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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 assumed
That 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 Casablanca
Because 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-
__________
*"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
__________
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.
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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
__________
*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.
__________
*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.
