Films About Research
I love films that include scenes of characters researching something. Nothing grabs my attention more than trips to the library, archives, or any other place filled with boxes of papers to sift through. Maybe it reminds me of my own time in education, hunting the stacks for books to use in term papers. I’m talking about films like All the President’s Men, which is mostly set in the brightly list offices of The Washington Post. Bonus points for the characters using typewriters a lot.
Perhaps I appreciate these scenes simply because of my love of the printed word: the feel of paper; the choice of typeface; the sound of turning a page. A well-bound book is hard to part with, even when it’s not particularly well-written or interesting. Something tells me that in another life I worked for a publishing company.
Another example is The Ring, the American version of Ringu, probably the most well-known Japanese horror film ever made. While I like both versions, The Ring is the rare exception where I actually prefer the American version a little bit more. The story makes far less sense compared to the Japanese version, but that’s fine. Naomi Watts’ character investigates the mysterious video tape, including a trip to the library to find out more information about local lighthouses.
There’s an interesting artistry to depicting research in films. How do you make something interesting that, when we get right down to it, is genuinely kind of boring in real-life? Research is slow, time-consuming, and difficult.
Filmmakers have to employ every trick in the book to make these scenes work. Montage, lots of cuts, voiceover, anything to make the scenes compelling. Filming a scene where a character silently reads for even two or three minutes would likely make audiences walk out of the theatre.
Zodiac is another one that spends a lot of time in the offices of a newspaper, this time the San Francisco Chronicle. We watch the protagonist as he becomes obsessed with the Zodiac killer and collects newspaper clippings, books, and all manner of ephemera. This one is easily the most dis-jointed out of the films so far. It’s trying to condense over two decades of history into a watchable 158 minutes. The director, David Fincher, is great at making research look good.
Se7en is another Fincher film that features a great scene of a soon-to-be-retired detective gathering material at a library. For writing this post, I briefly searched online to see if the library featured in the film is a real location. If this filming locations blog can be believed, apparently it was a defunct bank building.
There are many more, of course, but these are some that come to mind quickly.
Since we’re on the topic of research in media, I recently heard about the indie game The Red Pearls of Borneo. It’s a mystery game in the vein of The Curse of the Obra Dinn. While I didn’t much care for the latter (I found the time limits for the investigation scenes to be annoying), the fact that The Red Pearls is free to play makes me intrigued to check it out.