Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  * * *

  Burch (1973), 4

  STAGING ROOMS

  The professional working relationships that converge on any piece of cinema are not just a matter of different skills and crafts. They are also about different ways of thinking that have to be orchestrated. Writer, director, editor for instance – these three do not just work together, they bring potentially complementary but distinct ways of thinking about film to the construction of cinematic moments.

  To think filmically from the inside out – as a maker and artist rather than only a spectator – is clearly an acquired ability. Vincent Ward was exposed in Sydney, at an early stage in his career, to the thinking of director Phillip Noyce who would soon be making memorable Hollywood films (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Bone Collector, Salt, etc.) and playwright Louis Nowra, subsequently lauded as being not just at “the forefront of Australian theater” but one of the most important postcolonial dramatists working internationally. Vincent's discovery of the work of Britain's Dennis Potter would help crystallize his early belief that it was possible “to create work of the most serious intent – and yet make it accessible.” Editor John Scott worked with both Phillip Noyce and Vincent Ward (as well as with other remarkable directors such as Jonathan Glazer).

  Phillip Noyce is among the most accomplished practitioners of cinematic staging working in the international industry today, so we are going to take a master class from his film The Quiet American, edited by John Scott, before looking at a collaboration between Ward, Nowra and Scott.

  Staging is the next level at which the writer's contribution is re-imagined: the first in what is a series of re-imaginings, each informed by these complementary but distinct ways of thinking about film. If everyone broadly shares a conception of what film is, there will be a progressive convergence in which differences get subsumed and complementarity starts to charge the material with the electric potential that ultimately transforms its constituent parts.

  This is an early scene from The Quiet American (2002), directed by Phillip Noyce from a screenplay by Robert Schenkkan and Christopher Hampton, with cinematography by Christopher Doyle (Lady in the Water) and editing by John Scott. Based on Graham Greene's novel, The Quiet American follows a British newspaperman in Vietnam in the fading days of French colonial influence there (French Indochina, with its once lucrative plantations, dissolved into the partitioning of Vietnam between communist north and formerly Francophile south that in turn led to American intervention there in the 1960s). In the period when the film is set, the 1950s, the U.S. is already exercising covert influence in the region in the guise of “third force” ideas (that there is a necessary alternative to both communism and old-style colonialism), an influence that shades quickly into covert intervention. The journalist Fowler (played by Michael Caine) becomes increasingly certain that his urbane young American friend (the “quiet American” of the title) is not just a “third force” idealist but a CIA operative. He is helping to arm a violent Vietnamese splinter group whose atrocities – including a bloody car bombing in Saigon witnessed by Fowler – will be blamed on communist insurgency.

  This realization prods Fowler out of his detached complacency and he eventually colludes in the American's assassination by local nationalist activists, of whom Fowler's assistant Hinh is a ring-leader. In a 2007 speech, U.S. President George W. Bush referred to Pyle, Greene's fictional American, as “a symbol of American purpose and patriotism.” So Schenkkan, Hampton and Noyce's deceptively quiet film is also quietly incendiary in its politics. In this scene, Hinh and Fowler are discussing whether Fowler might travel north to where the violent splinter group is most active, in search of a story that may save Fowler's job since he has not been producing much of late.

  Fowler arrives at his Saigon office, exchanges pleasantries with Hinh (Tzi Ma) who makes tea, reads an ominous letter from his editor in London, then gets drawn to the map on the wall. The staging is on three axes: A, B and C (with an initial camera position in the corner of the room for the establishing shot). A shot-reverse-shot setup and cutting on the A axis organizes the initial conversational exchange, with the closer shots on the B axis intercut to draw us in and add emphasis. Then the C-axis camera position in the middle of the room picks up Fowler's glance at the map and follows him as he gets up to look at it more closely. As he does so, we have an utterly unexpected reverse – the camera on the other end of the C axis (in effect in the wall), completely subverting the old 180 degree rule, reversing our sense of right and left directionality in the space (see the bottom row opposite), and in effect transforming the scene.

  What this reverse in the staging achieves is a felt – an affective – anticipation of something not yet worked out in the narrative or characterization. Thomas Fowler, by picking a point on the map where he might find a “story,” is on the verge of committing himself to a course of action that will transform his understanding of both himself and the world in which he lives. What he finds at that point (opposite top) is a ravaged village in the perpetration of which it will turn out his American friend has been complicit (conspiring to arm those who did it in order to blame the insurgents and thereby justify subsequent action against them). Thomas's lesson in history vibrates with associations (opposite) — not with other films but with the histories, the places on other maps, that they in turn evoke. The fact that cinematic staging — the blocking, camera positioning and cutting of a scene — can carry this (not as a secret code or “meaning” but as a momentarily felt shift in the fabric of the film's material reality) is evidence of film's transformational potential.

  A matrix of “elsewhens”: top: The Quiet American (2002); middle: Soldier Blue (1970); bottom: River Queen (2005) and Rain of the Children (2008).

  By this slightly later point in The Quiet American, we know that Fowler (the journalist, on right of frame 1 opposite) and Pyle (the American, frame 1 background, played by Brendan Fraser) are both involved with the same Vietnamese woman, Phuong. Their competition over her comes in some ways to symbolize their relationships with Vietnam, while Phuong's negotiation of their interest in her comes to express her own search for identity as much as it carries the burden of that symbolism. In this scene Pyle visits Fowler, with whom Phuong is then living (but she enters late in the scene).

  The scene is staged on two axes again, with a third setup then disturbing that staging. A first axis is along the front edge of the scene (diagrams above left and middle left), from where the camera observes the two men arrive and pans left to follow them as they move across the space (from positions 1 and 3 through a pan at 7). A key camera position in the scene is then farther along this axis (position 11 and frame 11 opposite) as the two men face each other. The second axis is deeper inside the space (diagram bottom left), where two clustered shot-reverse-shot sequences are played out for the two portions of the men's conversation (shots 2 through 6, and 8 through 10, diagram below left). Then Phuong (played by Do Thi Hai Yen) enters.

  Three things are especially noteworthy about this staging: (1) the way that Pyle (followed in the pan at 7) keeps backing away from Fowler into the room, opening up a space between them (number 7 on the second row opposite) – it is not that Pyle is apprehensive at all, rather he is being evasive and the staging communicates this even before their dialog and the actors’ body language; (2) frame/position 11, which really emphasizes that space between the two men, is held for an unexpectedly long time, rather than returning to the shot-reverse shot pattern of 8, 9 and 10 (compare these camera positions on the overview diagrams left) – in effect the staging moves out of the shot-reverse-shot arrangement and does not return to it; (3) Phuong then enters into that space between them (not literally, as she comes in the same door as they did, but in terms of the spatial arrangements in the successive frames 11 and 12). Director Noyce and editor John Scott would have worked together on cutting the scene but holding a shot like 11 is not uncharacteristic of John Scott's work. He had access to the full shot-reverse-
shot coverage and could have continued cutting in that way from frames 9 and 10 onwards but holding instead on the two-shot of the men, with the void between them, makes a huge contribution to the feel of the scene. Not cutting is part of the very good editor's art. Phuong's arrival (frame 12) is then a more visually striking moment than one might have expected in so understated a scene, an “empty” space for her having been set up between them. The male gaze at a woman, and the mapping of this onto the spectator's gaze at the screen, has long been a feature of classical film form. So much so that academic film theory, to the casual observer, seems to have been dominated to an extraordinary degree by its interest in the gaze; often at such a level of psychoanalytically-informed abstraction as to have been off-putting for those filmmakers and others who might otherwise have been interested in film theory. But we can sense why it is important when, in The Quiet American, the camera and the two men instantly direct their gazes at Phuong.

  However, frame 13 is particularly interesting because we see their gaze rather than seeing Phuong via their gaze. Noyce and cinematographer Christopher Doyle cleverly set up a first person point-of-view shot for Phuong as she moves into the room. As spectators, we become suddenly aware of being on the receiving end of the male gaze, rather than ourselves invisibly sharing in it.

  The “gaze” we are thinking about here can be given very definite forms in Western culture. It was there when Charles Dodgson, whose pseudonym was Lewis Carroll, gazed with an unsettling intensity at the female child (a “gaze” that was transformed into Alice in Wonderland). It was there in Greek myth when Orpheus journeyed into the underworld searching for his dead wife Eurydice and secured her return on condition that he would not look at her, but he did. Twentieth-century feminist thinking, understandably, linked the male gaze to the objectification of women more generally. Mainstream cinema seems to have been invented around it. But it is also important to note that the male gaze in film, as here, is worked out in terms of the specifics of a scene and of a particular film.

  So the bottom row of three frames on the previous pages (frames 11, 12 and 13) represents a staging of the gaze in a way that resists any simplistic generalizations, as does this scene from Vincent Ward's River Queen (below) where Wiremu is taking Sarah up-river.

  * * *

  Ward on Potter in Boorman (1995), 15. Nowra in Gilbert (2001), 286. John Scott interviewed in Sydney, 05.11.10

  President Bush speech, Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, Kansas City, 8/22/07

  STAGING THE GAZE

  We have now looked in detail at staging and scene coverage and related this to the synthetic notion of decoupage (staging/camera positioning + cutting). Our diagramming of this has suggested the organized matrix of camera positions involved in the coverage of a scene, from which the editing constructs the final sequences, and how all of this if done with craft and artistry can work synergistically to transform the constituent parts. We have begun to see how, as a result, the film's material reality can momentarily transform itself by the apparently simplest of means but in doing so can powerfully suggest “elsewhens” (the instant of stillness and memory in Herzog's Rescue Dawn, the reverse on the map in The Quiet American). We have suggested that these “elsewhens” can connect images in ways that lie outside the classical organization of the particular découpage, allowing other kinds of connection to be made. We have found the first traces of an “elsewhen” in Vincent's What Dreams May Come (when the man falls through the crust of faces and we glimpse another web of images in the film, running against the grain of the multiplex-friendly Homeric journey). And finally we have identified the gaze as a key component in the matrix of the decoupage.

  We have begun looking for Vincent Ward along the way, so we will shortly bring all of this together in a detailed consideration of one scene from his Map of the Human Heart (1993), co-written with Louis Nowra and edited by John Scott (who cut The Quiet American as we have noted). But first it will be helpful to look at how Vincent stages the gaze in River Queen (2005), especially around the character played by Kiefer Sutherland (top right).

  The scene on the right is the most explicitly violent staged by Vincent Ward in his filmmaking career. The British colonial army in 1860s New Zealand is continuing to hunt for the Mori insurgents, now deep up-river (following the village clearances we looked at earlier). This contingent, among which is Doyle (Kiefer Sutherland), an Irish sergeant, unexpectedly comes across an idyllic scene of half-naked Mori girls playing with a skipping rope under a tribal banner. The girls are a lure and an explosive crossfire suddenly rakes the soldiers, the first to die taking a bullet in the head.

  Doyle, who has been in love with Sarah (Samantha Morton), survives this ambush but is fatally wounded soon after. Sarah finds him stripped naked and in trauma in the forest (top left opposite) and helps him back to camp. Subsequently she nurses him in a cabin by the river. Though friends since Doyle first worked with her father, an army surgeon, Sarah has never returned Doyle's love. But she lets him watch as she puts on a wedding dress she has been saving in her meager belongings. As she returns his gaze he finally looks away in distress and pain.

  Sarah leaves the cabin, picks her way across the wet moonlit rocks and makes love nearby to Wiremu, the disenchanted Mori scout for the army who had challenged Major Baine's policy of scorched earth. When she returns, Doyle has died, a small fluttering bird landing on his unresponsive chest where he had been feeding it millet seeds.

  These successive scenes – the violent “punishing” of the soldiers’ gaze and then the disappointment, deflection and displacement of Doyle's – suggest how the gaze as an organizing principle of decoupage is available not just for unquestioned application but for re-working within the specifics of the particular film. Here, in the moments before death, the gaze is revealed as a fantasy and its informing principle as trauma. That sounds like a “difficult” summation of the illustrated scenes, but we can take it quite literally for the moment – the soldiers’ instant of fantasy is traumatically interrupted and Doyle's few minutes of fantasy are supplanted by his substitution and death. The visual organization of these fantasies around the gaze entails that the gaze itself is momentarily exposed as traumatic in nature.

  However, Hollywood film's commitment to the fantasmatic gaze as “normal” has been almost total and River Queen has enough of the “Hollywood” form about it for the gaze to be largely recuperated throughout the film (except, as we shall see, in one or two coherence-threatening moments when Samantha Morton, the “difficult actress,” refused to do what may have been expected, whether through petulant instincts or conscious intent).

  The screenplay (in what would have been a much more conventional moment) has Sarah lie beside the still sleeping Doyle and hold his hand. She sleeps briefly, then wakes: “He is dead. Her eyes are brimming as she sits, still holding his hand.” But Sarah is not holding his hand when he dies alone and her point of view (below) emphasizes instead the absent touch by putting him so clearly out of reach now, the gap between them a kind of wound.

  Imagine standing looking out a window just before it gets dark. Everything seems laid out for you to look at, arrayed and framed for your visual satisfaction, a whole world. The brightness out there, through the window, contrasts with the protective shadows in your room. That is the fantasmatic nature of the gaze. But imagine it getting dark. Gradually the light fades outside, becomes darker than the light in your room. You begin to feel uneasy. You begin to feel that it is you being looked at. Now you feel certain that a look is being directed at you out of the darkness. If there were curtains you would close them. Suddenly you glimpse your own reflection in the glass and it only serves to reinforce the feeling that you are now the object being viewed. That is the traumatic nature of the gaze.

  TRANSFORMING THE GAZE

  In many ways this scene is very similar to the one we looked at from Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American – two men parry verbally in a room, sidestepping what they really need to say, n
ot least about their competition over the same woman. The staging plays out very differently though and the differences are instructive.

  From Vincent Ward's Map of the Human Heart (1993), this scene is from the middle of the film and shows Avik, an Inuk who has become a World War Two bomb-aimer on night raids over Germany, seeking help from Walter, a senior air force planner for the bombing of German cities. Years before, Walter had been an aviator, surveyor and map-maker in northern Canada where he had met the boy Avik, whom he rescued from tuberculosis – a white man's disease. In the sanatorium where Walter deposited him for a cure, young Avik had fallen childishly in love with a Metis girl, Albertine. In the early years of the war, Avik and Walter met again when Walter was back in Inuit land searching for a German submarine stuck in the ice. Avik asked him to look up Albertine (in fact to return a crumpled X-ray of her that Avik had kept from the sanatorium). Inspired by Walter, Avik joins the air force and ends up on a British bomber. He also finds that Walter did go looking for Albertine and that they are now living together, but Avik and Albertine renew their friendship in England and it develops into something more.