Une ouverture;
known otherwise as an opening.
Note: this post is a live draft, in order to provide evidence for the ISP mentioned below. When it’s all said and done, this post will probably be repackaged and reposted.
Who are you?
I’m Josh Magpantay, I’m an 18-year-old filmmaker hailing from the all-american suburbs of Dallas, Texas. At the time of this introduction, I’m a senior at Allen High School, but it’s only a matter of months until I’m a freshman at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts studying Film and Television.
I’ve been making movies for half my life now, and I’ve slowly worked up the editing suite ladder of Photo Story 3 for Windows XP — Windows Movie Maker — iMovie — Sony Vegas — Premiere Pro. The editing suite has always been my gateway into the craft, and as such, is the part of the process closest to my heart. To me, nothing else in the world is quite like stacking together image atop image atop sound until a story emerges—it’s a very special, precise way of building a narrative, and it’s far more subtle than anything else I’ve tried. (For example, I’ve noticed as an editor that I must put in the same time and effort trying to convey elements an audience must notice as I do masking elements an audience must not; it’s a weird subtraction-by-addition game that no other medium can replicate.)
What is 24 fois la vérité ?
24 fois la vérité is two things: an Independent Study Project (ISP) as is ordained by the Gifted and Talented curriculum of Texas, and a project filling a specific need of mine. For someone who wants to pursue filmmaking as an actual career, I am poorly, poorly watched. I never grew up a budding cinephile, but it seems that the young filmmakers I was surrounded myself with were—they all had more impressive general knowledge about actors, directors, movies in general. Someone’d mention someone as well known as Ryan Gosling and I wouldn’t be able to contribute to a conversation because I honest-to-god would not know anything about his work. I never had time to really sit down and watch movies that had already come out, so this is my way of forcing myself to do so.
24 fois la vérité aims to do something a little different from other video essay channels. Whereas other essays primarily try to convince you of a certain viewpoint on a work, saying X director does Y thing, I’m sharing only what I get out of each work and what I learn from each work—I have no actual formal experience in any film classes past an undergraduate-curriculum-turned-high-school-curriculum, so I feel I only have the right to describe, not prescribe.
Why 24 fois la vérité ?
Jean-Luc Godard, French filmmaker and père de La Nouvelle Vague of the 1960 is often quoted with the following:
“La photographie, c’est la vérité, et le cinéma, c’est 24 fois la vérité par seconde.”
Which comes from his 1963 film Le Petit Soldat, spoken by Bruno, its main character. Often, people add on the gibberish “and every cut is a lie” onto the end and attribute it to Godard himself but I’ve yet to figure out where it comes from. Anyhow, this has always resonated with me, and I adore the sentiment.
