On ‘Provers’ in Film
My first love was magic—card and coin tricks and the like. That’s not true—my first love was drawing, but there is nothing useful to that as patter here, so I’ll say that my first love was magic. Artistic presentation is full of white lies like that—if I were doing a magic trick that involved art materials, like markers, I might say that my first love was art. But because I’m talking about magic in this piece, I’ll say that my first love was magic. If you understood this paragraph, you now understand what patter is and how it is employed. Now, let’s teach you about another magic term: provers.
‘Provers’ means the things you do in order to prove that you’re actually doing them. These in turn may be lies though, but the idea is that you’re creating, or manufacturing, undeniability in regards to some aspect. As an example of a magician doing this, they might wave their arm above a floating object in order to prove that it is not tied to a string. As an example in moviemaking, if a character is spitting on another character’s face, you might do it in a two-shot, showing both parties, rather than cut between shots, in order to prove that they really did spit in their face. (That’s exactly what I did in my movie Mute Date!)
Though filmmakers virtually never use the term ‘provers’ (because they’ve never heard of it) that is what they are constantly looking for when watching movies. We as people who have made movies know what it takes to do most things cinematically—even things we would never need to do. That knowledge is what impedes our pure enjoyment as viewers more than anything else. Audiences can be savvy too, but not as much as they may think—until you’ve really done the damn thing and made a movie, you’re just kind of in the dark. Filmmakers aren’t ever trying to fool a civilian’s conscious mind, just their subconscious, at best—the only conscious minds they have to worry about are that of fellow filmmakers.
The arts of magic and filmmaking have a pretty large crossover as far as what you’re trying to accomplish, but the terms don’t seem to migrate—mostly because they’re secret ‘magic’ terms. I don’t play that shit, though. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not gonna tell you how every damn card trick is done, but I will use beneficial terminology freely. ‘Provers’ is a term worth knowing—and worth thinking about. You should wonder, as a filmmaker, as part of your role as such, what you can do in your power to make people feel like they can believe what is going on. You don’t need to accomplish realism per se, just believability. Anything short of that runs the risk of taking people out of the film. Take them out too many times and you’ve lost them. Magic without provers of any kind convinces no one—same goes with film.
If you enjoyed this piece and enjoy my films, consider contributing $2 per month to my film studio, Kill The Lion Films.