How to Watch a Movie (10 page)

You can say that the shower scene is effective because of Hitchcock's fastidious control—all those very short shots cut together so that (as he boasted) you never see a knife piercing flesh. That's true, and in the very rich sound track of that scene, the music screams, the water rushes, and you can hear and feel a blade biting flesh. So you can praise the film technically, as screen storytelling.

But that won't convey what has happened in the thirty minutes: we like Marion Crane and are rooting for her, but we also want to see her get some sexual delivery and satisfaction. We have become accomplices in the film (this is Hitchcock's most cunning and intimate skill) so that we can feel for the victim and the killer at the same time. This is far more than a conventional play upon the Jekyll-and-Hyde duality in most of us. It has to do with the structure of film as an experience, the marriage of intense actuality and magical detachment, so that we have a truly divided self. It is the way in which information can hardly exist without being emotional. And it is why the greatest test in watching movies is to respond to the plot or the characters, while observing film process, too.

Anyone who has written about film, and taught it,
recognizes those moments where someone comes up to you and says, “You know, I appreciate a lot of what you're saying and I find it very interesting, but it's taking me out of the story, out of the movie. I find I'm watching the camera more than what it shows me.”

I sympathize with that predicament. But my reply is that a little perseverance will be rewarding. When you read a novel, you are not actually lost in the story—you know your place in the text. If you drop the book you can find where you were. The “story” exists only as a conceit between the words on the page and your imagination. This happens quite naturally, and our history at the movies—our experience of the business—has been to believe we should relax, take it easy, sit back, and enjoy ourselves. But people cannot enjoy themselves without thinking about it. You may say to yourself that sex is purely physical, and it may be one of the most direct sources of pleasure we know, but we don't reach that conclusion without thinking about it. The most erogenous zones are all in the brain.

7

WHAT IS A SHOT?

O
nce upon a time, giving a camera to a kid marked a coming of age, so young people thought of taking a photograph as a personal advance. Today we all have phones that snap anything and everything. So selfies are as casual and disposable as chatter. It
is
the new talk. But suppose you want to take a picture of your girlfriend. Why? Well, there is still a way in which fond photos hope to establish a relationship as a way of saying, Look you're beautiful—and I have
seen
it.

Possessing a photograph is not owning a person, but it is a step in that direction, and if you start to study the way people display portraits in their home or in their life you may learn more about the family dynamic than is comfortable. Photographs are helpless testaments, but they can be possessions. The art critic John Berger was among the first to notice that a
photograph evoked both presence and absence: it reminds you of a person, but it underlines the way the person is not there now. Perhaps sometimes it's easier to love a photograph than a person.

So the girlfriend says, “Wait a minute,” because she wants to look her “best” or most like herself. She thinks to brush her hair; she realizes not long after that that she might as well have a shower. She may have a “natural” attitude toward her appearance, but equally she might consider going to a hairdresser, the beauty parlor, or a shrink. “You're sending this picture to your parents?” she asks, when she has gentle, vague, but undeniable designs upon them. She wants to impress them. So she wonders next if she may need to buy a few new clothes. To be sure, she feels happy and at ease in her old black jeans and the cherry red shirt—and it's not that she doesn't look pretty or cute like that—but this photograph is meant to last a long time and it is to be the first thing his parents will see. Granted she may not have made up her mind yet about you. Still, having your picture taken is no minor matter; it is a gesture toward gravity. She may not be afraid of having her soul stolen by the blink, but perhaps she is bound to assess the likelihood and temperament of her soul. “Don't make the cherry shirt look too … well, you know, ‘sexy,'” she asks, when she was the one who chose that shirt in the first place. (How would you like a documentary film of Anna Karenina buying her clothes, trying them on, deciding what suits her? Doesn't any actress playing Anna go through the same process?)

Who knows? This “cherry” shirt (some say “blood red” or “saucy pink”) may be the brief, preserved moment that you and the children to come will gaze at for decades—
prepare yourself
—after she had that awful car crash. When there is
an obituary, this may be the picture you give to the paper or which you print on invitations to the funeral.

“Do you want me to smile?” she asks. “Do you want me to look at the camera?” Immense aesthetic decisions descend upon you straightaway. You have become a director, just as she has taken on the role of herself, the one that never ends its run. This doesn't mean that either of you is a fake or dishonest: but you cannot carry out this simple matter without complex self-examination. In the year of
Anatomy of a Murder
and
Hiroshima Mon Amour
, the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a book called
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
(1959)—if movies had subtitles, this might fit 85 percent of them, not to mention the way
Anatomy
and
Hiroshima
ask questions abut appearance and its reliability. Goffman's book identified a doubleness in our selves, which is not duplicity, but is so far-reaching it may threaten the eight-hour sleep of assurance or integrity.

We need not go into all the areas of choice in this simple snapshot—whether she looks off into the distance like a dreamer or grins at the camera with clenched candor. Whether she has her hair up or lets it drop down on her shoulders—so that you are inspired to wait for a breeze or have her shake her head, making the hair seem more alive. Whether you ask her to bare her shoulders and she refuses—“This is for your parents!” Still, the request lingers in her face; she is thinking about it, and sometimes a camera can grasp thought. So then when the shot is taken, she discards that rose red shirt and knows you're watching so that after just a few more shots you could be making love. Because if people want to look “nice” or their best in pictures, then they are likely to become lovable. One of the standard functions of the smartphone nowadays is to
circulate candid inspection shots of boys and girls. Fifty years ago, maybe, lovers' snapshots had more tenderness or aspiration.

You may not think of yourself as a photographer (or director), but the camera does not permit that casualness. After all, you want the frame to be level. You want it to include your girl, and you can hardly help but make automatic adjustments in terms of what part of the frame she fills, and what else is in the picture. You are making a “shot.” Do you want space in the photograph, and if so, where? And what does that space say about her if it is dark or light? Why not have her stand in front of the bougainvillea? Or the brick wall? Or the sea? No need to write captions for those settings, but each picture has a different potential for meaning. You can vary the lens. You can come in close so everything else becomes a blur, the sea and the bougainvillea just color washes. You can shoot from enough distance to show the line of her body (“Put your hand on your hip,” you suggest) while giving a good idea of her face. You have to make sure of focus. You may even find yourself noticing the light, with the discovery that if she turns her head to the left and looks away with her head raised—such a good chin—the light and shadow frame her in a pleasing way. The sun and the clouds are helpers in all this, but if you had “lights” then you could make a whole world for her. Even if with an ironic touch, she might become a version of Marlene Dietrich in
Blonde Venus
or
The Scarlet Empress
, two of the films Dietrich made for Josef von Sternberg and which are among the most highly wrought movies ever shot.

You are making shots, and you are beginning to explore the range of choices that await professional filmmakers or artists. You can vow to ignore those choices, but the camera possesses all the material that will suggest decisions—it knows no other
way. Cameras have been locked in fixed positions—Andy Warhol did that in his factory films in the 1960s, because he was only interested in a bare, unaccented record of the life in front of the camera. He was content to be boring, because he appreciated the unassertive charm of duration, or the passing of time. Surveillance cameras are unattended, but their vantage has been selected to match their impassive but untrusting purpose. And part of the imaginative character of surveillance is that empty authority or the foreboding neutrality which seems so indifferent to what people do even if it was set up to record it.

The formerly innocent still photographer may be stricken by these considerations. He may recoil from the discovery that the simple urge to “show” something or someone rapidly leads into an analysis of seeing and being seen. So what can seem like an unexceptional and unprofound wish to pass on an image is on the brink of a relentless examination of what it is you are seeing, and what you want to see. To that extent, the merest “shot” from daily life is not far removed from the scheme of shots in a film of maybe two hours and several interwoven narratives—perhaps even a work of greatness. Whether you like it or not, to choose a shot and “take” it is to leave a record of your own sensibility, just as a few lines of casual talk can lead to a searching analysis of your persona simply on the basis of vocabulary, grammar, and verbal construction. We are not good at being spontaneous or free from analysis. That may be why we love the idea of that freedom so much.

Let's look at a few moments from various films just to show the sort of decision-making that can go into a shot, and what that reveals about the temperament of a film. In Otto Preminger's
Laura
(1944), a young woman has been shot and killed. Her face was blown away. Mark McPherson (Dana Andews) is
the police detective on the case. He is a rough guy, intimidated by the classiness of Laura and her apartment. But he decides to spend the night there. Why? To learn more about the victim's life? Or to sink deeper into the lovely ghost of Laura? So he commands her apartment. He wanders around, and the moving camera is gentle and encouraging to his snooping. It lets him live there, and relax. He is drinking, dreaming. That works on us as well as on Mark. He looks at her underwear and her letters done up in ribbons; he sees his own rogue appearance in her expensive mirror; he stands beneath the large over-sweet portrait of Laura like a sinner come back to church. He falls in love with her, and in that heady, invasive process he drops off to sleep. Then there is a noise that wakes him—a door opening. A young woman comes into the apartment—it's Laura! (Gene Tierney). Has Mark's desire brought her back to life or has he crossed over into the spirit world? At this early point in the film, the very elegant shots that Preminger adopts leave rich doubt as to whether this is a murder mystery, the discovery of love, or a film about incipient mental illness. It feels like a matter-of-fact cop's inquiry, but it's trying to seize rapture.

At the start of
Gone Girl
(2014), there's a shot of a woman's blonde hair, as a man's voice talks abut her and her mysteriousness. The framing feels affectionate, but the man talks about cracking the head open to see the twists of brain. If that's worrying, then she turns and looks at him (and at us) with the special gaze of Rosamund Pike, the actress playing the wife. What can you say about an actor's face that is legitimate? Well, in this case, there is some assistance. The part of the wife was originally meant for Reese Witherspoon, someone we like, someone whose face may be just a little more known or accessible than
that of Ms. Pike. The casting is important: Rosamund Pike is beautiful (whatever that means), candid but distant, cold, armored, and she comes without history. Her newness helps make that opening the best thing in an often hateful movie.

Now consider
Caught
, made by Max Ophüls in 1949. Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes) is a rather empty-headed model who married Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), a cruel, controlling tycoon. She leaves him and takes a humble job as a receptionist with Dr. Quinada (James Mason), who works for the poor. She likes the job and Quinada's dedication to underprivileged patients. She begins to find herself. One night after work, Quinada takes Leonora out. They are shy about dancing together, but then in one shot a tracking camera follows them across a crowded, smoky dance floor, the track seemingly driven by the music and their ease. We do not hear them talk. But by the time they come into the foreground of the shot, we know they have fallen in love. It is a scene of unforced simplicity or grace that uncovers new feeling in the story. Ohlrig always told her what to feel, but Quinada and the camera have let her discover it for herself.

We could have heard the two of them talk. The camera could be close and attentive, watching every flicker of emotion, with the other dancers passing by in the background. We could even have close-ups to register the deepening feeling in him and her. But Ophüls prefers the removed tracking shot, the ensemble of the dance, and a brief passage of time. He trusts to their silence and our anticipation. It takes just a few feet and twenty seconds or so for love to emerge.

This is one of the happiest moments in the work of a man usually certain that happiness was elusive and unstable—a breathless ecstatic tracking shot, carrying along the wife in
The Earrings of Madame de
, say, could as easily lead to ruin as success. The more of Ophüls you see, the more persistent these tracking shots are. Some observers regarded them as ostentatious decoration, and even a way of masking slight, overfamiliar plots. But I think they were second nature for a man who thought and felt in terms of movement and who understood it as a map of passing time. The movements in Ophüls's films are like the beat of a heart or a clock. They are life being lived and running out. So finally, with Ophüls, the condition of movement is close to a passion. Movie is a plastic art. The very name equates motion and emotion. It is always a kind of dance.

The more searching and deeply felt the cinematic expression, the more open a movie is to resonance, layering, and contrary interpretations. The work of Renoir is an example of that, and its motto comes from
The Rules of the Game
in which it is said that everyone has his or her own reasons for what they do. The conflict in that, the untidiness or the chaos, emerges in the resolve to see people in groups instead of simplifying closeups. Historically, and to this day, American film likes the closeup. So do we: it is the mainline into fantasy. But it has larger ramifications that have significance for democracy and liberty. As you watch, you cannot eliminate the undertone of philosophy even in a film that would shrink from that word. Or a photograph. There is a passport picture of Dr. Josef Mengele in which he looks kind, cheery, and thoughtful. In the age of photography we are all actors.

In John Ford's
The Searchers
, a female child, Debbie, has been kidnapped by the Comanches, in 1868. Her uncle, Ethan (John Wayne), goes in search of her. He is a harsh man, solitary, scathing, unfriendly, defeated in the recent Civil War, emotionally disappointed in life. He is accompanied in this
search by Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), a half-breed attached to Debbie's family, and it is Martin who sees in Ethan's hostility the threat that he means to find Debbie and kill her because she has been defiled by marriage to a Comanche chief, Scar. All of this is seen against the terrain of Monument Valley (in southern Utah), a sacred place for the Navajo, and for John Ford and automobile advertisements.

The search lasts five years, so that Debbie is Natalie Wood by the time she is found, and evidently fit to be a wife—though she seems to have no children. There is suspense over how Ethan will act, but in the event he embraces his niece and takes her home. Nothing is as ambivalent as that homecoming. We are inside the homestead looking out at the brightness of the desert of Monument Valley. Everyone else enters the house, as Ethan steps back to usher them in. Then the moment remains for him to enter. All of a sudden, a film of many moods becomes not just coherent, but necessary. This is why it was made. There is a single shot—the door, the figure, and the light beyond. The camera exposure is set for the desert, so the threshold is dark and Ethan is a silhouette, although we can see enough detail in his face and stance to know that a filler light has been put up for him. (This is technical, but as you watch films more, so you become like a member of the crew.)