How to Assess Direction

[terabin]

When someone says that a film contains bad/poor direction, what do they mean? Obviously, this thread will be in want of example to help with explanation. I guess I just find that it's rather easy for people to praise direction, and it's much more difficult to do the opposite. When one praises direction, one can say, OH, the director has a distinctive and consistent style, the director has a great attention to detail in the film's mise-en-scene, or the director is able to spin a captivating yarn through film. However, are consistency and meticulousness always indicative of good direction? If the film is engaging, does that mean the direction is necessarily good? Of course not.

What are the criteria for judging whether the direction is good or bad?

How can we distinguish between direction and cinematography, lighting, acting, dialogue, etc? Is this possible given that filmmaking is an ensemble effort? Auteurism runs rampant as an easy way to categorize and digest films, but it seems to me that this director-focused filmic worldview makes it such that our praise/criticism is often vague and baseless. Howard Hawks is great. Kevin Smith sucks. Why? What criteria are we using to judge directors?

Sorry, this probably sounds like film studies 101, but I think there's enough people that don't understand the basics around any forum (even this one) to discuss a little more about what we mean when we assess direction as good or bad.

[GringoTex]

If the film is engaging, does that mean the direction is necessarily good? Of course not.

Please explain, because this makes no sense to me.

[terabin]

Sorry, I meant, "necessarily good."

So I still have to explain it? For example, a film can be engaging based solely on a terrific acting job and a well-written character, something which does not necessarily have anything to do with the director.

[Mr Sausage]

You seem to be assuming that everyone works from some rubric that they fit over top of a film to determine its qualities. The assessment of whether the direction is good or bad depends entirely on the context of the film and the experience of watching it. Aesthetic choices are good or bad based on what they appear to be doing in this or that film. Because one choice works for one film, or even many films, does not give it an absolute value. If you want to know why 'the direction' is good or bad, you need to assess our judgements about specific films rather than ask us to explain blanket statements we have not made.

As for the rest of your post, it's not a question but an anti-auteurist argument.

[GringoTex]

For example, a film can be engaging based solely on a terrific acting job and a well-written character, something which does not necessarily have anything to do with the director.

So a videotaped performance of Hamlet on the London Stage with low lighting and barely audible sound can make for an engaging film?

[Michael Kerpan]

Auteur status is a working hypothesis not an answer.

[tryavna]

Actually, apart from the anti-auteurist overtones, I find this question kind of interesting, because there really should be certain more-or-less "objective" criteria for calling a director "bad." (Most of certainly do that around here -- at least from time to time.)

For instance, over the Christmas holidays, I was stuck in a hotel room during a snowstorm and had few other options than to watch a large chunk of Mercenary for Justice, with Steven Segal. It was, of course, a bad film in virtually every regard: acting, writing, and directing. And I feel pretty confident in condemning the directing, because the director obviously couldn't be bothered to make even the fight scenes exciting or vaguely realistic: actors obviously pulling their punches, broken urinals not leaking water, etc. (And if a Steven Segal film doesn't even have good fight scenes, then you know you're in trouble.)

That's a fairly basic example. But surely there's a level above outright incompetence that a hack director can achieve while still making entirely uninteresting movies, no?

[John Cope]

But surely there's a level above outright incompetence that a hack director can achieve while still making entirely uninteresting movies, no?

Con Air.

[zedz]

So a videotaped performance of Hamlet on the London Stage with low lighting and barely audible sound can make for an engaging film?

Isn't that one by Sokhurov?

[terabin]

You seem to be assuming that everyone works from some rubric that they fit over top of a film to determine its qualities.

Maybe the question then is: is a rubric desirable? Or, is a rubric possible? You seem to be saying no, for the following reasons:

The assessment of whether the direction is good or bad depends entirely on the context of the film and the experience of watching it. Aesthetic choices are good or bad based on what they appear to be doing in this or that film. Because one choice works for one film, or even many films, does not give it an absolute value.

This makes sense to me.

If you want to know why 'the direction' is good or bad, you need to assess our judgements about specific films rather than ask us to explain blanket statements we have not made.

In all honesty, I wasn't referring to any specific statements that were made here or elsewhere.

As for the rest of your post, it's not a question but an anti-auteurist argument.

I'm using the anti-auteurist argument to make my point about the difficulty in assessing direction.

[HerrSchreck]

Sorry, I meant, "necessarily good."

So I still have to explain it? For example, a film can be engaging based solely on a terrific acting job and a well-written character, something which does not necessarily have anything to do with the director.

I don't get the distinction between the necessarily good's in your first and second posts. They look the same.. and it doesn't look like you edited your post after gringos question..

Bad direction can absolutely destroy an actors good job, and many actor's performances are directly the result of the director's instructions-- and there are so many different kinds of directors it's nearly impossible to have a conversation on this topic with the kind of sweep you're looking for. Early Dreyer films saw him almost never working with the actors; Von Sternberg controlled gesture, facial manner, etc, so that you can absolutely attribute performance to him. Same goes with Bresson: he moved them like robots. Even before a set is laid down and camera and lights are turned on a director should be sitting with the actors, taking notes during imrpovs, and dragging good performances out of actors. Therefore in many cases a good performance from a cast is absolutely a sign of good direction. The director who doesn't sit with his actors is taking a huge risk, and clearly Dreyer changed his tune, at least by the time of JOAN-- we know this.

I think if the film is engaging, and you were entertained and forgot where you were for two hours, then the director did a good or competent job-- this doesn't necessarily make him a Great Director. Or an "arty" director. But thats not a requirement. And I'll tell you much of the problem today with directors, as "great" films have had such a resurgence on vid and become such a huge part of our pop culture, is that they are too focused on themselves as "directors", trying to be Great Directors, instead of the grind, the hard doldrums of what they should be doing:

Which is Bringing Out The Best In Everyone They Work With. A director is not there to have a single preoccupation. He's the guy everyone has to answer to, and therefore if there's a bad performance, if theres bad editing, if theres idiotic cinematography, he is absolutely to blame. He's got to have his eyes on all this stuff, helping everyone find what works and fit it into the Big Picture. If he doesn't have one (a big picture in his mind), then hes going to need n awful lot of luck in the end.

The director can and should be blamed for everything thats bad or good. A good director is a guy who makes everything come out "good" in the end. Whatever comes out "bad" in the end is his fault for not catching it, regardless whether it is simply an idiotic line that needs to be tweaked, a ridiculously self-conscious shot, poor casting, etc. A bad director is a guy who doesn't work his shit out beforehand and looks like an idiot in the screening room.

Sam Fuller said it best:

"Work it out befoaw hand.. ya can't make excuses when ya have a bad premeiya. Ya can't say ta the press 'aw, what I wanted a do was this, but it didn't quite work out' cause ya look like a jackass."

[exte]

When someone says that a film contains bad/poor direction, what do they mean? Obviously, this thread will be in want of example to help with explanation. I guess I just find that it's rather easy for people to praise direction, and it's much more difficult to do the opposite. When one praises direction, one can say, OH, the director has a distinctive and consistent style, the director has a great attention to detail in the film's mise-en-scene, or the director is able to spin a captivating yarn through film. However, are consistency and meticulousness always indicative of good direction? If the film is engaging, does that mean the direction is necessarily good? Of course not.

What are the criteria for judging whether the direction is good or bad?

How can we distinguish between direction and cinematography, lighting, acting, dialogue, etc? Is this possible given that filmmaking is an ensemble effort? Auteurism runs rampant as an easy way to categorize and digest films, but it seems to me that this director-focused filmic worldview makes it such that our praise/criticism is often vague and baseless. Howard Hawks is great. Kevin Smith sucks. Why? What criteria are we using to judge directors?

Sorry, this probably sounds like film studies 101, but I think there's enough people that don't understand the basics around any forum (even this one) to discuss a little more about what we mean when we assess direction as good or bad.

I think after going through the Blade Runner boxset, you can find the answer there. See, Ridley did exactly what he wanted to do there. And when he absolutely could not do what he wanted, he went about with the best solutions. Here's a film that was flat out rejected when it first came out and flopped. Then it was retooled (under his direction), and it found new profound life. Why? Look at it. It's the same hard work (be sure to watch the long documentary). Then listen to his commentary and often he'll say it's not about decision by committee. He says a director does, period. He's there to do. He's not there to consult. I think this is very telling, and you'll find this sort of single-minded determination with all great directors. They do what they want to do, and that's it. And if it's all wrong and doesn't work, so be it.... Am I answering the question here?

[terabin]

Bad direction can absolutely destroy an actors good job, and many actor's performances are directly the result of the director's instructions-- and there are so many different kinds of directors it's nearly impossible to have a conversation on this topic with the kind of sweep youre looking for.

Another great argument against the possibility of forming some kind of rubric.

The director can and should be blamed for everything thats bad or good. A good director is a guy who makes everything come out "good" in the end.

I really appreciate this thought, as I don't know that I've ingested it fully before. The idea, then is that the director's job is to ensure that everyone involved is running on full cylinders (and matching the vision that the director has for the film). I think I'm still slightly unsure about giving the director complete credit for or blame for something like the acting in a film, but I see your point. The finished, edited, ready-to-premiere film should be exactly what the director wants. Of course, this is in an ideal world without the obstacles of nagging producers, lack of money, etc. So, to go back to my original question, any element of the film is free game for assessing direction.

[Belmondo]

Remember back in college when our professors demanded (correctly) that we narrow our term paper focus to something that could be fully articulated in one or two thousand words?
This thread is much too broad and I'll limit myself to one aspect of how to assess good direction: PREPARATION
We have all heard that Hitchcock considered the filming of a movie to be "the most boring part" of the process. This is because he worked out every camera angle and every detail of every scene in his mind long before the cameras rolled. He knew exactly what he wanted when he showed up on the sound stage, and when he called for "next set-up", everyone knew exactly what to do.
This leaves only the performances of the actors to deal with, but the truth of the matter is that more often than not, the actors have a pretty good handle on their characters, and the director adds subtlety. John Hustons' guidance to an actor was "gimmie a little more", or "gimmie a little less"; Peckinpah might yell that "I don't believe a goddam thing you're doing", John Ford might grunt (if you were lucky) and Elia Kazan might take you aside and whisper a nasty untruth to get you to cry, but I still maintain that the greatest talent a director can posess is the ability to prepare the movie for filming long before the cameras roll.

[terabin]

Remember back in college when our professors demanded (correctly) that we narrow our term paper focus to something that could be fully articulated in one or two thousand words?
This thread is much too broad

I'm not writing a term paper. I'm trying, somewhat poorly I imagine, to generate discussion.

[Mr Sausage]

You seem to be assuming that everyone works from some rubric that they fit over top of a film to determine its qualities.

Maybe the question then is: is a rubric desirable? Or, is a rubric possible? You seem to be saying no, for the following reasons:

Rubrics are possible, but I think that is the wrong way to go, since they are unprepared for innovation, which means you're either A. continually altering the rubric to the point where it's not useful, or B. condemning or ignoring innovation because it inconveniences your rubric-method.

If you want to know why 'the direction' is good or bad, you need to assess our judgements about specific films rather than ask us to explain blanket statements we have not made.

In all honesty, I wasn't referring to any specific statements that were made here or elsewhere.

I know you weren't referring to specific statements. In fact I was urging you to do so.

As for the rest of your post, it's not a question but an anti-auteurist argument.

I'm using the anti-auteurist argument to make my point about the difficulty in assessing direction.

Auteurism or not, there is a person on the movie set called the director. It should be no more difficult to assess his work than to assess the cinematographer's or the editor's or the sound designer's.

[yoshimori]

... there are so many different kinds of directors it's nearly impossible to have a conversation on this topic with the kind of sweep youre looking for.

This has got to be the prologue to any discussion of direction. Directors we consider "good" have a broad range of interests, expertises, and imcompetences. Somewhat surprisingly though, HerrS goes on to make a couple rules for good directors:

Even before a set is laid down and camera and lights are turned on a director should be sitting with the actors, taking notes during imrpovs, and dragging good perormances out of actors.

But we all know of folks we'd call "good directors" who don't do this kind of "sitting, taking, and dragging". Focus on performance is only one mode of directing. My favorite movie is, perhaps, Zabriskie Point, but I've never met a movie-goer who didn't think the performances were awful. [Are they awful? I don't think I'd say so. I can rarely stomach the performances of Ms Streep and Mr Spacey, for example, but Mr Frechette's was perfectly acceptable to me. Which is to say: what constitutes a "good performance" is by no means always agreed upon, even by practioners, another whole can of worms re the "dragging good performances" requirement. ]

And I'll tell you much of the problem today with directors ... is that they are too focused on themselves as "directors" ... instead of the grind, the hard doldrums of what they should be doing:

Which is Bringing Out The Best In Everyone They Work With. A director is not there to have a single pre-occupation. He's the guy everyone has to answer to, and therefore if there's a bad performance, if theres bad editing, if theres idiotic cinematography, he is absolutely to blame."

Why this phrase should be so is not clear to me. If a director defines his or her role in a particular or narrow way, as having a particular focus (e.g. Cassavetes), why blame him for the supposed faults of others. Of course, most directors will probably want, insofar as they care about them and're able to detect them, to eliminate "bad" performances and editing, "idiotic" cinematography, etc, but the inability to detect major (and especially minor) "flaws" to the satisfaction of the viewer (me) is something virtually no one will be able to do. Though I'd agree that, ideally, a director should be on the lookout for such things, not all directors can be a Malick or a Kubrick or someone with a command of the technical aspects of, say, light, film stock, and movement. We'd never credit Jon Favreau for Chris Doyle's photography on Made, why then blame him if the work of a low-budget cinematographer yields less than perfect (or even "bad") results. To be sure, I sympathize with HerrS' dictat here, but, again, since each instance of filmmaking is sui generis, has its own set of circumstances (many of which are financial, technical, meteorological, etc), best, I think, to avoid such categorical statements.

The director can and should be blamed for everything thats bad or good. A good director is a guy who makes everything come out "good" in the end.

I'd emend that bold-face "everything" above to "something" or "enough things to please me".

Whatever comes out "bad" in the end is his fault for not catching it, regardless whether it is simply an idiotic line that needs to be tweaked, a ridiculously self-conscious shot, poor casting, etc.

Yes. If "bad" means "bad as far as I'm concerned though I may still count him an overall 'good' director for the things that are 'good' in his film".

[the virgin spring]

I've always perceived the role of the director as somewhat of an overlooking god. The acting, cinematography, editing, and sound is somewhat wasteful if the direction is done poorly.
Usually if you consider a film great, you should consider the directing great.(If you don't agree, give me an example) It was their creation, they deserve the credit for making it come together.

[GringoTex]

but I still maintain that the greatest talent a director can posess is the ability to prepare the movie for filming long before the cameras roll.

And then I throw down the Godard counter-example.

I think there are "objective" rubrics by which we evaluate films, but there are a large number of different rubrics: thus, it's impossible and nonsensical to develop a consensus summary of what makes a film great. What makes Hitchcock great has little to do with what makes Hawks great.

[stroszeck]

i think the moral is that cinema is the most subjective of art forms.