FOUR BULLETS

How do you win a game with no rules?

rough footage from Four Bullets

heists

if this really is a heist film you need to be researching heists.
some suggestions from the class:

Sex and the Moon:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/books/sex-on-the-moon-by-ben-mezrich-book-review.html

D B Cooper:
http://nymag.com/news/features/39593/

Reservoir Dogs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvoKT481EmU

The Aesthetic and Character

aesthetic |esˈθetik| (also esthetic)

noun [in sing. ]a set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement : the Cubist aesthetic.

The aesthetic of the film signifies much of the character in every film, combined with story, the audience gets the full picture of who the character is.  

In Taxi Driver, the dark aesthetic of the New York city streets, combined with the portion of the story where Travis Bickle continuously loops the city, portrays a man stuck in his own inner logic loop and his inability to break free.  In Dog Day Afternoon, Sonny Wortzik is first seen sitting in the passenger side seat of a car pulling into a bank that he and his gang are about to rob.  Sonny is shown in a place where he is not in control, and is going to try and orchestrate something of greatness, which will soon get out of hand.

In order to realize what the viewer is seeing in both Taxi Driver and  Dog Day Afternoon, the entire film must be watched multiple times to see the relationship.

This is not so in a Peckinpah film, from the beginning, the viewer, whether they know it or not, perceives exactly, the relationship the protagonist has with their environment.  Some would view this as a placation to the audience, a sort of dumbing down of the relationship between substance and form.

I would take the position that easily identified, does not mean easily seen into.  I believe there is a psychological richness in Peckinpah's portrayal of character, that is overlooked because of the simplicity of the marriage between substance and form.  I admire Peckinpah's relationship of character to aesthetic, and while it could be said that his films are flawed, I believe his characters are some of the most complexly illustrated on the screen.  

This level of complexity is something that I aspire to create in my characters.

STRAW DOGS - Trailer - (1971) - HQ

The Wild Bunch (Trailer)