Title/Year: The Bridge on the River Kwai / 1957
Director/Birth Place /Year Born: David Lean/England/1908
Budget: $3 Million Approx.
Gross: $33 Million Approx.
Synopsis: Set during WWII, A British colonel after
defying a Japanese POW camp commander helps oversee the construction of a bridge
that will span the Kwai River. Meanwhile an escaped American officer with the
help of Allies attempts to return to the camp and destroy the bridge.
Narrative/Visual Keywords: WWII, Prisoner of War,
British, Japanese, Escape, Morale, Bridge, Sabotage.
Characterization/Dialogue: The film stars William Holden, Jack Hawkins, and Alec Guinness, with them
all playing lead commanding roles, even the secondary characters in the film
developed and have personally identifiable traits. Dialogue is delivered is
classic Lean style, with significant relationships built between the
characters. The film is based loosely on true events during the construction of
the Kwai Bridge on the Burma-Siam railway during WWII.
Camera/Lighting/Editing Technique: Panavision format, Wide Angles, Long Takes,
Tracking and Dolly Shots, Natural outdoor lighting, Epic grand sense of scope
and vision throughout the film.
Political/Social Commentary: Director David Lean
based the film on the novel of the same name by Pierre Boulle. He was a secret
agent with the Free French, and based some of his imprisonment and forced labor
experiences on the Death Railway where over 200,000 perished. Boulle would also
go on to write the novel The Planet of the Apes, another work ripe with social
and political commentary.
Notable Collaborations: This was the third of six
films that Lean and actor Sir Alec Guinness worked on together. The film was produced
by Sam Spiegel who would go on to collaborate with Lean on Lawrence of Arabia
and A Passage to India. Spiegel was known for producing The African Queen and
On the Waterfront.
Random fact: The Bridge on the River Kwai was
nominated for 8 Academy Awards and won sever Oscars including Best Picture,
Best Director, Best Actor, Best Writing, Best Music, Best Film Editing, and
Best Cinematography.
In the case of director David Lean and his works, I would
argue for the case that he as filmmaker could be considered an auteur. As
pointed out in The Auteur Theory of Film essay, “The older auteurs didn’t dream
about camera movement, they dreamed about characters, whom they followed with
their cameras.” With a filmography spanning five decades, Lean has left lasting
influence on what I would consider other visionary auteurs, including the
Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, Steven Spielberg and countless
other contemporary filmmakers. Following
Lean’s style, these other director’s will often follow their complex characters
with the camera's lens.
Originating from influential French filmmakers and
critics during the 50’s, the Auteur Theory explores the notion of creative
control and vision in cinema. Auteur theory implies that the director is in
complete control of the film and is the film’s sole “author”, disassociated
from film studio constraints. The collective creative process of filmmaking is
also ignored by this theory. While Columbia Pictures and the producer of The
Bridge on the River Kwai, Sam Spiegel, would certainly have had some thoughts
or changes that they would have suggested that Lean, the film clearly is a
hallmark of his directing technique. “Auteur Theory, in its heyday,
concentrated attention exclusively on the fingerprints, thematic or stylistic,
of the individual artist” (Wood) And Leans thematic and stylistic fingerprints
are all over his films.
In the Lean’s Passion Was on the Screen article from the
New York Times Caryn James states “Though his facility seems to suggest the
anonymity of the old Hollywood studio days, Mr. Lean was not a director for
hire. He never resorted to making quick films for easy money. Instead he made
relatively few films and often spent years making painstaking preparations and
shooting in exotic locations.” Lean certainly was a man of passion and vision
when it came to his creative output. A film like Bridge on the River Kwai is
the collimation of Lean’s creative process and vision as an auteur filmmaker.
The film was shot in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, a remote island, with a cast and
crew of hundreds. The placement and movement of the camera is specifically positioned
to emphasize the characters emotions and the large-scale scope of the film. The
actor’s eyes in Lean film as consistently focused on to heighten the sense of
human drama.
From his version of Great Expectations to his final film
A Passage to India; which he also wrote the screenplay and edited, David Lean
throughout his filmography “captured what films are all about.” (James) During
his film career he was nominated for nine Academy Awards, seven of which were
for best director. David Lean’s epic scope and foresight made him an innovator
in film and a true auteur of the motion picture industry.
David Lean Accepts
the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1990
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLAj6Sbrh6k
Sources:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050212/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_on_the_River_Kwai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lean
Ideology, Genre,
Auteur
http://search.proquest.com.ai.libproxy.edmc.edu/pqcentral/docview/210263746/fulltext/138FD1C1A92735595B7/2?accountid=130772
Wood, Robin. Film Comment 13.1 (Jan/Feb 1977): 46-51
FILM; Lean's
Passion Was on the Screen
http://search.proquest.com.ai.libproxy.edmc.edu/pqcentral/docview/428038096/fulltext/138FD2427982690F1A4/2?accountid=130772
James, Caryn, New York Times [New York, N.Y.] 21 Apr
1991: A.13.
The Auteur Theory
of Film: Holy or Just Full of Holes?
http://search.proquest.com/docview/428908266?accountit=130772
Grimes, W. New York Times [New York, N.Y.] (1993, Feb 20)
pp. 1-1.9
Great! Makes me want to see more Lean films!
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