Making the Transformational Moment in Film
Page 3
The crisis looming then for “how to” film books is that so many of the techniques described are still assuming a perpetuation of classical Hollywood narrative. So this book is an attempt to capture and communicate a sense of how things have been changing. Vincent Ward, when he moved to Hollywood in the early 1990s, was widely recognized as one of the most promising post-classical Anglophone filmmakers of his generation (even if the term “post-classical” was not yet itself in vogue). So seeing the tension between classical Hollywood film form and post-classical form through the lens of Vincent Ward's films should be a good way of understanding what is at stake.
These days there is increasing debate about whether the post-classical is really a sea-change after all, and whether classical Hollywood narrative is not simply swallowing it up without so much as a hiccup. But that debate assumes an either/or outcome: that either the post-classical will replace the classical form or it will not. Instead, it looks like what is emerging is a state of increasing tension between classical film form and post-classical pressures on that form in the interests of doing new things with it. Again, Vincent Ward's work will prove to be especially revealing here; for his nine-year sojourn in Hollywood reveals quite precisely the nature of that tension in practice.
The Hollywood of the 1990s in which Vincent worked (e.g. on early versions of Alien3 and The Last Samurai) has been described by Peter Biskind as characterized by a “new brutalism,” with many films conceived by and for “delayed adolescents.” As Biskind points out, the influence of martial arts movies was noticeably strong. The emergence by decade's end of post-classical tendencies was in part a reaction to the marriage between classical Hollywood narrative and this “new brutalism,” a marriage that may have been exciting for a while (think of Quentin Tarantino) but one which also made a particular sort of hypercharged popcorn blockbuster the de facto standard (Speed, True Lies, Batman Returns, Mission Impossible, Independence Day, Armageddon, etc.). Unsurprisingly, more innovative approaches to film began to spring up in the independent zones (think of the Sundance Film Festival) and this helped define what we mean by post-classical, along with the growing influence of key filmmakers from outside the U.S. (Brazil's Fernando Meirelles, Germany's Tom Tykwer, Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai, etc.). This is by no means a matter of “art” versus “commerce” but of whether the business of filmmaking can renew itself creatively.
In case all of this is sounding rather “heavy” in a book of this sort, we can clarify it quite quickly with three examples. Peter Biskind suggests that the choreography of violent spectacle in martial arts movies inspired a generation of pop culturesaturated filmmakers who got their own chance to make movies in the 1990s. In fact, the classical style of bloodlessly choreographing the screen fight in American films is usually credited to the accomplished B movie director William Witney, director of numerous routine Westerns (“B movies” were for years the bottom half of a double-feature presentation at the cinema). An almost forgotten example is Apache Rifles (1964), one of Bill Witney's last films, as he moved into TV.
The violence in Apache Rifles escalates from familiarly rambunctious fist-fights and gunplay, of the sort that Witney had staged so influentially since the late 1930s, to an unexpectedly vicious attack on an Indian village by gold miners. In the middle of the conflict is a “half-breed” woman (the film's own term), played by Linda Lawson whose subsequent career would also be in television. Falling in love with her proves to be the salvation of the previously illiberal Army captain played by Audie Murphy.
Though a minor film, Apache Rifles is very competently made and a good example of the classical Hollywood narrative at its most routinely effective. There are several key points to be made about it for our purpose. When the question of the woman's “half-breed” identity comes to the fore, the moment is staged as an emotional spectacle, Linda Lawson's character tearfully waiting for Audie Murphy to make up his mind, his decision about her very much bound up with the larger story of his mission to pacify the rebellious Apaches. In Vincent Ward's Map of the Human Heart, a similar moment hinges around an image of the “half-breed” woman (a Metisse) catching her stocking on a nail and the moment derails the male protagonist's mission to find himself by finding her. This gives us a clue about larger differences between the classical Hollywood narrative and post-classical tendencies in film. We will look at this particular post-classical moment in more detail later.
The second thing to note is that the violence in Apache Rifles reaches a point of B movie routinethreatening intensity in the attack on the Indian village and the film has to back off the moment somewhat awkwardly, as if the genre in this “classic” form cannot quite cope with it. The so-called “spaghetti” Westerns of the 1960s would find a stylized solution for representing this new intensity within the genre, and the violence would find other cinematic expressions (from Peckinpah to Tarantino). Attacks on indigenous communities feature in two of Vincent Ward's films (River Queen and Rain of the Children), so we will be able to track the post-classical sensibility there, against a lineage stretching all the way back to D.W. Griffith's The Massacre.
The replacement in the classical Hollywood narrative film of Bill Witney style bloodless fist-fights and gunplay with Peter Biskind's “new brutalism” has not in effect replaced the anodyne choreography of disinfected violence with a new realism. The stylized violence in Salt (2010), where Angelina Jolie's character employs just about every martial arts influenced technique to bludgeon her way through the film, is the logical outcome of the new brutalism having taken on its own unreality. If Salt, directed by Phillip Noyce, is a near-perfect example of the resilience of the classical Hollywood narrative, then it becomes important to ask how the post-classical sensibility handles violence differently. We will be asking this in relation to Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American but mostly in relation to Vincent Ward's imagining of the air war over German cities in World War Two and of colonial and postcolonial incursions into indigenous communities (variants of that village in Apache Rifles).
So this gives us two ways into looking at postclassical film form. The third and final one, for this book at least, is to recognize precursory examples, where the classical Hollywood narrative got tested around its margins. Our main example is the 1946 British film A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Peter (David Niven), a Lancaster bomber pilot, bails out of a burning aircraft after a bombing raid on a German city in World War Two. He survives, falls in love with June, the American radio operator who took his last message, but then undergoes surgery for a brain injury. In a parallel fantasy of his own mental creation, Peter has cheated death and is taken to a heavenly court in the afterlife that will adjudicate on whether he will remain there or return to his earthly life (center opposite we see him on a stairway in the afterlife with his “conductor”). Both a stunning effects-laden example of how powerful the classical “Hollywood” narrative form could be when stretched to full capacity (even if not actually a Hollywood production) and at the same time a remarkable precursor of the post-classical sensibility,/! Matter of Life and Death sets up one of this book's main themes: the question of what it is like to imagine oneself in an afterlife. Vincent Ward's visually remarkable What Dreams May Come also asks this question with a stronger post-classical visual sensibility but still within a strictly classical Hollywood narrative form. So what happened there will prove to be highly instructive.
There is an intertwining of elements here: attacks on indigenous villages, the air war over Europe in the 1940s, imagining an afterlife. These contexts are revisited and crisscrossed throughout the book. The reason is that the post-classical sensibility in film seems to be attuned to time in new ways and we want to offer a practical experience of this through the pages of the book, rather than indulging in some sort of theoretical treatise.
The post-classical sensibility in its still unresolved search for appropriate forms has become much interested in “puzzle” f
orms. So the book you have in your hands has its own “puzzle” form, both to reflect this tendency and to explore the nature of this formal avenue.
The massacre in Apache Rifles (above left) is unexpectedly shocking, though kept at a discreet distance by framing through a fence, and the “half-breed” woman is positioned as the emotional object on which the story really turns. Salt (above right) demonstrates both the resilience of classical Hollywood narrative and the persistence of the “new brutalism” that emerged in the 1990s. A Matter of Life and Death (center) anticipated the “post-classical” by over half a century.
THE MODEL
The book progressively develops and explores a “model” of the transformational moment in film. You can skip forward to see the final version on page 227.
The preliminary version diagrammed here illustrates the two vital dimensions that will be fleshed out as we proceed. In What Dreams May Come (inset images top left and bottom right), the key character for our purpose is Marie, the young girl killed in a car wreck along with her brother. Played by Jessica Brooks Grant, Marie's imagined childhood world – in the form of an enchanting toy theater – is projected by the film into a strikingly realized afterlife through which her (also dead) father passes, intent on his own purpose. As an actor, Jessica Brooks Grant delivers one of the few largely “dry” or emotionally charged but undemonstrative performances in the film, and yet her visually imagined world takes us deep into a vivid, affecting and believable sense of what it is like to be Marie. There is a sense in which we will be arrested and briefly held in Marie's World, while her father (played by Robin Williams) passes through it. Marie's World and the father figure's (regrettably less believable and ultimately risible) mission attach themselves respectively, and to a revealing extent, to the two different styles of imagining we have introduced. Marie's World derives largely from the virtuoso visual imagining of director Ward, which projects a visionary potential into the traumatic situation. Her father's quest derives from the writerly imagining of Ron Bass, who scripted the film from a Richard Matheson novel.
In Vincent Ward's next film after What Dreams May Come, set in colonial New Zealand (River Queen), an early scene shows the destruction of an indigenous village (image below left in the model). We will shortly be analyzing this scene in detail. As the book proceeds, we will be asking about how such specifics also project themselves in time to connect with different situations (such as My Lai, Vietnam, March 16, 1968, image top right). Again, the two styles of imagining are at work – one more linked to conventional story requirements, the other to images that often have their own non-linear trajectories.
The book's overall project is to explore how these two dimensions interact to inform what we are calling transformational moments, especially those with a post-classical formal sensibility. The value of Vincent Ward's work to this project (apart from his early intuitively post-classical approach to film form and the way his later work reveals a creative tension between the two styles we have identified) is that he has consistently plumbed the nature of cinematic intensity in order to ask what happens when various kinds of intensity (of imagery, of performance, of imagining) are invested in the moment.
In this preliminary version of the book's model we have placed a question mark in the center beside the notion of generative rules. This refers to the possible existence of “rules” for generating effective filmic moments and, by extension therefore, effective films. “How to” books implicitly or explicitly promise access to such rules: the “hundred techniques” or whatever that, if mastered, will make your films great.
So we will want to ask in due course whether such generative rules are in fact at the heart of things. If you flip ahead to the later fully-developed version of the model you will find there that we have replaced the supposed “generative” rules of this kind with the rather different notion of transformation rules, which are peculiar to the particular creative process involved in making any specific work of art. We are still terming these “rules” because, once they have taken shape within a creative process, they become in effect its inner grammar. But they come from inside the particulars of that process, including the creator(s) of the work, not from a how-to textbook.
As we will discover later, narrative structure is an especially good place to see this distinction at work, between supposedly “generative” rules and particular transformation rules. There has been a proliferation of how-to books about the supposed rules for generating effective cinematic stories. But as Christopher Booker points out, in the best book written to date about the “basic stories” that lie behind most narratives, the deployment of a generative story structure as a “conscious construct” risks slavish reproduction of superficial aspects while missing from where story derives heart and soul, which is to say from the creating mind at work within the creative process. That is why this book weaves the particular story of a creative process through its model-building.
Christopher Booker points out how the ending of the original Star Wars film has two male protagonists bonding and walking up through a cheering crowd to be honored, “like boys walking up in front of their classmates” to receive some accolade, and how this reflects not so much a timeless, universal “mythic” narrative climax as a peculiarly American pattern of popular sentimentality twinned with a certain immaturity. Booker insightfully points out that this is characteristic of settler cultures repeatedly re-telling the story of how they escaped an “oppressively ‘grown-up’ old world” and of a consequent attachment to “quest” narratives. In one sense, therefore, the aspiring filmmaker who imagines him or herself walking up onto the stage at an awards ceremony, “like boys walking up in front of their classmates,” is replicating in their very imagining of a filmmaking story for themselves a broader attachment to a culturally specific “quest” for success. So perhaps we need to be quite careful about what story of creativity a book like this is implying. To be absolutely clear about this at the outset, the book will be deploying a second style of imagining this; one interested in artistry as a dense, difficult, often non-transparent process of working through its raw material in order to transform it into something moving and affecting.
So, as the inset examples in the model suggest, we shall look at both the potential world of a childlike vision and the virtual world of “elsewhens” that evoke an intransigently present and perhaps traumatic real world. The transformational moment in film, as ultimately defined by this book, is sparked by a certain level of intensity being achieved on both of these interacting dimensions.
In a remarkable essay called “The Child Director,” Jacques Ranciere says that the child always trumps the man (father/artist) when it comes to the directorial vision, but it will not be until page 183 and then page 228 here that we feel the full force of this insight, towards the end of this book's journey into the underworld of the film-making imagination.
What is mobilized
in film's own emotional
mapping is the plan of an
unconscious topography
in which emotions can
‘move’ us…
(Giuliana Bruno)
* * *
Cavell (1979), xxi
Biskind (2005), 127
Booker (2004), 382-383. The word “virtual” here is used as defined by Levy (1998), 168-79
PART 1
STAGING THE
MOMENT
The film
sentence is not based
on speaking but on the
juxtapositioning of shots
(Anthony Minghella)
IDENTIFYING THE TRANSFORMATIONAL MOMENT
“Go on Robin, tread on my face” (Werner Herzog to Robin Williams on the set of What Dreams May Come)
What exactly is a transformational moment in film? The two cinematic moments on the right are not “transformational” in the sense intended here. But the moment explained in detail on the next four pages is.
Top right is a moment from What Dreams
May Come, the Hollywood film directed by Vincent Ward. A man searches heaven and hell for his dead family, encountering along the way, among other extraordinary things, a field of faces that he must walk precariously through. Among the faces is this one – a bespectacled stranger who thinks his son may have come looking for him. Bottom right is a moment from Rescue Dawn, a Hollywood film directed by Werner Herzog. A German-American U.S. Navy pilot is shot down over Laos in the early secretive months of the Vietnam War. After being tortured, he is imprisoned in the jungle but eventually escapes with a companion. The companion (squatting on the right here) is brutally killed as they try to make their way out of the unforgiving jungle, but here he has come back to his friend that night as a “ghost” – in fact an illusion conjured up by a feverish mind. Herzog told this story once before – as a documentary originally made for a German TV series called Voyages to Hell. And that bespectacled face from another voyage to hell is Werner Herzog himself, in a cameo role at the invitation of Vincent Ward, whom a distinguished English film critic once called “an antipodean Werner Herzog,” a Herzog from the other side of the world.
Now the point about the two scenes opposite (apart from the coincidence around Herzog) is that while both are from Hollywood-favored “hero's journey” stories and both are arresting, memorable and powerfully suggestive of the two very different films’ larger themes – attachment and loss – neither on its own is really sufficient to be what we mean by a transformational moment in film. For one of these we need to wind back Rescue Dawn to an earlier moment (we will come back to What Dreams May Come shortly).