Soderbergh on Staging...Raiders of the Lost Ark: B/W, New Sound Track, No Dialog

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Came across this article by Steven Soderbergh where he is discussing staging using Raiders of the Lost Ark as an example:

http://extension765.com/sdr/18-raiders

Fincher said it: there’s potentially a hundred different ways to shoot something but at the end of the day there’s really only two, and one of them is wrong.

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So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are—that’s high level visual math s*%t).

At some point you will say to yourself or someone THIS LOOKS AMAZING IN BLACK AND WHITE...​

 

[Paul F]

This is a fun experiment if you have access to the full takes of a film. We did this with scenes from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and also from a Twilight Zone episode. We each cut the scene without looking at the original edit. It's remarkable to see the different decisions each of us made and how much difference it made in telling the story.

As to my effort cutting - of course I thought I did ok. But when I saw the final edit of the original work, I realized how bad my edit sucked.

 

[combatentropy]

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a work of art. Hopefully some day more people will recognize it as such. It's underestimated because it is popular entertainment, but so was Mozart and so was Shakespeare. Give it a hundred years, and maybe people will finally see it for what it is.