SHINING: Looking Again
I have carried my copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing for years. It is worn now, its cover creased and its edges beginning to fray.
Its opening thought—“Seeing comes before words”—has always stayed with me.
Inside the book, Berger quotes the revolutionary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, writing in 1923 about the possibilities of the camera:
“My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world.”
That line is one I have never forgotten.
It describes something I believe film can do. A camera does not simply record what is placed before it. Where we stand, what we notice and what we choose to place within the frame can help someone encounter the familiar differently.
Research begins a similar process before filming starts. It changes the position from which we look.
More than recording what we see
Artists have always found ways to show us more than the eye alone can provide.
Leonardo da Vinci observed nature with extraordinary precision. His drawings were not passive records; they were part of his attempt to understand the structures and forces beneath an appearance.
Van Gogh painted recognisable fields, faces and night skies, but his use of colour and movement communicated how the world felt as well as how it looked.
Picasso refused to restrict an object or person to a single viewpoint. Different angles could exist within the same image, bringing movement, time and knowledge into a still picture.
They looked closely at the world and then found a visual language through which to interpret it.
I see the same impulse in Christopher Nolan’s films. He reaches back to the physical foundations of cinema—celluloid, large-format photography and effects created in front of the camera—while using them to explore fractured time, competing perspectives and subjective experience.
He is not treating older forms of filmmaking as museum pieces. He is using their physical qualities to ask what cinema can still become.
That is what interests me: not reproducing the world exactly as it appears, but finding a way of seeing that allows us to experience it differently.
When research changes the view
A film may begin with an event, a person, a place or a detail that refuses to be forgotten.
The temptation is to decide too quickly what the story means. Once we have settled on an explanation, research can become little more than a search for evidence that proves us right.
The most valuable discoveries often do the opposite.
A document contradicts an accepted account. A conversation reveals that a seemingly simple decision carried an unseen cost. A location makes us recognise distance, exposure or isolation in a way that a map cannot.
The story changes because our position in relation to it has changed.
Research does not always give us an answer. Sometimes it gives us a better question.
Walking Mary-Jane’s path
I experienced this while developing Sweetheart.
The court case left an extraordinary amount of detail. Statements were taken, movements reconstructed and testimony preserved. The courtroom was packed.
These records tell us that people cared about what had happened to Mary-Jane. The public presence in court suggests grief, concern and a desire to see justice done.
Yet within all that detail, there is a profound silence.
Mary-Jane is at the centre of the case, but her own voice is largely absent. Her life and death come to us through questions asked by men, testimony recorded by men and decisions made within institutions controlled by men.
The records allow us to follow what happened, but they also reveal who possessed the authority to describe it.
Knowing these facts was one thing. Walking the same path gave me a different perspective on the story.
The landscape changed my understanding of Mary-Jane’s final journey. Distance became something felt rather than measured. The ground, the weather and the isolation began to suggest the physical reality of moving through that place.
I found myself considering how Mary-Jane, as a woman in 1858, might have perceived her situation.
We cannot know exactly what she felt, and I would not want to claim that we can. But research can help us understand the world within which those feelings arose.
Nature, geography, religion and fear converged along that path. They shaped what Mary-Jane could see around her, what she may have believed was possible and how alone she might have felt as she approached the end of her life.
The archive gave me the voices that survived. The packed courtroom revealed the strength of feeling around her death. The landscape helped me sense what the written record could not contain.
Walking there did not give me Mary-Jane’s thoughts. It changed the questions I was able to ask of her story.
Her vulnerability does not feel safely contained within history. It reminds us that every life is lived without knowledge of what comes next—and that our own existence in this world is more fragile than we often allow ourselves to imagine.
What stays outside the film
Not everything discovered during research belongs in a screenplay.
Some details change our understanding of a character without ever being spoken. Some influence the atmosphere of a scene. Others stay in notebooks, conversations and photographs because the film must remain a story, not become a lesson.
Yet these discoveries can still be valuable. They can help us think about our own choices, relationships and ways of living.
That is why we have begun SHINING.
The name Nidd is thought to come from an ancient Celtic word meaning “shining” or “brilliant.” It felt like the right name for a collection devoted to sharing some of the thoughts and discoveries that emerge while our films are being developed.
Each SHINING post will relate to one of our films without revealing its story. It will begin with an image or observation from the research and follow the wider human question it raises.
The first question
Our first reflection emerged from the research behind Dead Funny.
A bench sits beneath a chestnut tree, with a churchyard beyond. It invites us to rest among the traces of those who came before, while the world continues to change beyond it.
The photograph left us with a question:
If you could sit on that bench with anyone, from any place or time, who would it be?
And what would you say?
The question reveals nothing about the plot of Dead Funny. It offers something encountered while developing its world and allows that thought to become personal to someone else.
That is what we hope SHINING will do.
Our films will continue to tell their own stories. SHINING will share some of what changed while we were learning how to tell them—and perhaps offer another way of seeing what was there all along.
References
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-013515-4. Vertov quotation, p. 17.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)’.
The Museum of Modern Art, ‘Multiple Perspectives: Cubism’.
Van Gogh Museum, ‘Gallery Texts: Van Gogh in Auvers’.
British Film Institute, ‘Christopher Nolan: A Showman’s Odyssey’.
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