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AN ANNOTATED PROCESS JOURNE Y IN PURSUIT OF THE AMERIC AN DRE AM A S PORTR AYED IN THE FILMS OF SAM MENDES
HARINI VENK ATAR AMAN GR 612 : INTEGR ATED COMMUNICATIONS SPRING 2016
A DIRECTOR OUT OF THREE A WINDING THREAD ROA DM A PS A N D BUCK ETS T H E NA R R AT I V E A UNIQUE POSITION THE PEOPLE
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A Director Out Of Three
Director 01 MAJID MAJIDI
Culture and art are based on common characteristics between people. No matter what country or culture you’re from, you always believe in friendship, you always believe in human values, and you always believe in peace.
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To choose the muse you want to work with for 15 full weeks, a week isn’t really enough. Just 3 movies aren’t enough to prepare for becoming a director’s temporary understudy. And yet, as stipulation demands, out of the hundreds of directors out in the world, and the 50 odd on a sheet, a narrowing down to the number 3 is the first step towards finding that muse.
A director who struck me as someone who deeply considered the moral impact of his themes on his adult viewers was Majid Majidi. Although completely Persian, the aural language of his movies have little to do with the visual language, which leaves no message unsent. I chose him particularly because his main characters show their vulnerable faces to the audience, and his scenarios and resolutions leave the viewers stunned and nostalgic. His visual style is distinctly simple and ethnic, although there is a undertone of poetry to his stories that draws any audience in. His feature film screenwriting and directing debut is marked by Baduk (1992). Since then, he has written and directed many noteworthy films, like Children of Heaven (1997), nominated for the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards; The Color of Paradise (1999), which won the Best Picture award from Montreal International Film Festival, and Baran (2001), which won several
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major awards worldwide. In 2001, during the Afghanistan anti-Taliban war, he produced Barefoot to Herat (2003), an emotional documentary about Afghanistan’s refugee camps that won the Fipresci Award at Thessaloniki International Film Festival. In 2005, he directed The Willow Tree (2005) about a blind man who falls in love with someone other than his wife when he gets the chance to see again, which won four awards at the 2005 Fajr Film Festival in Tehran. I watched The Color of Paradise for this assignment, that tells the tale of a blind boy, his sisters and his widower father who resents having a blind son and tries to hide him away. The repeated and seeming heartlessness of the father contrasted with the simple innocence of the boy brings the audience to an emotional standstill across the length of the movie.
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Director 02 WIM WENDERS
In the beginning I just wanted to make movies, but with the passage of time the journey itself was no longer the goal, but what you find at the end. Now, I make films to discover something I didn’t know, very much like a detective.
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How do you choose a director to be inspired by? The process usually works it’s way out if you’re into making films—you see a film, you are blown away by the sheer brilliance of it, and you start worshipping the mind that was behind this screen magic. But what happens when it happens to 3 people? 3 minds that strike you senseless and pull you from the inside?
Wim Wenders is an Oscar-nominated German filmmaker. At university, Wenders originally studied to become a physician before switching to philosophy before terminating his studies in 1965. Moving to Paris, he intended to become a painter. In his list of accolades, he is also a photographer, and can be clearly seen portraying his abilities in framing and creating vivid compositions in his films. I chose him because of his use of intense visuals and thoughtprovoking core concepts. Francis Ford Coppola, as producer, gave Wenders the chance to direct in America, but Hammett (1982) was a critical and commercial failure. However, his American-made Paris, Texas (1984) received critical hosannas, wining three awards at Cannes, including the Palme d’Or, and Wenders won a BAFTA for best director. “Paris, Texas” was a prelude to his greatest success, 1987’s Wings of Desire (1987), which he made back in Germany.
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Wenders followed it up with a critical and commercial flop in 1991, Until the End of the World, though Faraway, So Close! (1993) won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. I watched Wenders’ Until the End of the World — critically acclaimed as a failure and as the end of Wenders’ reputable Hollywood career. From an avid film-viewer’s perspective, it just felt like an incredibly lengthy usage of time, color, and reel. From a designer’s point of view, it was an expanse of the outdoors, a whole world rolled into a road trip and the visual field of a free flying bird. As many of Wenders’ stories, this one deals with a road trip that spans all across the world with the protagonist, a young woman, in a personal journey of self-discovery, colliding with other supporting characters who in journeys of their own.
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Director 03 SAM MENDES
I don’t want to be known for one thing. I don’t want to have an adjective based around my name. ‘Lynchian’, I know what that is; I know what ‘Kubrickian’ is, what ‘Bergmanesque’ means. But there isn’t going to be, and I don’t want there to be, a ‘Mendesian’.
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At the end of any deadline, what pushes anything forward is it’s gestalt of success. Sam Mendes, the director I chose to work with, was a designer’s delight, in that he had so much variety that would keep my options open, so much depth that would give a project definition and so many visual hurdles that will keep my mind challenged till the very last minute of the project.
Despite the quoted disclaimer, Sam Mendes has a distinctive, classical sense of visual direction that draws the viewer’s eyes to notice and be overwhelmed by the both grand and minute details in his films. I chose Mendes as one of the directors I wish to work with based on the quality of emotional depth his movies tend to involve viewers to feel, and the flexible visual languages that are closely connected by a melancholic beauty. He is best known for directing the comedy-drama film American Beauty (1999), which earned him the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director, the crime film Road to Perdition (2002), and the James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015). While Mendes’ filmography is diverse, his characters and films are often defined by self-loathing or self-reflection. The protagonists he follows are generally at a crossroads, asking questions we all think about: “What’s
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the point of it all?” “Am I a good person?” “Am I like everyone else?” That last question, in particular, plays a major part in his films, leading the audience through a journey of self-discovery that connects in a very realistic and raw manner. Of all Mendes’ films, I watched the crime thriller, Road to Perdition, which was the story of a man, Michael Sullivan, Sr., working as a henchman for his mentor-figure, John Rooney, who favors him over his own son, Connor. The entire movie shifts back and forth between action and drama as fathers and sons struggle with their bonds. Mendes achieved something that was akin to a very rustic, stylish periodical that cut barriers of time and left viewers to directly connect with the fleeing father, a motherless son, a disturbed heir and a regretful patriarch. His storytelling skills and choice of subjects eventually led to him being the driving force of this project.
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W H Y A S A M ME ND E S F IL M F E S T I VA L?
Born on August 1st, 1965, Samuel Alexander Mendes grew up a cricketer, a writer and a dedicated student of literature. Director Sam Mendes, therefore, had plenty of experience in theater before directing his first film. The skills he acquired from the stage, like his eye for performances, was evident even in his debut feature, which won him his first Oscar—among many. Mendes is the man who reinvented the musical Cabaret, making it a massive hit in London. He won five Oscars for “American Beauty” in 1999 when he was not even 35. Since then he’s shown both remarkable range and consistent quality, his eight titles including a gangster film (Road to Perdition), war film (Jarhead), a comedy (Away We Go) and a second American domestic drama, Revolutionary Road, which powerfully reunited Mendes’ then wife Kate Winslet with her Titanic”co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. On stage, Mendes says, you might see similarities in the way a director handles a Shakespeare, a Chekhov and a restoration comedy, although nothing really links those plays. He observes:
“I’ve always been drawn to directors that morph themselves according to the nature of the material. Ang Lee, to me, is a brilliant director who can apply himself very specifically to a martial arts movie, a suburban drama, an 18th-century English classic, or special FX movie. You could study the work of Kubrick and know who the director was just by watching three minutes of a film. He’s not someone who is disappearing into the material, but imposing himself on it. And it seems to me directors are basically divided into those two categories.”–Mendes Picking apart at the time he takes to direct each movie, and the careful methods by which he selects the scripts, Sam Mendes can be considered the purveyor of what he calls the ‘American mythology’— the stage of hopes, dreams and journeys. A Mendes film festival, therefore, is not a typical come-watch-and-go kind of a movie marathon. It is a vacation of sorts, a temporal space for adults to survey the reality (or lack therein) of their fairy-tales, and some well-deserved introspection.
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I’ve always been drawn to directors that morph themselves according to the nature of the material.
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A Winding Thread
Most works by directors can be summed up by their obsessions— those repeated themes continuously articulated and further explored in each of their films, no matter how dissimilar such films may be upon first glance, such as Mendes’ films. While each of Mendes’s films have decidedly recognizable aesthetic traits (connected by his frequent collaboration with cinematographers Conrad L. Hall and Roger Deakins, and composer Thomas Newman), his thematic traits are a bit harder to pin down. Mendes has made five very different films occupying five separate generic categories: the tragidramedy, the gangster film, the war film, the domestic melodrama, and the quirky indie comedy. He has established a distinct visual personality, but with films so incredibly different from one another that he can’t be characterized by a generic thematic repetition. However, excluding his Bond movies, the
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A thread is nothing but the conceptual plotline of all the films within the film festival. In this context, it is the “story” of all films directed by Sam Mendes that are being showcased in this particular film festival, which include: American Beauty (1999), Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005), Revolutionary Road (2007) and Away We Go (2009).
characteristics connecting his films together became apparent and simply describable in one repeated theme/ obsession: his continued exploration of the changing concept of home. Considering this to be the eye of his storms, the meandering thread between all this movies can be captured is a series of graphs which can then be translated into the following thread: Everyone has a fixed sense of normalcy—a routine to follow, a family, and, even a home. An unexpected event, however, shifts their world into a profound loss of identity, and shakes the very foundation of their lives and pasts, forcing them into a process of self-discovery and towards a newly defined home.
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Roadmapping Buckets
PHOTOGR A PH Y_ 01
TYPOGRAPHIC_01
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Roadmapping and buckets are methods through which the projectfinds visual, material and literary direction. Buckets are based on the thread and follow the tone of the director’s conceptual cinematography. There were 2 series of these buckets , before and after refinement of the thread to meet the conceptual and visual directions.
GRAPHIC_01
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PHOTOGR A PH Y_ 02
T Y P OGR A PH Y_ 02
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LANGUAGE_02
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The Narrative
LEVEL 1
LEVEL 3
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The guiding narrative for this festival: I’m a man in my 30s, returning from my last day at the job. The rain begins to pour as I walk into a house with a white door. When I look outside the window, I realize I wasn’t actually home yet. The master-moodboard is the ultimate collection of all the roadmapping buckets into a singular visual pile from which inspired and generated for the visual (graphic & photographic) system of the festival.
LEVEL 2
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A Unique Position
INNER DEMONS
In French, the literary translation of the word mid-life is le demon de midi, or “the inner demon”. As we age, things often don’t turn out as nicely as we planned. We may not climb up the career ladder as quickly as we wished. Or we do, only to find that prestige and a high income are not as satisfying as we expected them to be. At the same time, high expectations about the future adjust downwards. Midlife essentially becomes a time of double misery, made up of disappointments and evaporating aspirations. Paradoxically, those who objectively have the least reason to complain (e.g. if they have a desirable job) often suffer most. They feel ungrateful and disappointed with themselves particularly because their discontent seems so unjustified—which creates a potentially vicious circle.
The unique positioning of this film festival is that it brings and connects the audience deeply to the trauma of non-entity that is characteristic of a mid-life crisis, especially when they are in an age prone to such a self-inflicted tragedy. The festival aims to be a subtle gateway towards addressing the audience to embark on a pursuit of self-reflection and discovery, to bring balance back into their lives and to redefine themselves. A topic hardly comfortable to talk about can be brought to a reflective screen through a personal sabbatical that involves a drive-in movie theater, some drama, laughter, tears and a whole lot of introspection brought about by the questions underscored in all of Sam Mendes’ films.
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The ideas that midlife marks the onset of decline, and that acceptance of growing limitations is the only mature way to deal with aging, are still generally accepted as good common sense. But common sense is overrated. Midlife is not a time of crisis, but a moment of transformation. This film festival celebrates this transitional period with the perspective of dreams, fulfillment and the notion of success.
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The People
AUDIENCE
Men and women between the ages of 35-55 years, who are married and/ or are parents to children entering teenage years. Such a crowd is on the verge of a potential midlife crisis and will truly feel the depth of Mendes’ characters who suffer from a loss of identity at around the same age. Sam Mendes extensively explored the theme of the American Dream in his works, a topic that most of this particular generation grew up envisioning will be their life. It is for the same reason that these are the audience that will intuitively connect with the films showcased in the festival and will find this as a means to start looking at their life with a renewed perspective.
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The festival began as a family trip, but over the course of the semester, it became more and more apparent that the introspection required a higher amount of gravity that children may not be able to withstand. Currently, it is a film festival for adults close to or in their midlife phase.
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POST E R IFIC AT ION BUILDING THE STORY L A N G U A G E O F T H E WA L L THE CORPOREALS DIGITA L PR E SCE NCE S F I N D I N G T H E WA Y H O M E
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Posterification
INITIAL DRAFTS
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The first step to building a piece of the festival is to start big. As big as a poster, say. As many as 10, say. And then refining again and again until it begins to feel like everything you want to communicate without words.
REFINEMENT 01
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REFINEMENT 02
REFINEMENT 03
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REFINEMENT 04
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Building the Story
TITLE IDEAS
In Between Lives
Lighthouse Sanctuaries
Fortress of Dreams
When Straddling Life
The Halcyon Days
Home’s A Feeling
Those Midday Demons
Nooks of Normalcy
Some Tipping Points
Inner Sanctuaries
Wednesday Horizons
Every Glass Path
A Sanctuary of Change
What Mirrors Reflect
Long Journey Home
The Mean Lifetime
The Other Self
Reflections In Blood
Upon Glass Roads Our Middling Quests Stillness of Storms An Infinite Halftime
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How do you begin a story? First the title, then the logo, then the tone, and then everything that sticks to the plotline.
SUBTITLE IDEAS
Searching for the hidden messages in Sam Mendes Films
A Journey on the Self-Aware path of Sam Mendes’ films
Exploring midlife through Sam Mendes Films
Finding the Other Half of Life Through the Films of Sam Mendes
Reflecting upon midlife with Sam Mendes Films
Riding on the edge of life with Sam Mendes Films
Discovering the journey of midlives on a Sam Mendes Movie Roadtrip
Beginning to understand the second part of lives through Sam Mendes films
Questioning the stifling silence of lackluster dreams through Sam Mendes Films
Discovering the definition of self and home in the films of Sam Mendes
Confronting inner demons on a Sam Mendes movie roadtrip A Tour of Sam Mendes’ Films A Sam Mendes Film Festival
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LOGO SKETCHES (HAND)
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LOG O SK E TCHE S (COMP U TER GENER ATED)
IN IN IN BET BET W BE WEEN T WE E N TWEEN LIVES LIVES LIVES
S IN B BET betw TWEEN N LIVES
IN BET T WEEN LIVES
betw lives
inbet ween lives
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IN BETWEEN LIVES
in betw ween lives in
be t w we en li ve s
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FINAL LOGO
Based on the modernist typeface Kepler, the logo was based off of the graphic and typographic buckets from the roadmapping set. The logo was typeset in Kepler Std Bold Italic, and then carefully cut and modified to remove the wonky edges of the letters, to make the logo more elegant, stable and sophisticated.
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The logo of the film festival is the physical, graphical representation of the thread itself. Broken and searching for definition, reality merging with the fantasy, a calm vision cut apart by chaos.
All the parts in the logo that were removed were done in the angle of incline of the letters or on its perpendicular normal. This particular action made the usually strong-looking typeface strangely vulnerable, like a person gone lost in a familiar place.
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Other typefaces in this system include: Din Alternate Minion Pro Gotham Narrow
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Language of the Wall
Based on the American Rose by Alan Ball, American Beauty is represented by the deep crimson hue of vintage blooming roses, echoing the ‘90s when interior design boomed and started imitating Victorian styles.
Road to Perdition happens in 1930s Illinois, and dealt with Irish mobs in heavy downpour. A pattern of umbrellas represents the sombre, dark, cold, dampness that also follows the comic art from which the story sprung to life.
A war biopic in the desert— Jarhead had the camouflage coming. Inspired by the patterns created by oil spills, this also registers as a map of personal dilemmas and forced detachment that Swofford narrates with in his memoirs.
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The sign of a home is not just in the people, but in the imprints they leave behind in the places they live. A simple choice like the colour of your dress can tell the world about your outlook. Imagine what wallpapers can say about how you view your life and your home? Each film in this festival have their own unique pattern of wallpapers generated for visually integrating and individualizing them.
A couple living in suburbia, slowly dying on the inside by the monotonous routine of daily, ordinary life that is the same as countless others: Revolutionary Road is the perfect illustration wallpaper that has endless, seamless patterns from the 1950s, so repetitive that you hardly notice how one line is different from the other.
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If each film was a room with their wallpapers, Away We Go has this one plastered to its nursery. A story that revolves around birth and the spring of a new life, this film is all about children, no matter its language. It about adults who haven’t grown up yet, and kids who live in their own worlds.
Each wallpaper pattern is the unique visual indicator of the film it was inspired by, and was used to build the system that tells the story without needing to use any words.
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The Corporeals
FORM AT A ND M ATERI A L S
Fabric: wool, canvas, cotton Cotton canvas is probably the homeliest material we have all grown up with. From old tablecloths to curtains, we’ve used them to cover up the old stuff, to transform something ugly and plain into something warm and, frankly, comfortable. And what about all those old trousers and shirts that became our grandmother’s hand-woven quilt for us? The subtle smell of last year’s incense, nutmeg or cinnamon lurking in the folds of it— truly, what feels more like home than old cloth-covered new things?
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Close your eyes. Try to remember home: the feel of the curtains; the soft, cotton of the shirt you wore on that warm summer day; the laughter of the kid on the streets; the clouds gathering, throwing a lull into the living room, darkening everything to a stormy prediction; the quiet, solid weave of fabric that covers everything hard with something soft.
Photography Be it cellphone selfies or polaroid snapshots, the fondest memories of every home are captured in glossy rectangles, otherwise known as photographs. This film festival is about home, memories and a space of self-reflection. Just as mirrors do, photographs are moments of reviewing the self outside the body, making it the perfect format to translate the experiential focus of the festival.
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Digital Prescences
WEBSITE
A website was created for this film festival, and can be accessed at the link: inbetweenlives.com The domain was purchased on Hover, and the template was based from Squarespace. Samples from the festival soundtrack are also displayed, along with the schedule, tickets, and other details of the festival, films and the director.
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Every festival today has digital components. Be it an application, or a website, or even a trailer, interface communication has become necessary to facilitate any kind of broadcast, informational or otherwise.
F LY I N G L O G O
A flying logo is simply described as the motion graphic based introduction to the festival. At least five seconds long, flying logos are generally black and white, and involve special animations on the title that closely relate to the thread. This festival’s flying logo works on the concept of a seemingly complete life, represented by the words “In Between Lives� cutting away into more resolution until it becomes the festival logo.
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Finding the Way Home
Having seen the output of this class in previous semesters, I was initially both scared and excited to work my way through it. Finding a director, deriving a thread, generating the mood of the films—sounds like the story of a fun class. And then you hit production, and you’re lost. Very ironically, as th thread suggests, it would seem as though everything was understandable, then something happens so unexpectedly that the trajectory of the assignment shifts partially into oblivion and hangs on to a corner of what could become reality. Sam Mendes is a reliable director, who has a flexible way of directing films that, at first, seem all different, and yet, so similar in the way they leave the audience after being viewed. Perhaps not the most life-changing mind among all the directors, but his works throw into perspective the idea of a modern fairytale crossed over with a possible dystopian side-effect of Murphy’s Law. His themes closely correspond with the circle of eternal change, which states that nothing good can last good forever, nor can anything bad; there is always a balancing that happens when natural or manmade chaos throws comfort out of the window. And therefore, no matter how long you’re lost, you can always find your way back home when you’ve been away long enough to remember yourself.
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At the end of the semester, all this work, and what’s there to be seen? There is a comprehensive list of what needs to be produced for a film festival kit, and there is an additional list of special components. Altogether, a film festival.
As the instructor reminds again and again, this is a systems project: not direction, not production, not animation. As a graphic designer, it is not my responsibility to be an expert on fabrics or wood or glass, but to know whether they guide my thread to prolong. I do not need to create light, sound or life-form to complete my assignments, I had to find the right context to fit separate parts into the gestalt of an integral system. In simpler words, it was to create unity with as much diversity was possible within a particular system, without compromising the concept that it was set to produce. Also, it was kind of fun to put myself through, even if it felt like a military gauntlet for designers.
A list of everything created for “In Between Lives,” a Sam Mendes Film Festival: Identity Poster Advertisement Catalogue DVD album Polaroid tickets Website Business System Container Journal Card Game Planter Postcards Flying Logo Soundtrack
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Course name GR 612 Integrated Communications
Instructor Hunter Wimmer
ESL Support Susan Paisley
Student Harini Venkataraman
Typefaces Used
Print Specs
Adobe Minion Pro Kepler Std Din Alternate Gotham Narrow ITC Cushing Std
Red River 32lb matte doublesided paper Epson 3880 Vivid Pro