I.

Research on Wes Anderson: His approach and philosophy to lmmaking

Nearly all the authors who write about Wes Anderson, whether they view him positively
or negatively, remark on his unique ability to create a miniature version of the world that
is somewhat removed from reality. In this world, he has complete control, creating
characters that while perhaps are simple, also reveal basic truths that are
representative of the real world.
Michael Chabon praises this quality in his article The Film Worlds of Wes Anderson,
writing that all art is a distilled version of a piece of the world. The best works of art are
able to be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. But
while Andersons work may only be a model of something more real, it is not without
gravity. Chabon writes that Andersons miniatures span continents and decades. They
comprise crime, adultery, brutality, suicide, the death of a parent, the drowning of a
child, moments of profound joy and transcendence. Anderson is able to take the
emotions that occur in real life and apply them to simplied, ctional situations,
situations that are carefully crafted for the sole purpose of conveying that emotion, that
one thought, that feeling.
Brendan Kredell views Anderson differently, and thinks that his simplicity is in fact an
oversimplication. In his article Wes Anderson and the City Spaces of Indie Cinema,
Kredell argues that Anderson typies the attitude of the urban gentrifying class that
rose to prominence during the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the
twenty-rst. He believes that these gentriers ignore history and culture to their
detriment, extracting only supercial qualities from cultures that they mine. The
cinematic city is abstracted and aestheticized, presented to the viewer as a
romanticized and essentialized space rather than an organic environment inhabited by
real people, he writes. The city is abstracted in the name of an urban lifestyle that
casually (and sometimes willfully) ignores the historical and cultural specicities of the
neighborhoods that it transforms. It is certainly easy to see how one could take this
view; Anderson does purposefully leave out a lot of details about the context of his lms.
But perhaps this is the point: in making a model of the world, one cannot then but back
every realistic detail into the model. In order to clearly and accurately convey the
feelings that Chabon describes, maybe some things are better left out, and maybe
these things include cultural and historical details that ultimately have no bearing on the
story.
Chabon addresses this point, writing that the world in its realistic state is too large of a
scope for a lm to handle. Grief, at full scale, is too big for us to take it in; it literally
cannot be comprehended, he writes. But distance does not ought not necessarily
imply a withdrawal With each of his lms, Andersons total command of detail both
the physical detail of his sets and costumes, and the emotional detail of the uniformly
beautiful performances he elicits from his actors has enabled him to increase the
persuasiveness of his own family Zemblas, without sacricing any of the paradoxical
emotional power that distance affords. Chabon sees Andersons ignoring of selected
contextual elements as a positive, a tool that allows him to create more powerful,
specic work, and that the addition of precise details is the way he makes up for the
lack of more general information in the lm.
In addition to Andersons philosophy and framing of his lms, there is also debate about
the role of architecture in them. Anderson tends to zero in on one location, whether it is
a hotel, boat, school, or private home, and much of the action occurs in this place.
Kredell once again takes issue with this, arguing that the focus of the singular location
diminishes the power of history and culture that a realistic neighborhood affords:
Anderson prevents the city from its own identity, choosing instead to treat it as a
location within which to construct his own social universe. However, many lms do
this perhaps shooting in one city and labeling it as another and Kredell acknowledges
this. He takes special offense not to the fact that Anderson misconstrues the
surroundings, but that he almost completely ignores them: Anderson does not simply
shoot his lm in a house in Harlem and represent it instead as a location in Brooklyn, for
instance. Rather, he obliterates the very space of the house itself. He shoots in
Harlem, but his lm belongs to nowhere.
Once again, perhaps Kredell is missing the point. In his article Wes Anderson: The
Architectural Film-Maker, Steve Rose describes the careful consideration that
Anderson puts into these made-up locations of his. Anderson takes pains to show you
that he is not cheating Instead of edits, he prefers zooms, whip pans and especially
tracking shot.. They are not only demonstrations of his technical virtuosity, they also
reinforce the continuity of his painstakingly constructed lmic space. Andersons lms
do not belong to nowhere, as Kredell puts it. They belong to an imaginary place, a
place that Anderson has created, a place that is brought into being for the sole purpose
of supporting the lm. These places are not random, and this is why Anderson does not
want the implication that a site has interfering with them: they are just right as they are,
as he imagined them, as he designed them. Rose writes of him: Liberated from the
constraints of function, Anderson can use architecture to manifest psychology. The
places that were constructed manifest the psychology of the characters in the lm, the
characters that Anderson created. It follows naturally that if he created the characters,
only he should know of the place that brings out their most important qualities as well.