Steven Soderbergh recuts Raiders of the Lost Ark as a silent movie
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Version 0 of 1. Having semi-retired from the directing game, Steven Soderbergh is now free to tinker in his garden shed – and his latest work is an inspired riff on a classic adventure story. He’s recut Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones tale Raiders of the Lost Ark, turning it into black-and-white silent movie. Writing on his own website, he wrote that the experiment was “for educational purposes only”, to illustrate the importance of considering the staging of a film’s scenes. “I operate under the theory a movie should work with the sound off, and under that theory, staging becomes paramount,” he writes. He replaces the sound with a pulsating electronic soundtrack, with various bits of it lifted from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s compositions for The Social Network. Soderbergh praises Spielberg, writing that the director “forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are—that’s high level visual math shit).” He also highlights Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography, saying it works in black and white as well as colour because “his stark, high-contrast lighting style was eye-popping regardless of medium”. It works remarkably well, and is indeed instructive. With just a placid soundtrack placed behind it, the composition and immaculately building tension of, say, the fistfight around a Nazi fighter plane pops out of the screen all the more. The lesson appears on Soderbergh’s website, Extension 765, which sells Polaroids from his film shoots, T-shirts, clapperboards and other ephemera. The director made hits like Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brockovich and Magic Mike over a 25-year career before announcing a shift away from feature film-making. His TV miniseries The Knick is currently airing on US network Cinemax, and he directed an off-Broadway play starring Chloë Grace Moretz earlier in the year. He has also recut other Hollywood films and posted them on his site. He spliced together Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with its shot-for-shot remake by Gus Van Sant, and also made a snappy 108-minute cut of Heaven’s Gate. |