a weblog by musician Stefan Kac
James Hillman and Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse
(1992)
[124]
Substance Abuse and Soul in Things
Dear Michael,I want to lay out—practically!—the connection between soul and things. Then it will be clearer what it means to be a "psychological citizen."
This is my Goodreads review of The War on Music by John Mauceri. It turned into more of a summation of everything I've been churning over for the past several years.
Scattered amongst the howlers is a story that deserves to be told. Two stars for that story, zero for its rendering here.
This review is both too long and too vague. I blame the bullshit asymmetry principle .
There are some notes and citations at the end, but really this is a polemical work and not a scholarly one. It is a mad dash on the hamster wheel for Mauceri, who repeatedly stakes out some patch of moral high-ground only to tell on himself later. Even the digression on sour liner notes is recapitulated when, in the acknowledgments, he says, "Many peers have read this manuscript, some of whom were enraged. ... What was hated—and why—taught me a great deal." One can only hope. But for now he has merely doubled down, as any polemicist must.
From today's reading, an auspicious juxtaposition, fresh as they come...
Louis Menand
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
(2021)
[78] The French had their own way of reading American fiction and their own understanding of what it was about. That understanding was partly an effect of translation and partly the consequence of a received idea of Americans. ... Their knowledge of the American character derived from translated novels and Hollywood movies. (But: misprision is part of transmission.)
[Maurice-Edgar] Coindreau taught at Princeton until his retirement, in 1961, but he was, quite self-consciously, a Frenchman. His own politics were reactionary. ... Despite their friendship and the success of Manhattan Transfer, Coindreau declined to translate Dos Passos's U.S.A., because he didn't like its left-wing politics. The reason he translated so many Southerners was because he identified with them as rebels against the modern liberal state.
... What interested him in American writing was the technique, not the Americana. He called the problem of translating dialect, for example, "a detail of slight importance." ... "All men of my generation in France have known in the homes of their parents and their grandparents white counterparts of Dilsey. We know how they spoke and this is the only thing that concerns us." ...
...
[79]
... In one respect, Larbaud and Coindreau were making a virtue of necessity. ... "Dat's de troof" says Job, the old Black man who works in Jason Compson's shop in The Sound and the Fury. Coindreau's rendering: "Ca, c'est bien vrai, dit-il." It's not the same.
This meant that French translations of American novels largely bleached out markers of race, region, and class. The effect was to classicize. ...phrases from the prefaces were parroted in the reviews, and they became the basis for the French reception of contemporary American fiction. Discounting the plot and universalizing the themes threw the focus onto the technique, which is exactly where Coindreau wanted it to be thrown.
What did the French find so modern and exciting about American literary technique? ... The French thought that Faulkner had achieved a powerful representation of lived time by radically subjectivizing the narration and by collapsing the distinction between percept and memory. ...
Faulkner and Dos Passos showed French novelists that you could organize a narrative nonlinearly and nonchronologically. ...
[80]
...
The other thing about American fiction that fascinated the French was what they took to be the elimination of psychology . "Hemingway never enters inside his characters," Sartre wrote. "He describes them always from the outside. The heroes of Hemingway and Caldwell never explain themselves. They act only." Sartre thought that Faulkner was his kind of phenomenologist; he showed the inside only to confirm that there is nothing there . Thought in Faulkner is simply the sum of one's intentions and character the sum of one's actions. The American novel seemed to have completely rejected what the modern French novel, and Proust's novel paradigmatically, had made its specialty: introspection and analysis.
A myth of primitivism figured in the French reception of American culture. ... When the Harvard professor Perry Miller toured European universities lecturing on American literature after the war, he reported enthusiasm wherever he went for American writing—provided it was violent. ...
[81]
...
The French thought that American fiction was raw and direct because that was the way Americans are. In American novels, Camus said in 1947, "[m]an is described but never explained"; the stories are universal, but "only at the level of the elementary." Sartre thought that le style américain was uncalculated and unreflective, a spontaneous outburst, and that American writers expressed themselves that way because they couldn't help it. "When Hemingway writes his short, disjointed sentences, he is only obeying his temperament," Sartre explained. "He writes what he sees . . . If Faulkner breaks the chronological order of his story, it is because he cannot do otherwise, He sees time jumping about in disordered leaps." Of course, Faulkner didn't show time jumping about in disordered leaps because he couldn't help it. He showed time that way because he had read Bergson.
French critics had an explanation for the absence of explanation in American fiction: they thought that American writers were imitating the movies. ...at the most basic level, the French thought that the influence of film could be seen in the paratactic atomization of action—the and then, and then, and then narration—of writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos. What we are presented with is a sequence of actions without commentary, like a scene in a film.
Sartre and Beauvoir's enthusiasm for American fiction went hand in hand with their enthusiasm for American popular culture generally and American movies in particular. ... They hated French films and French fiction. "[W]e loathed the whole idea of la vie intérieure," said Beauvoir.
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During his time in the army, Sartre recorded in his diary a fantasy of becoming a man of unreflective action. Such a man, he wrote, would be
handsome, hesitant, obscure, slow and upright in his thoughts; [he would] not have had any acquired grace, but only a silent, spontaneous kind:
...
I should have liked to be him. . . [a man] who thought little, spoke little and always did the right thing.Sartre ...was plainly taking his idea of America and the American from the movies. But it made sense for him to do this, because he was trying to analyze his way out of a culture of analysis. In a sense, he was trying to do philosophy in le style américain.
François Cusset
trans. Jeff Fort
French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, &Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States
(2008, orig. 2003)
[276] In summary, French theory did not acquire its crucial dimension of difference only through its aesthetic and political radicalism, but also through its ineluctable Frenchness—which, however clichéd this may be, is defined in the American mind-set by the values of seduction and irony. For theory too involves a certain seduction through irony. In the phrase "It's so French," repeated so often by American Francophiles—a zero degree of culturalist expression, but which is used only in reference to the French... —the quantitative adverb "so" points to an excess viewed as a flaw, an insidious form of immoderation, as if Frenchness signified a certain polite form of arrogance, a way of employing courteous verbiage or a sophisticated writing style to draw its interlocutor into doubtful paths and false conclusions, bringing us back to the primary sense of seducere in Latin. We might consider that an unstable balance has been struck, one that appears miraculous in American eyes, between formal classicism (as in Foucault's case) and extreme arguments, or between the accessibility and openness of a philosopher in person (for which Derrida was often praised) and the difficulty of the author and his works; it is this sense of balance that gave rise to the notion of a French seduction to which these authors owe much of their success in the United States. ...
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...certain cultural archetypes based on typical French seduction or chatter preceded, permeated, and even helped construct, to a large extent, the idea of theory. This is also why, for the past thirty years, American universities, after their extensive use of this small group of theoretical authors, scarcely more than a dozen, have taken an interest in everything they could find that appeared related to French theory and its charms of irony, considering New Wave cinema or the Nouveau Roman as accessories to theory,...
...
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...
Foucault's work is an example that stands apart. Even in comparison with Derrida, who became an icon and an institution during his lifetime, Foucault's long-term impact in the United States remains unequaled, both in terms of his books sold in translation... and in the range of fields of study he has transformed or brought into existence, as well as in the diversity of his audience:... John Rajchman's book,... and the Dreyfus and Rabinow classic study offer interpretations of Foucault of a quality that few similar projects in France have matched. There is, nevertheless, a considerable gap between the American Foucault and the French one,... The difference is primarily one of status: in the United States, Foucault represents the intellectual-oracle, whose prose unmasks biopower, furnishes weapons to contemporary struggles, and heralds the queer movement, and who is also the figure whose invigorating "philosophical laughter" provides assurance of the critical distance from his own discourses. In the American reading of Foucault, we find that the explosive pairing of "knowledge and power" occupies a much more central position than in Foucault's own perspective, and is seen as the key to his entire work, as well as the basis for an entire intellectual outlook. In the United States,
the rallying cry that was developed out of this binomial,
power-knowledge,
has served many purposes:
an impetus
for
a push to require
the ivory tower of academia
to carry out
its own performative duties,
a theoretical proof
that
universalism and rationalism
can be used
as
discourses of conquest,
and
a support
for
the notion
that
it is[280]
exclusion
(of the insane, of criminals)
that
produces the norm
(reason, justice)
.
This interpretation of Foucault , taking the aforementioned three main directions, provided his American readers with a veritable conspiracy theory, in the name of which they scoured society to uncover its aggressors and victims. American cultural studies or minority studies texts inspired by Foucault consistently focus on the notion of "unmasking" of "delegitimizing" some form of power that is "stifling" or "marginalizing" one oppressed minority group or another— an approach that stands in direct opposition to Foucault's genealogical method....as for turning him into the most fervent advocate for those without a voice, this role is conceivable only if we neglect the two limits of Foucault's "politics":
first,
the difficulty
of
establishing a coherent notion
of
the subject,
of history,
or of political struggle,
because
power itself
"is exercised from innumerable points"
and
"resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power,"
and,
second,
the opposite criticism
of which Foucault is often the target,
according to which
he
steals the voice of those without a voice,
speaking on behalf
of
the silent residents of asylums or prisons
just for the sake of
the sparks this produces
on a written page.
We might remember that Foucault asked to be spared this "morality of bureaucrats and police" that requires philosophers "to remain the same." This gap continued to grow with the thematic focuses of the following years, centered on the "ethics of the self" and the "truth-telling" elements of his work. Foucault's renown, which began growing in 1977, reached such a peak that his successors wanted to derive a "method" of self-construction from his work, a task for which they solicited Foucault's assistance during a series of lectures he gave at New York University (to which he is said to have responded, "The last thing I want to tell you is how to live!"). Their objective was to glean the essential principles of savoir-vivre, whether of a gay, stoic, philosophical, or activist variety. In an interview with the periodical Salmagundi, Foucault was even compelled to repeat insistently, "I am wary of imposing my own views," and then "I want to avoid imposing my own scheme," and finally, "as for prescribing [a] direction . . . I prefer not to legislate such matters." Certain critics even heard in Foucault the distant strains of a patriotic interpretation: Foucault's lexicon was made to resonate with an "American Aesthetics of Liberty," the idea being that Foucault and the United States share "a tradition of ethics[281]
that presents self-stylization as a practice of freedom," in which the self is "assumed to be a work of art" and "the desirability of normalization itself" is ceaselessly questioned—a mostly literary take on the subject amounting overall to a para-Foucauldian ode to pioneering, repressive America and its unexamined myths, one that Foucault the activist would no doubt have found distasteful.
Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)
CHAPTER 10
MERE ANARCHY: THE CINEMA OF DISINTEGRATION
[315]
...
PACKAGING CONCEPTS
The fragmentation of production coincided with the merger of the major distribution companies with larger corprate groupings. The period from 1966, when Gulf and Western took over Paramount, to 1969, when Kinney National Services merged with Warner-Seven Arts, saw an upheaval in company ownership more substantial even that that of the early 1930s. The majors diversified, predominantly into other media, or were absorbed into conglomerates attracted by their undervalued stock, their film libraries and their real estate. However, the reorganization of the industry that followed diversification was a less fundamental change than that provoked by the Paramount decrees. By and large, it extended the effects of divorcement. The merger with other media concerns, particularly the record industry, was in a sense only an extrapolation of the majors' post-
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Paramount commitment to a power-base in distribution rather than production, and the growth of independent production completed a process begun in the early 1950s.
Hollywood's acquisition by conglomerates has, to a degree, merely been the swapping of one set of distant masters for another. The new landlords of the Dream Factory, like their predecessors, have pursued the primary motivation of profit; on occasion obtained by slum clearance projects like Kirk Kerkorian's sale of M. G. M. assets to build a Las Vegas hotel, or the urban renewal program of Century City on the back lot of the Fox studios. But if Hollywood has shrunk physically under corporate ownership, with its volume of production declining from 196 features in 1969 to 106 in 1978, its business remains much the same, and in one respect only have the new patterns of ownership made a significant difference to the way it conducts that business. The role of the mogul has been abolished: Hollywood's recent studio executives are men under different influences from those of Warner or Cohn. They share a trait common among corporate management, of frequent mobility of employment. Where Mayer ruled M. G. M. from 1924 to 1951, the studio saw six different studio heads in the years between 1968 and 1979. Only Warner Brothers and Universal had the same management team throughout the decade, while career structures like that of David Picker are increasingly the norm. Picker became President of United Artists in 1969, left to go into independent production in 1973, became head of production at Paramount in 1975, and returned to independent production for Lorimar in 1977. This pattern of short tenure in senior management helped to remove the last vestiges of any identifiable studio styles. By the mid-1970s the post-Paramount attitude of regarding each production as a one-off event had reached a point where none of the majors any longer possessed a recognizable identity either in its personnel or its product.
The corporate acquisitions and the economic crises of the late 1960s occasioned the removal of the old guard. Box-office failures combined with the spectacles of the counter-culture (Haight-Ashbury, Chicago, Woodstock) to offer further evidence that Hollywood's liberal consensus was no longer adequate to the demands of a more youthful and volatile audience. The accepted explanation was that the industry had lost contact with its audience because there were too many old men with too much control over production to encourage the right material. In response,
[317]
Hollywood engaged in an unparalleled wave of parricide. Its most conspicuous victims were the last surviving moguls. Jack Warner sold his interest in the studio in 1967 to embark on a notably unsuccessful career in independent production. Darryl Zanuck lost the last in a series of proxy fights at Fox, and retired in 1971. Between 1966 and 1973 all the majors acquired new, much younger production heads, drawn as often as not from outside the immediate confines of Hollywood. The more public search for the kid genius director concealed a more enduring palace revolution giving power to a younger generation of executives whose previous careers were most likely to have been in television, talent agencies or "creative management."* If the personnel changed, the professional ethos remained the same. Heads of production continued to insist on their ability to gauge an unstable public taste, and to argue that the nature of the industry militated against predictable profit margins.
In other areas of its financial operations, the new Hollywood was more susceptible to corporate influence. The long-term response to the financial crisis of the late 1960s was for the majors to withdraw further from direct involvement in production, concentrate on financing and distribution, and find more ways of hedging their bets over investment. Tax shelter finance became an important source of production funding in the early 1970s when bank capital was more cautious about investment in films, and it probably saved Columbia from collapse. Occasionally two companies would jointly finance a large-scale production, sharing distribution rights. Of greater significance was the practice of pre-selling films to exhibitors by demanding non-refundable guarantees in advance of screenings, passing the loss on unsuccessful blockbusters like A Bridge Too Far (1977) and 1941 (1979) onto the owners of the empty theatres. In mid-decade the majors began to recognize and capitalize on the value of ancillary markets to the point where television sales in particular were commonly negotiated in advance of production, and their revenues taken into account in calculating budgets. Such mechanisms of distributor protection
__________
*e.g., James Aubrey, former head of CBS-TV, who became President of MGM in 1969; Ted Ashley, former agent at William Morris and founder of the Ashley Famous Agency, who took over production at Warner Bros in 1977; David Begelman, co-founder with Freddie Fields of Creative Management Associates, who became Columbia's production chief in 1973.
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meant that, at least for them, a film might show profit without drawing audiences. Their regular distribution fee, of 30 per cent of rentals, guaranteed them healthy windfall profits on "supergrossers," while also delaying the point at which every film was deemed to have broken even, after which the distributor would have to pay the film's producers a percen- tage of the profits.
Distributors negotiated from a position of strength to ensure their own stability, if necessary at the expense of exhibitors and producers alike. Theatre owners and television companies might have to carry the can for occasional unexpected box-office failures, but producers were more consistently penalized by overhead charges, punitive deductions for going over budget and interest charges while the film was recouping its costs. Although the commonly accepted notional figure for a film breaking even is 2.5 times its negative cost, on occasion distributor manipulation of figures prevented a film declaring profit up to a point well in excess of its notional break-even level. In December 1979 Fox declared that Alien, with a negative cost of $11m, had so far earned $48m in worldwide rentals and was still $2.5m in deficit. The net result of these distributor practices has been a pattern of broadly stable and increasing profitability for all the majors during the decade. By 1980, Ned Tanen, President of Universal Theatrical Pictures, was confident enough in both the certainty of profit and the uncertainty as to how it would be earned to declare,
the business projections we make for each year usually end up correct within one or two percentage points. We end up where we thought we were going to be, but we never, ever get there the way we thought we were going to get there.Stabilized distribution economics and a mobile corporate bureaucracy are the real legacies of the crisis of the late 1960s, not, whatever Francis Ford Coppola's good intentions, greater freedom for the individual filmmaker.
The dominance of the major distributors suggests that the influence of the smaller production or production-distribution companies has been exaggerated by writers in pursuit of critical genealogies rather than economics. In itself, the Hollywood Renaissance of 1969-71 was an inconsequential event: in search of the profitable youth film and uncertain where to find it, the studios floated independent
[319]
production companies with radical intentions (in particular BBS and Pressman-Williams) by agreeing to distribute their product, and themselves backed a few small-budget first features by young directors. After Easy Rider, these were almost uniformly unsuccessful: the few "anti-Establishment" successes at the turn of the decade were either large-budget productions such as Little Big Man or Carnal Knowledge, or, like Midnight Cowboy and M*A*S*H, were made by older and more established directors.
The illusion of the Hollywood Renaissance has, on the other hand, been of more consequence in formulating the received history of the 1970s, largely because of the allegedly crucial influence of one man, Roger Corman, in sponsoring the first efforts of the majority of directors who attained critical prominence in the rest of the decade. Michael Pye and Linda Myles, in particular, have promoted Corman's centrality to the American cinema of the 1970s, in their book The Movie Brats. His record of success is not to be denied: Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese, Kershner, Nicholson and Wexler all got their breaks via Corman, while his company, New World, was the prototype for Coppola's American Zeotrope, which itself sponsored Lucas. But Corman is (in almost any terms, but particularly economically) a peripheral figure in the film industry. Whatever claims to critical attention he may have, the nature of Corman's low-budget operation inevitably places it outside the orbit of the major companies, on whose omissions and miscalculations it is to a large degree dependent. Like his mentors Sam Arkoff and James B. Nicholson of American International Pictures, Corman's stock-in trade has been the exploitation of otherwise unrequited demand, whether that be as producer of biker movies or as American distributor of Cries and Whispers. His reasons for employing young talent have equally always been economic. Untried directors, actors and crew eager to make their first film are cheaper than seasoned and unionized professionals. AIP, New World and their imitators have largely taken over the function of B-features as the training-ground for talent the majors will later absorb.
Corman's historical importance stems from his commercial success in the period of the majors' greatest insecurity. But his working procedures were not a solution to Hollywood's economic problems, because they did not provide the majors with substantial enough product. In the early 1970s they were prepared to employ anyone, even Russ
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Meyer, who might provide a clue to audience taste. By mid-decade, they had abandoned their scruples and committed themselves to producing and distributing the kind of overtly sensationalist material they had previously avoided, and independents like Corman could not compete in production values with the likes of The Omen and Carrie (both Fox, 1976). With the decline of low-budget production, Corman's critical cultism and his commercial reputation began to ebb.
It may be that the most significant legacy of the brief rise of the exploitation movie in the Hollywood Renaissance was the majors' adoption of exhibition patterns that independents like AIP had been pioneering earlier in the decade. Saturation booking, the simultaneous release of a film into a large number of theatres at the same time, was a standard practice among exploitation filmmakers, whose economics required the rapid recoupment of investment. The majors began experimenting with it in the late 1960s, shortly before they started to use national television advertising. Strategies of this kind greatly increased distribution costs by expanding publicity budgets and print costs. Where in 1960 a maximum of 350 prints of a film might be made, by the late '70s a movie given blockbuster treatment might require as many as 1000 prints. Expenditure on publicity now regularly exceeds a film's negative costs (Fox spent $10. 8 million making Alien, and $15. 7 million advertising it). Such marketing mechanisms, available only to a limited number of films at a time, inevitably reinforce the distributors' blockbuster mentality. The new economics revealed themselves clearly enough in 1971, when the year's top-grossing film, Love Story, earned more money in domestic rentals than the next three highest-grossers combined.
As James Monaco has pointed out, what is notable about this economic strategy is that it is an essentially conservative response to a situation of limited audiences. The increased expenditure on publicity, with its tacit acknowledgment that it is possible to sell a film to the public, provides a further mechanism of distributor control. A low-budget production like American Graffiti may produce phenomenal profits when measured by the ratio of rental income to negative cost (in this case of 5000 per cent). But the decision to sell the film vigorously enough to make such earnings possible lies with the distributors, whose preference remains for the reliable investment. American Graffiti's success bought George Lucas a fourteen-fold increase in budget for his next film, Star Wars, the most remunerative movie in Hollywood
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history. By comparison to American Graffiti, it yielded a mere 1855 per cent profit on investment. But it was a product more satisfactorily geared to the logic of a corporate economics seeking market stability than the much less predictable earnings of Lucas' earlier film. Despite the enormous cash-flow figures of individual films, the blockbuster approach to marketing is, like all distributor mechanisms, designed to guarantee commercial stability rather than maximize profits. In this respect, it is in the grand tradition of Hollywood economics, where a superficial extravagance conceals a fundamental conservatism.
In contrast to the calamities of 1969-71, relatively few blockbusters have failed to cover their negative costs in the later 1970s, given the protection for the distributor provided by exhibitors' advance guarantees. On the other hand, blockbuster economics have a peculiar and apparently cyclical habit of getting out of control. At the outset of the cycle, unexpectedly large profits accrue to one or more films, provoking a wave of imitations formulaically repeating the successful film's attractive "elements." Production and marketing budgets expand in the attempt to produce more of the same, to a point where investment in production exceeds any possibility of recoupment, and companies suffer heavy losses as a result of overproduction. Retrenchment, in the form of limitations on budgets and a drop in the number of films produced, follows until the cycle repeats itself with another spectacular financial success provoking imitation. From the crash of Cleopatra in 1963 the cycle has repeated itself twice, reaching its critical stage in 1969-71 and 1980- 81. The most recent crisis, involving films such as Hurricane (1979), Raise the Titanic (1980), and most notoriously Heaven's Gate (1981) has not, however, been nearly so severe as the previous decade's, because the major distributors have maintained a firmer grip over expenditure, on occasion simply deciding to write off a $22 million investment in the production of Sorcerer (1977) rather than plough an equivalent amount into its promotion. The losses on individual films in 1980-81 were, in any case, occurring in a broadly buoyant market. The crisis was provoked rather by a degree of laxity in the supervision of a number of substantial projects and the box-office failure of a cycle of disaster movies, rather than the complete breakdown of producers' ability to predict public taste. The conservative blockbuster approach, with its commitment to marketing rather than production, remains fundamentally sound.
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To some extent, the differences between the production methods of exploitation movies and the packaging of blockbusters is merely a question of scale. In 1955 AIP was pioneering a process of commodity packaging by constructing a film around a title and an advertising campaign. The Beast from 10,000 Leagues has mutated into American Gigolo, initially constructed around a title and John Travolta (replaced, with a drastic cut in the budget, by Richard Gere). The essential change has been the mutation of the idea ("You bring me an idea, " said Jack Berners. "Things are tight. We can't put a man on salary unless he's got an idea.") into the concept ("That notion of the gigolo as a metaphor for the man who can't receive pleasure hit me and from that moment I had a metaphor that was uniquely representative of that problem.") The heavy emphasis on marketing strategies, combined with the absorption of distribution companies into multimedia conglomerates, has elevated the concept to a central place in contemporary Hollywood construction. Movies no longer exist as autonomous industrial products, but are increasingly manufactured as one item in a multi-media package. Star Wars, with its toys, games and bubble-gum spin-offs, is only the extreme version of the conventional packaging of a concept as film, record, "novelization," and so on. The use of pre-sold source material, in novel or play form, was hardly new in Hollywood, but producer Robert Evans set a precedent when he persuaded the publishers of Love Story to print 25,000 copies of the book by offering $25,000 for its promotion. Integrated and jointly financed promotion campaigns became increasingly the norm in the late 1970s, by which time the hype had become almost an art-form in its own right. The carefully orchestrated publicity campaign for Jaws ensured that the film's release just happened to coincide with widespread reporting of shark sightings around the American coast. Timing in such complex campaigns could be crucial in other areas, too. The disaster for Star Wars had nothing to do with the film. It was in not having the children's toys in the stores in time for Christmas.
This process of multi-media packaging has effectively substituted for the studio in the placement of an individual film. Instead of being part of a balanced cluster of films produced out of the same studio, it has become one of a group of products occupying different places in the media web. Likely to be the most profitable individual element, the status of the movie has nevertheless been diminished by a need for formal compromise with the demands of other
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products. In its construction, its producers have been obliged to consider the possibilities for its exploitation as a series of linked but separate commodites, and to compile their package accordingly.
As Hollywood terminology the package has a more specific meaning relating to the assembly of a production. Stars, script (or concept), and less frequently a director or producer, are "packaged" by a talent agency or an independent producer, and this package is then offered to one of the majors for financial backing or a distribution deal. Apart from its tendency to de-emphasize narrative, such an assembly procedure is no more novel than the pre-sold source, but it is another function formerly performed by the studios and now dispersed among a more amorphous body. Packages can be initiated by a wide variety of sources, and it is contemporary Hollywood folk wisdom that more time and effort is spent in the arrangement of the packages than in the resulting film, the process being made more complicated than previous systems of production by the competing interest of the various individuals involved. As Joan Didion put it in her essay "In Hollywood,"
... to understand whose picture it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo.She provides an acute analysis of the aesthetics of the deal:
The action itself is the art form, and is described in aesthetic terms: "A very imaginative deal," they say, or, "He writes the most creative deals in the business." ... The action is everything, ... the picture itself is in many ways only the action's by-product.The deal mentality is the result of uncertainty; many more films obtain money for development costs than go into production, and each individual, to stay in reasonably frequent work, needs to be involved in several projects at the same time in the expectation that one of them will come to fruition. This is particularly true for independent producers, whose income generally comes from profits rather than project development money, and who must therefore gamble on as many deals as he or she can keep going. Deal psychology has also facilitated--as well as in part being caused
[324]
by--the predominance of agents in contemporary production. The speculative and negotiating skills needed by the producer as deal-maker have much more in common with those of the talent agent than they do with the organizational and financial abilities required by a studio producer. Since the deal was inaugurated by Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin of United Artists in 1951, the dividing line between agent and producer has become ever thinner, and the occasions on which the agent has become the producer more common. The most grandiose version of this occurred in 1962, when MCA was forced by the Department of Justice to abandon its talent agency activities and took over Universal, but the list of former agents who have become producers or heads of production is almost endless, and it is these figures who supply and maintain the deal mentality, and the insecurity it breeds.
While Didion's recognition of the substantial irrelevance of the final product to the processes of its packaging is further evidence of the New Hollywood's narcissism and incoherence, it should not in itself be seen as evidence of a decline. Packaging is no more detrimental to film production than the modes of organization it has replaced; those, like James Monaco and Pauline Kael, who insist on seeing it as such have essentially failed to recognize that Hollywood never existed to make films, but rather to make people go to the movies. Like the studio system, the goal of packaging is the production of entertainment; like the studio system, packaging functions as an arrangement for reducing emphasis on the role of the content in what is being sold. The logic of media conglomeration has widened the marketplace in which the product is sold. It is now as tangibly on offer in book- and toy-stores as it is in movie theatres. In the process, its nature has changed.
The aesthetics of the deal have combined curiously with the critical enhancement of the director's status to produce, in the work of Spielberg, Lucas, De Palma and Milius, films which at the same time demonstrate a "personal cinema" through their mannerisms and operate the mechanistic structures that James Monaco has aptly identified as those of an "entertainment machine," much less concerned than earlier movies with telling their audience a story. Repeated assertions that the story is seldom a central element in deal-making indicate the extent to which narrative has been dethroned. Steven Spielberg suggests,
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What interests me more than anything else is the idea. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it's going to make a pretty good movie.But it is unlikely to be a film in which narrative reaches any great level of complexity, something which is clearly true of all Spielberg's films, which comprise situations allowing for plenty of spectacle but little plot development.
The speed with which narrative declined as a force in the movies in the 1970s may be indicated by looking at the decade's one contribution to Hollywood's repertoire of genres, the disaster film. Disaster movies are contemporary, debased epics, but more importantly they represent the archetypal package vehicle, the instrument the majors found for spending their money on predictably appealing spectacle. As a genre, they share neither an iconographic nor a narrative consistency, but rather an assembly of elements: stars in emotional conflict, sustained in crisis by a physically restricting situation. Airport, the first success of the disaster cycle, established a conventional pattern by which the audience is attached to the narrative by its concern for individual characters. Later variants overtly dislocated the competing elements that Airport successfully held in tension. Airport and its sequels maintain a linear (if circular) narrative: the survival of its characters is attached to the fate of the aircraft. All of them survive or perish together, however big or small their billing. The Poseidon Adventure (1973) is much more selective. Not only does its situation manage to dispose of all the minor characters (they are drowned en masse minutes into the film), but it also permits spectacle to be detached from any plot obligation. Random incident determines the fate of individual characters: Shelley Winters has a heart attack, Stella Stevens falls into a burning oil slick. Since the plot itself cannot develop--either some or all of these characters will survive or they won't--relations between characters are required to fill in the gaps between the film's spectacular occurrences. Because the situation supplies them with so little to sustain dialogue ("how do we get out of here?", "Where do we go next?") and the need to make the right choice to stay in the movie, they have to talk about something else. Hence the amount of time given over to discussing how fat Winters is, and the unprovoked belligerent exchanges between Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine.
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The result is an overt and unintegrated application of sentiment, most apparent in Winters when for no good reason she remarks to her husband, Jack Albertson, "Manny, how long is it since we told each other I love you?" At her death she repeats the same function with a more explicitly symbolic purpose, as she gives Hackman the Jewish sign for Life she has brought for her grandson. Separable incidents such as these provide an arbitrary and imposed meaning for the action, which otherwise remains spectacularly independent of significance.
Irwin Allen's next production, The Towering Inferno (1974, Fox and Warner Bros, a package assembled by Creative Management Associates), carries the process further, eliminating narrative altogether and substituting a game pattern of random incident and problem-solving for its characters. The film's introduction establishes a number of potentally complex character relationships with a thematic issue, mainly revolving around the complicity of William Holden and Richard Chamberlain in the breaching of safety codes. These are hastily abandoned once the fire breaks out, and are used instead to confirm characters' positions. Chamberlain becomes the film's bad guy, Holden's moral ambiguity is simply forgotten in the confusion. Where in The Alamo the survivors represent the hope of the future, the best Holden can offer by way of moral summary at the end of The Towering Inferno is, "All I can do is pray to God that I can stop this from ever happening again." The film operates the mechanisms of earlier narrative forms--Jennifer Jones' cat becomes a sentimental object embodying loss when O. J. Simpson gives it to Fred Astaire at the end--but operates them detached from a continuous narrative. The film is a series of disconnected exchanges between characters interrupted by the spectacle of the fire. Its packaging revolves round its situation and its consortium of stars. Characters are paired off in the introduction, offering a multiplicity of separate stories which the film may or may not choose to develop. The quantity on offer permits the film to dispose of some of them at random: Robert Wagner's clandestine affair with Susan Flannery ends abruptly when they become the first victims of the fire; Jennifer Jones arbitrarily falls to her death. Any character or story is available for sacrifice without disrupting the spectacle, and the only guarantee for survival is star status. By the same token, individual
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scenes operate as separate and complete units in themselves, unconnected to the rest of the film. Paul Newman, Jones and two children spent ten minutes negotiating a demolished staircase, an incident quite detached from events occurring elsewhere and getting them, literally, nowhere. Immediately after wards they discover their route down is barred, and have to climb up again.
The film revolves around creating incidents engineered by an arbitrary chance, such as the cement which blocks the door into the party room. No adequate explanation is offered for its presence, no justification required except that it provides grounds for another scene. Its placement is as fortuitous as that of the wall-light which Newman uses as a foothold to climb up to the pipeshaft in the same scene. Instead of seeking narrative continuity, the film is constructed like a set, with each group of characters isolated in their own area. What provides its coherence is not any sense of continuity or character development (the characters actually get simpler as the film progresses, and moral status is finally reduced to how well each character behaves when he or she stands in line for the bosun's chair, but the performances of its stars. Richard Dyer has commented on the importance of the stable camera and the stars' charisma in making the audience secure as they witness a disaster, but the stars' performances have another function as well. They--particularly Newman and McQueen, but also Holden--are the only sources of coherence in a film whose content is concerned with collapse, destruction, and deconstruction. Against this, the stars fulfillment of their industrial, commercial function directs the film away from a concern with loss, death, pain and money to a celebration of its performers, whose presence is necessary to justify and explain away everything else in the film. The audience witness performance as they witness spectacle, and since neither proposes causal relationships between consecutive events, they must accept arbitrariness in the film's plot progression.
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The impression of arbitrariness in the reporting of disaster reinforces the arbitrary quality of experience itself, and the absence of continuity in the coverage of events, as today's crisis yields to a new and unrelated crisis tomorrow, adds to the sense of historical discontinuity--the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable.Although Christopher Lasch's remarks are primarily directed against the news media, they apply equally to the narrative structures of packaged blockbusters. A variety of psycho-sociological explanations for the disaster movie phenomenon have been offered, and they can readily enough be identified as part of a larger conglomeration of films (including the science fiction packages which replaced them and horror films) which explore the bourgeois American hero's confrontation with the Unknown. This general emphasis seems at first sight almost too easy to identify as a significant cinematic response to the circumstances of the 1970s. Specifying what provokes such heroic insecurity is, however, rather more difficult, particularly in a critical climate dominated by psychosexual interpretations (the shark in Jaws as both phallus and vagina dentata). What has been less frequently pointed out is the aptness of the disaster movie as a metaphor for the film industry's own situation. Faced, at the beginning of the decade, with economic catastrophe and un- certainty about audience demand, Hollywood responded by abandoning the structures of narrative continuity that had previously served it so well, and inaugurating a cycle of speculative investments in disaster in which the only security, for audience and industry alike, came from star performances. The Unknown in these films is not merely contained in their content, but also in the way they are put together out of separable elements. Later variants of the package took the phenomenon to even greater extremes. Close Encounters of the Third Kind makes no attempt to connect its scenes or explain itself. As a narrative it is incomprehensible, as a story it spends two-and-a-half hours getting to the point at which a 1950s science fiction movie would begin. The Unknown in the American cinema of the 1970s is, more than anything else, a matter of narrative structure, a question of what commercial cinema should do if it is not to tell stories. Both the initial problem and its apparent solution came from the new instrument of consensus, television.
...
[357] American Graffiti might more conventionally be described as nostalgic, but nostalgia is only a form of fantasy. Nostalgia consists in a particular relation to history, in which objects are displaced from their material context in time and relocated in another framework detached from their original position. American Graffiti is no more set in 1962 than Star Wars is set "In a distant galaxy long long ago and far far away." It is set in 1973, fixed there by the style of its images and performances, and creates a fantastic version of Modesto, California by its nostalgic consumption of objects loosely belonging to the period it claims to represent. Nostalgia collapses into sentiment in the film's last shot, when it arbitrarily attempts to revise itself by entering history with a deterministic account of its characters' subsequent lives. The nature of the film is suddenly and drastically changed. Instead of remaining within the safe space of the fantasy movie, where privileged characters can produce non-causal performances, it suddenly claims that this night has been a formative experience, a dramaturgy which will lead to change in the external world. Curt escapes the closed world which will kill John and stifle Steve (Ron Howard) by going to college and becoming a writer in Canada, presumably to escape the draft. In a vestige of the liberal tradition, Terry the Toad (Charlie Martin Smith) is killed in Vietnam because he is physically inept with a motor scooter.
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Nostalgia has pervaded the American cinema of the 1970s as a leitmotif of narrative uncertainty. In the films of Dick Richards, for example, it seems as if the authenticity of the costumes and the labels on the tin cans is used as a substitute for coherent story development. The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972) resolves itself by a familiar device in films which make some initial attempt to reconsider the presuppositions of their genre. It collapses into generic conventionality, with the bad guys developing consciences and saving the wagon train. The same strategy of collapse can be found in Coma's (1978; dir. Michael Crighton) abandonment of its assertive heroine (Genevieve Bujold) and in the gradual conversion of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974; dir. Martin Scorsese) from a film about Ellen Burstyn's independence into a "woman's picture." At the beginning of the film, she and her neighbor fantasize about Robert Redford. At the end, she gets Kris Kristofferson.
Another of Richards' contributions to the decade's generic nostalgia, Farewell My Lovely (1975), offers an alternative response in employing the insecurities of film noir. The investigative narrative and its archetypal heroes, the private eye and the journalist, emerged in 1974 as figures for post-Watergate fictions. Their heroic status was compromised by their inability to bring their narratives to a successful resolution (Chinatown, The Parallax View); instead, the films beguiled their audiences with the notion that the central characters were as confused about the plot as they were. The employment of noir fixtures was a self-conscious justification for narrative confusion. The audience was presented with a recognizable terrain inhabited by objects and lighting codes remembered from earlier films, and this evocation of displaced objects directed attention away from plot to the image and the central performances of bewilderment and uncertainty.
The resort to nostalgic conventions and the unconvinced re-enactment of generic patterns is indicative of the more general collapse of temporal coherence in films of the 1970s. Wherever else in American culture the sense of historical continuity has come under attack, Hollywood has measured its deterioration in the growing failure to construct coherent linear narratives. Temporal connection, the primary tool of narrative causality, has been increasingly abandoned in favor of structures that declare their incoherence. Dog Soldiers (1978; dir. Karel Reisz) is in many respects (its presentation of space for example) notable for the old-
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fashioned conventionality of its construction. But it makes no attempt to place its characters in time, either historically (the film might be set in 1971 like the book on which it is based, or it might not), or in their movements from scene to scene. Instead, there is an assumption of simultaneity: the audience is forced to assume that the disparate events affecting the two principal characters occur at more or less the same time if it is to construct a comprehensible narrative sequence--a task which the film passively declares is not its responsibility. As it progresses, Dog Soldiers degenerates into a chase movie and its central conception of splitting the post-Vietnam American hero into two individually inadequate and mutually dependent characters collapses. By the climax both have become capable of heroic action, the motivation for which remains inaccessible to the audience, since neither character has previously offered a rationale for his actions. Ray (Nick Nolte) declares at one point, "I don't always have to have a reason for the shit I do," and the unmodulated performances of both Nolte and Michael Moriarty provide the spectator with no evidence of their motivations.
Where the American cinema of the consensus developed its mechanisms of construction around a requirement to produce narratives that were rigid in their linear determinism, the cinema of disintegration has commonly abandoned the attempts to tell stories at all, providing rather a sequence of events arbitrarily connected by the fact of their being edited together. From this the audience may construct as much of a story as they feel capable of. This loss of confidence in the ability to construct a sequential narrative time reveals itself most clearly in a reluctance to provide an ending. Star Wars does not just announce that it is not set in the conventionally remote future of science fiction but in the distant past. At its end it declares that it is the fourth episode in a series of nine.
More normally, Hollywood's recent products have refused to provide a sense of resolution in their conclusion, and have abandoned their central protagonists to an ambiguous fate. Gene Hackman seems particularly prone to this discomfiture. In Night Moves (1975; dir. Arthur Penn), he is left wounded in a disabled boat which describes circles in an otherwise empty ocean. The Conversation (1974; dir. francis Ford Coppola) closes with him playing the saxophone in the apartment he has just demolished. While the conclusion of Penn's film is clearly open to metaphorical interpre-
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tation, the end of The Conversation is merely ambiguous, available to signify anything. Coppola is notorious for the difficulty he has in ending his films, Apocalypse Now (1979) being merely the most spectacular and extravagant example. But the reluctance of Hollywood's contemporary self-conscious auteurs to provide endings which locate the meaning of their films is remarkably consistent. One might argue that the ambiguity of the final "God Bless America" sequence of Michael Cimino's The Deerhunter (1978) is an economic necessity, since a film which refuses to declare its attitude to American involvement in Vietnam is a safer box-office bet than one which does. One might argue that it allows the audience a choice of interpretation, or that it reflects the ambivalence of American response to the war. What it undoubtedly does do is to leave the film open as a text for an endless critical game-playing over its ideological implications, which may well guarantee Cimino's dubious status as an auteur simply by the weight of paper devoted to him. As part of a more general tendency, the contemporary emphasis on an aesthetics of performance would suggest that, since "Robert De Niro is The Deerhunter," whatever Robert De Niro does has the support of the film.
The privileging of performance which is so consistent a feature of the Hollywood product in itself disrupts the temporal continuity of a causal narrative. In performance structures, what a performer does at the end of his or her routine is no more significant than what he or she has done at any other point. The openness of Altman's (or, to a lesser extent, Coppola's) films to almost infinite restructuring is evidence of this, and endorses the argument that a fixity of meaning simply is not present in these inherently incomplete texts. By not telling a story (but rather offering several incomplete stories for the spectator to choose from), such films cannot be said to occupy narrative time. It is, then, hardly surprising that so little of the American cinema of the 1970s has concerned itself with an investigation of temporal structure, preferring instead to abandon time as a fictive concern either by the resort to nostalgia or by making narrative construction entirely the responsibility of the audience.
One of the few consistent exceptions to this general practice has been Sam Peckinpah's reassessment of the primary cinematic myths of America. Peckinpah's critical neglect during the decade has been curious: dismissed for his apparent political conservatism and misogyny and condemned for his depiction of violence, Peckinpah has never-
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theless conducted the most complex revision of cinematic temporal structures since Welles (or perhaps Griffith), and provided a functioning solution to the problem of joining inside and outside while operating firmly within the new post-television aesthetic. Peckinpah's films, however pessimistic their thematic conclusions might be, present some of the few coherent discussions of the pervasive phenomenon of incoherence in the contemporary American cinema and, contrary to most critical assumption, reconsider the problematic nature of heroism in a universe where morality can no longer be straightforwardly attached to physical decorum.
His early films (up to The Getaway, 1972) play on the extent to which their central characters exist as heroic outsiders because of their opposition to temporal progress. One advertising slogan for The Wild Bunch (1969) was, "The land had changed. They hadn't." It was equally applicable to the two gunfighters in Ride the High Country, Tyreen in Major Dundee, Cable Hogue and Junior and Ace Bonner. Usually aging men running out of space in which to act because time (progress) has made them redundant, Peckinpah's early heroes engage in some futile, romantic, and usually fatal gesture of rebellion, a sub-Hemingway stance which has clung as firmly to Peckinpah's public persona as it once did to John Huston's.
His later films, however, have questioned the traditional mechanisms of heroism. His central characters lack moral certainty, and they are also deprived of the guarantee of heroic status their performances might bring them elsewhere. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) does not concern itself primarily with Billy, whose mythic status is secure before the film begins, and who has nothing to achieve except its confirmation by his death. Instead Peckinpah concentrates attention on Garrett, who falls victim to the moral incompatibility of his desire to survive to be "rich, old and grey" and his need for individual independence. As a mythic force, Billy remains immune from narrative pressure, a situation reinforced by the industrial status of Kristofferson's performance. His physical movement is unaffected by the events of the film, and he relaxes into a separable activity of role-playing which represents both Billy the Kid and Kris Kristofferson, country-rock star. By contrast, James Coburn demonstrates his entrapment within the narrative, and his vulnerability to historical processes by becoming stiffer and more pained in his movements as the film progresses. Garrett's tragedy lies in his gradual discovery that a pro-
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fessional commitment to a linear course of action guarantees neither the loyalty and respect of his corporate employers nor the moral endorsement of the film and its spectators.
Peckinpah's subsequent films all assume the moral vacuum Garrett discovers. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), The Killer Elite (1975) and Cross of Iron (1977) occupy an anarchic terrain in which betrayal is endemic and heroism is inevitably compromised. Their central characters all function within a framework which assumes that their personal objectives will prove incompatible with those of the larger external forces which have determined the circumstances the film presents. For the protagonists, any action is permissible in the quest for survival, from the mutilation of a corpse to the murder of a child, but such figures can no longer hope for the sympathy of their audience. Nor, increasingly, do they seek it; Steiner (James Coburn) has no attachments to anything outside his platoon, and no rationale for his behavior except survival in what he describes to the Russian boy they take prisoner as No Man's Land. None of the characters in Cross of Iron enact positions which the audience can endorse, since the conventional yardsticks of morality by which they might be judged are not contained within the film. Steiner's brutal laughter, which closes the film over images of dead children, is an acceptance of the arbitrariness of the war the film depicts, and of the film's depiction of it.
Peckinpah's films match their deconstruction of moral certainty with an equally deliberate deconstruction of the spatial and temporal certainties within which such a moral certainty might exist. The films realize the condition of arbitrariness rather than merely depicting it, and force the audience to experience the condition of their characters by paralleling the characters' moral situation with the physical, perceptual situation of the audience. At its broadest, this process is signalled by Garcia's beginning and ending on a frozen frame: cinematic time is displayed as an arbitrary construct, which the film is free to play with as it wishes, and which the audience must simply endure acceptingly. Where, in his earlier films, Peckinpah employed slow motion to render ambiguous the spectator's response to a brutal action by revealing its grace, his later films employ it to reveal the arbitrariness with which the film travels through the gate of the projector. Slow motion ceases to indicate a significant event, as it did in The Wild Bunch, but rather to divert the audience's attention to incidental
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physical trajectories, such as the arc described by the spent shells ejected from a sub-machine gun. Peckinpah repeatedly demonstrates the moral incompatibility of cause and effect; Cross of Iron returns again and again to intercut shots of explosions and artillery shells being ejected. This is a description of process, established by a kind of angle-reverse angle cutting, but one which is only made possible by the recognition that the cinema constructs its space according to unique laws which enforce a relation between two consecutive images.
As juxtaposition constructs significant space, it also enforces temporal progression. The tank battle in Cross of Iron enacts in microcosm the narrative process of Garcia. The sequence begins with a series of static shots of the Russian tanks, cut together in an accelerating montage which animates the tanks themselves into movement. The film constructs not only its own moral landscape, but also its own momentum, which arbitrarily obliges or interrupts the movement of its characters. Peckinpah's aesthetic is constructed around the acknowledgment that the American cinema of the 1970s can place any two shots together and create an arbitrary meaning through the creation of an arbitrary space and time. It is an aesthetic that makes no concessions to the audience, who are offered fewer and fewer positions they may comfortably adopt, either spatially, temporally, or ethically. In Cross of Iron, the spectator becomes a redundant witness to a process completely out of his or her control.
In Peckinpah's films, the audience's only recourse is to a morality external to the film itself. In this deliberate anarchy is the most coherent statement of the endemic incoherence of contemporary American cinema. The collapse of consensual structures has led the American film into an apparently unavoidable oppositional stance to the primary source of consensus, television. The best hope it has offered has been the suggestion that it is possible to survive a disaster movie, but the heroic status of survivors, from Travis Bickle to Rolf Steiner, is uncertain to say the least. Even the most closely argued of these films oblige the audience to keep a distance from the screen which threatens them. The juvenile attempts at consensus via a conservative engagement in fantasy have merely produced a reactionary cinema of escapism that re-enacts Hollywood's simplest generic and heroic archetypes without the context that once gave them meaning. The more complex articulations of Coppola or Altman limit them
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selves by their exclusion of the audience, and their refusal to offer a fixed meaning. The nihilism of this response achieves its most deliberate formulation in the anarchy of Peckinpah's world
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INTERLUDE
THE MULTIPLE REVISIONIST AND THE DETACHED
NARCISSIST: DON SIEGEL AND CLINT EASTWOOD
The increasingly provisional nature of cinematic structures in contemporary Hollywood in many respects echoes the practices of the filmmakers of Dissent. In interviews, Scorsese is fond of declaring that his tracking shots borrow from Fuller's. But the disintegration of consensus has eliminated the context in which Fuller might register his dissent through his mobile camera, leaving only the empty form for Scorsese to imitate.
Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)
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"WHAT IS REAL?" ... PART ONE: COHERENCE
"Can I tell you a story, Rick?"
"Has it got a wow finish?"
"I don't know the finish."
Bergman and Bogart in
Casablanca
The dual sense of "perfect reproduction" describes both the intent and the effect of the industry's operation of technology. The strictures of the Production Code, the obligations imposed by the duty to entertain, and the idealist nature of Hollywood's adopted ideology meant that it represented the world not as it was, but as it should be. To describe an aesthetic so committed to illusion, artifice, and idealism as "realist" seems a perversity sanctioned only by tradition. To call The Wizard of Oz a "realist" film seems bizarre. The aesthetic strategy employed by the cinema of the consensus was not concerned with the philosophical or perceptual presumptions behind its imitation of life, only with the technical expedients necessary to sustain its illusion. In its presentation of perspective, for example, it was opportunist and inconsistent. Set design in the 1930s assumedThat the Long Shots would be taken with a 40mm lens. For closer shots a 50mm lens was ... the usual choice, and of course for Close-Ups something like 75mm.The quite visible variation in apparent object relationships between the foreground and background of shots taken with lenses of such different focal length fell within the tolerance levels of a loosely-defined normative perspective, but hardly suggested that Hollywood cameramen recognized realism as a perceptual system governing their work.
However awkward a term it may be, however, realism cannot be altogether discarded. Perfect reproduction engineered a style which concealed its mediation of the narrative it presented. However conventional and codified it may have been, it offered itself as natural because it assumed, as part of the cinematic contract, a fixed relationship between film and audience, and did not seek to question that relationship. If a text and its consumers share the assumption
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that a fixed and mutually known set of conventions represent external reality, and neither seeks to challenge the efficacy of those conventions of representation, then we may describe the text as "realist," regardless of what perceptual systems it operates. The conventions of representation that Hollywood's consensual cinema employed provided its audiences with the means by which they could treat what they saw as if it were real, and order their emotional responses accordingly. Hollywood's realism operated at two levels. Perfect reproduction effaced the techniques by which it produced a seamless flow, and concentrated the audience's attention on the contents of that flow, the narrative. The spatial construction of narrative placed the spectator in the film, while the ordering of events attached the spectator emotionally to its characters as benevolent sources of meaning and significance. Despite the opportunism of its techniques, the cinema of the consensus was committed absolutely to the maintenance of continuity as the primary ingredient of its realism. As a result it was firmly attached to the articulation of a coherent narrative structure.
The narrative of Casablanca (1943, Warner Bros.; dir. Michael Curtiz)--which may indisputably be regarded as "classic Hollywood text" of the consensus--is constructed to support and clarify the story of the film, aiming at a coherence in the revelation of the plot in order to concentrate attention on the story as it is revealed. The audience is attached to the film by the process of the revealing of the story , not by the facts of the story's revelations . One example among many is the introduction of Ingrid Bergman, and the establishment of her previous relationship with Bogart. Up to this point the film has concentrated on establishing its locale, Bogart's cynical isolationism ("I stick my neck out for nobody"), and the apparent major plot device of the theft of the letters of transit and the arrival of Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Henreid and Bergman first appear entering Rick's Cafe in a long medium tracking shot, which takes them past Sam (Dooley Wilson) at the piano. Wilson and Bergman seem to recognize each other, and Wilson looks worried and shakes his head. A signal to the audience's attention has been provided, but it is not immediately pursued. Henreid and Bergman are joined first by Berger (John Qualen), a member of the Resistance, and then by Captain Renault (Claude Rains), in conversations about Henreid's situation. Bergman asks Rains about Wilson--"'somewhere I've seen him"--a remark whose significance is signaled by its delivery in extreme close-up. Rains
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supplies an enigmatic description of Bogart, and its impact on Bergman is again shown in close-up when the group is joined by Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt). However, the subject is not pursued and conversation returns to Henreid's politics and future. But the disruptive influence of Bogart's presence is registered by the repetition of close shots of Bergman, detaching her from the men's conversation. When Rains and Veidt return to their table, a female guitarist begins a song, during which Bergman and Wilson exchange looks of recognition, and Wilson repeats his concerned expression. Once more, the cue is left hanging while Henreid joins Qualen at the bar. Bergman calls Wilson over to her table. Wilson tries to convince her Bogart has another girl, but she tells him "you used to be a much better liar, Sam." He replies, "Leave him alone, Miss Ilsa, you're bad luck to him." In its ordering, her next line encapsulates in microcosm the mechanism of the narrative:
Play it once, Sam, for old times' sake ... play it,
Sam, play, "As Time Goes By."The audience are inveigled into a process of revelation, without discovering, until the end, what the object of that revelation is. The spectator is cued to anticipate an event, the content and meaning of which has not been disclosed. Wilson's playing of a song whose significance is never explained is made important by its presentation over an extreme, melancholic, close-up of Bergman that lasts for 20 seconds, much longer than any previous shot. The song brings Bogart to the table, and the existence of a mutual bond is again established by the intercutting of extreme close-ups of their faces (the first close-up of Bogart in the film), reinforced by the sudden introduction of violins on the soundtrack. At this point, with the nature of their involvement completely unstated by the same means that it has been declared central to the narrative, Rains and Henreid appear to once again change the subject, and the couple spend the rest of the scene exchanging looks and reminiscences of their last meeting ("The Germans wore grey, you wore blue") which provide the spectator with no more explicit information.
The process of revelation is continued, at a broader level, throughout the narrative. The audience witness Bogart's remembering his time with Bergman in Paris, while her marriage to Henreid, her intention to leave Henreid for Bogart, and Bogart's final decision to send her to America with Henreid are all revealed by similar constructions to
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that of her introduction. The plot is presented as a linear causal chain, each event located by a relationship of cause and effect to those which precede and follow it, but it only functions if it is correctly placed in the chain. Bogart's memory of Paris is, obviously, chronologically misplaced--it happened before all the other events of the film. But it is, more importantly, placed at the point in the plot when its partial vision of events (Bergman's explanations will qualify it later) is most emotionally affective.
The linear causal chain of the plot leads inevitably to a point of resolution, but because the spectator is engaged in the process by which the story is revealed, he or she can ignore the determinist causality of such a structure and the restrictions it places on possible interpretations of an event. There is, inevitably, a tension between the plot's determinist pressure towards a resolution of events, and the "realist" objections to an idealist simplicity in the tidy end-stopping of events at the film's conclusion. This structurally insoluble tension in narrative realism (the force that draws realism towards melodrama) is dissipated by the consensus cinema's mode of construction. Guided through the plot by the revelatory narrative, the audience is encouraged to feel unconcerned about the conflict between determinism and normative, unresolved reality by the coherence of what they see and hear. Their acceptance of the story comes not from what they are told, but from the way it is told to them. They can accommodate the contradictions of realist narrative by seeing the events of the film as amounting to a crisis which determines the course of the lives of the characters in it. The typical film of the consensus ends at the point at which another film might begin : in Casablanca, for example, Bogart's adventures with the Free French in Tangiers, or Bergman and Henreid in America.
What holds for narrative structure also holds for scene construction. Because the coherent narrative locates an individual scene at one point in its causal chain, an element of the scene must be reserved for the elucidation and justification of that process of causal linkage. Each scene in Casablanca advances the plot by confirming the knowledge the audience have derived from previous scenes, and adding further information to it. The process of confirmation is enacted through the consistency with which the scenes are presented, a consistency which can be regarded as a form of psychological and circumstantial realism. Consistency of
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character motivation projects a believable psychology: when Bogart rejects Bergman on her first night-time visit to the cafe the audience recognize that his drinking has exposed the sentimentality beneath the cynical exterior. When he meets her in the market the next morning and asks for the explanation he turned down the night before, the audience understand that the cynicism ("after all, I got stuck with a railway ticket, I think I'm entitled to know") is only a defensive veneer. Bogart's psychology, along with that of the other characters, is being gradually revealed to the audience, who have to construct it from the information the film provides. Circumstantial realism, similarly, is provided by the consistency with which the film describes and relates its locations and the creation of the seamless illusion hinges, at a level more basic than psychological characterization, on the two fundamental areas of perception most immediately available to cinematic manipulation: the depiction of time and space.
A cinematic narrative is temporally composed of a set of ellipses; it is a distillation of a series of significant events. The presentation of time within a narrative is more immediately apparent than the presentation of space, since the periods not included in the narrative are evident by their omission. We may, for example, see a man getting into his car and driving off, and then cut to his arriving at his destination. The coherent narrative, however, attempts to disguise the elliptical nature of its temporal construction by subordinating both the actual time of a depicted event and the real time experienced by the spectator in the cinema to the artificial, perceived time presented by the narrative. For this purpose, it uses a number of devices to create a continuity in perception of two narratively linked discontinuous events. The most simple device is a passage of "linking" music, which, by its rhythmic or patterned management of the passage of time, provides a suitable vehicle for the presentation of the narrative's temporal continuum. Appropriately enough, the opening bars of "As Time Goes By" have this function in Casablanca. The same purpose, the subordination of external time to the narrative continuum, may be served by the use of "linking" shots, the content of which is unimportant save for their function of relating two consecutive scenes by an association of ideas. For example, one scene may end with a tilt up off the characters onto blue sky, followed by a cut, perhaps imperceptible, to blue sky, which tilts down to the same characters in a different location, different characters, or whatever. The plane to Lis-
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bon serves this purpose on more than one occasion in Casablanca, transferring attention from one group of people looking at it to another, or to the scene of its arrival. The same effect can be achieved by the use of fades or dissolves, which have their own connotations as accounts of elapsed time, or, in the extreme assertion of narrative control over plot events, by a montage sequence. In each case the linkage device establishes a chain of causality which is stylistically asserted by the film, subordinating other perceptions of time to that of the narrative. The arbitrariness of all these devices is contained by their conventionality. The attribution of a distinctive connotation to each of them (a fade implies a longer ellipsis than a dissolve, while a wipe suggests spatial rather than temporal alteration) covers their presence as techniques by emphasizing their function as meaning. The coherent narrative cinema requires that the scene-to-scene linkage should be as unobtrusive as possible, since the main intention is to persuade the audience to assume the connections of linear causality, in order that they focus their attention on the plot or theme. The technical devices of the cinema of coherence aim to divert the spectator's attention away from themselves as mechanisms of the illusion, and to concentrate it the more on the illusion they create--that is, to divert the spectator's attention away from the film as ob ject to the subject of the film.
A similar argument may be advanced in relation to the depiction of space within the scene. A coherent narrative aims to present space in terms which are immediately recognizable to its audience. This requirement encourages the construction of images which do not distort conventional perspective relations, implying that most images will be recorded by lenses in a relatively narrow range of focal lengths. Equally, it encourages the development of conventional patterns for the juxtaposition of shots: the pattern of establishing long shot, medium shot, close up is one example; angle-reverse angle cutting is another. When these conventions of the image are disrupted, the audience is being signaled: for example, the close up of Bogart when he first sees Bergman not only takes the camera closer to him than it has been before, breaking a convention of distance, but is also shot with a wider angle lens than is used for other close ups, and taken from an angle above, rather than level with, Bogart's eyeline. All this communicates surprise and discomfort without articulating them explicitly, or markedly disrupting the image stream. Unless aiming for a particular extraordinary effect such as shock, the coherent narrative
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requires the audience to understand the way the space in a scene works (e.g. the area in which a character can move), in the same way that it aims for an unconscious awareness of the temporal ellipses in the narrative. They share the same purpose of convincing the audience of the film's stylistic benevolence in presenting the most readily comprehensible depiction of events. We understand by a simple time ellipsis that nothing important has happened in it, and this process is made easier by a stylistic device that is self-effacing and allows us to ignore it. The normal perception of spatial relationships similarly allows us to take them for granted as comprehensible. Thus it is possible for us to divert our energies towards comprehending the events of the plot, rather than the manner of their presentation.
"WHAT IS REAL?" ... PART TWO: BENEVOLENCE
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the
world, she walks into mine.--Bogart in CasablancaBecause it is a system of conventions, the parameters of realism change. The depiction of time and space within the consensus cinema at any particular historical moment is governed by codes of presentation which determine what is to be regarded as normative perception. The evolution of such conventions is, in turn, governed by the technological developments in recording equipment and by the filmmakers' assessments of what the audience can unproblematically comprehend. The introduction of the close-up was once resisted by producers because they were concerned that audiences would not understand what had happened to the rest of the actor's body. Off-screen music in early sound films was similarly opposed on the grounds that spectators would demand to know where the orchestra was. The emergence of consensual conventions has consistently been a process of experimentation, originally causing a perceptual dislocation (and frequently being exploited for that effect: Citizen Kane being perhaps the most notorious example), but being gradually accommodated into a readily-understood code of practice. The re-introduction of deep-focus photography in the early 1940s and the extensive use of telephoto and zoom lenses in the 1960s confronted audiences with unfamiliar images that were initially difficult to comprehend. Repeated exposure, however, acclimatized viewers to
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the adjustments of perception the images require them to make, and subsumed these technical strategies within accepted, consensual conventions.
A similar observation presents itself with regard to the depiction of time within the consensus narrative. Increasing familiarity with the conventions of cinematic presentation reduced the length of time assumed necessary for the audience to locate themselves within a scene. Thus the signaling devices of scene change have progressively evolved from fade to dissolve to direct cut, as the audience have been deemed gradually more capable of following a quicker presentation of events. This, indeed, applies as much to speeds of cutting within a scene as it does to inter-scene changes. Contemporary audiences find films of the 1930s interminably slow by comparison to more recent pictures. The gaps between dialogue are longer, the camera position changes much less frequently and according to a more rigid pattern, and the story, in consequence, appears to be evolving more slowly. The story itself may well seem simpler as a result. What contemporary viewers experience is the gap between the normative perception they have acquired from films of their own period, and the conventions of presentation operative at the time of the film's creation. Beneath the superficial difference in appearance, films of the consensus are united by the attitude they share toward their audience through the operation of whatever contemporaneous conventions of spatial and temporal delineation are in existence at the time of their production.
Similar conventions operate with regard to performance. The acting styles of the consensually coherent narrative cinema concentrate attention on the characters rather than the performer, and consequently psychological realism becomes an important factor in convincing the audience of the validity of the characterization. Although approaches to performance may vary, from the inherently conservative "reaction" technique of John Wayne's recreation of his political archetype to the Method school of a psychological understanding of the character seeking to obliterate the actor as performer, the principal objective of both is to provide an unselfconscious performance, the creation of a character whose existence the audience can accept as readily as they can accept the depiction of his or her spatio-temporal arena.* For the audience, the plausibility of a characteri-
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*"The simplest examples of Stanislavsky's ideas are (cont.)
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zation must equal the plausibility with which they regard a room or other location, in order that they can assume the psychological basis of the character as a set of limitations on his possible actions, as they assume the spatial basis of the room as another set of limitations. With this assumed knowledge, they may then concentrate their attention on the events and themes of the film, which will generally be expressed through the development of emotional relationships between characters.
What the film will have established through its employment of these conventions of acting manner and of presentation is the emotional relationship the audience should have with the film's characters, and above all with the star Capra has defined the goal:
You can only involve your audience with people ... you give them something to worry about, some person they can worry about, and care about, and you've got them, you've got them involved ... because my main objective is to involve the audience, to get them when what they're seeing up there ... when they begin to believe it, and they become part of it and they become interested in what's going on up there on the screen.
The audience must identify the hero as one of Us, and thus accept his problems vicariously as their own. The typical coherent narrative presents a personalized drama, in which the story is told to us through the central character. As instigator or victim of events, he or she is the story's protagonist, the reason we are seeing the story unfold in the pattern that it does. To make sense of the story, we must recognize the characters for what they are supposed to be, and allocate our sympathies accordingly. Our entrée into this process is most commonly provided by the star (hero/heroine), who acts as our benevolent guide to the story's
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actors such as Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Spencer Tracy. They try not to act but to be themselves, to respond or react. They refuse to say or do anything they feel not to be consonant with their own characters." (Lee Strasberg) Whether or not Strasberg's interpretation of Stanislavsky was correct is an interesting but peripheral issue; it was Strasberg's Method, not Stanislavsky's, which was the pervasive influence on screen acting from the 1950s onwards.
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emotional value-system, by encouraging us to align our character sympathies and antipathies with his.
The complex mechanics of this alignment may be sufficiently illustrated (though not exhaustively analyzed) by drawing attention to two areas in which a given film plays on prior audience knowledge and expectation. The "star vehicle" operates a double-bind on the audience, by which it ties the spectator to the narrative by making star and character interchangeable. The behavior of the star's character is sufficiently close to the public image of the star himself for the star to become credibly absorbed into the story; a point well enough illustrated by the tendency among critics to use actors' names as often as character names when describing plots. The function of a great deal of Hollywood star publicity was to establish an archetypal persona which would refer interchangeably to the actor and to the parts he played; Margaret Thorpe cites the example of William Powell, whose urbane comedy roles at M. G. M. meshed perfectly with a publicity image that emphasized his sophistication and intimacy with "the world of books." There was sufficient variety of archetypes to provide each member of the regular audience with a close approximation of his or her perfected self-image, which in turn served as the basis by which he or she could transfer his or her allegiance from star to character. A star whose roles corresponded to his or her public image did not seem to be acting, but merely playing out on the screen a possible variation of his or her real life.
Casablanca provides an example. The audience, lured into the story by the process of its revelation, recognizes archetypes and identifies, in Bogart and Bergman, its guiding protagonists. Both enact themselves: Bogart the crumpled isolationist whose verbal cynicism imperfectly conceals his honorable sentimentality, Bergman the mysterious insecure woman wary of her own passion ("I don't know what's right any longer. You'll have to think for us."). They are separated by their emotional depth from the other characters, three of whom are named after European cars, and all of whom enact stereotypes which are not their own possession. (One might perhaps argue for the individuality of Sidney Greenstreet and Claude Rains, but they are closer to inflecting a stereotype than establishing their own archetypes.) The initiative of the narrative oscillates between Bergman and Bogart; the other characters do no more than establish its circumstances, and then behave according to
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the predictable patterns of their stereotypes. Only Bogart and Bergman are uncertain, and that uncertainty provides the narrative momentum, since plot development and outcome are dependent upon the choices they make, to an extent that simply does not apply to the actions of any other characters. At the same time, the larger ideological significance of the story is tied to their actions. Bogart is explicitly identified as a representative of American attitudes ("It's December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?... I bet they're asleep in New York. I bet they're asleep all over America"), and both, but particularly Bogart, sacrifice their personal desire for a greater cause whose moral force they finally recognize. The viewers, then, attach themselves to them (importantly, to both of them) to find in their performances an emotional and a political depth of sentiment not provided by the rest of the film. They are obliged to believe in Bogart and Bergman as Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund if they are to accept the fiction of Casablanca and the abandonment of American isolationism.
The form of believability provided by the star system is reinforced by another mechanism, by which the sentimental significance commonly invested in objects in the external world is dwelt upon in the movies as a means of realizing their material existence, and hence that of the characters who handled them. In Casablanca this function is implicitly supplied by the nostalgic force of Dooley Wilson's music. In John Cromwell's more explicit sentimental tour de force, Since You Went Away (1944; prod. David O. Selznick), a series of sentimental transactions takes place in which inanimate objects are invested with an emotional value by their past associations. In the opening scene, Anne Hilton (Claudette Colbert), returning from seeing her husband leave for the war, wanders numbly about their empty house, touching objects we can see to be full of emotional significance now that they are deprived of their familiar context by her husband's departure. This principle of substitution, by which emotional attachments between characters are distilled into the sentimental significance of objects, is clearest in the transactions around Bill Smollett's (Robert Walker) watch, which was originally given to him by the Hiltons' boarder, his estranged crusty old grandfather Colonel Smollett (Monty Woolley). Bill gives it to Jane Hilton (Jennifer Jones), his sweetheart, as a keepsake when he goes off to war. After his off-screen death in action has belatedly made clear to the Colonel the depth of his affection for his grandson, Jane
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gives him Bill's watch for Christmas. By this stage, almost the conclusion of the film, audience and characters have invested so much emotional capital in the watch as symbol of lost possibilities in the past and in the future that the final transaction, by which it is returned to its original owner, requires no dialogue explanation for its emotional effect. The watch distills the relationships among the three characters and serves to signal that emotional matrix by its every appearance. The cumulative effect is here less important, however, than the symbolic displacement that is involved for the audience. We are engaged in the characters' problems by their distillation into objects onto which we can project our own emotional responses. The mechanism opens the narrative to our participation, but only along the closed and directed lines of the plot. We either cooperate with the mechanism, or we refuse to be affected. We cannot select our own moments of significance, because the film signals our expected responses too clearly for us to ignore them. By building on a common emotional experience, the sentimentally evocative power of objects, the film ties us to the characters. We identify with their patterns of emotional response; hence, we identify with their emotions.
"WHAT IS REAL?" ... PART THREE: SIGNIFICANCE
It seems that destiny has taken
a hand. --Claude Rains in
Casablanca
Realism in the cinema should not be seen as a perceptual system, but rather as an idiomatic tendency, a means of providing an opportunity to dramatize. Since the rejection of the Expressionist strategies of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the perceptual conventions of the cinema have been assumed as being naturalistic: object relations are presented as inflexible and normative to our experience outside the cinema. Science fiction films like The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) in fact rely on such perceptual conventions for their effect: there is only a distortion of size, not of the perspective which governs the audience's understanding of spatial relationships . The establishment of a normative Perspective is an important initial objective for any film.[204]
It provides a spatial context, a framework within which the audience can view the narrative events. Perspective is established by the consistency of object relationships which define the space within a shot, and particularly by the movement of objects (including characters) through that space as a means of determining its boundaries. The sequences in Rick's cafe in Casablanca generally begin with a shot of the exterior or the sign, identifying the locale, followed by a general shot of the interior before narrowing the field of view to a particular group of characters. What these "establishing" or master shots establish is less the locale of the scene (which is equally recognizable in closer shots) than the spatial borders within which that scene will be enacted. The purpose of such shots is to define for the audience the limits of the scene's possibilities; characters may enter or leave this space, but for the duration of the scene events of narrative importance will take place only within its parameters, and within those parameters objects will obey the normative conventions of perspective.
Since the narrative provides its own causality, it ascribes significance to any event it presents, and makes itself "maximally meaningful." By locating everything it presents in a causal sequence, it makes everything it depicts important to the provision of a context for understanding what happens. This applies not only to the content of a shot, but also to the shot as an act of presentation in itself. The need for normative spatial relations, as a means of reducing the possibilities of interpretation, becomes apparent. If the audience is to understand a sequence as causal, they must be able to connect the events of that sequence through the similarity of their technical presentation. One shot follows another in a causal and significant chain, but the continuity of that chain must be sustained by a consistency of presentation. The structure of a sequence thus becomes dependent upon its gradual focusing on its most important narrative constituent. The pattern of cutting from the establishing shot, which provides the arena for action and locates the characters, to a medium shot, relating the characters to each other, to close-ups related by their viewpoint (e.g. reversed over-the-shoulder shots) is diagrammatically typical of the conventional construction of a dialogue scene. The spatial relationship between the protagonists must be established in order to provide a context within which the audience can place the action. Not only is it significant that a particular line of dialogue be delivered in close-up, but also that that close-up be located
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within an arrangement of shots providing a spatial continuum that can be immediately understood.
The regular employment of patterns of sequential shots establishes the pattern as a means of understanding the film's manipulation of space, independent of its original purpose of providing a continuity of perspective while allowing the cut to take place. Through their awareness of the pattern the audience can accept shots which distort normative perspective. It is, indeed, this ability on the part of the audience that finally undermines the validity of realism as a perceptual system. The spectator is not baffled by a wide-angle, telephoto, or even a zoom shot: not baffled, that is, to the point where he or she can no longer comprehend the narrative information presented by the shot or integrate it into the story. This achievement is brought about principally by conventional cutting procedures which make it possible to locate a shot independently of its presentation of space, while nevertheless ensuring that that presentation does not lose its significance. A close-up, for example, is spatially the simplest kind of shot because it involves the greatest degree of spatial isolation. Its impact is commonly intensified by emphasizing that isolation by shooting it in telephoto, which by condensing perspective and reducing depth of field can deny the character so presented any spatial relationship with his or her surroundings.
The mimetic power of the film image obviates the necessity for most of the strategies of a literary realism. The need for film to provide an explanation of events, and thus a demonstration of causality, in spatial terms requires instead the development of codes of camera behavior which are comprehensible to the viewer. Such codes, however, comprise only a skeletal aesthetic--a set of common reference points for communication from film to audience. For an individual film, they do not in themselves amount to an aesthetic of intention or an aesthetic of process. They are rather the means towards an aesthetic end, that of convincing the audience that the story being told is a plausible fiction--is, in that sense, "real." While an appreciation of the mechanisms of spatial articulation in the cinema is essential to an understanding of its objectives, including its political objectives, the presentation of spatial relationships cannot be offered as the central tenet of the consensus aesthetic. That lies rather with the cementing of the relationship between film and audience via the establishment of plausible characters in a plausible setting.
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To return to the example of the telephoto close-up, the technique of spatial isolation must be employed towards a psychological end in the creation of the spectator's understanding of the character concerned. That isolation occurs in relation to a specific piece of information we are provided with, for example through dialogue, and amplifies it. The close-ups of Bergman, which are commonest at Casablanca's moments of crisis, present her as an object of the audience's emotional attention, detached from her material surroundings, and often from the group of people she is with. Such close-ups oblige the audience to respond emotionally, since they are offered no alternative object for their attention. The significance of any particular spatial articulation cannot be understood outside of its specific narrative context, even if in itself it may be independently recognizable as part of an aesthetic strategy. But that recognition is only useful to the extent that it can be integrated into an interpretation of the narrative as a whole.
The conventional codes of realism primarily comprise a narrative device which provides the story with an implicit guarantee of causality. Its skeletal aesthetic simply offers an opportunity to dramatize within the confines of a comprehensible framework. The spatial logic of conventional scene construction, such as that outlined above, is to present characters in a space in order to isolate them within it, and then to explore their emotional relationship, partly through the scene's manipulation of space. The establishing shot sets the borders, the medium shot further narrows them down in order to define an area of meaningful interaction, in which the characters dominate the space between them and the space between them and the audience. The close-up eliminates space by focusing on an object presented in non-spatial terms (or at least terms which do not seek to relate it to other objets through the way in which they both fill space). The progression from shot to shot produces an expectation in the audience of a dramatic or psychological progression in the characters' actions or relationships. Although the creation of a normative perspective initially serves the purpose of providing the audience with a recognizable system for comprehending the images it is offered, that purpose is bypassed by the process of focusing on smaller spatial units which seek to locate the spectator's interest not in the character as a figure defining himself by movement through space, but in the character as a reactive psychological object whose response to situations is the chief subject of the audience's concern.
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Ford, for example, is little interested in the physical relations between men and objects, or between men and men, except as they signify their psychological relationships, their morals or their relative status. Objects exist as unconsidered props to the depiction of their state of mind, symbols with a shared meaning for characters and audience (e.g., the cactus rose in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Attention is diverted from image to significance, and from action to consequence, a device again clearly established by the narrative construction of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. What makes Ford's work so distinguished within the traditions of the consensus is his ability to generate a more intense identification between characters and audience than any other filmmaker.* This he achieves principally by creating areas of shared significance, which, while not necessarily being explicitly stated (the symbolic implications of the cactus rose are never spelled out), are nevertheless readily apparent. Ford's characters appear always to have read the script in advance of their performance, to be aware of their destiny to the extent that their fates are prefigures in the nuances of their performances. Ethan's inability to reintegrate himself into the community at the end of The Searchers is determined by his inability to pass through any doorway when shot from inside looking out. Determined, that is, not only for the audience reading the shots as psychologically symbolic, but also for Ethan, who approaches each such shot warily and reluctantly, thereby implying its significance for the audience because of its significance for him. For Ethan, and thus for the audience, doorways become moral spatial signifiers.
These "realist" mechanisms of the coherent narrative can be seen as no more than a logical choice for the rapid presentation of a quantity of information which the film requires the audience to assume. They provide the common ground between filmmaker and spectator, working to this end in the same way as generic codes, of which the "realist" idiom is ultimately only an example, albeit a very large and complex one. As a code, it has two effects on the comprehension of the information it transmits. Firstly, it serves
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*This I take to be the answer to Godard's question, "Mystery and fascination of this American cinema ... how can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when he abruptly takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?"
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to divert the audience's attention away not only from the mechanics of the film's constructions, but more broadly away from the action of the film to the significance attached to that action. This is particularly noticeable in its attitude to violence, where the physical nature of the action, the dynamics of one man striking another, for example, is not the subject presented for consideration. Rather it is the consequence or significance of violence which is considered. In the opening scene of The Train Robbers (1973; dir. Burt Kennedy), John Wayne has gathered a group of gunmen together for a purpose which as yet only he knows. When one of the younger men, Christopher George, demands to know what they're going to do, Wayne turns around and unexpectedly punches Rod Taylor, the veteran who brought George along. Before any can ask the obvious question, Wayne growls at the prostrate Taylor, "I thought I told you to find men who could take orders." The violent action dramatizes Wayne's attitude, which is explained after the event. The explanation provides the action with a meaning it lacks in itself. *
In such areas of physical presentation, in which the coherent narrative displaces significance from the events depicted to the meaning of those events, it necessarily works towards a conclusion, a resolution that takes place not within the film, but for the audience after the event. In a perfect coherent narrative (such as Casablanca) the final scene colors previous events, allowing us to tie up the loose ends of the plot and to understand why all the characters behaved as they did. The neatness of this conclusion is inescapable, because the constructions by which events have been depicted have worked throughout to eliminate possibilities for the audience.
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*This is in clear contrast to the manner in which Clint Eastwood, for example, punches people. As a hero, Eastwood is never one of Us, but is rather, in McConnell's terms, like Keaton and Cagney in "the state of grace," separated from close audience identification by his complete mastery of space through movement. When Eastwood punches another character, it is not to make a narrative point; invariably, he punches downwards, not as an act of assertion. Anyone punched by Eastwood is already discredited; the punch serves only to portray the dynamic of their relationship. Since the violent action is not burdened with a meaning external to itself, and is therefore redundant to the plot, it can carry its own significance as a purely physical statement.
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The film has, for example, consistently employed the visual device of tracking in on characters for significant reactions or lines of dialogue. Bogart's explanatory resolution ("Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor") is cued by an extreme version of this device, a rapid track in from long medium shot of him and Bergman to a tight close up of their faces. The momentum of the movement confirms Bogart's decision. The spectator functions in relation to a coherent narrative purely as a recipient of a given meaning, offered a preexistent, received method of approaching the events of a film, a method determined by the manner of their presentation. Because of the style's tendency to concentrate on the emotional significance of those events, the spectator is offered only a pre-existent moral or political interpretation of the film, via a process designed to make him or her as little aware as possible of its determinist effect.
Such a unilateral channel of communication can only be established if the film succeeds in inducing the spectator to acquire or sustain an involvement in the primary product, the story. This engagement with the unfolding plot is clearly an effect of the tightly constructed coherent narrative. But it is predicated on the presumption, established through convention, of a resolution. The spectator's uncertainty about how the story will conclude is bracketed within the certainty that a conclusion will draw together the various strands of the plot, thus validating the plot's construction. The bracketing devices in The Wizard of Oz (1939, M. G. M. ; dir. Victor Fleming) present an explicit example of the attitude underlying the consensus view of the political function of the cinema. The film is overtly a populist piece about self-discovery and self-realization, but, crucially, this process of self-realization is only ratified by the presentation of a symbol: the Straw Man gets a diploma for a brain, the Lion a medal for courage, the Tin Man a watch for a heart. And while the presenter of the symbols, the Wizard of Oz himself, is a phony wizard, he is nevertheless the architect of the benevolent synthesis, dispensing a solution. For if his magic is mere mechanics the arguments supporting his non-magical symbolic gifts demonstrate that wizardry is not necessary, since the three characters had in themselves what they wanted him to give them by magic. Dorothy's (Judy Garland) realization of this, that
If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't go looking any further than my own back yard,
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because if you can't find it there, then you probably never lost it in the first place.
allows her to achieve her goal, to get back to Kansas, to escape from the colored fantasy world of the cinematic dream to secure monochrome reality. The benevolent resolution links self-realization to an incitement to stasis in the discovery that "There's no place like home," and in Dorothy's expressed intention never to go away again. For both Dorothy and the audience, the film's bracketing scenes function as a means of locating the film as a dream, and its events as an intensified experience from which a moral lesson may be gained, but whose excitements and dangers can be enjoyed because they are located within a framework which defuses them and makes them safe by explicitly removing them from actuality.
