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MillimeterExperimenting on Nash
Mar 1, 2002 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
Ron Howard's controversial take on the life of famed mathematician/schizophrenic John Nash in A Beautiful Mind is not the only current film interpretation of Nash's story. A far more unorthodox approach can be found in the 11-minute, experimental documentary, 2+2, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
The film is co-directed by Benita Raphan — an Inferno artist and designer currently working at New York creative agency, Blah! Blah! Blah! — and Clayton Hemmert, a partner and editor at New York editorial house, Crew Cuts. Their approach was to combine highly experimental, nonlinear visuals with a traditional documentary audio narrative in which experts provide voiceover explanations of Nash's mental illness and his contributions to economics, which eventually won him a Nobel Prize. They do so over an image soup consisting of video images that Raphan wildly manipulated in Inferno (version 4.0), and Hemmert cut together on an Avid, over the course of more than a year.
To make such an approach work, experimental design and clever editing proved to be “the whole thing,” according to Raphan.
“We didn't have a shooting script or boards,” she explains. “Instead, we did audio interviews with these experts; we shot some video images, and then on Inferno each day, I created images that I felt were applicable to the story. Clayton and I then figured out how to fit them together. We had the voices but created the visuals as we went along, building and layering more and more of them until we had enough for a full story.”
Except for a brief still photo of the now-elderly Nash and the use of some of his mathematical equations, most of the film's images — generally shot on a variety of video formats — have no direct relationship to Nash's life story. They do have a relationship, however, to themes in Nash's life — chaos, bursts of creativity, schizophrenia, and mathematics, among others. Thus, numbers exploding into a jumbled mess, dark silhouettes and x-ray images are used to illustrate the story told in the voiceover.
“Basically, I was fortunate to have access to an Inferno because of my [former] job at [New York editorial boutique] Quiet Man, so I just used it to create all sorts of elements in different ways, layering them together and adding to them,” says Raphan. “Sometimes, I would use settings on the machine from my advertising jobs and plug unrelated images into them just to see what would happen. We also played with color and spent months cutting it all together in funky ways. One of the definite influences, though, was the concept of mathematics. We animated equations that came from his writings and other number and symbol combinations, evoking how his mind worked.”
Hemmert adds that the idea was to create “a visual, appetizing piece” in the experimental style that Raphan prefers, but with a more straightforward documentary narrative to hammer home the two main themes of the Nash story — mental illness and brilliance.
“Unlike the Ron Howard film, which gets into his love life and lots of things that may or may not have happened in his life, our focus was strictly on his genius and his schizophrenia,” says Hemmert. “It was a long process because we had to invent enough images to have a film to match the story we wanted to tell. Cutting this way on the Avid was particularly fun for me because this is not the type of stuff my typical commercial clients would ask for.”
Indeed, Hemmert's use of the Avid, combined with Raphan's use of the Inferno, constituted, essentially, the entire creative process for the documentary, which has no CG whatsoever and very few standard live-action images. Raphan thinks such non-traditional uses of those tools can be quite useful for indie filmmakers bold enough to experiment.
“This is all non-traditional,” she says. “This is not the way you normally use Inferno. I used it more as a paint box to experiment on canvas, rather than knowing exactly what I was looking for when I started. It was a situation where the film kind of creates itself in front of you.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.