Roger Ebert in Conference on World Affairs

Lots of heavy hitters in Boulder this week. In fact, I just heard Roger Ebert and director Ramin Bahrani dissect the small-budget indy film Chop Shop at the University of Colorado. Bahrani’s film, which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, and was then released widely, is set in NYC and follows two poor orphans through their exploits of prostitution, theft and life. The film was shot in only 30 days. The movie looked really cool, although I only saw at best 10 minutes of it over the course of 2 hours. They literally hit play, watched 5 seconds of film, paused, analyzed, tirelessly fielded questions (hollered out from a crowd of a couple hundred in Mackey Auditorium) hit play again, and repeated the cycle for 2 hours.

It’s really cool to get inside a filmmaker’s (and movie critic’s) head. He explained why he used sharp light contrast, how it took hours set lighting for an outdoor night scene, how he created tension through holding the camera on certain expressions for  lengthened moments, why he threw a flip-flop into a puddle during a torrential downpour (to symbolize the loss of innocence by showing childhood nostalgia of the beach and playing float away.)

Bahrani talked about how directors set up scenes to guide a viewer, but how they cheat geography in the process.

He talked about the power of dramatic irony – when the audience knows something a character doesn’t.

He said drama is when anticipation meets uncertainty.

Roger Ebert, who lost his voice and speaks with a computerized voice that has many accents (he mimicked Sir Lawrence for awhile!)

Anyway, I enjoyed hearing the filmmaker and big-time critic interact with the crowd – many attendees seemed to be movie buffs and caught onto more visual metaphors than I! How lucky we are in Boulder to have so much culture in our lap this week!