Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  What comes clearly into focus in this scene from Map of the Human Heart is the subaltern status of two of the three main characters. Albertine and Avik both wear the uniform, both are being used by the white world in ways that have little to do with who they were before. Except that both have willingly sought out these roles. And Walter is not some one-dimensional oppressor. He has been, in many ways, their friend. In Albertine's “I can get away with looking white,” as the dust lies shroud-like on her hair, resides an entire, complex exposure of how the dominant white world constructed a “universal human being” in its own image and then made it seemingly natural for others to aspire to that image.

  Shortly afterwards, Avik discovers that his crew is being sent on an extra mission, to fire bomb the German city of Dresden. He goes to see Walter and, for the first time, sees the object that he himself has become. (We looked at that scene in detail earlier in the book.)

  THE “UNIVERSAL HUMAN BEING”?

  The writer Gayatri Spivak, thinking about her own upbringing in the education system in India, remarks that the “hero” of the Western traditions she was exposed to “was the universal human being.” Moreover, she says, “we were taught that if we could begin to approach an internalization of that universal human being, then we would be human.” With an Irish Catholic father whose grandfather had left a tenant farm in Ireland owned by an absentee English landlord after famine made life untenable, and a German Jewish mother whose father had got the family out of Germany in the 1930s, Vincent Ward's own “internalization of that universal human being” was never going to be an absolutely straightforward one. The half-glimpsed circumstances behind his father Patrick's trauma on the road to Deir ez Zor on his way to Teheran, in this iconic family story (left), and Vincent's trip to Hamburg looking for his maternal grandparents’ house, both have the potential to chip away at any easy adoption of the “universal human being” as the model of how to “be human”; not least because an iron-clad commitment to versions of that universal figure had produced the victims, the “undesirables,” who populate the background of those historical circumstances.

  This telling of a fragment of “family history” in the first ten minutes of Holy Boy, the documentary, raises questions about memory, time and story. Though the Russian soldier aiming his rifle at the Polish woman and child – a fragment of a larger moment that would put Pat Ward on the road to Teheran three years later – has a hair-raising sense of tension and terror about it, it remains difficult not to see that image and the others as mostly here to represent something abstract – “refugees,” even “history.” But what if we pick out one detail – those muslin drapes over the beds in the Syrian hospital (far left), and see the story from there?

  The infiltration of story includes the “English Patient” quality in our imagining of Pat Ward's burned body being taken first to an Arab hospital in Deir ez Zor before transfer to Beirut (coincidentally, Anthony Minghella was an admirer of Map of the Human Heart and used the same composer, Gabriel Yared, when he directed The English Patient). But what if, perhaps with the help of that last association, we pick out one detail here – the look and feeling of those muslin drapes over the beds in the Syrian hospital in the documentary frame overleaf, the faintest evening breeze from the windows fluttering them almost imperceptibly?

  When archival images document a history more loyally, what does cinema do instead? There is something about cinema's rendering of things – not just of detail but of the larger fold of cloth, the way things hang in space and shift in time – that might seem a loyalty to realism and a fidelity to documenting but is in fact rather different. Where one aspect of the archival images on the previous pages moves outwards towards a generalization about lives and times, the “Pentateuchal” style of imagined moment (as we want to think of it) compels us to feel differently, and to shift our attention inwards instead. There is an automatism about the succession of archival images. They manufacture a sense of time according to familiar conventions and organize their historical objects in recognizable ways to do so. Add on top of that a story with a familiar shape and the moment is no longer arresting in the same way, especially if we are watching moving images rather than still frames. Even the faces of the “Teheran Children” on the previous pages hover somewhat uncertainly between these two possibilities: that they are individuals who might speak to us across the intervening years about ordinary things, or that they are refugees whose faces only speak to us in the collective about horrors in response to which we must wring our hands one more time.

  The photograph of the beds in the Syrian hospital is less archivally insistent about making a general point. So we can linger for a moment over those muslin drapes. In doing so, don't we momentarily come closer to Patrick Ward who lay in one of those beds in 1942 while his burns began to heal, listening at night to the unfamiliar sounds of a Beirut street outside while the muslin rippled? The word “gallant” put into the mouth of the King in the London Gazette, in that ritually ventriloquistic gesture, seals a process of “Homeric” generalization instead. A deserved acknowledgment of course but also an archaic word attached to Spivak's “hero.”

  Whether in Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (left) or in Map of the Human Heart (above), when Albertine catches her stocking on a barb of wire, the cinematically arresting moment does two things. First it tells us that we could be present in that moment were it not for time. The moment feels physically, spatially present to us in all its subtle materiality. It is not so much that we are not there. It is that we are not then. And second? Well, the book hasn't quite got to that point yet; but it is going to be about what Kathleen Stewart means when she refers to “the sure knowledge that every scene I can spy has tendrils stretching into things I can barely, or not quite, imagine.” As we will discover, there is a risk in such moments of turning inwards instead (especially through actors looking for a truth within themselves) when the transformational orientation is properly outwards.

  * * *

  Spivak (1990), 7. Documentary source, War History Branch, Dept. of Internal Affairs, Wellington NZ

  Spivak (1990), 7. Documentary source, War History Branch, Dept. of Internal Affairs, Wellington NZ

  Stewart (2007), 128

  SUMMARY #1

  What have we found out so far about the transformational moment in film?

  (a) It happens when a cinematic moment becomes more than the sum of its parts.

  (b) It includes what the viewer brings to the moment, which is a readiness to feel something about the moment – an affective potential.

  (c) This affective potential does not necessarily need to go into large onscreen emotions – in fact the directing of affective potential into prominent “emoting” by characters, though common, may misdirect it away from the kinds of moment we are interested in.

  (d) Among these kinds of moment, there may be connections that are organized along different lines than the plot (“plot” as a particular interlinking of story events) – our transformational moments may further a plot but they may at the same time be organized along different lines within the film, and sometimes they may not actually further the plot at all.

  (e) The synergistic combination of different techniques informs the construction of these moments – they are not reducible to the effects of one technique.

  (f) Staging is an important first place to look for how the transformational moment in film is actually constructed, although the French filmmaking term decoupage is even more useful as it emphasizes the indivisibility of staging and cutting (which tend to be thought of separately in the English-speaking world).

  (g) The “gaze” is a key effect of staging and cutting and a fantasmatic gaze (based on being the seer rather than the seen) is a now familiar, omnipresent feature of how “classical” cinematic form attaches its staging and cutting to a particular point of view and offers that point of view to the spectator.

  (h) There is potential for a reversal within the gaze that is inhere
nt in every staging of it and being able to tap into this potential is a key resource to have available, where appropriate, in constructing the post-classical transformational moment – the potential for reversal is always there but relatively seldom accessed.

  (i) The screen that carries the transformational moment is a field of forces, among which compositional factors play a significant role in setting up the affective potential even before objects on the screen take on represented identities, and even though that happens instantaneously – meta-compositional forces intensify this potential.

  (j) The transformational moment in film is subject to various kinds of containment capable of blunting its potential or erasing it entirely – and among these is a tendency to harness story to mythic structure and to the idea of the “universal human being,” both of which suit Hollywood's understandable interest in finding a global narrative transparency (product that travels well) but both tend to limit the possibilities.

  (k) Time is an important dimension to the kinds of moment we are interested in, and these moments are often capable of evoking “history” in a way that differs from mere historical re-enactment – by suggesting connections across sheets of time.

  (I) f + i gives us a good example of e.

  (m) When g combines with the kinds of containment identified in j we are likely to have an example of mainstream movie-making at its most formulaic. But there are other formulas…

  (n) b + h promises a powerful combination.

  (o) d + k promises another powerful combination.

  (p) Starting to wonder about b + d + h + k?

  We have also been tracing one filmmaker's navigation of these possibilities in his own life, along with the work of some of his friends, because it is not as a textbook exercise that these things become actual, only as practical and creative solutions.

  This, the book's second exercise focused on creative solutions, is concerned with using visual composition to express some of the meaning that a scene has. At its best, this can produce what we have termed a meta-compositional effect, where the other elements in a scene do not have to spell out absolutely everything for us because the visual composition is communicating so powerfully.

  Look back at the storyboards for the un-made West of the Rising Sun and at our related discussion of the frame below, as well as the plot summary contained in the page from the Holy Boy documentary (pp. 79-82). Merritt, the western-style hero working in Japan in the 1870s, has been killed. In our version he is not just feigning in order to trap his assailant! Rebecca Bryson is an adventurous widow who has been travelling with Merritt and the samurai Kenichi.

  On the next page we have written an imagined scene to follow on from this storyboard frame. (Left is a nineteenth-century postcard of a samurai or member of the Japanese military nobility like Kenichi.)

  The exercise is to storyboard the scripted scene, with an emphasis on visual composition. Rough sketches are fine for compositional purposes (artists’ charcoal sticks or felt-tip pens are good sketching media as they make it quick and easy to shade areas and block out shapes).

  We are using this print by Japanese landscape artist Hiroshige as the basis for the setting where the scene is to be shot. Empty it of Hiroshige's people (and mentally remove the decorative prints on the interior walls). With the houses on right and left and the trees beyond, this is the space you have available for compositional purposes. How can you use this space – and the visual elements it offers – for compositional effect? Think about framing and angles. How many shots do you need for the scene? Will the camera move, thus changing the composition?

  Reading

  Giannetti, Louis (2010) Understanding Movies (Boston MA: Allyn & Bacon). In its 12th edition at the time of writing, the chapter on mise-en-scène (with a section on composition) is still one of the best overviews available, with excellent illustrations. (mise-en-scène refers to the arrangement of elements within a three-dimensional filmed space with a view to its still typically two-dimensional representation on screen. Composition is a key element of mise-en-scène.)

  Block, Bruce (2008) The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media (Burlington MA: Focal Press), second edition. This is the “bible” for visual composition on screen, especially the first four chapters. Bruce Block always relates composition to other aspects of the visual construction of the image.

  Things to Think About

  Where is the moment with most compositional potential here? Rebecca pulling away? Kenichi picking the flowers? The awkward few seconds between them? Rebecca walking off? The boy running out to accept the flowers? Kenichi standing alone at the end of the scene? These are all important aspects. But is there one part of the scene where you can specifically use composition to say something that the characters are not saying or that even their actions are not fully expressing? (Hint: one possibility is the moment when Rebecca walks off but stops briefly, her back still turned to Kenichi….)

  Viewing

  Tokyo Story (1953), dir. Yasujirô Ozu (Japan). For some very four-square compositions with the camera always three-feet off the ground and a use of empty space that has extraordinary power. Profundity without showing off.

  THE TRANSFORMATION RULE IN NARRATIVE

  The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (also released on video in the U.S. as The Navigator, an Odyssey Across Time) was Vincent's second feature and second official selection in competition at the Cannes Festival (1988). It had taken four years for the young director to make, in the context of tax incentives and loopholes that had made the first half of the 1980s a relatively risk-less boom period for Australasian film production but a period brought rapidly to an end by changes to the tax regimes in both New Zealand and Australia that saw many investors pull out. While Vincent waited in Sydney, producer John Maynard pieced together the needed funding in fits and starts and the film finally emerged as the first official coproduction between the two countries, sweeping the boards at the Australian Film Institute Awards that year. Vincent and John Maynard's previous Cannes selection, Vigil (1984) had begun a remarkable reputation-building process internationally – it shared the billing at Cannes with films such as Wim Wender's Paris Texas and Lars Von Trier's The Element of Crime – and encouraged important pre-sales to international film distributors for the next film. The New Zealand Film Commission, a government agency set up in the late 1970s to channel public money into developing and sustaining a national film industry (as happened in many countries due to concerns about viability in the face of Hollywood's international dominance) made its then largest yet commitment to supporting a single film. Nonetheless, production faltered for financial reasons partway through, reportedly when private investors who were crucial to the overall package pulled their money out and put it into a Broadway musical. With Australian Film Development Commission support the film did get completed and when Navigator was released it consolidated its then thirty-three-year-old director's growing reputation. Major London publisher Faber and Faber published the screenplay (by Ward, Kely Lyons and Geoff Chappie) with an introduction by film journalist and critic Nick Roddick (then editor of trade paper Screen International) who said, quite simply, that Vincent Ward had now become “a major-league film director.”

  The Navigator is itself in some ways a parable about storytelling, so it affords an ideal opportunity to consider the nature of cinematic story and narrative (the way a story is told).

  The main sequences in The Navigator are summarized on the left, with timings for each section. The film is set in late medieval Cumbria, a then isolated, mountainous region in the northwest of England. “Medieval” here means less the actualities of that long historical period between Roman Empire and early modern world and more a modern imagining of simpler, inward-looking communities eking out meager but honest existences with little concern for anything beyond their own horizons. The people in this kind of imagined community are versions of the peasant figure that historian Kathleen Biddick has called a
“melancholic object” invented by later medievalists, impoverished yet innately noble in spirit, craftspeople rather than alienated functionaries of industrialization, superstitious but in a way that can elicit modern empathy. Kathleen Biddick recounts how the first issue of The Ecclesiologist (monthly journal of a Victorian society dedicated to returning church architecture to the luster it had had in the Middle Ages) carried an appeal from the Bishop of New Zealand for working drawings of medieval church design, including moldings, doors, arches, etc. so that these could be imitated in the colonies, a task for which pattern books were eventually produced in England and distributed everywhere from New Zealand to the West Indies. So the pairing of the idealized medieval peasant figure and a religious medievalism opposed to the perceived corruptions (especially visual corruptions) of modernity has had a potent history in the English-speaking world. The Navigator's central fantasy is that a group of these medieval peasants, threatened by plague, tunnel through the Earth (and time) on a pilgrimage to find what turns out to be one of those modern churches that evoke the “medieval” for its anti-modern connotations (in actuality St. Patrick's Cathedral in the city of Auckland, New Zealand). Ironically, the exported medievalism that offered the colonial world an imagined picture of pre-modern spiritual clarity is re-worked by a post-colonial filmmaker in The Navigator.

  At the center of the film are two brothers – nine-year-old Griffin and his older brother Connor who has been lured away by the temptations of the outside world but returns disenchanted and with news of the chaos being caused by the plague. Griffin is having visions – disjointed images that begin to take on the form of “flash-forwards” to a journey that the brothers and four men from the village (Searle, Ulf, Arno, Martin) will embark on. Threatened by the steadily approaching Black Death, a pandemic sweeping across the known world, the community wants an offering to be made at the rumored “great church in the west.” They work copper mines in the mountains where they live and, in desperation, Connor leads the small band down a great pit where they toil overnight with a massive wooden tunneling machine, breaking through unexpectedly into the sewers of what turns out to be a modern city. There they hope, before dawn, to find the church they are looking for and hoist on its spire a great copper cross, the template for which they have brought with them, along with chunks of smelted copper ore to cast the cross if they can find a foundry.