ladies and Gentlemen please please patience you must have patience now you will all get a chance to State your views to miss parro at his own good time hi I'm Danny Boyd and this is Cinema STS a celebration of film and film form I have no fear Melle they all come out looking much more peaceful this scene comes from the 1974 adaptation of murderer on the oran Express directed by Sydney the met one of the absolute finest to come out of the American new wave of Cinema and The Man Behind for my money the greatest
courtroom drama ever made you are the law the sequence is 5 minutes long Rock Solid no Cuts Le oh like the French Bergman would go on to win an Academy Award for her role one of the briefest Oscar winning performances of all time the scene is also representative of what I think this adaptation of Oran Express does best through its editing it staging and its camera work hello it observes Mrs AB I'm sorry to have kept you take this scene from the 2017 adaptation for example I woke up in the dark and I knew there
was a man in my room 10 cuts nine different shots you are certain it was a man and yeah I know what it feels like to have a man in my bedroom that's one option or I mean there was a man in my compartment last night it was pitch dark of course and my eyes were closed in Terror then how did you know was a man because I've enjoyed very warm relationships with both my husbands we're a series of cuts and shot setups governs where we look and for how long a stationary frame that's well
staged can deliver both action and reaction don't you agree the man must have entered my compartment to gain access to Mr ratchet I can think of no other reason it gives us complete information and the freedom to sit with characters and observe Dynamics on our own terms tenants of the original film that drove nearly every scene and Technical decision sorry if I Hur the lad provocation LT was an actress director as different as Oran Express was from his usual body of work it's no less a film about characters and their circumstances well can't you tap
the telephone wires this is not a ship ex are we he wanted to impose a kind of claustrophobia understanding what that compactness does to a group of people packed the board of passenger train stranded in a snow drift and in turn how those conditions motivate the focus and compositions of your [Music] shots the remake by comparison Sid steps these creative restrictions man ate more stick than I've ever seen in my entire life it find finds every opportunity it can to leave the confines of the train to expand the playing field to keep things Dynamic never
changing but at the expense of perhaps some of the smaller details consider for instance the way the bulk of characters in each film are introduced in brana's version It's all about speed and variety now Marquez and estravados are introduced on the platform ratchet at the restaurant BOS McQueen checking in the counts at the bar Mrs hovered in a tracking shot from outside the train dragir of an her maid arriving inside the train and Hardman boarding here constant change forward momentum but by the end most these intros last between 10 and 12 seconds Mrs hubard gets
the longest introduction and yet we barely see her face um so the [Music] alternative keep it simple try introducing your characters one at a time in sequence in the same location it may sound boring but with this many players it brings the attention to the characters themselves all else being equal 30 seconds to minute each and linked with a common connective tissue ah Pierre the conductor whose interactions with each passenger though we would note on a first viewing tell us everything there is to know about who these characters are and what they're up to the
up Earth is has arranged because in Lum version nothing is obscured least of all by editing we're given all the clues and all the time we need to consider them and uh Pierre since you are here already we can conveniently start by questioning you the interrogation sequence no doubt provides the best example of this in a similar structure as the introductions we have a dozen suspects presented in sequence and given equal and ample time to explain their stories respond otherwise he will detain you longer than you would detain him and that also means that as
an audience we hear all the questions you buy a message found in his compartment and get all the answers uh he'd he'd have burnt that though as as I told you so that for each character we can make a determination of guilt he did it or of suspition shots are long expertly staged and most of all complete the Remake well in line with its commitment to momentum and scale cross cutting action sequences and changes and environment VI for our attention many of the interrogations here are edited in parallel and as a result questions are asked
but never answered who did you shower interviews are cut away from but never concluded it's Master a man dying is a man with nothing to lose more occurs Within These scenes within a central characters awareness than we you're ultimately granted the privilege of observing with information always just slightly abbreviated or obscured in the way it's presented rather than asking about a piece of evidence directly even less point in asking the color of your dressing G that topic might be alluded to secondhand aad told me you ask the color of her dressing gown rather than spending
time on a vital clue unfortunately the first letter of your marriage signature has been almost OED by Grease SP it's passed over and our attention redirected by the way there is a grease spot on your wife's name you might want to look at that is not well what's so great about the Simplicity and time spent with the original is that later in the summation all the testimony we heard can be referred back to as evidence synthesized and reinterpreted under a new lens literally instead of the usual visual language of a flashback distorted image black black
and white lumed and the great Jeffrey unsworth did something fascinating trial by 12 good men and Truth they would shoot the same key lines twice by 12 good men and true first is normal all my ladies have said so then immediately again in a radically different way all my ladies have said so different lighting different angle and a wider lens so that this in the interview she was gentle and frightened becom this in the flashback admitted under emotional stress that he had actually known Mrs Armstrong all beard very slightly she was gentled and frightened same
exact information we already had here is the simple answer just a new way of looking at it it is also a more complex one this summation is a 30 minute Tor of force Eight Pages of monologue limited cutting every three shot long multi-compositional and brilliantly staged with action and reaction 15 characters packed wall the- wall as hercu parro takes center stage in cramped quarters for the sake of symmetry here's the Remake true to its own form it finds yet another excuse to take us off the train seeding everyone along one side of a last separate
table limiting the possibilities in staging and restricting coverage to a series of doubles and singles typical sha reverse sha telling us where to look what to listen to and whose reactions matter plus some gun action for good measure now I'll be honest I've been harder on murder on the or Express's later outing than I set out to be these are two films out of two very different eras of film making and I think the choice to make a modern movie that's more Dynamic more kinetic and larger in scale to keep wider audience engaged is beyond
sensible but what immerses me in the original adaptation of orian Express is its Simplicity and its dedication to the Agatha Christi tradition of laying it all out and then taking a great detective to put it all together will the 1974 version feel slow to a lot of people now I have no doubt but I think it's more confident film I think it puts more faith in its plot in its performances and its script in it sours material and most importantly in us the viewers offering us more control over where we choose to put our attention
and what we choose to do with the information that we're [Music] given as always I'm Danny Boyd thanks for watching we need to shut the curtain mark it hey everybody today's video was brought to you by movie a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great Cinema from all across the world from ionic directors to emerging aurs movie always has something new and amazing to discover and that's because with movie each and every film is hand selected by a team of curators giving you access to the best of cinema at your fingertips streaming anytime anywhere I
recently watched The Last Picture Show on movie so if you're interested in more films from the Sydney L's generation of filmmakers this is one of the all-time classics not to mention it starts very young Jeff Bridges and siil Shephard you can watch it or anything else streaming on movie for free with an extended 30-day trial if you go to movie.com cinematics once again that's mubi.com cinematics for a whole month of great Cinema for free
