How to Watch a Movie (11 page)

Ethan does not enter the house. Perhaps the emotion inside is too much for him? Does he want to be alone, or does he sense that he needs to be away from others? Has searching become habit? Has it made him an outcast? Has he recognized in himself the racist violence that came close to killing Debbie? Is he lonely or possessed by horror? Whatever our answer, all in one shot he hesitates on the threshold, then turns away,
steps down from the porch onto the desert floor, sways as only Wayne could, moves into the ochre and orange expanse—until the dark door closes, shutting him out and ending the film.

Think of the home-movie footage Abraham Zapruder shot in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He was not skilled, his camera was not refined, he had no artistic ambition. But his single-shot (486 frames) is not just the best record of what happened in those few seconds, it has been the template for explaining the event. It is chance cinema, documentary, humble, rough and ready, but maybe the most significant and reinterpreted film of the twentieth century.

These are just a few shots out of millions in the history of film; and for all except the Zapruder footage, let's say there were twenty or thirty alternatives, some of which may have been filmed and then discarded. There is no need for us to count the shots as we watch the film. But we cannot avoid the rapid process (twenty-four times a second, more or less) in which the supposed reality of a story is selected and taken for us, piece by piece. All I have tried to do in these few examples is to say that selection is not casual (not even when it has the air of absolute, insolent arbitrariness, as in some films by Jean-Luc Godard). It is as deliberate as the rectangle of our screen or frame remains firm. More than we may be able to articulate quickly, the patterns of this shot-making have entered our consciousness: so we know and feel the rhythm of crosscut close-ups in significant dialogue scenes; we are not surprised to hear the central logic of master shot and detailed close-ups that is used in filming countless scenes; we anticipate that shooting a character from the rear is likely to lead to some demon coming up behind them, goosing them or devouring them. We may not know the term “offscreen space” (a critics' favorite) but we feel its potential as easily as we expect the unexpected in life.
Just as we now know a certain number of plotlines by heart and habit, so the syntax of shot-making has gone into our nervous system. This is not necessarily good. The sheer tonnage of images and stories may have helped account for the tedium and predictability of much of the medium, and put a hysterical stress on novelty for its own sake. So picture-making acquires a mad imperative: show us something we have never seen before, even if that thing is “impossible” in life.

That matter of possibility, or its opposite, is highly important. For decades, audiences responded to movies as they had done to photographs for fifty years or so before the stills began to move. They trusted them. They agreed with the implicit contract—
that is
Lincoln, or Walt Whitman—and they abided by the progress apparent in such shots. It is part of our fascination with Lincoln, and our respect for what he did, that we have still photographs taken over the last few years of his life that could be stills in a movie about a leader's fatigue, his doubt and difficulty, his illness (perhaps), and the aging that accompanies such responsibility. It's easy to say that Daniel Day-Lewis was outstanding in Steven Spielberg's
Lincoln
, though that may be undercut by the certainty that he would be that good in advance. To this day, however, despite the skill and dedication with which Day-Lewis made himself a version of Lincoln, I believe the still pictures from the 1860s are more moving. Day-Lewis may be more impressive, or spontaneous, as Daniel Plainview in
There Will Be Blood
—because he is the original Plainview, unhindered by questions of resemblance. One hundred and fifty years after Lincoln, it's easy to believe the man was playing himself in life. But Plainview is fresh, insane, and dangerous. On screen, I think I prefer him (though it's better that Plainview was not president).

So the great impersonations of early cinema—Paul Muni as
Zola or Pasteur or Juárez (how could he look like all of them while maintaining integrity?)—have paled and dated compared with, say, the increasing effort in Gary Cooper to look like Gary Cooper. That man aged and seemed to suffer in the way of Lincoln in the still pictures. Go from
Morocco
to
Meet John Doe
and from
The Fountainhead
to
Man of the West
and you cannot miss the way, shot by shot, time has eroded beauty, confidence and perfection. In turning up to be photographed, to be shot, Cooper was doing something that transcended acting. He is in the company of Rembrandt or Lucien Freud looking at themselves in the mirror.

That sense of plain life revealed on film was a vital part of the pact with reality implicit in movies. In our time, that pact has been increasingly qualified by special effects, by digital photography, by electronic images generated in the computer. To say the least, we do not trust the shot in the way we did, as a record or an imprint of reality. That has changed moviegoing along with so many other aspects of our culture. But the promise of life is still there, and still honored in many films.

One of the gross restrictions on liveliness in our movies is the pressure under which something, always, has to be
happening
. A kind of claustrophobia can result; you can feel it in Hitchcock and in every commercial ever made. And the dominated eye can wither the soul. Whereas I love that air of indolence or indifference that can come from just looking at time passing, and asking yourself, is something happening?

If we go back to our starting point in this chapter, to a photograph of a girlfriend, we know the feeling that while some pictures are adequate records of the appearance of the person who was “shot,” others “get” her—they reach into the inner life or soul; they make us want to
look
. That may be because you
learned as an amateur to manage the light and the composition in novel ways, and because the girl loved you and felt that the act of photographing her was a measure of trust so that, for an instant, she looked away at the light and thought of nothing except that her life depended on the moment—more or less that is what Josef von Sternberg asked of Marlene Dietrich in their films together. That is what turns a snapshot into a picture, or an ordinary photograph into a shot. It is in taking exceptional, penetrating pictures that most camera-handlers discover the desire to be photographers and what it is to look with depth. In the same way, any attempt to write is going to feel the resonance of words and sentences. So the record of life becomes an attempt to understand it. A shot is always that attempt, so long as we are watching closely. A film teaches us to see, and the shot is its mechanism. You can say it's like a word, but that's too crude. Sometimes a shot is a sentence—or a book.

As if that were the whole thing.

8

WHAT IS A CUT, AND DOES IT HURT?

A
shot might run forever, or as long as life. Sometimes you feel that urge in its momentum. It's part of the fluidity in film and the modern sensibility of surveillance. That Zapruder film from Dealey Plaza concludes when the motorcade races away to the hospital, and Zapruder surrenders to the shock of what he had witnessed. But our curiosity about that terrible day wishes the shot could be endless. If it could have begun earlier, and known to pick out some special places (if Hitchcock or Scorsese had been in charge). If it had been thorough surveillance; if it had scrutinized every possible shooting spot—then the motorcade might have been stopped. You can anticipate the discipline that follows in a future security system that sees everything.

A tracking shot—working in space or time—is an
exploring wonder. But how will it terminate? Jean-Luc Godard once said that every beautiful tracking shot—even those by Max Ophüls—contained the seeds of its own destruction. It had to stop eventually, and in practice that required an imperative of story. It's like the tracking shot with the car at the start of
Touch of Evil:
it almost requires a bomb. For a brief period, in the late 1940s, Hitchcock fell in love with endless shots and the prospect of unbroken film. So he shot
Rope
as if the entire thing were a single shot. The result was tedious and clumsy, but ostentatious, and in a few years Hitch regained confidence in his own natural talent for cutting.

It's the same with sentences. No matter how sweeping the current of words, the reader is impatient for a full stop, and the chance to try another. But in shooting and cutting, just as much as with talking and pausing, we can begin to feel the deepest rhythms of story, process, seduction, or attitude. When Ernest Hemingway's work had its first impact, critics spoke of naturalism, terseness, visualization, and simplicity; and some saw this as a writing affected by watching movies. But only if you agreed that movies had cuts, or edits, or joins; and only when you appreciated that that linkage had rhythm. (In this paragraph just ending—this one—you have to read sentences, and even ideas. But you must read punctuation, too.)

At the start of Jacques Demy's
Bay of Angels
(1963), the camera begins on the figure of Jeanne Moreau walking at dawn on the promenade at Nice. Then (on a car) it races away from her until her pale, nervy figure—she is in white with platinum blonde hair in a black-and-white movie—is lost in the distance. It is not that she removes herself; it's fate or traveling that lets her vanish in the crowd. All of this is accompanied by a cascading piano score by Michel Legrand, an
accompaniment that feels as sustained as a river in spring. It doesn't matter what the shot is meant to mean (in terms of some tidy caption). The momentum doesn't bother with literary equivalence. It's so exciting that you feel it could go on forever in a movie called “One morning in Nice, I saw this woman …” But, then, sooner or later (and often as if we willed or wished it), the screen cuts to some other image and a story settles in about this woman, a chronic gambler, and the young man who will be altered by her way of life. Once the story is indicated, that piano music could be the roulette wheel, or its exhilaration in her head. And the steady diminution of her figure could be suggesting, one minute you're a winner,
the
winner, and then you start to be forgotten. But don't worry too much yet about what the shot means. Just go with the flow and wait for the cut that will begin to tell us whether that flow is a gentle stream or a racing sea, and whether we are the sturdy skipper in command, or swept away.

Now, in the days of moving film, shot at twenty-four frames per second (or whatever), the celluloid strip, if you had been able to examine it, was so many still pictures, one after the other. But separation was elided and replaced with continuity and duration because if you ran enough frames a second the eye and the brain attending saw life, or something so lifelike there was not much distinction. That was called persistence of vision. I put it that way because in finished prints of those movies, a cut is exactly like the gaps between frames. The gap may be an enormous jump, going from T. E. Lawrence's hand held over a flame in Cairo, to the immensity of the desert. But it is one frame after another on a strip of film. It is only in the editing of a film that someone took physically different shots, trimmed them, and then spliced them together, with
film cement. Work prints composed like that would only go through the projector if the splices held. So the cut was also a splice, a coming together, a marriage.

This is not just playing with words. It's raising an issue that goes to the heart of the nature of movie—and it is something violently, but creatively, opposed to the philosophy of the endless shot. “Once upon a time” can suddenly become twice upon a time. Something else springs from that: most films, cautiously, will play it safe with time: begin at the beginning and advance to the end (
High Noon, All Is Lost, Twelve Angry Men
). But one film we've noted already,
Citizen Kane
, begins at the end and then comes back to the end from several different directions. Time is the playground of the movies—if you're alert enough to play there.

The word “cut” is tricky. It makes people think something has been omitted or excised. Once upon a time nudity was cut out of films; sometimes nowadays it is deliberately added in. But a director and an editor work toward a cut that is an assembly—the editing is done to create meanings, not omit them. The “director's cut” is now a precious contractual right, eagerly sought and often infringed upon, so sometimes the director's cut is only seen on the DVD release. Films like
Heaven's Gate
exist in different versions in which, far from being cut down, the idea of the film expands. There is “lost” footage from
The Magnificent Ambersons
that every film scholar has longed to find for over seventy years.

In film today, there is an intriguing clash between cuts that specify or focus an action, and those that let possibilities flower. When Terrence Malick made
Badlands
(1973) he cut the scenes of the runaway kids on the prairie to be precise and anecdotal, though he loved the openness of them
dancing in the car headlights. But in
The Tree of Life
(2011), the cuts shift from family life in Texas in the 1950s to prehistory or the distant future with disarming ease. So sometimes Sean Penn in modern dress seems to be gazing at dinosaurs. Just a hundred years earlier people had stumbled on the basic link: he looks—he sees her; two shots that might have been made months and miles apart but which seem fluent on screen. In
At Close Range
(1986), there is a simple scene where teenage Sean Penn meets Mary Stuart Masterson. We know this kind of moment inside out. It is handled in crosscut close-ups; the two kids “act well” or they had something for each other. Who cares?—you can't watch without falling in love with editing.

At other times in the work of editing, when story problems arose, the looking shot might be cut with a mate that was never intended in the script. Yet still it works. You have to have spent time in a cutting room to appreciate this dynamic magic and the way it can confound, betray, or rescue shooting. But those cuts in
The Tree of Life
have led Malick from narrative to philosophy. The only question is, Can they carry an audience along with the ease and soaring desire from that bit of
At Close Range
?

It comes to this: the cut in a movie can be violent, transformative, and intimidating. Once we realize that a film can cut quicker than we can see—for we do not exactly see the join, just its impact—then the cut is a blade hanging over us, like a guillotine. That application is most evident in films that seek to frighten us. The appearance of the woman through the blurry shower curtain behind the oblivious Janet Leigh in
Psycho
is done within a shot—and it is one of the most frightening moments. But once the sequence gets under way, the line of the film becomes a series of savage cuts that mimic the thrusts of the knife—although the cuts also allow us
not
to see
a blade cutting flesh, which would have meant trouble with the censor in 1960. But the violence of the editing and the jagged, wounded force of the surviving shots is all part of the way Hitchcock has constructed
Psycho
for shock effect. And once Hitch has cut to the knife in the shower, any other cut is possible in the future—it could be a severed head in your bed, a horse's head.

So, perchance to cut is a perpetual threat. No such dread operates in theater, where we sit in a similar position with a spectacle contingent on physical possibility. In fact, in the theater (the fencing in
Hamlet
, say) the action tends to feel ponderous and stilted just because it is hobbled by pretending. But from the outset in cinema, infinite imagined (or undreamed of) possibility has been in prospect. The more a film cuts, and the more adventurously, then the readier we are for its astonishment. Some sense of dread or magic is never far away, not even in naturalistic drama. Those cuts can hurt, but they can transport and transform and they can heal old wounds.

On a cut, the man in the neorealist classic
Bicycle Thieves
has his worst fear realized: his bicycle is stolen—so he will lose his job. Could things be worse? Could the alien that menaced Sigourney Weaver all those years be lurking around the street corner? No, that seems far too fanciful an association for the Rome of 1948. But don't forget that this impoverished man's job is pasting up posters of Rita Hayworth in
Gilda—
life-size, voluptuous, fantastic, a cutaway in the same frame, and a surreal partner for his threadbare life, nearly as unexpected and “crazy” as the 1979 alien created by H. R. Giger. So edits can exist in the same frame. In Alf Sjöberg's
Miss Julie
(1951; and a woefully neglected film), the past and the present coexist in the same shot, the child and the woman side by side.

Another way of handling that subtlety is in another lost art,
the dissolve, where one image becomes another. At the depth of his despair in
The Wrong Man
, the falsely accused Henry Fonda character starts to pray. As he does so, the image picks up another one, a dissolve, of the real criminal walking down the street, coming toward the camera, until his face occupies the exact space that was Fonda's seconds before. I don't honestly believe in praying, but I believe in those shots and their slow cut. It's also a moment in Hitchcock's career where one cannot forget the fact of his Catholicism and the impact a sense of guilt and chance had on him.

The same kind of impending future waits in comedy, too. Thus, Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd (or M. Hulot or Jim Carrey) are all likely to encounter (or be) sudden and absurd hazards. What this entails is a constant promise of surprise and peril more akin to magic acts or sporting events than the deliberate advance and accumulation of stage plays and operas. It is one of the secret sources of an inspiring sensationalism at the movies; the other is the suggestion that “everybody” goes into that revealing dark for a miracle or a gotcha. For decades, that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion was a promise of unimaginable intrusions or wildness.

Yet, for every gotcha cut in the history of film, there are probably fifty smooth or invisible cuts. In the origins of the medium, the “matching” cut was far more a means of engineering transition or flow, and those things are a way toward subtlety. D. W. Griffith is hailed as one of a pioneering generation that identified the singularity of shots and then found ways of assembling them as building blocks in a sequence so that an audience reckoned steady time had passed. It's akin to the realization that in a narrative you can put down one sentence and then move to another set somewhere else or in a
different time, in which the gulf is bridged because interest or attention carries over from one to the other. Just read this passage from near the close of Scott Fitzgerald's
Tender Is the Night
(1934). It's a lesson in reading, that could only be filmed if read onto the sound track:

Nicole kept in touch with Dick after her new marriage; there were letters on business matters, and about the children. When she said, as she often did, “I loved Dick and I'll never forget him,” Tommy answered, “Of course not—why should you?”

Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success. Nicole did not find what the trouble was, but she heard a few months later that he was in a little town named Batavia, N.Y., practicing general medicine, and later that he was in Lockport, doing the same thing. By accident she heard more about his life there than anywhere: that he bicycled a lot, was much admired by the ladies, and always had a big stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion. He was considered to have fine manners and once made a good speech at a public health meeting on the subject of drugs; but he became entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he left Lockport.

Notice how easily that short passage provides facts, as well as the unreliable report of facts, and the subsequent uncertainty, and the melancholy it leaves. It's the kind of fluent transitioning that makes the cinematic adaptation of good prose so difficult. Even in abbreviated form, to show the entanglement and the lawsuit would be over-obvious; the cut from one to
the other would seem clumsy and melodramatic. If actors said those lines—“I loved Dick …”—they would be pregnant and pressing; but on the page they are intriguingly quiet, or casual. An emphatic enactment would miss the poignant chemistry of Dick's decline and Nicole's glimpses of it. Just because film is so deliberately constructed—shot first and then cut and gathered—it has a problem with ease and suggestion. For in truth not everything is visible, and Fitzgerald's opportunity to move in and out in a sentence is so light-footed and adroit. By contrast, the impact of editing often underlines an attempt at meaning or insight in a crude way. So filmmakers are always striving for the suppleness in writing. But it's hard for an artful movie to seem relaxed.