Designed Films
My first film education came in high school in the basement of my grandparents’s house. My grandmother, ever the early adopter (and perhaps pirate?), was early to the VCR and had recorded dozens of movies for her personal library. Each video had two or three movies recorded onto it and was labeled with a number on the spine. A printed index hung on the wall next to the floor-to-ceiling shelves where you could find, for example, that North by Northwest was the second movie on tape 47. We visited their house for a week every summer and each night, I’d pick a new movie to watch; the only criteria I created for myself was that it had to be a movie released before I was born. I watched my first Hitchcocks from those videos. I watched To Kill a Mockingbird and the original King Kong. Aunts and uncles started recommending movies, pulling videos off the shelf for me. My love of movies started in that basement.
My second education was the two years I spent working at a video store in college. As employees, we could check out three movies at once for free, and I often maxed out my rentals, going through filmographies of directors or taking recommendations from the regular customers, often watching 4 or 5 films a week. I got into documentaries here. Certain movies, just seeing their covers, reminds me of working the late shift putting DVDs back on the shelves. Later, when I first subscribed to the Criterion Channel, what I consider my third education, I was reminded of both my grandparent’s basement and my short tenure at Hollywood Video. Criterion was my third education with its curated collections and video commentary, my movie watching became strategic and considered again in a way it was when I was younger.
This is perhaps a long winded way of saying that I’ve been interested in movies for as long as I’ve been interested in design and though I chose one to study and work in, the two have always co-mingled in my mind. Cinema has remained a touchstone in my cultural development and an influential place for inspiration in my work. I continue to look for connections between them and seek out the overlap in the construction of a design and the construction of a film. After all, many of the movies that stick with me — the ones I often count as favorites — I tend to describe as movies that feel as if they have been “designed”. But lately I’ve been wondering what that means: what makes a film designed? What does it mean for a movie to feel designerly?
Sometimes I think I say a film has been designed if it’s formally innovative, playing with narrative or structure. But this doesn’t feel quite right: there’s nothing inherent to design that equates to formal experimentation and there are plenty of formally ambitious films that don’t, to me, feel like they’ve been “designed.” I’ve been rewatching the movies of Charlie Kaufman lately and am continually dazzled by his 2009 film, Synecdoche, NY, a daring, epic, formally audacious film that seemed to fit my above description. Is this designed?
Perhaps, instead, I mean movies that are reflexive in some way; they make you aware of the artifice of the filmmaking process. Again, Kaufman’s movies would fit the bill here: Synecdoche, NY or Adaptation, a movie that’s literally about the making of the movie you are watching. I’m reminded, too, of Wes Anderson’s films, a director I’ve probably thought more about than any other. While the exquisite detail and structure to his sets is a turn off for many viewers, I find the imposed artifice exciting, as if it’s somehow more honest. I recently watched Ramell Ross’s 2024 film, Nickel Boys, a beautifully cinematic film which uses a fascinating first-person camera angle, with characters looking directly at you, the viewer, as if you were in the movie. Here, the viewer is both inside and outside the film. Or consider Lars von Trier’s “documentary”, The Five Obstructions, a constructed documentary about filmmaking and the creative process. I’ve called all of these movies designed at various points.
I do think this starts to get closer: in each of these the formal conceits become a part of the story. One of my very favorite movies is Orson Wells’ F for Fake, a film essay about cinema, trickery, and storytelling. (I made a whole film, ten years ago, inspired by it!). Here Wells blends found footage, documentary reportage, and staged scenes to explore his ideas into a form that starts to feel like it’s been designed.
Perhaps its not just any formal conceit or experimentation but specific structural models. A movie that has always felt designed to me is Mike Mills’s film Beginners. Interspersed in the narrative is voice-over narration with slideshow like montages of still images, found footage, and typographic treatments. Mills began his career as a designer and I think that sensibility shows in his films: there is something almost literary or book-like to their construction. But maybe I think of his films as designed just because I know he’s also a designer? The Norwegian director Joachim Trier does similar things in his films but with no design background. His film The Worst Person in the World, another of my favorites, and another that feels “designed”, opens with the title card “A story in 12 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue”. Again, there is a literary-feel to this structure and each chapter is introduced with a title card.
Is this what makes a film designed? The use of the tools of design? Typography, image color, line, shape, rhythm, etc? Both Mills and Trier use typography heavily in their movies and play with still images, illustration, and staged photos. Anderson, too, employs typography in title cards, supplemental information, and structural orientation. Consider his film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a story within a story within a story. Each layer is shot in a corresponding aspect ratio to delineate where in time you are; size, shape, and color used the way a graphic designer might. Is a designed film simply one that uses the elements of design?
Maybe that’s enough? I want to find a better language or framework for talking about filmmaking that feels designerly. I wonder if I’m just trying to apply my discipline’s language on another and it’ll never perfectly overlap. Or maybe I just want to claim the movies I love as something other than they are. Do I want them to be design or do I want design to contain filmmaking?