"Right from the beginning, his understanding of cinema was apparent...He already understood and integrated the plasticity of cinema with the plasticity of narrative. Every shot is the narrative and the narrative is every shot...Many films are delicately subservient to an idea or theme and consequently the images are never allowed to exist as themselves. They illustrate a scripted, written reality or concept...This subtle distortion of the vision-language hierarchy violates the primordial strength of what cinema has to offer. It flattens out reality and it flattens out cinema." -- Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema

I imagine the reason I'm so comfortable with improvised dialogue is that I don't even listen to the actors--I just watch them (which reminds me of something Darren Hughes wrote about Around the Bay). In Canary, the metaphor for this phenomenon is fairly obvious, as Carla stalks various people throughout the movie, circling and staring like a director watching the action unfold while providing no indication that she's listening. Does Carla's character understand German, Vietnamese or Russian? Or English, for that matter? Does she understand any language at all? We have no way of determining that. For the sake of our director-actor process, I handed her a shard of a newspaper sports page and told her to read (silently) the same sentence over and over again until I called "cut." I robbed her character of language as forcefully as I robbed her of society--they are interdependent, after all. What better way to right the vision-language hierarchy than to remove the faculty of speech altogether?

Before becoming a director, David Lean edited the films of Michael Powell. Powell said of Lean: "He always cuts on the silent head of a Moviola, because he doesn't want to be distracted by what the actors are saying."