7:50 am
Keep up the trail-blazing work. I’m looking for you and your team to do a project about 9/11, Iraq War, government corruption, all intertwined with each other. There are a lot of theories floating around about such conspiracies.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Thanks Robert. I do have an Iraq Direct Action Project but have not found a way to get in to do it. As you know I’ve done feature films in Jordan, Japan, and South Africa as part of the Direct Action World Cinema Project. This is grass roots drama, enabling the participants to shape and act in a movie which they “invent” and produce, sometimes in as little as three days. It’s not generally understood how professional and eye opening such projects can be, working with everyday people who play roles they understand from their own experience. Right now I’m in Boston where I showed OPENING last night at the Boston University Cinematheque, one Chikara Motomura and I did in Kansas City, about an art opening which is suddenly hit with a tornado warning. It would be great if you would spread the word about these films, some of which are for sale on the website, but moreso, to drum up interest in communities which would like to make films like this. In Iraq for example. Tomorrow we begin showing the nine 9 @ Night films, Direct Action in the San Francisco Tenderloin, at the Harvard Film Archive. Three films per night for three nights, films we made with our Tenderloin yGroup Player’s Ensemble. 14 1/2 hours of film and fourteen years of work. I believe this work is ground breaking and leads to potential movements of genuine peoples’ cinema around the world.
November 23rd, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I love your direct action approach to filmmaking. It takes me back to childhood when acting and pretending were daily rituals…what a lost art! Pushing cinema to an unfamiliar edge is what creates breakout performances, and I appreciate you making the road a little easier by paving the way for us inspiring filmmakers. Independent film may not have the force of the box office draw but it lends itself so useful to those that want to master the craft of creating something provocative, unique and truly special in the eyes of a lover of light and lens. cheers!
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:03 pm
Hello Maki,
Thanks for your words. I hope the power needed to stray from familiar turf will lead you to discover the personal poetry which will make your work unique. I stand behind you in that search.
And our the next job after finding a way to produce a film, or a body of films is to get our work out to the people. No, our films cannot be popular. Pop culture is popular for a reason. It’s simple minded and easy to grasp, and has, today, become the only culture recognized by most institutes and organizations, museums, galleries,cinemas etc. and so you have the absurdity of Harley Davidsons at the Guggenheim or a Todd Haynes film, for example, seen as a significant statement. Hollywood is a tougher and more entrenched enemy than the pop culture practiced in the plastic arts but there are many brilliant people working there who are filled with guilt, second thoughts or misgivings about the work they do and the money they make doing it, and are therefore looking for opportunities for something done for the sheer joy, the risky shot in the dark, the leap into the unknown. This offers us some chance to work with brilliant and recognized talent, although it also prescribes the danger of accomodating to the fame and power possessed by those who may not, after all, want to submit to the methods of independent artists. The power of media “stars” is heady, palpable and dangerous. John Cassavetes advised all who worked in both worlds to “remember the difference” and that is what we have to do if we venture from the freedom of collaboration with friends and confidantes who want to sleep well at night be it on a bed, in a tent, or on solid old terra firma.
But however you cut it, our job is to speak loudly, clearly, fervently, using all our powers of persuasion, all our juice and judgment, to get our work out there into the world. Next to fund-raising, it’s the most difficult thing to do, but if you don’t undertake it you will be choosing to be changed every time you give your work to a distributor for nothing, every time you lose control of your rights for a nickel and dime (which you probably won’t collect anyway) and every time you get too weary to be the advocate of the poetry you choose to make. I hope this doesn’t sound like a lecture, because really, I say these things to ward off the creatures who wail and scream in the forest at night, rabble-rousers in fraidy- cat trousers who make all of us wonder if we can stay the course. I offer this short rant in that spirit, conjuring up strength with a few chuckles, but hoping to support you in your convictions, your primary companions on a difficult road.
Insight and courage in undertaking that tougher route. Looking over the map, I see no alternative route for you or anyone who feels the calling.
Stay strong… take Aim!
Rob
December 13th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Dear Mr Rob Nilsson,
I admire your spirit. What joy it is to read such a manifesto! I find the Direct Action Cinema Manifesto as important as the Dogme95. I feel that films and acting is a meditation of Life. I dislike films that misinterpret life. It is so inhuman and narrow minded. We make films to understand human beings.
I am still trying to adapt your philosophy. I have been attached to “Films as a short film” concept for too long that my conversion of the DAC manifesto is a complicated one. But with more exploring (and a bit of soul searching), I will reach the promise land.
Hope to attend one of your workshops. When is the next one? Please send me details.
Thank you and Continue Inspiring.
– Raymund Cruz
Philippines
December 15th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
THANK YOU FOR YOUR GREAT WORK.
December 23rd, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Hi, thanks for writing in. Of course I am familiar with the works of Satyajiy Ray… he is the pioneer of the new wave Indian cinema, truly inspiring. Intereting to learn about your Indian leanings. Lets hope our paths cross one day.
I was recently at the Kerala International Film Festival and was on a panel with the amazing Chilean director Miguel Littin who said, “If you have returned, you have never left”. So there, hope you will be back in India soon.
You may please write to me at sridhar.rangayan@gmail.com . I would be grateful if you could mail me your contact since this blog route is pretty longwinding :-)
Cheers,
Sridhar Rangayan
About me at IFFK - visit here