Technicians and Magicians

Can we learn a useful point by contrasting those filmmakers discussed all the time on Youtube with filmmakers rarely mentioned? I think we can.

Certain film creators are candidly technicians: their methods can be separated from their films and analyzed. We need technicians because they can show us how things are done; they can teach us the craft of movies, and inspire, in turn, a new generation of creators. When I think of technicians, I think of directors like Hitchcock, Lean, Welles: directors who allow the scaffolding to remain on their constructions, who leave their works open to be studied.

On the other hand, certain filmmakers are magicians: they rely on technique as thoroughly as technicians, but they conceal their methods behind layers of complexity or implication that cannot easily be separated from their films. The magicians I have in mind are directors like Powell and Pressburger, Renoir, Bergman.

Magicians could be studied. Someone on Youtube with time and ambition could sit down and take apart the methods used in a film like LA RÈGLE DU JEU, and compare them with CITIZEN KANE's. Nobody seems compelled to do this, yet I believe that technically-minded students could learn as much from Renoir as they could from Welles. They could learn as much about technique from BLACK NARCISSUS and PERSONA as they could from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and PSYCHO, but the work needed to uncover the hidden methods of magicians is more complicated, more time-consuming, than the work needed to study technicians.

There is no value judgement, here: I love films by technicians and by magicians. Yet I can recognize the greater ease and clarity in taking apart the films of technicians than in staring at the chasms and whirlpools of magicians, even as magicians compel me to stare.