Tag: English

Why the Battle of New York Might Still Be the Best Superhero Fight Sequence We’ve Seen so Far

Very soon, Infinity War is promising to bring the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) together for one big fight. But do you remember what it was like when the idea of superheroes from several movies teaming up for a crossover event first became a reality? Film critic Matt Singer is currently rewatching all the MCU films and when he got to 2012’s The Avengers, he noticed something in his “What holds up” section:

The final 30 minutes of the film is one enormous multitiered set-piece. Even though The Avengers is the biggest Marvel film to date, I’m not sure its final battle, in and over the streets of New York City, has gotten the full credit its due. It is one of the great sustained pieces of cinematic action of the 21st century, weaving together the activities of six different Marvel heroes (…). You’re lucky if a movie has two or three iconic moments. The Avengers’ Battle of New York sequence has half a dozen all by itself (…).

Singer is right, of course. The “Battle of New York”, as it will be called in-universe after the events of The Avengers, is basically what started Marvel’s whole “third act problem”. While the MCU films that came before it all had characters battling single opponents in the final confrontation of the story, Avengers and its director Joss Whedon raised the stakes and introduced the concept of a group of characters fighting against an army of faceless goons with basically the whole world at risk.

So, why is the Battle of New York still so effective? That is what I want to show today. For the first time in years, I have dusted off my David Bordwell hat and actually analyzed a single cinematic sequence closely, instead of just looking at big picture stuff. I believe the sequence’s success boils down to two things: location and dramatic structure.

Set up the perimeter

Even though the Avengers are fighting for the fate of the world, their radius of action is actually pretty small. About 90 Percent of the Battle of New York take place within four blocks of New York City’s Grand Central Terminal and the MetLife Building, which is where Stark Tower is located in the movies. Instead of spreading the battle war zone across the whole city, Whedon reinforces again and again that it is in everybody’s best interest to contain the fighting to a few square miles to hurt as few civilians as possible. Whether it’s Captain America telling the police to set up a perimeter “all the way back to 39th street” or Iron Man quipping “I’m bringing the party to you”, viewers are constantly reminded that the fight is actually very controlled and centered on the main characters.

This, of course, had a big impact on production. No part of the battle was actually shot in New York. Most of the street scenes with the police and civilians were shot in Cleveland. The production also built part of the viaduct leading from Grand Central Terminal into Park Avenue, where Cap and Black Widow are doing most of the fighting, as a green screen set. But Industrial Light and Magic shot 275,000 images of the actual New York blocks where the fighting was going to take place and stitched them together to recreate the location of the fight in the computer.

What all this ultimately means, is that Whedon is able to situate us quite clearly in space, no matter how chaotic the fight gets, often opting for vertical instead of horizontal axes of action. He reinforces this several times during the sequence with characters turning around and returning to the hub of the battle. The most notable instance, of course, is the long shot that connects all the Avengers and their individual fights into a greater whole. Its trajectory can be precisely placed on a map: it goes up Park Avenue, two blocks down West 42nd Street, almost until the New York Public Library, and then takes a hard right turn to continue up 5th Avenue for another four blocks. This sort of spatial clarity is very rare for a modern blockbuster and it’s a big part of the effectiveness of the sequence.

Dramatic Structure

The problem of many superhero fight sequences, especially those that involve many characters, is that they don’t really evolve. Characters fight, maybe they move from location to location, maybe there is a ticking clock or a maguffin quest that needs to be solved during the fight, but at some point the fight is simply over. For The Avengers, Whedon has famously said that he structured his fight into “five acts, with a prologue” on 15 pages of script so the previz team had something to work with. But this structure also gives the fight an evolution that pulls us along as viewers.

The classic five-act structure, as formulated by Gustav Freytag, divides a drama into five parts that, if you diagram them, form a sort of pyramid shape. The first act (exposition) serves as an introduction to the characters and the situation. The second act (rising action) then sees these characters get deep into a conflict, with the third act (climax) showing this conflict at its peak. Then follows a reversal of what we have learned so far (falling action) with the final act (denouement) resolving the conflict either in a hopeful or tragic way.

When you look closely at the Battle of New York, the stretch between minutes 102 and 130 of the movie’s runtime, it’s actually amazing how easily it falls apart and into this structure.

Prologue

The prologue to the battle starts as soon as the portal opens after Iron Man’s time-buying dialogue scene with Loki. The first Chitauri enter through the portal and wreak havoc. People hide. Loki and Thor fight on top of Stark tower. Finally, the Quinjet crashes on Park Avenue. Now, everyone (except for Bruce Banner) is on the scene.

Exposition

The real threat, the first of the Chitauri Leviathans, is introduced. Loki leaves Stark Tower and joins the Chitauri. Hawkeye, Black Widow and Cap are trying to decide what to do. Cap talks to the police and establishes the conflict (Civilians might get hurt), the location (set up a perimeter to 39th street) and the role of the Avengers in the fight. Bruce Banner finally shows up, hulks out and kills the first Leviathan with a single well-placed punch. It is now clear that the Avengers have a real chance of winning this battle, if they work together. This is reinforced by a triumphant fanfare of the Avengers theme in the score and the iconic shot of the team assembling in a circle (the header image for this post).

Rising Action

“Send the rest”, Loki snarls, and two more Leviathans come through the portal. Cap now lays out precisely what the goal of the upcoming fight is going to be, and which part every character is supposed to play:

Alright, listen up. Until we can close that portal, our priority’s containment. Barton, I want you on that roof, eyes on everything. Call out patterns and strays. Stark, you got the perimeter. Anything gets more than three blocks out, you turn it back or you turn it to ash. (…) Thor, you gotta try and bottleneck that portal. Slow ’em down. You got the lightning. Light the bastards up. You [Black Widow] and me, we stay here on the ground, keep the fighting here. And Hulk? Smash!

As viewers, we now know exactly what we should be looking out for. Moreover, Cap – who cannot fly, is not indestructible and has no other visible powers – has shown us what his role is: he is the leader the Avengers need if they want to work as a team. With the individual goals set, we see a few successful fights as the battle gets underway, but Cap ultimately has to see that his plan won’t work in the long run. Together with Black Widow, he redefines the goal: the portal must be closed. Black Widow takes off.

Climax

At this point of the battle, we get to see our heroes winning. It starts with the long shot mentioned earlier that shows the Avengers working together like a well-oiled machine. It also has the most moments of levity, with Hulk both punching Thor out of frame after they brought down another Leviathan and later giving Loki the headache of a lifetime in the “puny god” scene.

via GIPHY

What’s more, Cap finally gets to rescue some civilians from a bank, like he wanted to do the whole time. And Erik Selvig finally wakes up and tells Natasha that he should be able to close the portal. “You know what?”, we’re saying to ourselves, “this might just work!”

Falling Action

Even Avengers have limited stamina. A series of shots shows the toll the battle is taking on our heroes. Iron Man crashes. Hawkeye is out of arrows and has to hide in a building. Hulk is under a constant fire from the Chitauri he can’t escape. Even Cap gets hit. But Whedon really turns the tables by introducing an outside threat nobody saw coming. Nick Fury’s council of secret world leaders wants to nuke New York and nobody can stop them. Not even Fury himself, not even with a bazooka. Now, the Avengers are in a bind. They might close the portal, but that won’t save Manhattan from nuclear destruction. What are they going to do?

Denouement

In the final act of the Battle of New York, the film recenters the fight on the action of one person. Tony Stark, who has been accused of only thinking about himself most of the time, gets the chance to redeem himself through sacrifice. He catches the missile and transports it into the portal with everyone watching. The nuke explodes and conveniently kills all the Chitauri, who don’t seem to possess a will of their own. Now, Black Widow can close the portal. Tony falls, gets caught by the Hulk and lands on the exact same spot the fight started. “We won.” The final beat shows Loki waking up with the Avengers towering over him. Only after this does the film move on to the actual aftermath of the battle.

In Conclusion

Notice how every act slightly shifts the goal of the overall fight. At first, it’s just the Leviathan, then it’s the containment of the battle, then it’s the closing of the portal, and finally it’s getting rid of the nuke, which also serves to end the fight as a whole. Every Avenger gets their chance to shine during this, whether it’s Hawkeye picking off Chitauri chasing Iron Man or Thor calling down lightning to the Chrysler building. However, the metanarrative, which is also the metanarrative of the whole film, stays the same throughout: Avengers. Together. Strong.

Tying all of these qualities together is something that many other superhero battles lack. The airport fight in Civil War is contained to one (rather boring) location and it twists and turns dramatically, but while it should be telling the story of the film in miniature (two factions of superheroes believing in different solutions to the same problem), it is hard to tell who is on which side and why. The final fight scene in Black Panther reinforces the central conflict between T’Challa and Killmonger, but it has to give everyone else something to do as well, so it spreads out the battle to several different locations and several distinct personal conflicts.

When we look to Infinity War, we can at least see that we have a central promising villain in Thanos. There is also a good chance that the metaplot will be similar to the one in The Avengers – heroes have to put aside their differences to vanquish a foe that’s more powerful than each of their factions. But already the trailer and title hint at an actual war, which means a battle fought simultaneously on several geographically separate fronts. So maybe, we will never get another Battle of New York. But now at least we know how it’s done.

Quotes of Quotes (XXVIII) – J. J. Abrams on the Fan Director’s Dilemma

When I recently wrote about modern franchise movies showing signs of fan fiction, Star Wars, of course, weighed heavily on my mind. About a year ago, I had already expressed my fear that The Force Awakens might end up a sort of Star Wars simulacrum, but J. J. Abrams’ answer to an audience question at San Diego Comic Con a few weeks ago appeased me somewhat. Here’s what he said:

I watched Star Wars with my parents, too. It means very much to me as it means to many of you, so I feel like the only answer I can give you is: We love it, we care about it so much. Our job is to not be blinded by that, meaning you can’t just be a fan and then make a movie because you’re a fan. It’s not enough, you gotta really say: What’s the story? I’m gonna tell you from personal experience, when you’re directing a scene on the Millennium Falcon, it doesn’t make the scene good. Now, it’s bitchin’ that it’s on the Millennium Falcon, you want scenes on the Millennium Falcon. If I can make a suggestion, direct scenes on the Millennium Falcon, it’s hugely helpful. But it doesn’t make the scene automatically good. So you have to ask – it’s literally Storytelling 101 – what do the characters want? Who are they? What makes this interesting? What’s unexpected? It has to be fun, it has to be scary. The power of what has come before is so infectious and so deep that you have to harness it, but you can’t be blinded by it. And it’s a constant thing, working with [screenwriter] Larry [Kasdan] and [producer] Kathleen [Kennedy], there were always checks and balances, saying, “That’s really cool, but what does it mean?” You know? Why are we doing this?

“3D is finished” says Ben Stassen, director of 3D film The House of Magic

I saved one interview from my prolonged stint at the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film last month, because it was interesting enough to merit a solo spot and because the film it concerns hits movie theatres in Germany this week.

Ben Stassen, the Belgian co-director of The House of Magic (German: Das magische Haus), is a veteran when it comes to 3D-animated films (which is probably why he has perfected the pose seen in the image above). He started his career – and his company nWave Pictures – in the early nineties and created theme park shorts for several years, before he decided to ride the digital 3D boom of the late noughties with his films Fly me to the moon and Sammy’s Adventures. He’s a strong figure in Europudding land and very confident in his opinions about the industry, which – as you will see – can sometimes lead to him descending into rambling about it for a while.

The House of Magic, his newest film, is actually quite good. It uses 3D in a very knowing way and takes you for an entertaining 90-minute ride that you won’t regret if you’re into that kind of stuff. In the interview, Stassen talks about the inspiration behind The House of Magic, the challenge of competing with Hollywood and the uncertain future of 3D.

You’ve done quite a few 3D-animated films in the past, what’s the new ground that you’re exploring with this one?

With the first three Films, Fly me to the Moon, Sammy’s Adventures: The Secret Passage and Sammy’s Adventures: Escape from Paradise, it was much more about an immersive experience, going to space and under water. I think that one of the most important things about 3D is that it gives you that physical immersion that you don’t have in a 2D film. You might have an intellectual and emotional immersion, but you can’t have a physical immersion.We wanted to continue that with this film, but I also wanted to explore the more gimmicky side of 3D, because the story lent itself.

“I wanted to explore the
more gimmicky side of 3D”

By gimmicky, I mean in-your-face effects. The other films had a few in-your-face effects, but this film is about a bunch of characters – animals and automatons – that fight to prevent a house from being sold. All the visitors that come to buy the house and the movers and all these people that want to get rid of the house, the characters want to stop them. They stop them by using all kinds of things, so it was a really nice setup to do in-your-face effects that were part of the story, not just gimmicky, gratuitous and meaningless. I wanted to explore that and that’s one of the things that we did here and hopefully it works well and is well-integrated into the movie.

Did you approach it in this way? Did you say “What kind of story could we find, where people throw things around a lot?”

No, actually it was the other way around. I was looking for a film to do after Sammy. You must know that in animation, there are very few writers that write scripts on spec, meaning: you write them and then try to sell them. In live action, thousands of scripts are being written, in animation: almost none. Because there are no buyers. All the big studios do their own thing and the small independents like ourselves, we do try find them, but people don’t spend energy writing the scripts. So, I was looking for a film to do. And 15 years ago, we had done a theme park attraction – because that’s still a big part of our business. I’ve done a lot of IMAX films but also short, what we call 4D-films for theme parks. 15 years ago we did a film called Haunted House about an abandoned cat that was looking for a place to stay. And that film had been so succesful worldwide, I decided to take that twelve-minute-film and expand it to a full feature-length story. So, we had already tested the concept of doing a film like that with a lot of immersive and in-your-face effects in a theme park environment. The big difference is that when you do a feature film, you need to build a story. You need to build up the characters, it’s not just about sensations, but also about emotions. But that was the starting point.

© StudioCanal

You are maybe the most well-known European figure who kind of stands against Hollywood’s dominance in computer-animated film. Do you see yourself that way?

It’s true that we have been trying to be in the major league with the quality of our films, the quality of the animation, and thanks to our affiliation with Studio Canal we’ve had reasonable budgets to do a film. By “reasonable budgets” I mean 20 to 25 million Euros, which compared to the US is about 20 percent of their budget, so we’re still not in the same league in terms of budget, but we’re trying to be, in terms of the quality of the films. Now, the challenge is that it is extremely difficult to get US distribution. So yes, we are a little bit perceived as the people that are able to do films that get distributed worldwide. Fly me to the Moon was distributed in theatres, I think this one might get theatrical distribution, we’re negotiating right now. But the Sammy-Films went directly to DVD in the US and that’s quite frustrating.

“The US makes it very hard
for independents to succeed”

It’s quite a frustrating thing, because the US dominate the market and basically make it very very hard for independent animation companies or animated films from outside the US to succeed, not only in the US but also in the rest of the world. In the 1980s, 1990s, the majors released two or three films a year. Now there is ten or twelve films coming from the majors – DreamWorks, Pixar, Blue Sky, Universal – and so they block all the good windows. A window is a good period to release a family film, like Christmas or Easter vacation. And you only have five or six good windows for animated films and they’re all completely blocked by the US majors who have way more money and way more marketing power than other animation studios, so it is very challenging and very frustrating in a way. It’s hard to make the business model work. For us, it does work, because we have that combination of making feature films that succeed quite well and get sold worldwide, from all the territories in Europe to China to South America. But from the feature films we also make shorter films that we exploit in theme parks and that can make the business model work. That is why we are one of the few companies in europe that cancompete with the Americans a little bit, because we have these other sources of revenue. Otherwise, it would be almost impossible.

Ignoring the business side for a moment, how do you think the European animated film is doing from an artistic standpoint at the moment?

The great thing that has evolved over the last few years is that the technology – I don’t want to bring everything back to money, but it has become much more affordable. So, ten years ago, from a creative standpoint, the Americans had a big lead, because they had big research and development teams and could create tools that enabled them to do more refined, better-looking animation. Now that has become off-the-shelf software, and we do have a small R&D team internally. So, now at least we have the same tools as the Americans. I think that, from a creative standpoint, our films start to look really really good, even though we don’t have the same budget and we are being considered like being part of the major league in terms of the look of our films.

“You cannot only appeal
to a local market”

One of the strengths of the US film industry in general has always been that they develop stories that have worldwide appeal. And when you do a computer-animated film on a certain level, you do have to pay a lot of attention to them. You cannot deal with a local subject that would only appeal to a local market. You need to broaden that up, so the commercial side of doing animation still has a big impact on the creative side. Probably far more than in live action. In live action, you can make small, independent films that are great and sometimes even succeed internationally. In animated films, it’s different, because it’s family entertainment. You have to please the parents, the kids and you need to be really as broad as possible, which means more americanised. When you look at all the animated European films that have succeeded worldwide, they have all been more americanised, based on the model of the big US films, which is not the case with live action films. You can sometimes have really local stories that become huge successes worldwide. Animation is also the only field, where they always compare you to the Americans. If you make a film, the reviews and the audience, they compare you to Pixar and DreamWorks. If Luc Besson in France or a big German director makes an action film, they are not compared to the last Bruce Willis …

(I frown)

A little bit, but they look at it: Is it entertaining? Yes. For us, it starts from there. It starts from “How does it compare to …” In live action, it’s much less. So it is challenging, but, you know, it’s been fun. It’s worked. So far.

© StudioCanal

You’re also one of the pioneers of 3D, of course, not only because of your theme park background. The way I see it, at the moment is that it gets tacked on to every summer blockbuster, whether it works or not – and then you have movies like Gravity last year, where it’s really put to the test and audiences like it. So, where do you see 3D going in the future, in maybe the next five to ten years?

It’s going nowhere. 3D, I’m afraid to say, is going to die. Because you have one Gravity, which is absolutely fantastic, for a hundred other films. 99,9 Percent of the films coming out of Hollywood are not 3D. They are, at best, 2.5 D; 2.25 D. The evolution is such that, as we speak today, there is not a single US film shooting in 3D. We started by converting them from 2D to 3D, then a few films were shot in 3D, and now they’re all converted again, because 3D does not work. Well, 3D works fantastically well in films like Gravity and I think we pay a lot of attention to 3D in our films, but most people don’t. Even great films like the Pixar films. I heard an interview with a Pixar director, saying he doesn’t handle the 3D, it’s done in post-production. Not converted – they do render both eyes, but if it’s not part of the storytelling then why do 3D?

“3D is finished
in two or three years”

Audiences have come to realize that. They don’t want to pay extra money anymore to see 3D. The kids don’t want to wear glasses. You can see it in a film like The House of Magic, which has already been released in a few territories: the little kids don’t mind wearing 3D glasses, if they have a sense that it makes a difference. So I’m extremely frustrated, because I truly believe that 3D as we know it today is going to be finished within two or three years. Not ten years, two or three years. Even countries like Italy – The House of Magic came out only in 2D in Italy, even though I spent a lot of time and energy making it in 3D. Why? Because they decided that family films will not be released in 3D anymore. Only the tentpole Hollywood films, because people don’t want to pay. The future of 3D will be in high frame rate. So far there’s only two films that have been in released in HFR-3D. The Hobbit 1 and The Hobbit 2 by Peter Jackson. The next one will be Avatar. Peter Jackson did it at 48 frames per second, and Avatar will have 60 frames per second.
© StudioCanal
It’s quite technical, but at a high frame rate you have absolute freedom to do anything you want. At 24 frames per second, you are so limited – and that’s why a lot of filmmakers don’t want to deal with 3D. You cannot do fast lateral movements, you have to be very careful in anything you do, so that it doesn’t strobe and stays watchable. In HFR – and I’ve seen The Hobbit at 24 frames 3D and in HFR – it’s a different film. The 48-frame-version is fantastic. And the 24-frame-version has been re-converged so that people don’t get sick during the projection. So I think that in the future, the current form of 3D will probably die and there will be a few, much fewer 3D films, but films that are truly designed for 3D. And there will not be three per weekend, but maybe ten per year. Films like The Hobbit, Avatar and hopefully a few animated films and hopefully ours will be among them. I think that’s where were going, because why do we even have 3D? One reason: Hollywood was unable to convince theatrical exhibitors to go digital. They didn’t want to spend the money. And at one point they decided to say: We’re going to do 3D, because you need a digital projector to do 3D. Avatar was really the milestone. The most digitisation of movie theatres around the world happened with the release of Avatar and then it grew from there. So now Hollywood doesn’t care whether 3D stays or not.

“Hollywood doesn’t care
if 3D stays or not”

The interesting thing is that HFR-3D, which I see as the future of 3D, is what the studios are going to use, on a different scale, to convince exhibitors to install 4K projectors. Because 4k projectors can do native HFR, with the existing projectors you need to spend too much money on the projector to make it possible. Not every theatre is going to be equipped with 4K projectors, but a multiplex of 20 theatres may have one or two 4K projectors. And again, the argument ist: go HFR and you get The Hobbit in 3D. To me the biggest milestone in 3D cinema from Hollywood was The Hobbit 1, because it was the first one to do that. We did it in the 90s already with Showscan and 60 frames per second, but that was for a theme park specialty market. The Hobbit was the first one to do it for the multiplex and I think that’s the future.

Thank you for your time.

Das magische Haus startet in Deutschland am 22. Mai im Kino. Ein bisschen mehr zum Film und anderen Familienfilm-Highlights auf dem ITFS habe ich für das Kinderfilmblog aufgeschrieben.

Quotes of Quotes (VI)

“I feel like, on a more macro scale, there’s started to be a relationship between filmmakers and people who watch their films – you know, on Twitter and on the Internet. That relationship’s based on honesty, so the minute I knew that I was definitely not in the game, I made sure that I made that clear. Because I don’t want people to think I’m out there pulling strings on this thing. I don’t have a PR rep. I live in Vermont. It’s just me on my computer, seeing these things catch fire.”
– Colin Trevorrow on his alleged involvement with Star Wars

I have always been interested in fame. When I was in my late teens, I had the chance to talk at length with an actor who was now working in theatre but used to star on a daily German soap opera, about the experience of being recognized on the street and being sent love letters by teenage girls. In my vast egotism, however, what I find most interesting about the new artist-fan relationship brought about by the internet is not even the way the artists/celebrities feel about it (although that is still fascinating as well, listen to this episode of the /filmcast to hear three average Joes talk about their small internet fame). What’s exactly as strange is the way, this new communication paradigm sometimes makes me (and, I guess, others) feel like I know people I most definitely don’t. And then I try to chat to them on Twitter as if we’re mates. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s weird.

Found: C-3PO Tape Dispenser Creates Disturbing Associations

I saw this a the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The kind of stuff that got produced in the early days of Star Wars merchandising will probably never cease to amaze me.

You probably need an adult (dirty) mind to think dirty about this but I don’t want to be parent to the kid who shouts: “Look, Daddy, C3PO has sticky white stuff coming out between his legs!” The “look” on Threepio’s face, however, is what makes this really priceless.

Kevin Feige’s Masterplan

The most recent episode of Jeff Goldsmith’s excellent podcast series The Q&A featured a recording of Jeff’s Panel The Art of Adapting Comics to the Screen at Comic-Con. In it, he interviewed two screenwriting duos, who have written for films set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) – Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Captain America) and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby (Iron Man). Among other things, Jeff asked them about Marvel Studios’ president of production Kevin Feige’s overall vision for the MCU. This is what they had to say:

Hawk Ostby: Kevin, first of all, is amazingly smart. He also loves these characters and he knows this universe so well, you’re not gonna put one over on him. It was just very clever, the way he planned – just sitting around, listening to how this all was going to gel with all the other storylines and planting things in the movie. It was fascinating. (…) The big idea was really when he said: “At the end of Iron Man, he’s gonna say ‘I am Iron Man.'” And we thought: “Wow, that’s crazy – then what happens?” And he says: “We’ll figure it out”. That was the really big one and we thought: “Wow, this is really cool.” Because nobody had done that.

Mark Fergus: He wore everybody down. Everyone kept saying: “We’ll come back to that, we’ll come back to that.” And by the end of the movie, he had everyone going “Yeah, that is awesome.” (…) [He said :] “Let’s paint ourselves into a corner and then next time figure out an awesome way out of it.” And this teaser at the end with Sam [Jackson]. Kevin did the greatest thing. He previewed the movie all over the place and left that out. And at the first day of theatrical, it was there. That [meant] that Iron Man was just the beginning of something bigger. (…) This was now going to branch off into all these other movies. (…) It was really just a punch in the face going: “Yeah, here we go. Marvel Universe!”

(…) Chris Markus: When we went into our first meeting, the bulletin boards all around the room were all Ryan Meinerding’s concept art and at least one of them had Red Skull, Cosmic Cube in his hand, and a picture of Asgard shooting out of it, so we were like, “Okay, Thor.” And then, they knew they wanted Howard Stark in it – it was amazing to walk into this thing that’s already interconnected with all these tentacles to all the other movies.

Listen to the whole Podcast on The Q&A.

What is the purpose of Harry Potter: The Exhibition?

A week and a half ago, I visited Harry Potter: The Exhibition at Discovery Times Square in New York. If I had not been on holiday in New York this summer and steeped in the Harry Potter films through my podcast series, I would probably not have bothered with the exhibit. Having seen it, however, it left me intrigued and puzzled.

The press release for the opening of the exhibition in April 2009 in Chicago boasted “more than 200 authentic props and costumes from the films” and had Eddie Newquist, president of the company responsible for the show’s concept, excited about it being “enchanting, engaging and, above all, true to the spirit of the films”. What does that mean?

The most interesting part of the exhibition for Potter buffs is indeed that it showcases original props and costumes. Which means that you can finally see clothes worn by Dan Radcliffe, Alan Rickman and others “for real”. You can see, for example, how small the three young wizards once were – something which at least for me is always hard to imagine when your only reference is a big screen image.

The exhibit is also made up like a theme park ride, full of replicas of scenery and characters from the series. These make for “magic” atmosphere, of course, but they also hammer home what seems to be the point of the whole exhibit: that Harry’s World isn’t something that was created by a team of talented filmmakers, but something that is almost so real you can experience it yourself. The following examples illustrate this concept:

1. Every costume will bear a caption reading something like “Robes worn by Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) in ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'”. Note how the caption emphasizes the fictional character over the actor, ignoring the fact that Harry Potter never actually wore the robes. Daniel Radcliffe wore them while he was playing Harry Potter.

2. The Hagrid costume on display is not human-sized, it’s Hagrid-sized. The belonging plaque will still read “Clothes worn by Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane)”, eliminating the notion that Coltrane is actually not as big as Hagrid and probably wore smaller clothes when he portrayed the character, while the clothes on display might have been worn by a size double, if they are actually authentic props at all (there is no way to tell).

3. In a part of the exhibition that deals with the villains of the films, a statue of the house elf Kreacher sits between the costume busts. It’s a lifelike recreation of what the elf would look like if he ever actually existed outside of a computer and it also has a little plaque reading “Kreacher as seen in …”. This is, of course, completely meaningless, because this painted styrofoam Kreacher is just as unreal as the virtual elf on the screen. An interesting alternative would have been to display the maquette that Industrial Light and Magic used to create the character, but that would probably destroy the “magic”.

For me, this conception of the exhibit renders it quite useless no matter what you are interested in. If you really want to look behind the screens of the film series, you will be disappointed, because the show offers nothing at all about the making of the films, except the props (unlike, for example the Museum of the Moving Image which I visited a day later and which absolutely knocked my socks off because it is designed so well). If you want to study the craftsmanship and attention to detail that went into the production design of the movies, the shenanigans around the actual displays will drive you mad and give you a hard time actually looking at things up close. And if you are interested in the complete immersive Harry Potter experience, you will be disappointed as well, because the props and costume displays clearly disrupt the storytelling experience of the exhibit, as they come from a world outside the show (which differentiates the exhibition from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park).

Moneymaking aside, what is the purpose of exhibitions like this? According to David Monsena, president of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Harry Potter exhibit “embodies the Museum’s mission of inspiring the inventive genius in everyone”. How any part of Harry Potter: The Exhibition could inspire you to more than buying stuff in the gift shop, however, remains a mystery to me.

(Edward Rothstein of the “New York Times” thinks many of the same thoughts but arrives at a more positive conclusion.)

Rowling, Marvel and DC – Controlling the Cinematic Universe

At the end of my podcast with Kirsten Dietrich about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a topic of discussion came up that I would like to mull about a bit longer in this post. We talked about whether the Harry Potter movies, even if they are maybe not the best possible translation of the books into moving pictures (I still think that a TV series might have made for a better, if more expensive, adaptation), have become the definitive visual representation of the seven novels, not least because the author J. K. Rowling was very involved in the production and casting from the very beginning.

Translations from one medium into another usually involve several changes in the ur-text to fit and, indeed, adapt it to the new medium. In this way, they generally create a new universe related to but not congruent to the universe of the ur-text. In one of the videos on the Extended Edition of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, the screenwriters and some Tolkien experts broach this topic when they talk about adapting Tolkien’s novel. I think it is Brian Sibley who points out that, in the future, there will be two important Rings texts: Tolkien and Tolkien as interpreted by Jackson.1

In the case of Harry Potter, because the author was so heavily involved in the adaptation process, the two universes are almost alike. The films, although they differ from the books in some ways, have almost become part of the Harry Potter canon (and indeed are seen this way by the fans of the HP universe) and have succeeded in creating the definitive visual representations of characters and some events in the books because they have Rowling’s seal of approval. This has even been enforced legally, as Kirsten points out in the podcast. When Sabine Wilharm, the illustrator who created the covers for the Harry Potter books in Germany, created additional paintings that show other scenes from the books, Warner Bros. sued the commissioning publisher. The same brute force has been applied to creators of fan sites.

Ownership of and control over an intellectual property is the foundation of succesful franchising. While it does goes to silly extremes sometimes (as mentioned above), it’s a key ingredient to make the franchise work and fit together. For the process of adapting source material into film while controlling that source material at the same time (as Rowling did), this still seems to me to be a relatively new mainstream concept that I would trace back to the creation of Marvel Studios in 1996. I’ve read enough “development hell” stories to believe that adaptations, for example of comics, used to be handled differently. The IP owner would sell their license and the studio would go and adapt it, sometimes screwing up, sometimes not, but always with very little input from the IP’s originators.

The early films produced with Marvel Studios in tow, such as Sam Raimis Spider-Man films and Bryan Singers X-Men films, already had a certain amount of faithfulness to the source material “in spirit” that earlier incarnations had not achieved (or so, I gather, fans believe), similar to Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkien. By setting up the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), however, the former comic book publisher has added another layer to the cake: harnessing the process of filmmaking, which involves hundreds of people in contrast to the few involved in creating a comic book, to produce a number of films that tie in to create one cinematic universe that, while not corresponding one-on-one to its source material, is canonic in its own right. In effect, they too are creating definitive cinematic versions of their comic book characters.

I have already expressed my admiration for the Avengers film, the first culmination of the MCU, in this blog one year ago and there is nothing more illuminating about the process than this quote by Marvel president Kevin Feige:

It’s never been done before and that’s kind of the spirit everybody’s taking it in. The other filmmakers aren’t used to getting actors from other movies that other filmmakers have cast, certain plot lines that are connected or certain locations that are connected but I think for the most part, in fact, entirely everyone was on board for it and thinks that its fun. Primarily because we’ve always remained consistent saying that the movie that we are making comes first. All of the connective tissue, all of that stuff is fun and is going to be very important if you want it to be. (Source)

The result might be thought of as a slap in the face to the individual artistic expression of any one director but it’s very effective. Marvel are applying to movies what has been general practice in TV series for ages, even more so since the advent of complicated series with multiple narrative strands such as The X-Files or Lost. They are continuing down this route, rebooting Spider-Man (as they already did with The Incredible Hulk) and, in effect, X-Men to integrate them into their grand scheme. And DC, with their umpteenth version of Superman (Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder) and, probably, Batman in the works, are hard on their heels.

The difference to a TV series, of course, is that there is no real linear plot to the MCU. While the films leading up to The Avengers share a certain timeline, each narrative strand also stands on its own with just a few nods to its sister narratives. If the actors are willing to participate, the films allow for endless tangents and intersections while they, at the same time, stay locked together in one unified and definitive worldtrack2 controlled by Marvel.3

This article only summarises some of the things I have been thinking about lately. I have probably forgotten important ideas and misinterpreted others. I would be very happy to discuss the thoughts sketched out above in more detail with readers of this article. Head to the comments!

1 Jackson very cleverly mediated between his version of Tolkien and the visual interpretations that had come before him by enlisting John Howe and Alan Lee as concept artists. In this way, there is no real “break” between how many fans had always imagined Middle-Earth to look like, including cover illustrations etc. into their imaginations (as one does), and how it looked like in the film. ^
2 I have just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s novel “Anathem” and borrowed this word from the book. ^
3 A multi-faceted adaptation of Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series with Ron Howard at the helm that, in its concept, shares some ideas with something like the MCU has, unfortunately, just been canned. ^