"Don't Add; Just Subtract"

[bcholmes]

On the season 3 DVDs for BSG (which came out this week), there's a longer version of the episode "Unfinished Business" -- the episode with the boxing match between Lee and Kara. Unlike season 2's longer version of "Pegasus", this version isn't a "preferred, longer cut", it's an earlier editor's cut that's 25 minutes over time.

Some stuff about the structure of this episode, and the commentary that Ron Moore provides is really interesting.

First up, there are a number of scenes in the longer version that I really like. There's a great scene where Tigh, in the present-day part of the story, looks over and sees Lee and Dee together, and Tigh has his own flashback to New Caprica, and some of the most loving dialogue between him and Ellen.

There's another scene in which Starbuck has come back from her night with Lee and finds Tigh. Ellen is asleep on Tigh's lap, and Anders is face-down, asleep on the ground. Tigh and Starbuck talk about the fact that she sleep with Lee, and it's a glimpse into how Tigh and Kara have managed to patch things up between them.

There are a number of nice moments with Dee, especially in flashback. But mostly, I find Dee's extra dialog is too much exposition. I found myself preferring the extended version for about the first half, because it opened up the episode and gave other characters good character-building moments. But whenever the episode came back to Lee and Kara, I felt like the wonderful, "they still have feelings for each other, but they're also hurt and pissed at each other" subtext was made too much into text.

Moore talks about some extra dialog featured in the final fight between Lee and Kara. They say things like "You never could let anyone get close". It was way too much. Moore says that the dialog all looked good on the page, but when you actually filmed it, he realized that all one needed was the lines, "I miss you" / "I miss you too". And he's right. (As was Eisenstein, it seems). The flashbacks fill in everything that the characters are feeling when they're fighting.

Okay, change gears. About a year ago, I was in a long car ride with someone and we were talking about film. My traveling companion was arguing that she often got bored with film and/or television because information conveyed was slow. Her argument was that because she read so much, she felt like she could get so much more information out of a book in the same period of time.

My argument with that was that what I loved about film was the way a look, or a particular shot, or set of shots could communicate so much without the need for words. Some of my favourite moments in film use no words:

The beautifully languorous shot in Solaris where Chris Kelvin has arrived on the station, and everything is still, but he's taking in the new environment.

The scene in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly where Blondie has heard the spurs of the men coming down the hall toward his room. And when they burst in the door, he shoot all three of them, and as the lead guy is falling down, he looks up at Blondie in a puzzled expression that says, "How did you know?"

That wonderful moment in Notorious when Alicia realizes that Alex and his mother have been poisoning her. The whole construction of that scene is a virtuoso effort.

Same with the last act of "Unfinished Business". In the final, aired version, Lee and Starbuck are slugging it out, but we know that they're motivated by their attraction to each other, and their hurt over what happened on New Caprica. When we see Dee -- and Dee has lost a lot of dialog -- her face just brilliantly communicates how horrible, and raw, and clear it is. That their fight is painful for other people, too. That Dee knows in that moment that she's Lee's second choice. None of it is said. It's all facial expression, and shot, spliced with flashback. And it works so much better because it hits us in the gut, instead of intellectually. Or, I think so, anyway.

Comments

[sarah-dragon.livejournal.com]

Although I am myself very critical of visual mediums, another strong point they have is the ability to use music in place of dialog or just in general to set mood and convey emotion, something a book lacks. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is a good example of that as well. I think because it was a 'spaghetti western' people do not watch it, but Sergio Leone was brilliant, IMHO.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I'm totally with you. In some cases, books are brilliant because they can very quickly convey some important things that would take much longer with pictures. But when it comes to facial expressions, (moving) pictures win. Because no-one needs to say "She's hurt to be second-best".