salt about les mis bbc under the cut.
okay. i just gotta say, regarding the gifset where lily collins and david oyewolo are talking about the part where he as javert throws her as fantine to the ground. she lands badly, but she winces and continues acting in character, and the camera cuts away from him which is good because he’s horrified that he actually did throw her to the ground.
here’s the thing.
that was a little accident, right? that was an organic scene that happened between two actors.
pinches bridge of nose.
sighs.
theater is organic, because it is new every night. actors get sick and react differently to their understudies than the leads; the audience is particularly receptive or not receptive; maybe there’s a tech fail, or someone forgets to come onstage at the right cue; maybe someone accidentally falls into a trash can and ad libs the rest of a soliloquy from that new vantage point. the actors’ choices matter, but it is a live thing, so each person’s choices interact with things outside their control every single time. theater lives. it breathes. so do live concerts for orchestra, for singers, for comedians.
but nothing in film is organic, just like nothing in writing is organic.
these are created things, set in amber, preserved. these are not alive the same way that theater or concerts are.
there is a choice behind every movement. every element -- the lighting, the costumes, the sound, down to the last flicker of film and the last byte of noise, everything you experience in a film is something that someone decided specifically to do. it is a curated experience. it is inorganic. it is manufactured.
does that mean film is worse than theater? duh, no it doesn’t. but what it does mean is that you look at it for what it is: a series of choices carefully selected.
the accident of david throwing lily to the ground -- which, as we see in the gifset, he very clearly did not mean to do! -- existed organically.
but they had been doing a couple takes of it, as far as i can glean from the gifset. so there were multiple takes to choose from, including that one.
the director chose that one specifically.
this action happened organically, but it does not exist in the bbc miniseries organically, because -- i cannot repeat it enough -- the miniseries is a filmed entity, a manufactured thing, a made thing which consists solely of decisions within the creators’ control.
when i scream “WHY DID THIS HAPPEN” at my computer (or in the tags of a gifset), i am not screaming it at the actors. i am screaming at the director, who chose for this organic moment caught on camera to be part of the manufactured scene that happens in the tv show.