The research bench
Axis of Action is the field guide — the finished map of the codes and conventions of film. This is the bench behind it: a viewing journal, and the working notes it throws off. Notes are small, dense with links, and always cite their sources. Follow anything.
Recently watched
- Taxi Driver (1976) A returned soldier drives nights through a city he wants to wash away. Scorsese's first acknowledged masterpiece — and the wiki's best case of point of view doing the work of an argument.
Three ways in
Short trails through the notes. Each one is an argument, not a category.
How a film decides who you side with
Allegiance is engineered, and it can be handed from one character to another mid-film without the audience noticing the transfer.
When the censor becomes the stylist
Two films, two ratings fights, and two constraints that got praised afterwards as artistic choices.
Who actually wrote this film?
Taxi Driver has at least three authors and they describe three different films. A useful corrective to auteurist reflex.
The spine
The notes the rest of the wiki leans on hardest — counted, not chosen. The number is how many other notes point here.
- 26 scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
- 24 source Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art The standard textbook. Where this wiki's definitions default to when nothing fancier is needed.
- 23 film Psycho (1960) Hitchcock's cheap, fast, black-and-white shocker — the richest single text for teaching codes, conventions and contexts.
- 19 source Scorsese on Scorsese (1989) The director's own account, film by film, assembled from interviews. Intention straight from the source — with the usual caveats.
- 18 film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.
- 15 context Commerce The money context: who pays, what they expect back, and how both shape the text — in production and in reception.
- 15 scene Psycho — the parlour scene Norman and Marion eat sandwiches while the mise en scène quietly explains the entire film.
- 14 source Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese Aaron Baker (ed.) (Wiley Blackwell)
- 13 source Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990) The production history. Where nearly every behind-the-scenes claim about Psycho should be checked.
- 12 concept Point of view Whose experience organises the narrative — and how films reassign it without telling you.
- 11 concept The camera as voyeur The argument that narrative cinema's default camera position is a watcher who wasn't invited.
- 11 idea Killing the protagonist at minute 47 Psycho spends its first act building a protagonist by the book, then murders her at the mid-point of act two.