Making the Transformational Moment in Film
Page 4
Dieter – the lost and imprisoned pilot in 1966 – is explaining to his friend Duane how he came to be a flier. It is a story that goes back to his childhood in Hitler's Germany, scourged by war. As written by Herzog, the story recounted by Dieter (Christian Bale) draws heavily on the real Dieter Dengler's own account from Herzog's earlier documentary. Duane and Dieter sit side by side, perched on a giant stone jar in their prison compound in a rare moment of comparative ease amidst the habitual struggles for food, for sanity, for self-preservation, for some vestige of dignity. Beyond the compound is the dense jungle of Laos, itself in reality a larger prison and ultimately just as great a threat to sanity as the actual prison conditions they endure.
Several elements come together here: an expertly crafted (casually profound) dialog by Herzog, Christian Bale's utterly persuasive performance as Dieter (he had just done a supporting role in Terence Malick's The New World), Steve Zahn's edgy, intense and highly complementary performance as Duane (bringing a mercurial quality to his growing friendship with the more single-minded Dieter). Duane (seated on the left) has been a prisoner much longer by this point and one quickly feels that he is already on an emotional precipice. Later it will be Duane's death – beheaded by machete – that will bring Dieter to that edge too. Unobtrusively convincing art direction by Arin “Aoi” Pinijvararak keeps the background ambiance, the look and feel of prison compound and jungle, always there in our peripheral consciousness even as our focal consciousness gets concentrated in scenes like this one. Cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger's naturalistic use of light lets the changing moods of the “Laotian” jungle and skies (actually Thailand) express themselves vividly. But it is Zeitlinger's camera that we want to pay particular attention to.
What Zeitlinger and Herzog do with the camera here is the element that really triggers the moment's transformational potential: the scene becomes more than the sum of the parts alluded to. It transforms those parts. The moment begins with the camera at position 1 (frame 1). As Dieter and Duane talk, the camera drifts slowly on the path marked. Frames 1 and 2 are not separate shots, but the beginning and end of this camera movement and of a single shot.
There is then a shot-reverse-shot conversational exchange between camera positions 2 and 3 (frame 3 being the reverse). But next the camera re-traces its initial movement by backing slowly away from position 2 along its original line as far as position 4 (frame 4), again in a continuous shot. All of this is unobtrusive as camera movement but at the same time it creates a very particular kind of space around the two characters, a space quite different than if it had been produced by a classical stand-offish master shot followed only by cutting between over-the-shoulder shots.
Instead, by the time we reach camera position 4 (frame 4) we have been drawn in around a semi-circle, the fulcrum of which is Dieter's story about his childhood, and then we have slowly withdrawn again. As we pull back, the two characters go immobile, caught in their own thoughts. Immobility is not an especially easy thing for actors to do, accustomed as they are to delivering something more active, more busy in response to the camera's attention. Here, however, the immobility (frame 4) is profoundly suggestive. The lines that actor Christian Bale has just delivered are closely based on what the real Dieter Dengler says in Herzog's documentary. They have gone back to his childhood home in Germany and Dieter is remembering his village being attacked by low-flying American aircraft when he was nine years old, during World War Two. He was watching from the window with a brother.
Dieter (in documentary):One of the airplanes came diving at our house, and it was so unusual because the cockpit was open. The pilot had black goggles that were sitting on his forehead. He was looking – he'd actually turned around – he was looking in at the window…it was like a vision for me…from that moment on little Dieter needed to fly.
In the fictionalized re-telling of this, Herzog sticks closely to the original but introduces an instant of eye contact between the American pilot and the German child.
Dieter: It was feet away from the house…and the canopy was open. And this pilot, he had his goggles up on his helmet and I could see his eyes. And he was looking at me, right at me. He's looking right at me and as he turns to go…he's looking right at me still. And the thing is, from that moment on, little Dieter he needed to fly. (They both laugh)
Duane: You're a strange bird Dieter. Guy tries to kill you and you want his job.
In the earlier documentary version, Herzog illustrates this moment of reversed gaze by inserting an old photograph of two children at a window. But in the feature film we do not “see” this memory in the same way. Instead the camera moves slowly back on its path from 2 to 4 and while it does so the two men's extended instant of immobility suggests an “elsewhen” that they seem momentarily conscious of (opposite). This “elsewhen” may be something like the scene in the old photograph (we can imagine something very like it as Dieter talks), but it is more generally to do with not being here and now, in this imprisonment, where needing to fly has an awful poignancy.
Combining the dialog and performances with that camera movement defines a space which is both literal – the space marked out by the camera – and imagined. The camera's movement affords space and time for this moment to happen. The camera's movement transforms the other contributing elements, assisting the whole to become more than the sum of the parts. When it does so, the camera movement is no longer something separate – it becomes integral to the moment. And of course a viewer does not actively notice much of this underlying construction as it goes on. Instead it is the filmic moment that is experienced. This is what a transformational moment in film depends on.
It will not always be a camera movement that is so indispensable to achieving this kind of transformation of course. There will be many other possibilities, which is what this book is about. Indeed in this example there is one further element that adds an additional transformational layer. As the camera settles back towards position 4 (below), where the re-framing reminds us again that we are in a bleak prison compound, a fragment of music is briefly introduced. It is an end punctuation for the moment. Herzog had available to him a striking cue by composer Klaus Badelt called “Hope.” You can see even from the title why it might have been appropriate here. The cue is richly emotional – it builds towards a fullness of sound (the orchestral version on the Rescue Dawn soundtrack album is the best way to hear this) but retains a plaintiveness that is quite striking. However, rather like the old photograph, if used here it would have been trying to “illustrate” something about the moment from the outside rather than staying inside the moment.
Instead Herzog uses a brief fragment played on a khene, a Laotian wooden mouth organ. It gives the moment its end punctuation but it has a strangeness and sorrowfulness and fragility that belong inside the moment in a way that an intruding orchestral score could not have done. The orchestral “Hope” cue is used later, during the prisoners’ escape and behind the action. So the fragile, strange sound of the khene here is much more powerfully evocative of a still unrealized hope. The transformational moment is complete: what have been transformed are the constituent elements that together become more than their separate parts. Or almost complete – because it is always possible with moments like these to find other “perfect” details that contribute to the whole.
Just before the camera settles back at position 4 to complete the moment, we glimpse in the background the gaunt figure of one of the other prisoners, whom we have seen here in frame 1 as well, a man teetering into madness whose paradoxical fear of leaving obstructs the escape attempt. As the camera completes its slow semi-circling movement and return, the background image of this emaciated figure passes in effect between Duane and Dieter in mute visual testimony to what they might become. In fact the fragment of music played on the khene begins just as this rather spectral figure appears in the background, rendered out of focus by the shallow depth of field. The khene playing is an example of non-diegetic music (not being play
ed in the scene) and yet is very much of the moment.
WHAT THE SPECTATOR BRINGS TO THE MOMENT
Something vital does seem to enter this kind of moment from “outside.” The spectator has to contribute something to it as well. We can approach the general question of what this is by “triggering” it artificially here.
If we think about the scene on the left (from What Dreams May Come), we may readily find ourselves thinking about it as a representation of hell. We may have other images in mind, from religious books, from art (we will come back to some of these later). What Dreams May Come won a visual effects Oscar for its sometimes astonishing imagery, and its depiction of “hell” is nothing if not visually arresting. Chris (Robin Williams) has lost his family – his two children to a road accident, later his wife (Annabella Sciorra) to suicide. In between these tragedies, he is involved in a vehicle pile-up in a road tunnel and finds himself…well, we will come back to where he finds himself. But at this point in the film he appears to be on a voyage to hell in search of his wife, guided by the mysterious figure of The Tracker (just visible here in the background, at the edge of the field of heads). Horribly, Chris spots his wife's face amidst all the others, he runs towards her, but before reaching her he crashes suddenly through the crusty surface into a sea of bodies. Before recognizing his wife's face, he has paused to exchange a few words with the bespectacled man, played by Werner Herzog.
But what could the spectator be contributing here? We can experiment with this by telling you about the women's voices the man hears as he picks his way clumsily through the faces, trying not to tread on too many. All around him the fragments of voices evoke past lives, traces of guilt, shards of identity. “I never took more than thirty percent from any client” pleads one woman's voice. In fact all the women's voices we hear in this scene were done by the talented voice-over actress Mary Kay Bergman, the “official” voice of Snow White for Disney since 1989. Mary Kay Bergman committed suicide in 1999, not much more than a year after she did this scene for What Dreams May Come.
Now that you know this “external” fact, it is probably impossible to watch and listen to this scene without feeling something. You may even be a little uncomfortable with our mentioning it in his context. What you are now bringing to the scene is affect (a, fekt with the stress on the first syllable): an initial disposition of feeling that may not yet have been representationally captured and turned into a selfconsciously expressible emotion or thought (like empathy, sorrow, or an idea about whether “guilt” should attach to suicide). We have artificially injected affect into this moment, in relation to the images on the left, by pulling something in from outside. But affect can be brought to the transformational moment from “inside,” not as something extraneous. We will come back in more detail later in the book (in a section called “What It Is Like”) to how this is managed.
We are likely to care every time we hear Mary Kay Bergman's voice, now that we have imported something extraneous into the scene in order to trigger the presence of affect. This affective response is unquestionably there in the Rescue Dawn scene we have just analyzed. Affect materializes in the space described by that camera movement we looked at, is drawn into that space by the combination of elements and because a place is being made available where it can attach itself.
But Robin Williams’ conversation with the bespectacled man (they briefly mistake each other for father and son) belongs to that part of What Dreams May Come which is dominated by soupy, mawkish dialogue by Ron Bass that tries to tell the viewer what to feel, in the context of the screenplay's determinedly classical Hollywood narrative form. The third image opposite, on the other hand, an image of bodies glimpsed as the man plummets through them, belongs to the same scene but to the post-classical dimension of the film, where affect just materializes spontaneously and breath-takingly in the image and where the moment offers itself irresistibly for affective attachment. In a later section on color, we will emphasize this other side of What Dreams May Come, because that is where its transformational moments are concentrated.
Affect's abundant availability to be materialized in film is clear from how important some films can be to people. It is March 1999 in Utah, five months after the release of What Dreams May Come. A gay Mormon boy writes this in his diary: After sacrament, wait – during sacrament meeting yesterday, I began to feel guilty for the night before. I left in the middle of someone's talk. I drove to the top of Flat Iron Mesa, and I thought. I thought of what happened between [boy's name removed] and me. I drove home and stared at my four bottles of medicine. Would it be enough? Do I have the guts? I thought of the movie What Dreams May Come. It saved my life…It's hard to be Mormon. It's hard to be gay. It's Hell being both.
We don't know by what individualized connections the boy on the edge of the mesa came to care about – to invest affect so significantly in – this film (perhaps its “heaven” seemed like a Mormon one to him, perhaps its “hell” frightened him, or perhaps something about the images helped him to imagine a better escape from imprisoning and reproachful ways of thinking). We do not really need to know. The point is simply that people are willing and want to connect affectively with films. The transformational moment in film respects this fact.
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http://gaymoboy.blogspot.com/(journal entry 3/15/99 posted 8/18/05)
WHAT THE TRANSFORMATIONAL MOMENT CONNECTS WITH
Of course the kinds of moment we are interested in here do not sit in isolation within the films that carry them. Quite the contrary. All successful cinematic scenes relate closely to the scene before and the scene after, sometimes in terms of continuity, sometimes through juxtapositions that are less reliant on continuity and more on surprise. But these particular moments tend to be especially embedded in deeper structures of interconnection within a film.
The “maps” on the right are not meant to be detailed depictions of these interconnections, merely to suggest the sorts of connection that are at work here. In the case of Rescue Dawn, the moment we have looked at connects back to the prior scenes of abuse and imprisonment (the gaunt prisoner in the background providing a strong visual reminder). It also, very powerfully, turns out to connect forward to the “ghost” scene where the slain Duane re-appears to Dieter, deep into the escape attempt and with hope all but gone. And it connects with another “elsewhen” – not quite so literally as shown in the old photograph from the earlier documentary version but nonetheless a place of childhood and history that gives the moment its particular resonance, as two boys look through a window at the future, which gazes back at them.
What Dreams May Come is especially interesting when we start to consider the deep interconnections around that moment when the man falls through the crust of heads and glimpses those bodies. On the previous page we used an early storyboard visualization of the film's central narrative image – the figure alone, on mountain's edge, contemplating the hero's mission. That image absolutely dominates the film's narrative and forward momentum – and it is that journey which the screenplay's dialogue insists on spelling out in terms of some regrettably maudlin story ideas. So there is an arrow heading straight on here (figure right), continuing that journey with determined if misplaced conviction. But the moment's deep interconnections loop back into the film. In fact an extraordinary thing about What Dreams May Come is that all of its transformational moments connect backwards rather than forwards, as if giving the forward movement over, surrendering it, to Hollywood's much worshiped Homeric hero's journey. Meanwhile it also adopts a skewed, post-classical inner structure that bends time back on itself; another (largely silent and visually stunning) film that runs in the opposite direction from the hero's mission and carries viewers’ affective attachments into different times.
So the fragmentary but unforgettable moment of glimpsed bodies belongs to this other geometry and connects back through several other moments in just that way; for example to the lost woman plunging naked and rapturous into an icy lake in the “hea
ven” section of the film, or to a cutout paper toy-theater figure of an acrobat tucked into the edge of a picture frame containing a photo of one of the dead children. These pathways of interconnection also blur gender distinctions intriguingly, where the hero's journey remains very much caught up in gender stereotypes, often to the point of exaggerated parody except that the dialogue plays it so straight. By contrast, these other interconnections of moments are ultimately more associated with the children in the film (especially Marie), who are themselves unexpectedly androgynous figures.
Without pursuing the “puzzle” of these specific connections any further just yet, the point to be made here is that the transformational moment may connect as time-oriented images in ways that are relatively independent of the connections made by the forward narrative movement of the film, where our two diagrammed “loops” on the figures indicate these time-oriented images at work, albeit in the case of Herzog's film an “image” from another film. It must also be said quite clearly that what we are suggesting does not refer to “hidden meanings” in the film or some sort of coded secret, but rather to a map of affective attachments as a characteristic of post-classical filmic form, though here still contained by the classical Hollywood narrative form of the screenplay.
What Dreams May Come as a crash on the Hollywood Freeway
Actually, the car crash that “kills” Robin Williams at the start of What Dreams May Come happens in San Francisco's Broadway Tunnel, but the real “crash” here is the film itself, and that definitely happened in Hollywood. The intuitively post-classical filmmaker and Hollywood impacted loudly at this point. What this means for the book will become clearer as we proceed, but it comes down to this in summary. That impact sent the character played by Robin Williams off on his hero's mission into a “heaven” and a “hell” ostensibly both of his own making – they consist of things from his life, words said, memories clung to, regrets. Not perhaps entirely unpromising material but what classical “Hollywood” form, as channeled through the screenplay, does to this is a combination of three things: (1) the mythic structure of the Homeric journey with its recognizable stages mapped onto a three-act structure; (2) what we can call Capra's Error – thinking that drama happens when the actors cry (American director Frank Capra once said, “I made some mistakes in drama. I thought the drama was when the actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries”); (3) failing to heed what we can call Minghella's Warning about speaking not being the basis of the “film sentence.” These three characteristics reinforce the classical Hollywood narrative form of the film. But where the film's extraordinary post-classical material – channeled by Vincent Ward – in fact came from and why it is so revealing about these transformational moments in film are questions that will have been answered by the end of the book.