Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  In this scene Avik (Jason Scott Lee) is asking for Walter's help because his bomber crew has been assigned to one more mission despite having completed their tour of duty. But suspicion begins to dawn on Avik that Walter (Patrick Bergin) may have colluded in the assignment to get him out of the way. Walter's room at Bomber Command's planning headquarters is full of maps – maps of all kinds, everywhere, and not just for the attacks on Germany. Avik is impressed as they enter the room (covered from camera position 1). Walter closes a closet door on the map-adorned far wall but, as Walter moves up the room, Avik goes to take a look in the closet.

  Cutting to position 2 sees Walter pouring drinks and glancing back at Avik. Technically there is a double action at the end of shot 1 and the beginning of shot 3 – Avik starts to open the closet twice. But it is deliberately cut this way to prolong the moment. The spectator does not notice the overlapping action as a discontinuity but feels the moment hanging suspended in time. What is revealed is an automaton – a mechanical figure, a life size female “doll” covered in fragments of maps. As Avik turns slowly to stare at Walter and then back at the automaton, evidently struggling to understand what he is seeing, the camera at position 3 dollies slowly in past Avik to “look” at the automaton, which has been triggered by the door opening. The figure clanks and whirrs into motion and turns its back, the camera dollying out again along its line at 3 as Avik crosses its path to go for the drink Walter is now holding out.

  There is nothing like that axis at 3 in the staging of the similar scene we looked at from The Quiet American. What the camera does here on this axis creates a third presence in the room. The spectator is unlikely to be overly conscious of this at the time but it colors how the entire scene feels. One way of “explaining” this axis would have been with a reverse to show the automaton's point of view as it were. We have all seen shots where a character reaches into a closet, a refrigerator or a safe and inexplicably the camera is in there looking out. Almost always these are pointless visual gimmicks in the setup. But here, cinematographer Eduardo Serra, editor John Scott and director Ward refuse such gimmickry. Instead the movement in and out along the axis at 3 resists attachment to any eyes within the scene, even the automaton's in the closet. In fact the camera passes Avik's own look on its way towards the automaton.

  The camera at 4 moves with Avik towards the other end of the room and pans slightly there to follow Walter as he moves between the desk and the windows. We hear the sounds of soldiers drilling outside.

  What follows is entirely conventional shot-reverse-shot coverage of the conversation between Walter and Avik. The frames on the right condense this sequence of shots but the cutting and camera positioning will be self-evident from the selected frames. The eight shots of Walter during the conversation are all literally over the shoulder as shown in the diagram, as is a shot looking down at photographs of Dresden on the desk. The seven reverse shots on Avik are offset somewhat from Walter's position and the close shots, because the lens has been zoomed in from there, have a shallow depth of field that throws the background into softer focus (frame far right middle).

  Avik eventually refers to the automaton, glancing over at it (far right middle). Walter briefly turns to look at it as well (frame bottom left). Shot 11 – of the automaton – is now from Avik's point of view and also aligns his position with the other end of that axis established by camera position 3 (previous diagram). So that earlier point of view is retrospectively picked up by Avik. The overall effect is to have made that gaze involving the automaton the central organizing axis of the staging – much more powerfully so than the position at 2 with the movement (4) from there into the scene. The establishing shot (at 1) is never returned to, unlike its more normal establishing of a baseline axis in the last scene we looked at from The Quiet American.

  So the staging of this scene establishes a gaze involving the automaton object around which the rest of the setup organizes itself. Although Avik eventually “adopts” that gaze (and only in a brief sideways glance), it preexists his doing so.

  When Walter looks back at Avik (the final frame on the right), actor Patrick Bergin delivers one of the most intense monologues of his career. It is, in large measure, this monologue and the automaton-gaze that combine to transform this particular moment in Map of the Human Heart. The depth and unsettling intensity in Patrick Bergin's performance at this point needed the staging to have set up the situation in this way, both by creating a focused space around him through the convergent lines of the staging and by linking that space to the third presence in the room through the establishment of what we have called the automaton-gaze.

  As this has been the book's final “lesson” focused on staging, we can finish it by moving beyond staging in order to understand more fully what has just happened in this scene.

  STAGING THE “ELSEWHEN”?

  As this further extract from Perkins Cobb's unfinished Holy Boy documentary suggests, both historical and biographical elements inform the scene we are looking at from Map of the Human Heart. It would be a mistake, of course, to “explain” the scene in those terms.

  In fact both the historical and the biographical get transformed within the scene into something specific to the film, not least to its material organization of images and to the function of the gaze (specifically the automaton-gaze) within that material organization. But they also tell us about the double orientation of the gaze around which the scene is constructed – it is both a fantasmatic gaze (projecting the fantasy of control onto both the woman and the mapped places) and a gaze troubled by its own potentially traumatic reversal, where the unreproducible archival image far left suddenly occupies the place of the woman in Walter's closet. Or rather, like the old photograph of two boys looking out a window in Herzog's documentary moment when Dieter Dengler watches aircraft attack his childhood home in Germany, the image makes specific here something that the film evokes as an “elsewhen.”

  It becomes clear then that what we might think of as sheets of time can be staged in this kind of post-classical moment, not as epic imagery of “historical” reenactments as has so often been the case on the screen, but as “elsewhens” informing the now of the filmic moment, even inside rooms.

  What Avik realizes in the scene we have just looked at is that Walter now reduces everything – the woman whom they both love in their different ways, the people in the German cities – to objects that he aims to dominate. But not only that – Avik realizes he too has become an object to Walter, not just an object to be “rescued” as a child from his Inuit community in the Canadian north and deposited in a sanatorium but an object now to be assigned one more mission over Germany. Avik does not share Walter's gaze at the automaton – Avik joins the automaton as another object. It is in this realization of his own objectification that Avik experiences the reversal of the gaze and feels, not its fantasmatic illusion of control, but its traumatic nature.

  The quality of the writing and Patrick Bergin's remarkable performance throughout the film both render Walter as a complex, multi-dimensional (and for the most part not unlikeable) character, so this moment is all the more quietly shocking.

  At this transformational moment Avik also realizes that he is not on a journey of his own making – that his life is threading in and out of Walter's progress which is itself a growing perversion of the hero's journey towards fulfillment of his goals. Avik is off-centered not just in relation to that story but also in terms of the larger historical events in which that “hero's journey” is embedded.

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  Documentary source for “Holy Boy” images opposite, Michael Foedrowitz archive, Berlin

  THE VOGLER MEMO

  In 1985, the year Vincent took his first feature Vigil to Cannes, Christopher Vogler, then a story analyst at Walt Disney Pictures, wrote a seven-page in-house memo that still has a somewhat legendary status today. Little did Vincent know that his own subsequent arrival in Hollywood, after Map of the Human Heart, would coincide with the
dominance there of ideas that the “Vogler Memo” captured. The Holy Boy documentary (right) includes a storyboard reconstruction (following pages) and a description of a key moment from West of the Rising Sun, a project that subsequently became The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise (a film on which Vincent Ward had an executive producer credit). There are many differences between The Last Samurai and West of the Rising Sun, which was co-written by Robert Schenkkan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who co-wrote the screenplay for The Quiet American (as well as four episodes of The Pacific, HBO, 2010). But the most interesting for our purpose is this scene.

  The hero (much like the character played by Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai) is a Westerner hired in Japan for his skills, though in this instance he is driving a herd of imported cattle needed to relieve a famine. As a character, Merritt could have walked off the set of any old Delmer Daves or Anthony Mann western onto these pages. Along for the trip is Rebecca, an independent-minded woman based on adventurous Victorians like Isabella Bird who visited Japan in the 1870s. The presence of a Japanese orphan boy, from the village they are headed towards, seems to promise a ready-made family if Merritt's interest in Rebecca follows the conventional storyline.

  But the Schenkkan-Ward screenplay arrives at this moment – at the remote village where the samurai for whom Merritt is working will make their last stand against the pursuing imperial forces – and Merritt is suddenly killed. This is the mandatory story stage of last-minute dangers on the hero's journey that have to be overcome before he triumphs. So where is the hero?

  We have already looked at Vincent's later film River Queen. Clearly Rebecca from West of the Rising Sun becomes Sarah in River Queen. There is also the potential here for Kenichi, the samurai watching her in the last frame, to equate with River Queen's Wiremu, Sarah's lover. (The names are interesting: in the Old Testament, Sarah was Isaac's mother and Rebecca his wife.) So unresolved potential from one film carried over into the other, while West of the Rising Sun was replaced as a project by The Last Samurai, a film that shared some of the core concepts but started over with a fresh screenplay.

  Rebecca gazing out in the moonlight at Merritt's body, beyond the village's now barricaded perimeter, equates with Sarah looking at Doyle's body (Kiefer Sutherland) in River Queen, a scene we have already illustrated (indeed the screenplay describes Merritt as Irish-American). Kenichi's presence in the background equates with Wiremu's presence outside the cabin in River Queen: except that Wiremu and Sarah consummate their relationship whereas here the latent potential in unresolved. (See Exercise on page 121.)

  Nor in fact would it be resolved, because it was impossible for Schenkkan and Ward to write that in 1990s Los Angeles with any real prospect of it being accepted. What the Vogler Memo did was articulate and help sharpen for many people Hollywood's growing collective faith in a standardized mythic story structure especially suited to turning out the multiplex blockbusters then needed. Star Wars had established the model: big Homeric stories delivering big story arcs with predictable emotional satisfactions. Myths have always tended to function in the same way, so unsurprisingly a self-reinforcing loop soon got established between a “mythic” story structure and high-concept movies packaged for the deal-makers’ blockbuster mentality. Smaller films then got caught up in the myth-oriented mood that seemed to be promising a winning formula.

  The Vogler Memo was written by Christopher Vogler during a week in New York with fellow story analyst (and theater director) David McKenna. It summarized the ideas of Joseph Campbell (writer on comparative mythology) whose work Vogler had looked at while in the cinema studies program at the University of Southern California. He recognized the influence of Campbell's ideas on George Lucas's construction of Star Wars. In seven pages Vogler distilled this down to stages in the hero's journey (such as becoming aware of a challenge, resisting the necessary change, crossing a threshold, confronting obstacles, making the big leap, challenges stacking up, re-dedicating oneself to the task, facing last-minute dangers, etc. – there are various ways to describe the phases and transitions Campbell had found in the world's mythologies).

  Fax machines seemed to have been purpose-made for leaking this sort of memo and it soon escaped the confines of Disney, where it had already gone to people like producer David Hoberman (Good Morning Vietnam, Stakeout) of Disney division Touchstone; by all accounts then spreading through Hollywood's agencies and executive offices as a uniquely succinct expression of something that was very much in the air. For example, it was picked up at Paramount at the offices of production executive Dawn Steel (Top Gun, Fatal Attraction); Disney head Jeffrey Katzenberg (later the ‘K’ in DreamWorks SKG) apparently embraced it with enthusiasm (Vogler went straight to work for him on The Lion King); and soon the memo was being widely quoted elsewhere to endorse the view that a good movie story has a definable myth-like shape that a writer ignores at his professional peril. It is not so much that the Vogler Memo caused any of this; rather it has come to symbolize what became part of the “common sense” understanding of story in Hollywood at that time, and to a great extent still today.

  So in West of the Rising Sun, Merritt lies in the darkness and is approached by the sharpshooter who downed him. The screenplay continues: “He unsheathes his sword…Merritt raises his right hand holding the derringer and….” The hero, obeying a “mythic” rule, rises from the (pretended) dead, kills his assailant, takes part in the heroic last stand of the samurai, wins the woman, adopts the boy…. The Hero's Journey reinstates its authority. In fact the project then evolved towards a yet more “perfect” version, one less troubled by other possibilities, and this became The Last Samurai, a textbook application of the approach to story that had been so effectively crystallized by the Vogler Memo.

  * * *

  Storyboard by Thaw Naing for Holy Boy: Looking for Vincent Ward (unfinished documentary) dir. Perkins Cobb, illustrating West of the Rising Sun (unmade film written by Robert Schenkkan and Vincent Ward).

  STORIES AND LOGLINES

  A “logline” is a short, pitchable statement of what a film is about. Usually it is only one or two sentences long. The type of logline today's industry expects to see will name a protagonist, suggest their main character trait, set up what their goal is and what forces oppose attainment of this goal. The main character trait will often just be a single adjective (courageous, bored, unhappy, etc.). The goal is often linked to an “inciting incident” (“Stripped of his power and sent into slavery by his tyrannical arch rival, brave Roman general Commodus must do [x] to achieve [x],” Gladiator (2000)). What the protagonist must do might be a series of linked things (“avenge the death of his family, rise through the ranks of gladiator school, re-instate the authority of the deposed Senate,” etc.) but the logline typically subsumes these into one more abstract statement (“must fight to survive and to avenge the wrongs done to him and to the Roman people”).

  The logline will imply the sorts of event that will occur in the film but does not need to list them. Instead, it sets up the framework within which certain events and actions are likely and suggests what links them. A good logline of this type will be clear about where a film is really headed: in Gladiator is it really in the end about revenge or about restoring justice or both? (“Must fight to survive, to avenge the wrongs done to him and bring justice to the Roman people.”) So even a small tweak to the wording can make a big difference.

  In recent years, loglines – which is to say the stories that people are wanting to make into films – have tended to conform more and more closely to variants of the “Hero's Journey” template – a modern distillation of the structure of myth. The Vogler Memo which captured this tendency has been developed into a book that elaborates the stages. If you do not have access to the book, there are numerous summaries online, including “The Writer's Journey” Wikipedia entry and at the official website http://www.thewritersjourney.com.

  This structure is based on the passage from a protagonist's ordinary world
into and through a “special” world of some kind and an eventual return to the ordinary world. The “journey” is triggered by a “call to adventure” (which the protagonist may initially resist), then (in the “special” world), encounters with tests, allies and enemies on the way to an ordeal and a reward, which puts the protagonist on the road back (rededicating him or herself to the goal). There tends to be one final hurdle to get over (and sometimes an associated crisis of self-doubt) before the goal is achieved. So we can see in Gladiator that Commodus's ordinary world (honored Roman general and family man) is overturned, the life of a slave and then gladiator becomes his “special” world, but the goal requires his striving to return to the world from which he came in order to achieve what he wants. (Gladiator was written by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson. John Logan was screenwriter on The Last Samurai, developed from the earlier idea we have looked at as West of the Rising Sun). The “special” world is conceived as including a place or crucible (or “inmost cave”) of transformation, so we will want to think in due course about whether or not we are using the word “transformation” in the same sense here.

  This structure of myth tends to be taken in two directions. There are simplifications of it (life is normal, something happens to disrupt normality, things get really bad, hero overcomes the bad stuff and returns to a new normality). And there are immensely detailed elaborations of it, adding sub-stages and specifying relationships between protagonist and various allies and enemies (mentor, trickster, father-figure, etc.) The elaborate versions are often driven by the notion that the “transformation” is some kind of transcendent rite of passage that returns the protagonist to the ordinary world a better person in some way. Many aspiring and established screenwriters now use this as a system of generative rules for generating new screenplays.