Making the Transformational Moment in Film
Page 2
To grasp this we can try applying to our warm-up exercise's image one of Auerbach's own descriptions of the Homeric style: “All cross-currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the actors, has disappeared.” Go back and forth between these words and our image and you can see that in fact the opposite starts to happen. The image arrests us, draws us in, holds our attention precisely because of its cross-currents, its casual detail, the feeling of things that are secondary to any main events, the sense of things unresolved or uncertain. And all of this surrounds any “simple orientation of the actors,” e.g. towards a single story. The image is fraught with background.
We might notice the shadows on the wall to the right, or the way that the figures at the top of the steps are turning into the light, or the poorer clothes of the woman second from the left with her carpet-bag, or the glare of light through the railway station roof (how easily we know it is a railway station). And once we notice all of these things it is very hard to un-notice them again. But we could get this image under tighter control by telling one story (the film is a crime mystery set in a grand hotel) and in the forward movement of the film's story and action we would in fact start to un-notice these details. It is, however, very much in the nature of film as a medium that the details are there to be noticed and, in this case, it is difficult not to think that the director, designers and cinematographer intended as much.
We can go further. Whatever the actual story of Hotel-Savoy 217, it is difficult not to let our sense of what was happening in Europe at the time color our response to this image. The people on the move, the sense of dislocation, of lives crammed into battered suitcases, become something more interesting than whatever rather thin story may actually have been told. Eric Auerbach himself could have been one of these travelers (which one?). The lead actress's mother could have been one: Brigitte Horney, in the foreground, was the daughter of the subsequently famous psychoanalyst Karen Horney, by then living in the U.S. amidst Brooklyn's community of Jewish refugees.
Vincent Ward's mother, grandmother and aunt could have been among them, on their way from Hamburg to Palestine at exactly this time.
Or we could assemble some production notes about the film that might tune our response still further: director Gustav Ucicky is thought to have been the illegitimate son of the painter Gustav Klimt; cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner's camera had been a key element on many classic German Expressionist films of the previous twenty years (including Murnau's Nosferatu and Lang's M). Indeed here one even gets the feeling that they too may just be passing through, serving their time on a routine piece of Nazi-era escapism as everything changes around them and the abysmal looms. And as we look at this image we might even be tempted to recall director John Boorman's anecdote about the advice of an unnamed cameraman: “One good shot can ruin a bad film.”
But perhaps, as our imaginations handle these cross-currents, the most potent thing going on is the contrast between the figures moving away in the background and the spilled suitcase in the foreground. As the English writer John Berger has observed, “The true stories of our time have to be able to reconcile a pile of clothes in a drawer with world historical upheavals.” Knowing that the story in Savoy-Hotel 217 may not have achieved anything so profound, indeed was not literally “about” any of this, does not stop us from seeing in this image all of that potential if we adopt this style of imagining.
So this is the point. By being based on the photographic process with its near incapacity to omit “insignificant” details, the film image hovers between the intersecting planes of the two great styles. The potential for a kind of current or spark to pass suddenly through the image as it jumps from one plane to the other is what gives the moment the characteristics of the qualitatively transformational.
Hollywood-dominated cinema is massively skewed these days towards the Homeric style. That has been part of Hollywood's victory culture as the dominant film industry and the definer of what so many people understand film to be. This book proposes that a re-balancing of the two styles might not be a bad thing, which is not about maintaining a distinction between “art” or “independent” film on the one hand and “mainstream” or “studio” film on the other, as that kind of distinction has tended instead to institutionalize a separation of styles.
Our “bisociation” diagram helps explain why it is necessary to weave the work of one filmmaker through this book's account of transformational moments in film. The “spark” connecting the two planes, the two styles of imagining, is about the creative process. In fact the “bisociation” diagram is adapted from Arthur Koestler's book The Act of Creation. If we leave the two intersecting planes unlabeled, it is a kind of empty template for creativity, where the bisociated elements can be almost anything, creativity being a label for the current that suddenly flows from one plane, one dimension to the other. The point is that we cannot look in enough depth for the creative process in pick-and-mix fashion by taking a lot of disconnected examples of moments, like the three or four we started with. So we have to plump mostly for one body of creative work. Why Vincent Ward for this? Indeed, who is Vincent Ward?
Reputation is a funny thing. Vincent's work came obliquely to the attention of one of its largest ever audiences in a recent episode of Family Guy, the satirical American animated TV series in which nothing is considered exempt from mockery. In an episode called “Brian's Got a Brand New Bag” the local video store is going out of business and selling off all its DVDs for a dollar each. Peter, patriarch of the series’ dysfunctional family, is lined up outside waiting for the store to open. When it does, he grabs Road House (fast cars, bar fights, big trucks, bigger explosions). The checkout guy makes him an offer. “As a bonus I'll throw in What Dreams May Come.” “No thank you.” “No charge.” “I do not want it.” “But it's free, sir.” “If that DVD even touches Road House I will kill you.” As Peter leaves, the checkout guy looks down at the DVD of Vincent's film and says, “Don't worry, someday someone will come and take you home for their very own.”
The huge spike on IMDb Pro's STARmeter at the time of What Dreams May Come back in 1998 is as good a representation as any of a high-point in the U.S. for Vincent's professional reputation (as tracked by searches for his name on IMDb Pro). Over a decade later, though, the very funny Family Guy vignette suggests it still has currency, but especially as shorthand for everything that Road House is not. In fact, the cleverness of Family Guy is often in turning its mockery on its head. What Dreams May Come, and a filmmaker like Vincent, are less the objects of mockery here than is the kind of film suggested by a reviewer of Road House on IMDb who said “Anything for guys who like movies is in abundance.”
One of the highest recent STARmeter spikes for Vincent is also revealing. When fellow New Zealander Peter Jackson made The Lovely Bones (2009) about a murdered girl's afterlife, a good deal of commentary recalled that Vincent Ward ten years earlier had directed a much more visually ambitious depiction of an afterlife in What Dreams May Come. As a result a re-review of the film by Huffington Post's Alex Remington in 2010 caught the spark of rekindled interest (literally visible as a big spike on the chart): “An idiosyncratic auteur, he deserves wider recognition. Few other directors would muster the ambition to depict heaven and hell, let alone issue a compelling, original vision. For that reason alone, American audiences deserve to see more of his work.” With more of the work available on DVD or Blu-ray and pay-per-view sites such as MUBI, this book reflects that interest.
Vincent's work is easy to caricature. In her directing debut, the award-winning British film The Unloved (2009), Samantha Morton depicts the joyless life of Lucy, a young girl in a drab English town who is taken into state care to protect her from an abusive father. Lucy's day to day existence is depicted in a flatly emotionless way, observed by a dispassionate camera. But the hints we
do get of her inner life (below right) are all references to images from Vincent Ward's body of work. The “bunny ears” were a promotional image (from a deleted scene) for Map of the Human Heart. The white horse features in most of Vincent's films. Lucy is framed looking at a radiant sky in a shot that “quotes” a moment we will examine later from What Dreams May Come. These might only be a pastiche that slyly parodies Vincent's pictorial preoccupations. But on her own in the evening, in the room she shares with a girl who is being abused by one of the care workers, Lucy looks at an old book with Biblical pictures, in this instance by Hieronymus Bosch, echoing a scene in Vincent Ward's own first feature film Vigil where a girl of the same age does very much the same thing (there it is Gustave Dore rather than Bosch). The Bosch painting also evokes the “tunnel of light” moment in What Dreams May Come when the protagonist enters the afterlife. So it becomes clear that the director here is finding in Vincent's work a visual language to ask a question: is there any kind of transcendence possible in circumstances of seeming joylessness?
Whether it is being quoted with irony in Family Guy or subjected to pastiche in The Unloved, the point these references both make is that Vincent Ward has been one of the few film directors of the past thirty years who have used film to probe – we might even say to research – the question of transcendence. He has done so by pursuing cinematic intensities. Film offers at least two kinds of intensity: that achieved through color, light and music, and that achieved through staged and filmed acting. Vincent has pursued both kinds. (Samantha Morton acted for him in River Queen just before she directed The Unloved).
So this book will ask a related question: do what we are calling “transformational moments” in film involve transcendence? Or is there ultimately another way of understanding the transformational? We will track these questions all the way through the book.
In What Dreams May Come, there is a mysterious figure called The Tracker (played by Max von Sydow) who shadows the lost in the afterlife. This book has its own equivalent in the form of Perkins Cobb, first introduced to the world by the film writer David Thomson. Cobb's unfinished documentary about Vincent Ward provides biographical insights here when we need them. As a result, we will be able to see into the creative process in a way that is seldom possible.
In October 2004 Vincent Ward was fired as director from the film River Queen that he was shooting in New Zealand. Although he was re-hired for postproduction, for producers to fire a director half way through production is an extraordinary step. It can effectively end an international director's career due to subsequent difficulties getting “bonded” (being included in a motion picture completion guaranty or bond from a specialist insurer, something that banks and film financiers typically insist on). In fact the completion guarantor's risk manager was instrumental, along with experienced producers Don Reynolds and Chris Auty, in Vincent's removal. But at the heart of the problem was the director's working relationship with lead actor Samantha Morton.
In his own recent book, six years after the event, Vincent says he still does not fully understand what went wrong, but paints a not unfamiliar picture of Samantha Morton as a “difficult actress,” while acknowledging the unusual talent that led him to insist on her for the role in the first place. As the dust settled on the controversy, its re-telling by various people turned it into a case-study in just about everything that can go wrong between a director and an actor, the kinds of thing cataloged by John Badham and Craig Modderno in I'll Be In My Trailer: The Creative Wars Between Directors and Actors (2006). An obsessive and perfectionist director meets a volatile, incandescent, “troubled” actor. Sparks fly. Tempers fray. Etc. In fact, the extensive interviews done while researching this book have convinced me that there is a more fundamental, and more interesting, explanation for what happened on River Queen. Moreover, when we get to it later in this book, it has something to tell us about what can happen when classical narrative form on the dominant Hollywood model meets what we shall be calling “post-classical” sensibilities. The latter have the creative potential to renew and re-energize filmmaking today, but filmmakers are still looking for the best solutions to the tensions that are arising between the older forms and the newer ways of thinking about film.
The graph below charts Vincent Ward's professional reputation in the film industry, as gauged by IMDb Pro's data on searches for his name in its subscription database. In 1998 he was in the top four hundred industry professionals by this particular measure of professional interest. The subsequent graph charts the tension between Vincent's post-classical sensibility and the mainstream industry, with more recent spikes indicating that his visionary skills have not been forgotten. It is to Map of the Human Heart that this book will turn for the prime example of those skills.
Vincent Ward's reputation graph; data courtesy IMDb Pro. The recent spike generated by The Huffington Post is clearly visible as a “whatever happened to Vincent Ward?” moment in the industry.
* * *
Auerbach (1968), 19,23
Boorman quoted in Macnab (2009), 4. Berger (1985), 96
INTRODUCTION
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
This book has to be read as an example of its own argument. In other words, it pursues its object – the transformational moment – using both “styles” outlined in the Preface. Rather like looking at our warm-up exercise's image, it is possible to jump through the book from start to finish looking for a straightforward journey (the “story”) through the ideas. Hopefully those ideas can be clearly spotted in the various sections, like fast-forwarding and spotting the scenes where the obvious action is. But the book is also very much concerned with the other style. Because I am suggesting the “Pentateuchal” style is currently a suppressed one in Anglophone cinema, the book is concerned with emphasizing what it is like to function within that style. So this way of reading the book will take more time, paying attention to background, to the interweaving of material, to suggested interconnections, to layering. This includes Perkins Cobb with his parallel documentary, considered here much like a fictional “Tracker.”
This approach means that there is no linear and self-contained treatment of one film at a time. We cut through and loop back across the films as necessary, depending on what aspect of the transformational moment we are focusing on.
The book covers: staging the moment; visual composition and the moment; narrative and the moment; color, light and music in relation to the moment; what it is like and the moment (“what it is like” refers to the sense of understanding what it is like to be the fictional person or persons in the film and the way things seem to them – academics call this “qualia” but we are avoiding academic jargon).
Those are the main sections of the book that can be found by fast-forwarding linearly. Aspects of film such as acting, cinematography or editing will appear, then, distributed across several of these broad sections. Along the way, the book also builds into an exploration of what it is like inside one creative process (in this case Vincent's, because one book can only scratch the surface of one person's creative process, never mind attempting to explore others), although many films and filmmakers are discussed as we proceed.
WHY READ THIS BOOK?
There is a disconnect between applied “how to” film technique books and film theory books. Stanley Cavell, in his book The World Viewed, talks about a seminar he ran in 1963 on film aesthetics, which set itself the aim of discussing film based on the participants’ “memorable experiences of movies” rather than on “theory.” However, says Stanley Cavell, the willingness to forgo theory was “too proud a vow” and the seminar kept reaching dead ends: “A frequent reaction to these dead ends was to start getting technical; words flowed about everything from low-angle shots to filters to timings and numbers of set-ups to deep focus and fast cutting, etc. etc. But all this in turn lost its sense. On the one hand, the amount and kind of technical information that could be regarded as relevant is more than any of us knew; on the other
hand, the only technical matters we found ourselves invoking, so far as they were relevant to the experience of particular films, which was our only business, are in front of your eyes…. Then what is the reality behind the idea that there is always a technical something you don't know that would provide the key to the experience?”
So this book is for those readers, interested in film practice, who have given up the idea “that there is always a technical something you don't know that would provide the key.” The book instead moves backwards and forwards between technical “somethings” and the experience of particular films in a manner unconcerned with technical comprehensiveness. All we can really aspire to, as writer and reader, is some modest version of Stanley Cavell's own achievement: ‘I had some words I could believe in to account for my experience of film.”
A CRISIS IN “HOW TO” FILM BOOKS?
Filmmaking techniques get combined into film forms – particular ways of making films, ways that are not necessarily timeless. What has come to be known as “classical Hollywood narrative” is one such form. It may seem to be timeless but, in fact, clear signs have been emerging of “post-classical” ways of making films. These are not confined to the fringes of independent or even “arthouse” cinema but have been emerging right at the heart of the big-budget mainstream, for example in a film such as Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), and over the past decade in the kinds of work instigated by films such as Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) or David Fincher's Fight Club (1999). More deliberately maverick work such as Terrence Malick's The New World (2005) serves to underscore the changes that have been taking place in approaches to staging, narrative, performance and character.