Storyboarding, comic books and Miho's cute but deadly mayhem

I have often wondered whether film directors who 'come at' film in a predominantly 'motion picture' manner are different to those diectors who come to cinema via another artistic medium, whether it be drawing/painting, sculpture or writing. Whilst storyboarding is an essenetial ingredient in any pre-production process for a movie, it is invariably done by someone other than the director, someone employed specifically to draw the storyboards working with the script, and under the guidance of the director, to make up what, in essence, is a crude freeze-frame animation of the movie's progress from scene to scene. I may be completely wrong here but it has never seemed to me to be more than an aide-memoire, visual shorthand for the director, to jog his or her memory of the contents of each individual shot and how he or she wants it to look.

However, directors, in the main, come out of the experience of training to be, and experience of, directing 'motion' in real time and they must see it as an ever-changing, continuous 'narrative'; this is probably true also of those who write, at least those who write decriptive novels or short stories which possess some kind of narrative arc. However, is it the same for someone who comes the background of a 'pictorial artist'?  Someone who comes from a background of freeze-frame where you have only one image to get across your idea; even in the case of 'comic book' artists, you capture only about 1% of the images flashing by at 24 frames per second, each image slightly, almost imperceptibly, different to its predecessor.

(I think actors who become directors have a slightly different take on things; they are well used to following another's direction, may contribute in the details, and this I feel allows an experienced film actor, in some ways, to acquire, at least, some training, almost by osmosis, in the art of direction.)

I was reminded of this by three very different movies. One was my annual pilgimage to the shrine of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (Director's cut, naturally), which deserves no further comment from me; I said all I wanted to say in my first post of 2013.  The second was Scott's 'The Kingdom of Heaven', set during the period between the second and third crusades when Saladin emerged victorious after the disastrous (for the Crusaders) Battle of Hattin which left the Europeans in no state to withstand even a perfunctionary siege of Jerusalem; Saladin took the city in October 1187. While the film is, in my version, overlong, and stars the lacklustre Orlando Bloom as the 'hero', it is noretheless sumptious in its vision of both the landscape of Palestine and the opulence of a court conditioned to European wealth and it is Scott's vision of what 'epic film-making' should be, which elevates the .movie above the merely mediocre. (Beside, I fail to believe that any film with Eva Green can be a total failure, just look at the Golden Compass!)

It is well known that Scott used to be a graphic designer before cutting his directorial teeth with idiosyncratic TV advertisements which led to his work in mainstream cinema and I do wonder if his whole approach to visuals is not somehow different to the run-of-the-mill movie director because of his art training in what essentially would be 'static visuals'.

Completing the trio, was Frank Miller's and Robert Rodriguez's version of Miller's dystopian and violent comic book adventures about Basin City, 'Sin Cit'y. What was remarkable about the film was its very (again) idiosyncratic take on the film noir genre. Shot with real actors (the actual roll call makes an impressive cast list of Hollywood's finest, ranging from Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis at one end to Jessica Alba and Elijah Wood at the other)  in a totally digitally created enviroment; almost the entire movie was shot the with barest of sets before a 'green screen'. The effect was both not unlike the normal forties and fifties Hollywood version of 'film noir', shot in the main on back lots or in the studio with a back projection and the worst excesses of the CGI compositor's artifice; it did however share that 'comic book' quality to an even greater extent that did del Toro's versions of the 'Hellboy' franchise. Certainly, in blending animation with live action , it played an entirely different 'tune' than 'Mary Poppin's or 'Who framed Roger Rabbit'.

I have been a sometime admirer of Miller's graphic work since the mid-eighties when he produced the '4 volume' 'Batman: the Dark Knight returns' which fundamentally changed the way in which 'super heroes' and especially Batman was portrayed in the movies, although to be fair to Stan Lee and all at Marvel comics, they had been portraying dysfunctional super heroes in comics since way before the mid-eighties. What was different about Batman was that it was a DC Comics franchise which seldom hit anything more than a simple good versus evil scenario.

On the whole, I tend to find current levels of graphic violence in comic books a little disconderting but this, I imagine, simply reflects the changing nature of the audience; much of the output over the last twenty years or so has been pitched firmly at adults. Whether this reflests a desire to embrace new art forms or whether it is a 'dumbing down' of stories for a much decreased attention span, I do not know. Perhaps it was merely a desire on the part of writers for the genre, and by extension their artists, to follow more ambiguous, and therefore more interesting plotlines and characters.

One of the most interesting aspects to Sin City as cinema if that it was shot in colour but rendered into black and white, in the manner of film noir, and yet retained colour for certain feature, the red dress of a woman or Marv's bedsheets stand out for me. A bizarre twist in a bizarre film. Oh, and Miho is an absolutely superb creation. A whore, she is one of the members of a group that 'self-police' the red-light district in Basin City, thus keeping the pimps and the mob at bay. Wielding two katana*, she expertly chops  up body parts in an orgy of mutilation whose only saving grace was that she very good at it and the film makers chose to display blood on the screen as a pure white fluid rather than the usual dark muddy grey in black and white films; this leant a thankfully comic book quality to the gratuitous mayhem. Very pretty to look at to boot but not a girl you would necessarily want to meet down a dark alley late at night, whatever your intentions!

To answer my initial question; I do not know, perhaps they do not either.


* Katana, the long, curved and very (very) sharp sword worn by samurai in the medieval period in Japan. Constructed by a long, and expensive, process of continually folding and hammering a combination of low cardon and high carbon steel, with frequent reheating and immersing in water, the resulting blade held a supreme cutting edge and could cut a man effectively in half in the hands of an expert. It was usually paired with a 'wakizashi' (a much shorter sword) or a 'tanto' (a daggar). They were both held pushed down on the same side through the 'obi', the traditional wide sash worn round the waists of both men and women in traditional Japanese dress.

A little picture of a Tokugawa (Shogunate) era samurai showing the position of the two swords. From about 1860, just before the Meiji restoration in 1868 which banned the samurai class and made the wearing of the swords that had been the emblem of their rank illegal.