Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  We will be coming back to What Dreams May Come but first we will take a detailed look at filmmaking in practice in Vincent Ward's River Queen, his next film after leaving Hollywood.

  * * *

  Lucas quoted in Lewis (1995), 40. Coppola quoted in Gay Talese (1981) “The Conversation,” Esquire (July), 80

  WHAT FILMMAKING IS – FROM MOVEMENT TO KNOWABILITY

  Asking what filmmaking is may seem like asking the obvious. But filmmaker and writer Noel Burch, who moved from the U.S. to France in the 1950s, sounded a valuable cautionary note when he pointed out: “An American filmmaker (or film critic, in so far as American film critics are interested in technique at all) conceives of a film as involving two successive and separate operations, the selection of a camera setup and then the cutting of the filmed images. It may never occur to English-speaking filmmakers or English-speaking critics that these two operations stem from a single underlying concept, simply because they have at their disposal no single word for this concept.” The French filmmaking term decoupage (the cutting up and reassembly of space and time) identifies a synthesis of “setup” and “cutting” and superimposes this conceptual synthesis on the more concrete working tool of the shooting script.

  Intuitively, the best directors probably do this whether they have a word for it or not – almost like having an imaginary screen in front of them while they are working, shooting script in hand, a screen on which in their mind's eye they can see the synthesis taking place even as the setups are being laboriously arranged (perhaps monitored on actual video screens), while the cutting may still be hours, days, or weeks away, and the hubbub of production surrounds them. Having storyboards to hand can obviously help, in a practical sense, in this process of synthesizing setup and cutting in the directorial mind's eye but an intuitive ability to see synthetically is something that undoubtedly goes beyond such practicalities. This is especially so since there will be significant differences between storyboarded visualizations in preproduction, the pragmatic choices made in setting up and shooting with actors and the assembly decisions made in postproduction. The synthetic vision is more about seeing the multiple possibilities inherent in the material as it develops while not losing sight of its potential for coherence.

  A problem then in writing about film technique is the tendency to concentrate only on successive and separate operations. How to think about these things simultaneously is the conundrum. And yet it is an essential thing to be able to do, especially since the “successive and separate” approach may ultimately imply that good filmmaking is achieved merely by mastering the separate operations. A central argument of this book is that the most powerful cinematic moments are always more than the sum of their separate parts, indeed that these moments transform the constituent techniques, are synergistic rather than merely additive.

  To further illustrate this way of thinking about film, it may be helpful to consider a specific scene, starting with the screenplay. This scene takes place in the 1860s in the north island of New Zealand but has a more generally recognizable aspect to it as well. The spectacle of a colonial or settler army clearing an indigenous village is a not unfamiliar one and has a now disturbing historical resonance that connects the U.S. Cavalry in so many westerns with cinematic depictions of the British Empire in the nineteenth century and with cultural memories of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam or similar events today.

  Major Baine is a potentially familiar figure – the military martinet (from Henry Fonda in Fort Apache to George C. Scott in Patton or Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now), unbendingly ruthless in executing his duty. Wiremu is a native scout for the army, with conflicting allegiances. In the Hollywood western genre, when not merely extras these tended to be half-native characters, like John Wayne in Hondo or Robert Forster in The Stalking Moon, but Wiremu is played as Mori by the accomplished Mori actor Cliff Curtis (from NBC's television series Trauma). Baine is played by the experienced English stage and screen actor Anton Lessor. So the scene centers on Wiremu challenging Baine unsuccessfully, while the village burns around them and the indigenous inhabitants are dragged away or killed for resisting. The screenplay page sets things up quickly and then hinges around one key instruction to the actors (“WIREMU and BAINE lock gazes”) for their exchange of words as the two characters face each other on horseback.

  The “textbook” way of setting this up would be an establishing shot of the burning village (extras scurrying around, dramatic vignettes in the middle ground as people are dragged from their huts), then a shot-reverse-shot sequence for the conversation, with perhaps a two-shot framing both Wiremu and Baine together at some point for variation (the sequence could be fully covered in a master shot, a two-shot and from the twinned shot-reverse-shot angles). Shooting over the right shoulder of one character and the left shoulder of the other would keep their visual left/right screen relationship stable (shoulder of one character just visible when framed on the other), something that the textbooks say is mandatory. The rest could be left to the actors. Locked gazes. A tense exchange of opinions. That approach seems entirely consistent with the screenplay. It would result in a technically competent piece of filmmaking, a “textbook” exercise with no challenges for the editor at the cutting stage. But it is not what we have in River Queen, with cinematography by Alun Bollinger and editing by Ewa Lind.

  Instead of a conventional establishing shot for the first line of the screenplay page – “The village is in flames” – we are plunged straight into the flames. The first image is a sideways tracking shot, left to right, with a long lens, across a burning hut, so the visual field is completely taken up with flickering orange-red flames and half-glimpsed silhouetted outlines of soldiers and struggling villagers, a heat shimmer leaving us in no doubt about the intensity. The left to right movement matches that of one white woman as she walks behind a burning hut – we just pick her up at the end of the shot, framed head and shoulders in shallow depth-of-field as she moves pensively amidst the burning wreckage of the village. Then we cut to camera position 1 as Wiremu “races his horse into the village.” We are looking past Major Baine on horseback as his horse shifts nervously amidst the chaotic scene. The long lens leaves Baine in softer focus in the foreground as his shifting figure half obscures the approach of Wiremu's horse.

  The diagram shows Wiremu's approach. As he wheels around Baine to confront him (“Permission to call the troops off, Major!”) the point of view shifts to what might have been the conventional shot-reverse-shot line. But the camera tracks from position 2 to position 3, in effect crossing the conventional line (from looking over Baine's right shoulder to looking over his left). Wiremu reins his horse round in a tighter turn and Baine simultaneously pulls his horse to the left (camera position 4). As the two characters’ relative positions are established for their exchange of words, the camera positions for the duration of the shot-reverse-shot cutting (shots 5/7/11/13 of Wiremu and shots 6/8/10/12 of Baine) are held very tight to the line between them. As their horses continue to shuffle and shift uneasily, the camera in effect crosses the line several times and the overall visual effect is one of instability and tension. There is a visual “hyperactiveness” to the way that Wiremu and Baine's relative positions in the frame shift (the kind of thing that “classical” shot-reverse-shot setups are meant to avoid).

  This visual impression is accompanied by an interesting variation from the screenplay's key instruction for their exchange – “WIREMU and BAINE lock gazes.” In fact Wiremu stares at Baine but Baine does not meet his gaze through most of the shot-reverse-shot exchange. Actor Anton Lesser chooses instead to glance about at the out-of-frame activity in the burning village around them, which keeps his character very much anchored in what is going on off frame even though we are not seeing any of that at this point. We have two acting styles here. Cliff Curtis, playing Wiremu, has an intensity “dial” as an actor that he can modulate in very fine degrees: he can turn up and focus the intensity, which gives him a strong on-screen pre
sence at dramatic moments like this. Anton Lesser's approach here is perhaps more technically nuanced, as he takes the scripted instruction to “lock gazes” and works with it in two ways: he holds off looking directly at Wiremu (while giving us a strong subliminal impression of the sort of scene he is glancing at off camera at this moment) and then he suddenly spears Wiremu with his look as he delivers the portentous line “Do what you have to. Get this place cleaned up.” The actors bring a contrast to their interpretation of the page of script that underscores their character differences. Cliff Curtis takes the script's instructions literally and plays all three of his lines here with an intense directness. In a sense Anton Lesser is not playing his own first three lines so directly – he is playing his presence in the larger scene while offering these lines in response to Wiremu's challenge. But the actor almost imperceptibly shifts the focus of his performance towards his fourth line and holds off the instruction to “lock gazes” until the very same moment.

  When we overlay these performances on the camera setup as described, it becomes clear how the result is not just additive but synergistic. The “hyperactive” staging of the shot-reverse-shot exchange, with its unstable points of view (first signaled by the camera crossing the line at 2/3), gets added to by the contrasting performances in which the two actors handle differently the instruction to “lock gazes.” Anton Lesser's reading of the scene turns that instruction into an instant to be controlled, having seized that instant out of the shifting relationships (both spatially and in terms of character) and out of the surrounding maelstrom of the scene. And in that seized instant a larger relationship gets suddenly focused – that between colonial power and indigenous people.

  But the découpage is not finished yet. It is important to note the two points of view (camera positions 4 and 9) that are not part of the shot-reverse-shot pattern. The first immediately precedes the shot-reverse-shot sequence while the second (position 9) is inserted into it. In both cases they catch Wiremu glancing aside. In the first instance he looks at a Mori woman being dragged away, cursing and bleeding, by one of the soldiers (shot 4B). She screams at Wiremu the originally unscripted line “Shame on you, you traitor!”

  In the second instance something farther away catches his attention. We see what he has seen in what is, in effect, a continuation of the scene's very first shot – the white woman, Sarah, half-glimpsed through the flames (shot 9B). These are both point-of-view shots of Wiremu's (what he is looking at when we see him in shots 4 and 9). The first was only in the screenplay as a general description (“A Mori WOMAN staggers by, cursing, one ear bleeding heavily”). The second was not scripted at all. The cursing woman's specific exchange with Wiremu would have been a straightforward inclusion during production as the scene got developed but the second is a postproduction development. Wiremu's momentary glance out of frame in shot 9 was “found” during cutting and anchored to the cutaway of the woman behind the flames, once the decision had been made to use that image. And again the overall effect is synergistic, not just additive.

  Wiremu's dead brother years before had fathered Sarah's child, a boy then kidnapped by his Mori grandfather and taken up river to be raised as Mori. Sarah has been travelling among Mori, searching for the boy for some ten years at this point. Wiremu and Sarah will eventually become lovers. Wiremu catching a glimpse of Sarah through the flames, a moment constructed almost entirely in postproduction, puts their respective identities, separated by the burning village, into the crucible of ethnic and cultural differences from which a different future will emerge for both of them. Spelling it out in this way, however, takes longer than the moment itself takes on screen. 9B is just a five-second shot but its careful and deliberate addition to the layering transforms the moment. The terrible undercurrent in Baine's “Get this place cleaned up,” with all its connotations of racial separateness, is counterpointed by the momentary visual connection between Wiremu and Sarah.

  The fact that she does not see Wiremu, does not return the look, leaves plenty of scope for the story to develop. But it also poses the key question of Sarah's knowability (or otherwise) and whether that knowability is crucial to the realization of a story.

  Central to the classical Hollywood-influenced form is the knowability of the protagonists. Story events make sense because we come to know the characters whose personal motivations and actions either cause events themselves or cause larger reactions to events. Baine and Wiremu have this quality of knowability here, but Sarah much less so. Momentarily pulling close in on Sarah with a long lens dramatizes the question of her knowability, as she seems to evade this gaze. We will detail the pursuit of Sarah's knowability when we return to River Queen throughout the book. The point to be made about it here, however, is that this will prove to be River Queen's rupture point as a film that is fractured (like What Dreams May Come) by unresolved tension between post-classical filmmaking sensibilities and classical narrative film form.

  The object of that cutaway shot (9B) – actor Samantha Morton playing Sarah – attempts an extraordinary post-classical refusal of knowability throughout the film (as we shall see in the final part of the book). But this is at odds with the film's increasingly strained efforts to “know” her through various devices (notably a diary-type voice over dubbed by another actor). The director Vincent Ward did not in fact direct the scene we have just explored. It was directed by the film's cinematographer Alun Bollinger because Vincent had just been precipitately dismissed by the producers as a result of a dispute with Samantha Morton, seen opposite at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood in 2009, four years after River Queen. It does not always come to such a dramatic impasse but filmmaking is this too: a complex set of professional routines and working relationships bound up with collective commitment or otherwise to specific ways of conceiving what film is. Re-employed for postproduction, Vincent did bring his synthetic directorial eye to the final construction of the scene.

  So achieving the minute of screen time we have just analyzed suddenly looks anything but “textbook” in its multiple challenges, including the management of complex working relationships. But the challenge that we can generalize around here is that of negotiating a tension between classical and post-classical forms, with River Queen the second of Vincent Ward's two films that startlingly reveal these tensions at work.

  Samantha Morton and (right) Bette Davis

  The knowability of a central female character in the classical mode has time and again been a matter of what cultural critic Tara Brabazon calls a “womb with a view” – the construction through script and performance of wives, mothers and objects of male attention. Stereotypical emotionality is often a principal characteristic. In What Dreams May Come, we see Annie (Annabella Sciorra) once in her workplace – an art gallery – but only when phoning her doctor-husband Chris for his advice in the middle of an emotional crisis about paintings that have not turned up for an exhibition (he cures a girl with one hand and solves Annie's problem with the phone in the other, his patience with the relative trivia of the latter signposting what a good doctor-husband he really is). Placing an “emotional” woman as a sympathy-eliciting fulcrum of a film in this way is an old gender-stereotyping Hollywood trick. Samantha Morton – one of the most interesting international actors of her generation – is certainly known as a “difficult actress,” as Bette Davis once was (above, in Now Voyager). Asked by Steven Spielberg to wait on the set of Minority Report while a stand-in was used to set up lights for one of her scenes, Samantha Morton told him, “I might as well go home now.” But a question to be revisited later in the book is what the balance might have been between this “difficult” persona and a refusal, even if only at an intuitive level, to offer her character up as knowable in the classical way, a refusal that will turn out to be instructive for us regarding the potential of post-classical film form.

  As we think about these things, it is important to bear in mind that they have their own history.

  We can watch classical Hollyw
ood film form inventing itself in a film such as The Massacre, made by D.W. Griffith in 1912 for the Biograph Company (left). A scout for the army sees his sweetheart fall in love with and marry another man. Sent to the frontier with the army, he then participates in an attack on an Indian village. The “rules” of frame-to-frame visual continuity are still being developed, as we can see with the shots of the woman by the river who leaves frame left and re-enters frame left in the next location (the house), which seems logical except that of course this is a reverse on her movement: “classically” she would be shot from the other side at the river in order for her screen direction to have remained consistent. In the two setups for the house exterior and interior the left frame edge on the interior and the right frame edge on the exterior are matched, so screen direction does remain consistent there and the resulting screen spaces are very stable. The soldiers’ horses prance restlessly, suggesting the pent-up energy that will be released in the attack on the native village.

  There is no “coverage” of scenes. Everything is filmed in static master shots, so shot-reverse-shot cutting is not yet apparent. When we watch the scout inside the house look at the couple outside, we have to wait for him to exit in order to see them; there is no point-of-view shot to reveal what he has seen. But other techniques of “identification” are being developed. Before the attack on the village, we see an Indian woman and child in the already conventional sympathy-arousing device. During the attack (bottom row left) we see her run from the tent with her baby and fall out of frame in the foreground. Then the final shot of the massacre shows them lying dead among the other bodies, a powerful image distinctly reminiscent of Timothy O'Sullivan's photographs from Civil War battlefields. The Vietnam War era western Soldier Blue (1970) re-staged this scene with “shockingly” explicit detail (right). But, oddly enough, the early Griffith film has just as much impact, not least because Griffith ends the scene with a lingering shot of a camp dog wandering amongst the bodies. The dog's evident confusion and anxiety is an extraordinary moment and something that only film could have achieved.