The Sticking Place Theatre and Film productions

Alexander 'Sandy' Mackendrick, after retiring from his career as a film director in 1969, spent over twenty years teaching his craft at the newly established California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he produced hundreds of pages of class notes and sketches. These texts cover a wide range of subjects, from the intricacies of story structure to the technicalities of directing and acting, from the mythical significance and history of cinema to the science of visual perception. For Mackendrick, all were indispensable skills for the student of film-making, without which the ability to succeed would be severely limited.

Mackendrick's distinguished and influential body of work as a director is not the principal reason why his writings, reproduced in this book, are worthy of study, but it is one reason why we might pay attention to what he has to say about cinema. By the time he arrived at CalArts, Mackendrick had many years of film-making experience behind him. During the war he produced propaganda films for the Ministry of Information, and as a member of Eisenhower's Psychological Warfare Branch shot footage of the Allied invasion of Italy. During his early days at London's Ealing Studios in the 1940s he worked on a number of scripts and storyboarded several productions before directing five films there (of which his comedies are generally considered some of the finest films the studio produced): Whisky Galore (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), Mandy (1952), The Maggie (1954) and The Ladykillers (1955). Mackendrick went on to make the legendary and much revered Sweet Smell of Success (1957) in Hollywood, followed by Sammy Going South (1963), A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) and Don't Make Waves (1967).

For students of film, more important than Mackendrick's nine features is his excellence as a writer and pedagogue, a role he was to play until his death in 1993 at the age of eighty-one. Copies of his notes remain prized possessions among CalArts graduates who speak of their mentor with veneration. Designed to guide students through the disciplines Mackendrick called Dramatic Construction and Film Grammar ('the narrative and visual devices that have been developed through inventive direction and performing during cinema's short history'), the handouts are masterful studies of the two primary tasks confronting the film director: how to structure and write the story he wants to tell, and how to use those devices particular to the medium of film in order to tell that story as effectively as possible. Devoid of obscurantism, concentrating on the practical and tangible rather than abstract concepts of cinema as 'art,' they reveal that Mackendrick had the talent not only to make films, but also to articulate with clarity and insight what that process involved.

The reasons why Mackendrick chose to quit directing and become a teacher are not difficult to understand. By the late 1960s, as Patricia Goldstone has noted, he 'found himself spending more energy on making deals than on making films.' Mackendrick admitted that, after Ealing Studios was sold, 'I had a disheartening time in many ways as a freelance director on the open market, something I was never really suited for.'

At Ealing there was a father figure - producer Sir Michael Balcon - who along with his administration protected me when I first entered the industry in 1946. For ten years I was horrendously spoiled, with all the logistical and financial problems lifted from my shoulders, even if I had to do the films they told me to. The reason why I have discovered myself so much happier teaching is that when I arrived here after the collapse of the world I had known at Ealing, I found that in order to make movies in Hollywood you have to be a deal-maker. Not only did I really have no talent for that, I had also been conditioned to have insufficient respect for the deal-makers. I realized I was in the wrong business, and I got out.

Mackendrick's widow Hilary remembers that 'however ambivalent Sandy was to the cosy world of Ealing compared to the life of the independent film-maker, he had a regular salary, which relieved him of the pressure of finding income to keep going in between projects.'

Moreover, just before Mackendrick joined CalArts, his long-cherished historical epic Mary Queen of Scots collapsed when the film was cancelled. Hilary Mackendrick says that 'Sandy really did feel quite vulnerable, but, in his rather gentlemanly fashion, declined to take the necessary legal action for the studio to honor its contract. He said, "I'll be paid for making films, but I won't be paid for not making films." He suffered from chronic depression throughout his life, and from childhood had been severely asthmatic, a condition that eventually killed him. Sandy was desperately worried when he wasn't working and couldn't see a film in sight, and felt bitter about how he'd been abandoned by the film industry.' At this time, CalArts was seeking to appoint a Dean to the School of Film and Video, and after a number of meetings, Mackendrick was offered a contract that he happily signed.

A CalArts brochure from the early 1970s explains that the Institute had been looking for 'a leader among professional film makers who is not a prisoner of technology but its creative user, and to whom teaching young film artists is not a way to immortalize his own image.' The Los Angeles Times noted in 1969 that Mackendrick originally contemplated the offer 'with no clear knowledge of the operating philosophies that were in the making [at CalArts]. But after eavesdropping at three or four days' worth of faculty meetings, at which [members] kicked around their freewheeling interdisciplinary ideas, Mackendrick says, "I was hooked: I didn't know if they wanted me, but I knew that I wanted them."'

Although he had studied at the renowned Glasgow School of Art for only one year (leaving to take up work in the art department of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in London), Mackendrick found the overtures from CalArts intriguing, remarking in 1977 that 'the idea of starting as Dean of an art school when you haven't completed art school yourself seemed too funny to resist.' After having spent so many years as a film director, Mackendrick believed CalArts was the place where he could best channel his energies and indulge his 'present passion': the 'unanswerable question' of whether or not film-making could be taught, one with which he was to become increasingly fascinated. 'I find myself absolutely riveted to this particular thing I'm doing now by a strange and unbeatable mixture of exasperation and curiosity,' Mackendrick explained, 'and I'm absolutely devoted to finding out how it works.' Noting that he found being associated with his students' rites of passage 'very touching,' he explained that during his first years at CalArts he wasn't in the least scared of learning how to teach, 'because I think that is essentially what a film director does most of the time.'

Former student Michael Pressman, now a producer and director, was in Mackendrick's first class at CalArts. 'Sandy loved teaching, and we really could feel how excited he felt about it,' says Pressman. 'He had several careers: illustrator and cartoonist, graphic artist, screenwriter, then a director, and then a teacher. He had walked away from the film industry, and there were many people in the business who couldn't understand why. I remember being twenty years old and I certainly couldn't understand it. Today, after twenty-five years in the business, it makes sense to me: Sandy just wasn't interested in the machinations of Hollywood. CalArts was the perfect environment for him, a place where he could give students the invaluable benefit of his knowledge.' Hilary Mackendrick says that 'it was as a teacher that Sandy found his true métier, and I suspect his remarkable critical faculties were more appropriate to teaching than to film-making. I know his last ten years at CalArts were his most fulfilling.'

Regarded by many as one of America's most progressive schools of higher education, the California Institute of the Arts, as its current brochure notes, 'was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the performing arts. The Institute was established through the vision and generosity of Walt and Roy Disney and the merger of two well-established professional schools, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, founded in 1883, and the Chouinard Art Institute, founded in 1921.' Under Disney's guidance, degree programs in dance, theater, design, critical studies and film and video (including the influential experimental animation course ) were added to those in art and music. Richard Schickel has written that for Walt Disney, CalArts was 'on a grand scale, his own dream of an artist's utopia reconstituted; it was the old studio art classes grown up. A good deal of Disney's estate went to this, his last monument, which he saw as a place where all the arts might mingle and stimulate one another.'

Established 'with the dream of starting a tradition of academic unorthodoxy,' CalArts has always viewed the 'industrialization' of the arts with a healthy disregard. Though it has fed Hollywood its best and brightest students from its inception, the Institute was originally conceived as 'a facility in which students could make films as an artist paints pictures, a creative setting neither vocational nor academic.' Jack Valero, one of Mackendrick's first teaching assistants in the early 1970s, remembers that CalArts 'was a very experimental place, a kind of bohemian paradise where the key word was 'interdisciplinary.' For the first few years there wasn't even any real testing of any sort, and students got either a pass or fail rather than actual grades. There were never any 'teachers' and 'students' at CalArts, only artists with varying degrees of experience. Though every film school has its own character, being situated just outside Los Angeles and not right in the belly of the beast has always given CalArts more freedom to experiment than other schools, for example USC and UCLA.' As Mackendrick explained, Hollywood studios 'don't dare, can't afford, to try new things. We can.'

This is a group of schools of 'Art.' Art-with-a-capital-A. From the beginning we declared that we were not a trade school: we did not aim to provide the kind of training directed at preparing students for employment in the industry. By industry, of course, we mean the movie business that, in capitalist America (whether or not we like to face the fact), is a profit-motivated enterprise designed to produce a consumer product for a mass market. In general, the teachers at this institute are not in favor of commercialism. Most, if not all of the programs, encourage students to regard the work that they do as self-expression.

Examine the word. Expression, in the sense of externalising concepts, and self in the sense of feelings and thoughts that are individual. The self-expressing 'Artist-with-a-capital-A' is intent on producing work that presents an image of his or her feelings, thoughts, intuitions, and then makes that work publicly available.

'There's something obsessional, compulsive about wanting to make films and we should go with it, not discipline it,' said Mackendrick in 1969. As such, rather than working to 'commercial standards,' something they would probably end up spending their entire working lives doing if they chose to work in the film industry, Mackendrick urged students to toil over their 'own personal projection' of who they were.

Nevertheless, athough CalArts concentrated on 'what's called independent film-making, as distinct from movie directing,' Mackendrick was reluctant to speak of cinema as an 'art,' suggesting that unlike the film director and his multitude of colleagues, 'the true artist works alone.'

There's quite a profession sprung up these days of people who write and lecture about what they call the Cinema, spelt with a capital 'C.' It means 'Film as an art form.' To people like myself who work in film studios, the cinema is more understandable when spelt with a small 'c' and when it means something concrete, often literally concrete: a rather ugly building with lurid posters outside.

As Mackendrick explained in one handout to students:

When I joined CalArts, I quickly realized I should try to conceal a very embarrassing truth. Though I have, throughout a long and lively career, seldom had any really close friends who were not in some fashion involved with painting ( with sculpture, with writing novels, plays or poetry, or with acting either on the stage, in films or both), it never occurred to me to refer to myself as an 'artist.' What I thought of myself as was a 'professional.' First in advertising, subsequently in the cinema with some interludes in theater. A 'professional,' at least in the common usage of this term, is one who is very far from being 'independent.' If the artist seeks - indeed demands and must have - 'freedom,' then the industry professional has to face that what he needs and wants is 'dependence,' the mutual and reciprocal support of others in what is an industry that produces a product designed for mass consumption in the hopes of massive profits.

For Mackendrick, the job of a director was a 'craft' that could be learned by anyone willing to undergo the necessary rigorous training. He was anxious to spell out to CalArts students - many of whom prided themselves on being 'artists' yet dreamt of gainful studio employment as Hollywood 'professionals' upon graduation - that there were very definite skills they needed in order to become efficient storytellers within that system, or indeed any area of film production.

One would not banish pianos from a music school on the grounds that an ability to play is merely a technical skill. We expect you to be able to read a light meter, focus a lens and use an editing machine, because these instruments of the craft are inseparable from the practice of the 'art' of the film-maker.

Writing in 1954 about the studio system, he noted that

[the] whole elaborate industrial plant is a piece of machinery and it cannot turn over until one or two appointed people have fed into it the most tenuous raw material in existence - a creative idea. I have used that word 'creative' with some misgivings. I have referred to art and self-expression. The surest way to cause embarrassment among people who actually work in film studios is to use these words. They sound slightly indecent. This is not humility on our part. It is tact. When we know that someone is risking vast sums of money we think it is bad manners to brandish our artistic temperaments. It makes the business men nervous. And since the money we are gambling is mostly theirs, the least we can do is to act as if we were reliable and responsible characters: not artists but craftsmen, highly paid craftsmen who can be guaranteed to turn out goods of standard quality.

Though Mackendrick was respectful of innate 'creative' ability, he believed it was ineffectual if not accompanied by this 'reliability and responsibility' and a sound technical knowledge base from which to draw. Only with such qualities, alongside the obligatory commitment and toil, would CalArts students achieve their full potential. 'Though it will be only a couple of weeks before you are familiar with the basic mechanics of film-making,' wrote Mackendrick, 'it will take a lifetime of hard work to master them.'

Owing to his convictions about the necessity of some form of training for students of film-making, Mackendrick's approach was perceived by many at CalArts as being somehow antithetical to what the Institute strove to be: an arena for complete freedom of self-expression, an experimental laboratory devoid of any commercial considerations for the industry. Mackendrick was aware of the appeal of experimental storytelling and actively encouraged students to follow such paths by ensuring there was a wide spectrum of teachers at the film school. Don Levy and Nam June Paik taught avant-garde film, Jules Engel tutored students of experimental animation, and Terry Sanders and Kris Malkeiwicz instructed those interested in documentaries. But he nevertheless felt that many of the methods of the avant-garde were at best controversial, at worst an evasion of students' real tasks as film-makers. 'Sandy constantly pushed students to ask themselves exactly what it was they wanted to be avant of,' says Lou Florimonte, who taught at CalArts with Mackendrick for many years. 'If they didn't have a grasp of how story structure and film functioned at the most rudimentary level, just what was it they were experimenting with? Sandy believed there were certain 'rules' that serve as the bedrock of narrative storytelling, a good knowledge of which would help students master their craft. But he encountered many students over the years who felt that stories needed to have something of a magical and unknowable element to them and who were resistant to the way he reduced narratives to their nuts and bolts. Consequently, Sandy's ideas were seen by some as being old-fashioned, unadventurous, and rather commercially orientated, a perception that came from his emphasis on discipline and structure.'

Writer and director James Mangold was Mackendrick's teaching assistant for two years. He explains that 'art schools often attract the kind of people who are resistant to learning certain things. Sandy was the one person at CalArts who said to students, 'By coming here and ignoring those things, you are missing out on things you need to know about.' Though he liked to explore the work of so-called 'experimental' film-makers, Sandy represented the old guard and believed there were certain skills that storytellers needed to acquire before flushing their psyches out through their art. Because he could be resistant to people who wanted to make some kind of passionate mess before they could render even the most basic shapes, Sandy was sometimes in conflict with students who thought he was blocking their personal expression.' Mackendrick, driven by his acute understanding of the grim realities of life in the film industry, felt he was doing no such thing. Wanting to equip students with the most functional and adaptable collection of tools as possible before sending them out into the world of work, the key to his approach was simple: to train students 'so they can cope with anything that might happen.' With the rudiments of film grammar applicable to all forms of cinema, Mackendrick believed that pushing students to familiarize themselves with the 'rules' he discussed in class would help them express themselves with maximum clarity in whatever realm they chose to work.

After nearly ten years as Dean, Mackendrick resigned to concentrate solely on his teaching at CalArts where he was, by all accounts, a hard taskmaster. 'Sandy's ideas were quite advanced for some students, and it's perhaps fair to say he wasn't a natural teacher for beginners,' says film historian Philip Kemp. 'In the classroom, where he wielded impressive authority, his way of teaching was to be very tough, on the grounds that if students were talented and motivated - if they had a genuine need to make films - they would get through regardless.' But though he had a certain aggressiveness and intellectual arrogance about him, Mackendrick elicited fierce loyalty and respect from his protégées who fought to study with him. 'Sandy wasn't intimidated by anyone, yet could be very intimidating himself,' says Lou Florimonte. 'It was difficult to relax when you were with Sandy as he was constantly turning things upside down in a challenging and provocative way. He never set out to offend, he just wanted to keep things alive, and as a teacher was extremely mischievous and unpredictable in a very creative way. For Sandy, good was never good enough, and he would accept a student's deficiencies only after every effort had been exhausted - long sessions of guiding, illustrating, arguing, pleading and threatening. His real gift was being able to see with incredible clarity the work that was presented to him, and one simple comment to a student often meant his ideas would fall into shape. If a student did finally get Sandy's approval, he knew he had a project ready to take out into the world.'

Mackendrick had various methods of pushing students in the right direction. One of the most rudimentary was repetition, an important cornerstone of his system of instruction. Many students recall his aphorism 'Process, not product' and belief in what he called 'repetition directing,' the practice of small throwaway exercises that would place students on the steep learning curve that a mastery of film-making requires. Another, tied to the idea that student films were either 'too long' or 'much too long,' was to place an egg-timer on his desk just as a student was about to tell his story in class. A third was based was based on the series of cards on the walls around his office upon which were written various principles. David Brisbin, a former student and now a production designer, explains that 'in our groups of six or eight people each of us would write a scene and give it to our classmates. We would all be responsible not so much to critique, rather to come up with ways to solve various structural problems as they became apparent. We'd be sitting there talking, and when a mistake was made Sandy would point to a corner and we would all immediately know what kind of changes the script needed. Our student lives very much revolved around what was on the walls of that room. The simplicity of the 'slogans' was very helpful to us all, and the mistakes we all made were usually so standard that the cards stayed up there for years.'

But perhaps the simplest and most effective way Mackendrick got the very best from his students was by forcing them to work hard. He wrote about how tirelessly students needed to persevere in order to realize their ambitions, and about how he himself had much sympathy with students

who try to avoid the exhausting, time-consuming and boring work involved in gathering data, reading masses of background information, traveling to talk to people and exploring places. It's not easy, but it is the grist for invention and an essential step of the creative process.'Creativity' will always look after itself if you are prolific in production, which means starting off by turning out masses of work that is relatively unoriginal, derivative and imitative. When productivity has become second nature, you will find you have acquired a freedom in which your particular and personal individuality emerges of its own accord. One of the things I find most frequently missing in students as they arrive at CalArts is not imagination itself, rather the knack of making a disciplinary effort in the knack of fertile invention. Intelligent and critical students are all too apt to use 'thinking' as a substitute for the much harder work of 'imagining' at the intuitive, emotional and sensory levels. People who talk about things instead of doing them tend to use analysis as a substitute for creativity. But a statement about the kind of effect you want to achieve is never a substitute for the often exhausting labors that must go into actually creating that effect. Work is the only real training.

'I remember more than once writing a three-page screenplay and showing it to Sandy,' says James Mangold. 'The next day he would hand me seven pages of notes and drawings about it. As a lazy seventeen-year old who had cobbled together those few pages the night before my meeting with him, I was amazed at what Sandy was willing to do as a teacher. He worked so hard for us, much harder than we deserved. He was never a nine to five teacher, and we never felt when he closed his office door behind him in the evenings that he had left his ideas and students behind. His response to our work was so incredibly un-lazy and passionate, and there was always a kind of warning bell that I heard whenever I was with him. To me it rang: "I am the writer and director of films you are still watching thirty years after I made them. The determination and commitment I have shown is something you will need if you are to survive in the world I have left behind." In retrospect, I have come to understand that within those seven pages that pulled apart and ultimately annihilated my work, Sandy's lesson was that in order to make something good, real diligence is needed.'

But however formidable his working methods, for many students their time with Mackendrick proved invaluable. 'Sandy gave me a knowledge base from which to draw from, often unconsciously, and not a day goes by in my working life when I don't think about what I learnt in his classes and from his notes,' says former student and film critic F X Feeney. 'I've never met anyone who has as universal and as integrated an understanding of how you get a written story onto the cinema screen as Sandy did. The highest praise I can give him is that he showed us how superficially we looked at cinema. Through my understanding of his handouts I can intuitively articulate what it is about a film that excites me and - crucially - what is lacking in a bad film. What made Sandy unique was his emphasis on craft and his avoidance of talking about 'art' in abstractions and generalities. He was an instinctive systems builder, combining the soul of an artist with the expertise of an engineer, and with a true renaissance man's sense of detail displayed a profound and systematic understanding of cinema's complex weights and measures. Sandy could look at any apparatus and break it down into its component pieces, and taught that by peeling back the layers and carefully studying something, whether it be an image, a story, a vaudeville act, or a joke, it was possible to unlock the mechanisms that made it work, and just as importantly be able to express what it might be lacking.'

Though the selection of Mackendrick's writings presented here is far from complete, it does give a solid overview of his teachings. As he specifically designed his notes to be 'aids to students' memory of our classroom discussions,' Mackendrick was always reluctant to make them available to people not enrolled on his courses. This is why several of the handouts constructed around specific scenes from films screened to students are not particularly useful on their own and not included in this book. Examples of texts omitted from this collection include the comparative piece entitled 'The Play and the Film: Oedipus Rex' that, though fascinating, merely gives a scene-by-scene breakdown of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Pasolini's 1967 film version (both 'worth studying for pure mechanical structure' notes Mackendrick). Another lengthy handout reiterates ideas detailed elsewhere, then uses them to construct a silent film version of the first half of scene two of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (one that, Mackendrick somewhat proudly explains, 'uses only seven title cards containing a total of eight-six words'). 'The intention of this exercise,' he wrote, is not to prove that dialogue is unnecessary in the cinema. Indeed, the reverse. By exploring how film grammar can communicate most of the bare essentials of the narrative without the spoken word, we are able to isolate just how much extra is added by the quality of the dialogue and the actors' performances.

'The Watergate Hearings' is comprised of Mackendrick's transcripts and storyboards of the televised hearings in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and raises pertinent questions about the nature of non-fiction film-making. F.X. Feeney recalls that 'the handout was Sandy's way of getting us to understand that all forms of television and cinema should be looked at in terms of film grammar. It was apparent to him that there was someone structuring the narrative of the Watergate broadcasts, just as there is behind the most elementary piece of news reportage, political propaganda or educational film.' But 'The Watergate Hearings,' like other texts absent from this book, seems to be very much an adjunct to classroom discussions and screenings, and lacks the energy and vitality of Mackendrick's writings included in this collection.

Several handouts dealing with dramatic construction have also been excluded, for example 'From Book to Screen: The Third Man' that compares Graham Greene's novella with the screenplay he wrote for Carol Reed's 1949 film, and another that reproduces a particular chapter of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath alongside the relevant dialogue from John Ford's 1940 film version. One of Mackendrick's most memorable exercises was created when he took the set of storyboards he had drawn of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane - a film told in a series of flashbacks - and re-edited them so they ran in chronological order. ('Needless to say,' wrote Mackendrick, 'it isn't as good, since what has been thrown away is the central thematic idea: the exploration of why the man was the kind of man he was.') And though his lengthy handout on Aristotle's Poetics - primarily made up of excepts from the Greek classic with short commentary interspersed - is also missing from this collection, Mackendrick urged students to read the work repeatedly. Several handouts not re-printed in full are quoted from in this introduction, which also contains interviews with former students and colleagues, as well as extracts from Mackendrick's unpublished (and always undated) notebooks.

In Mackendrick's archive there is a large collection of his Step Outlines and storyboards (often with accompanying dialogue) of scenes from various films. In the days before video and DVD players, these pages must have been treasure-troves for students. But today, however masterful a draftsman Mackendrick was, they seem poor substitutes for the films themselves, titles that include The Asphalt Jungle, Casablanca, The Life of an American Fireman, On the Waterfront (opening murder, Johnny Friendly's backroom, taxi cab), Touch of Evil (dynamite in shoe box), Intolerance, Shadow of a Doubt (various sequences, it being a film Mackendrick frequently used in class), Le Jour se Lève, La Grande Illusion, The Hustler, 8½ (Guido's first appearance at the spa) and North by Northwest (crop-dusting). Two of Mackendrick's favourite examples were the final scene from Chaplin's City Lights and the 1957 Western 3:10 to Yuma, a film that in Mackendrick's mind was constructed with 'simplicity and economy,' full of 'formulaic and archetypical' characters whose dialogue 'has an immediate purpose and effect.'

As producer and former student Thom Mount notes, 'Sandy taught that film is a popular art, not a fine art. The gyroscope that will point your own films in the right direction is a broad understanding of the culture around you.' As such, amongst Mackendrick's papers are his texts on the historical development of theatrical forms and the origins and nature of storytelling and drama, pages that take in Homer, Virgil, Hobbes, Kant, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Bergson, Pirandello, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Freud, Jung, Bettelheim, Ortega y Gasset, Sartre, R.D. Laing, Walter Benjamin, Margaret Mead, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Jean Piaget, Somerset Maugham, Konrad Lorenz, Harold Pinter, Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, Robert Frost and Mickey Mouse, among others. Mackendrick prepared notes on subjects such as myth (that for 'primitive societies represents what bedtime stories do for us during our childhood'), make-believe ('a curiously subtle and complicated psychological state') and religion. Works he considered particularly beneficial to an understanding of myth and storytelling were Johan Huizinga's book Homo Ludens ( 'a study of what has been called the willing suspension of disbelief that is involved in 'playing,' the imaginative act of make-believe'), Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing and Keith Johnstone's Impro (especially Johnstone's work on 'Status'). Mackendrick also produced lengthy summaries of cinema history - from Paleolithic cave painting to Thomas Edison, from Georges Méliès to Michelangelo Antonioni - as well as handouts on comedy, most of which are drawn from Max Eastman's book Enjoyment of Laughter. (Mackendrick told students that 'If you have ambitions to practice comedy, you won't learn a lot from books.') In a summing up for their final class, Mackendrick wrote to students:

What is it I have been trying to demonstrate for you as we have been vivisecting all these stories - stories as varied as prehistoric myths, ancient epic tales of gods and heroes, classic works of the theater, folk stories, fairy tales and even anecdotes, and finally as commercial mass entertainment? It's this: they all seem to share a similar anatomy. Though wildly different in their content, they are curiously alike in structure.

Finally, an important element to Mackendrick's teachings, one he believed to be critical to an understanding of the director's craft, stems from his interest in science and extensive readings in the discipline. Though certainly not the first film-maker to explore such things (in Painting with Light, his classic 1949 book on cinematography, for example, John Alton writes that 'the human brain is the most completely equipped television-studio there is'), Mackendrick believed students should have an elementary comprehension of how the brain functions in relation to visual perception ('the mental reading of the information coming from the eye'). Students may have looked blank-faced when told they needed to know about image movement in relation to the retina, or wondered why they should study handouts such as 'The Evolution of the Eye and Brain,' 'Persistence of Vision,' 'The Illusion of Movement in Film' and 'The Neural System and Levels of Awareness.' But Mackendrick was adamant such things needed to be understood, explaining in a notebook how

the principles of the psychology of perception are important to students' understanding of the effects of camera movement, and of their value in the study of film grammar... Particularly in narrative/dramatic cinema, the director must rely on the 'tricks' that deceive the eye and the brain. Using these 'flaws' in perceptual processes, he builds out of fragmentary pieces of images and sound a new and persuasive but fictitious 'reality.

Mackendrick cited the work of neuropsychologist Richard L. Gregory, whose work is summarized in one handout.

Gregory's point is that even our everyday perception of reality is in a sense illusory. Film/video language is a system of visual and aural signals conveying meaning and structure to the mind, not the eye. The mechanism of the eye (not only the camera-like aspects of the physical eye itself, but the nerve-chemistry of rods and cones in the retina) supplies information that passes along the optic nerve to the cortex where the signal is decoded and interpreted. This is a complex process, but what is important for the film director to understand is that the brain (the mind's eye and ear) is active. The eyes may do some of the decoding, but it is the brain that reads the visual and oral information, sometimes relying on information from both, as well as calling on stored memory, to find meaning. In short, perception is not a passive activity: it involves making a decision about the sensory data that is supplied.

The many pages on the science of perception and vision are not included here because they are probably either out of date, or available in a more coherent form elsewhere, or both.

Mackendrick's notes are generally free of personal anecdotes about his own work as a director (the most obvious exception being the lengthy piece on Sweet Smell of Success in the Dramatic Construction section). 'A director should never, on any account, try to 'explain' himself,' he wrote. 'What's more, the impossibility of being objective about one's own work is what makes it so much more useful and instructive to use as study material the work of other people about whom one can be relatively objective.' But the most important reason why Mackendrick avoided using his films as classroom examples was that he was increasingly convinced of 'the harm done to young folk by what is known as the cult of the director - the director as the figure responsible for everything,' something he was 'dedicated to stamping out.' For Mackendrick, the very word 'director' implied being in control of other people's skills just as much, if not more, than the exercise of one's own craftsmanship. As he explained, 'The true role of a director involves more than having practical experience in various technical skills - it means functioning as a leader who is able to give direction to a group of other talented individuals.' In fact the great directors, he suggested, 'dissolve and disappear into the work' while making 'other people look good.'

I am nothing but the centripetal force that holds these interpretations together. I may privately think I did it all, but in fact I'm kidding myself, because the director is merely the channel of other people's talents.

One of Mackendrick's most ardent beliefs about the collaborative nature of film-making - and a critical link between the two sections of this book - was the importance of writer and director working together in order to bring their visions to the screen within the same film. As far as Mackendrick was concerned, the technical concerns of film grammar were never to be explored independently of story, while at the same time any competent piece of cinematic storytelling was an inevitable example of how 'form can never be entirely distinguished from content.' Mackendrick was keen to emphasize that everything in a film should be at the service of the narrative, whether it was lighting ("What mood and emotional tone can be established through the use of light and shadow?"), editing ("If I cut here, what will be revealed to the audience, what will be left out, and how will this help tell the story?"), framing and shot size ("If I use a close-up here rather than a long shot, what am I asking the audience to think about?"), camera movement ("If I move the camera, from whose point of view will the audience be experiencing the action?"), or acting ("How can I use this prop to convey a particular story beat to the audience without saying anything?"). 'Every bit of a film,' wrote Mackendrick, 'ought to be a necessary part of the whole effect.' Simply, the wide array of concepts articulated in the two sections of this book were always intended to reinforce each another.

By plotting, in two intricate handouts, the precise physical moves of characters in various scenes from Orson Welles' Touch of Evil and Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, by alerting students to the camera moves and shot sizes used to reinforce thematic content, by demonstrating how the characters interact with each other and with on-set props, Mackendrick was able to show just how unified his notes on Film Grammar, Dramatic Construction and acting are. 'How does one go about planning the camera angles and moves, the staging of the actors, and the decision when to cut away from one shot to another?' he asked in a handout.

It must start with the story, needless to say. When working with a text, the first thing a director must do is break the scene down into moves. This doesn't mean physical moves, rather the dramatic beats that mark the intentions of the characters, the steps of story progression, all of which are only later gradually translated into the staging of the actors. What students must do is think first from the point of view of the performer and only then consider what things look like through the viewfinder.

There exist several practical guides to film production, and many volumes that purport to teach the craft of writing for the cinema. While preparing this collection I read a good number of these texts, something that enabled me to understand what makes Mackendrick's book so distinctive.

First, unlike most books on the subject, On Flm-Making is written by a bona fide film-maker, a man whose cinematic achievements are recognized more than thirty-five years after he directed his final film. Moreover, his insights as a teacher come not only from his years of practical experience, his time spent as a professional writer and director in Hollywood and elsewhere (Mackendrick was nearly sixty years of age when he taught his first class), but also from his subsequent twenty year study of how film-making might best be taught.

Second, Mackendrick is a lucid, vibrant and invigorating writer. Compared with the overwhelmingly shallow and self-serving prose of the more than three dozen authors I consulted (primarily those claiming to know the secrets of dramatic construction), this volume has genuine literary qualities. It also, thankfully, eschews the 'Believe In Yourself' and 'Maximize Your Creative Powers' approach so many 'how-to-write' books take.

Third, most crucially, Mackendrick's belief in the exploitation of cinema's unique qualities as a storytelling medium is something other books on screenplay writing largely ignore. So enthralled by their apparent understanding of how a well-written film script is structured, these authors either totally disregard or breeze perfunctorily over the inextricable links between the work of the screenwriter and the film director. But as Mackendrick explains in the following chapters, a writer's ability to do his job is severely curtailed if he has only a superficial knowledge of how cinema functions as a medium. Most other books explain that dialogue should be kept to a minimum (the old adage 'show, don't tell' is ubiquitous), while the subtly distinct idea that words be used merely as 'the sprinkles on top of the ice cream cone' is relatively unexplored. A good example of Mackendrick's characteristic approach is his discussion of 'subtext,' a crucial component of any film story. In most of the books I consulted, subtext seems to be confused with 'subplot' and is explored entirely from the writer's point of view. Though in the theater it is the actor's job to render even banal dialogue meaningful (with - as Mackendrick would call it - different 'colours'), with cinema it is the competent director who will use the fundaments of film grammar to turn script pages into effective cinematic sequences. By not taking into account what the camera, lighting and editing machine are able to convey to the audience, regardless of what is being said by the actors, other authors explore only half the story. In fact, most other volumes scarcely touch upon the concept of visual storytelling at all, and when they do often make what Mackendrick would have considered a fundamental error. For many writers, a film that contains beautiful cinematography and imagery is 'visual.' But to Mackendrick such works were merely pictorial. A truly visual film, he explained, is one that exploits the medium of cinema to the fullest extent by telling its story primarily with shot-to-shot images.

This volume is not the final word on the craft of film-making, merely one man's carefully considered thoughts on the subject. Much of what follows may be seen by some readers as representing an extreme point of view. But this is probably the point, for Mackendrick was aware that students would pick and chose from his ideas, inevitably combining them with other teachings, as well as their own notions of what cinema is. Always keen that film-makers steer clear of books about cinema ('talking about film is something of a contradiction in terms: it is already in the wrong medium') and reluctant to edit his own writings into a coherent text for publication, Mackendrick was always anxious that students concentrate on the practical applications of his classroom teachings.

One of the ideas that pervaded CalArts' classrooms from day one was that of 'No information in advance of need.' As Mackendrick suggests, this book (which is full of information) is perhaps best appreciated by those neophytes who have already experienced their own practical difficulties in writing and directing for the screen. But even for those people who feel the need - erroneously, Mackendrick would have insisted - to read a book or two before they pick up their equipment and start experimenting, it is safe to say that these notes contain much that film-makers and artists might dwell on. Cameras and editing systems are, to paraphrase Jean Cocteau, as accessible and affordable to today's directors as pen and paper are to the novelist. Consequently, once Mackendrick's writings on cinema and storytelling have been absorbed and digested, there can be no excuses for not putting this book down and pushing forward with your projects. It is here that the ideas will cohere, the mistakes will be made, and the real work done.

Paul Cronin
London
July 2003