Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  So when Sarah and Wiremu make their leap this is the world that Karl Jenkins has them leap into: a musically-evoked world that Jenkins has described as “extended choral-type work based on the European classical tradition, but where the vocal sound is more akin to ‘Ethnic’ or ‘World’ music” where the choruses sound “tribal.” As Sarah, Wiremu and the boy escape towards the river, this is the sound that wells around them (see Peter's screen grab of tracks), with orchestra and choir rising above the frantic shouts and gunfire from the pursuing British soldiers.

  Original score by Karl Jenkins.

  Transcribed by David Archer,

  transcription copyright Soundstone Music 2010.)

  They plunge into the water and get swept away, as much by the rising tide of music as by the river. The massive aural effect overall is in striking contrast with the fragile guitar moment we have just discussed.

  Then, as they scramble ashore on the other bank to join the Mori entrenched on the hillside there, Jenkins’ female vocalist rises above the choir for the last thirty seconds of the piece, accompanied by the strange tinkling of bells (the bells are the fifth track from the top on the screen grab and these thirty seconds are framed with a fine white line). This section, transcribed above, is where the cue most clearly resembles musicologist Timothy D. Taylor's description of the Delta commercial, with its promise of an elsewhere to fly off to: “This music's signification of a vague kind of spirituality or mysticism is in keeping with the clear mission of…taking viewers away from the here and now and toward an exoticized elsewhere.” This kind of music, says Taylor, echoes “centuries of western notions of other places as spiritual, in contrast to the modern West.” In other words, Karl Jenkins’ music, here as elsewhere in the film, may underscore the drama in effective ways but also captures and contributes to a generalized narrative image for River Queen. In that respect, the guitar snippet dropped in to the preceding moment by the music editor can be seen as compensatory for the score's general tendency to work over the top of the moments instead, in the interests of sustaining that more general narrative image.

  So there is an important lesson here about music in films. The transformational moments we are looking for are, by and large, less concerned with that general narrative image. Where there is music in these moments it tends to be of the moment instead. And as the earlier example from Gabriel Yared suggests, it is more concerned with exploring “what it is like” for a particular character than signposting the audience's more general response.

  This quality of what-it-is-likeness is going to be the next object of inquiry here as, in fact, the last major constituent of the transformational moment. So before moving on to that, it is important to note the similarity between Karl Jenkins’ practiced evocation in music of a generalized exoticism or an “elsewhere” and Albert Bierstadt's painterly evocation of “transcendent” elsewheres bathed in light. Light, color and music can all be subsumed in the pursuit of that fantasy as we have seen – but they can also be deployed differently within the moment. What-it-is-likeness is a further key to these moments.

  Delta Airlines TV commercial (1994)

  THE DREAM WORK OF CHARACTER-MAKING

  Christopher Bollas has noted a deeper notion underpinning our term “transformation” – the idea that “the writers, filmmakers, and artists of our time are engaged in a most profound and intense transformation of the unconscious identity of a generation into consciousness.” It is at exactly this point that the what-it-is-likeness of a character in film can intersect with the what-it-is-likeness, indeed with the “character,” of any one of those creative artists, and Christopher Bollas further proposes that we “dream work” characters into becoming; not just fictional characters but our own characters. So this “dream work” of character-making (like Griffin's visions in The Navigator) crisscrosses the line between art and life. Thus in the next section we are going to attempt an imaging of just a few of those circumstances in which Vincent dreamed himself into existence. We are doing this not as an exercise somehow separate from our consideration of the films, and not at all to reduce those films to biographical explanations, but as a way of grasping how the transformation rules peculiar to an individual creative process are bound up in this kind of dream work.

  * * *

  Didion (2004), 73-75. Cupitt (1987), 147

  Blue Sky Studios press release, Oct. 1999

  Eduardo Serra interviewed by Diane Baratier, AFC newsletter (Paris), September 2005

  Stephen Book interviewed in Los Angeles, 02.01.10

  Michael Kamen interviewed by Dan Goldwasser, 09/04/99, www.soundtrack.net

  James Horner interviewed by Daniel Schweiger, Film Music Radio, 2006, www.filmmusicworld.com

  Karl Jenkins interviewed by John Mansell, Soundtrack, 2008, www.runmovies.eu

  Taylor (2007), 196

  Bollas (1993), 252

  Judy Ward interviewed in Greytown, September 12,2009 (photo of Vincent courtesy of Judy Ward)

  Maurice Askew (first head of the film program, School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury) interviewed in Christchurch, January 26, 2010 (photo of Vincent Ward and Maurice Askew courtesy of John Perrone)

  Louis Nowra (author, playwright and screenwriter) interviewed in Sydney, October 19,2009

  Perkins Cobb, interviewed in Cannes, May 13, 2009

  Sarah Whistler (Vincent Ward Film Productions) interviewed in Los Angeles, January 30,2010

  Stuart Fyvie (LipSync Post) interviewed in London, June 30, 2010. Final frame shows the “rebel” Mori chief as played by Temuera Morrison in River Queen (2005).

  The earliest record of Vincent's family in Ireland is in 1796 when Thady Ward is recorded as a tenant growing flax for the linen industry on this hillside farm at Kilnagarn in County Leitrim, then Cormac Ward as a tenant farmer here until his death aged 84 in 1870. Cormac's son Thomas stepped out of this thatched stone cottage in 1862 and looked across the waters of Lough Allen for the last time as he departed for Australia, leaving like a generation of young Irishmen whose childhoods had coincided with the Irish Famine that left the country impoverished. Thomas's younger brother Thady was present at their father's death here but by then Thomas had given up on the goldfields of Australia and settled across the Tasman Sea, in Morrison's Bush near Greytown, New Zealand, with a Limerick-born widow whom he married after her first husband died fighting a fire that swept across the whole area. Thomas was Vincent's great-grandfather. Thomas's contemporary, Englishman Humphry Butler, a commander in the Royal Navy and great-grandson of Brinsley Butler, 1st Viscount Lanesborough, owned 2,800 acres in County Leitrim as an absentee landlord, including the farm where the Wards were tenants. In Morrison's Bush, opposite, the Wards carved out their own place on what had once been Mori land, between a loop in the river overlooked by a steep cliff and a straight track that would become the road named Ward's Line.

  Wairarapa Standard, 1888

  “Mr Ward, a sturdy son of Erin's Green Isle, is the pioneer settler of this Line. The Line is, in fact, called after him. He has been on this property 24 years, and like other plucky settlers, conquered swamp and bush to carry out his project of forming a home for himself and his family. There are wellcleared paddocks, and orchard with trees well pruned, an infant plantation rising to protect the property from wind; oats and wheat, potatoes and vegetables. The barn and sheds are very capacious and strongly built.”

  Dan Fleming

  The American West and the British “West” (Australia, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand) exercise a profound and continuing influence on imaginations in the Anglophone world, not least the cinematic imagination. The settler myth at the heart of these “Wests” is in many ways the deep structure behind an ongoing attachment to the myth of the “hero's journey.” Associating this with more universal claims – that it is a human myth instead of a particular people's myth – keeps alive a triangulation most clearly seen in Shane, above (1953, dir. George Stevens). The gaze of the boy is deflected off his fath
er (the prototype settler) onto the figure of myth. And in versions like Shane the original occupants of the father's land are nowhere to be seen though everywhere a potentially traumatic presence, as are the real conditions of the settler experience. Understanding the endless repetition of this pattern – this deflection toward myth but potential for trauma – is crucial to grasping why so many cinematic moments are still profoundly influenced by it. This is especially so when the landscape (including its light and color) is drawn toward myth.

  right: detail of a painting (oil on canvas) by Stephen Hannock for What Dreams May Come.

  left: Vincent Ward on his great-grandfather Thomas’ farm, Ward's Line, Morrison's Bush, New Zealand.

  Vincent Ward, Morrison's Bush, New Zealand, 2010

  Vincent Ward in his studio, New Zealand, 2010, painting is work in progress (treatment of surface resembles Stephen Hannock's luminist technique)

  Vincent Ward, shearing shed, Morrison's Bush, New Zealand, 2010

  top: Ralph Hopkins collection, #99-291-152, Wairarapa Archive NZ. Charles Van Schaick #23745, Wisconsin Historical Society USA.

  bottom: Vincent Ward, Morrison's Bush, New Zealand, 2010, photograph by the author.

  Were we to design a poster for what it is like in Vincent Ward's “dream work,” this painting by American artist Albert Pinkham Ryder (Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, 1888) could serve as the narrative image, albeit with tongue somewhat in cheek. The artist's perhaps largely unconscious journey back to the river becomes the hero's journey, like Siegfried's here on horseback. One of the figures in the river re-appears in a painting in progress in Vincent's studio, arm bent back over her head in the same gesture. Light, color and landscape carry traces of other images and rhyming action – Friedrich's Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, thus the tree in What Dreams May Come, the woman in the river in River Queen, the cliff above the river, the boy alone on the great-grandfather's farm imagining journeying heroes. The narrative image, like a film poster's, is a huge reduction of course, but this one looks promising.

  There is more to this narrative image, however, than a particular biographically informed confluence of imagery and fantasy, and this is what makes it worth commenting on in the context of the book's larger interests. In fact, the key point is that this painting does not necessarily provide a way in to personal preoccupations, an individual artistic “vision,” a “worldview,” auteurist “themes,” or any of the other ways of writing about an artist as a special individual. It only looks promising in that regard because it draws on larger forces that may have helped make the style of imagining that we encounter in a person such as Vincent.

  Ryder's painting evokes what the critic Edward Said memorably described as “an atmosphere created by both empire and novels, by racial theory and geographical speculation, by the concept of national identity and urban (or rural) routine,” which is to say the atmosphere of nineteenth-century imperial and colonial myths that shaped our world by continuing to shape its routines, including routines of the imagination as lived on a farm in rural New Zealand (itself there as a result of “geographical speculation”).

  But Ryder also taps into the trauma that shadows those routines, where the women in the river could become those escaping the fires of Hamburg or Dresden when empires clashed, or “refugees from the east” in The Navigator, or even the indigenous people of some village being “cleared” (as well as any lurking fantasy or memory of secretive pubescent sexuality), and the whole image seems imbued with the alternative “underworld” that nineteenth-century writer Hippolyte Taine saw as the new place of the imagination – not a mythical or biblical underworld but an underworld of what move us. The creative convergence of elements from these two structures – myth and trauma – defines a core space of “what it is like” to be moved.

  The preceding experimental visual essay is not intended as merely a pictorial interlude in the main business of the book. It is intended to suggest something of the possible contexts for the one transformation rule we have been able to identify as a driving force in Vincent's creativity: when seeing reaches a point of sublime intensity it risks “seeing too much” and becomes traumatic. This also hints at possible sources for his intuitive post-classical sensibility as a filmmaker – the thing that set him at odds with classical Hollywood narrative even as he attempted to accommodate to it. In that respect, Vincent Ward was very much ahead of his time, anticipating the post-classical turn in filmmaking by two decades. Being out of synch in that sense, though, would not have been a professionally comfortable condition, indeed would not have been without its own trauma.

  For us, on the other hand, Vincent's work brings into view the basis of those transformational moments that now take on an even greater significance, because they mark a potential transformation of classical Hollywood narrative form into post-classical form. This form is not yet clear enough for us to describe it independently of the actual work that struggles to realize it. But what we have learnt here is that new ways of handling time are very much part of the transformation.

  The question of communicating what-it-is-likeness in film is a crucial one. This is often thought of as a matter of identification with or sympathy for a character. But ask yourself, glancing back at the fragment of a life story suggested a couple of pages ago, whether you felt something for the person who committed suicide amidst the rubbish pushed for years off the cliff-edge at the back of a farm? If you did, this required neither identification with nor sympathy for a character. Just a sudden capacity to feel what it was like. Those other responses could come later, given enough to attach themselves to.

  Moreover, there are discernible traces of other things in that fragment. The young woman by the river on page 187 is actually from the work of Black River Falls’ town photographer Charles Van Schaick who documented life in a settler community in Wisconsin in the U.S. at the time an unnamed photographer captured a neighbor of the Wards outside the Morrison's Bush Post Office in New Zealand. Author and historian Michael Lesy included the Van Schaick photograph in Wisconsin Death Trip, an extraordinary assemblage of images and newspaper accounts that suggests what it was like for those people. “History with a wrench” a Newsweek reviewer called it, and the “wrench” is the opening up of what-it-is-likeness inside the documentary detail, especially a sensation of grasping the trauma that jauntier pioneer community self-descriptions of collective and individual pluckiness tend to erase. That such descriptions also tend to erase other presences – such as indigenous people – is very much part of that trauma or that wound in the telling (and the factor we will be returning to). As Joan Didion points out in discussing Bierstadt's painting of the Donner Pass, two presences are missing from that vision – the indigenous and the traumatized voice that says, “Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.”

  What we will do in the rest of this book is consider in some depth how film handles moments of what-it-is-likeness.

  * * *

  Didion (2004), 75

  Said (1993), 5

  This is the book's third exercise and is concerned with character.

  If you can obtain the DVD, Mister Lonely (2007, dir. Harmony Korine) makes intriguing viewing as a way of thinking about the links between acting style and character. Werner Herzog plays a priest who accidentally drops a nun out of a light aircraft on a mercy mission to drop supplies to a jungle village. Samantha Morton plays a Marilyn Monroe impersonator in a troubled relationship with a Charlie Chaplin impersonator in a Scottish commune of impersonators. A determinedly experimental film, as you may have guessed and as is director Harmony Korine's style, Mister Lonelys most revealing aspect for our purpose is Samantha Morton's performance.

  The character played by Samantha Morton is fundamentally unknowable, her background and motivations obscure, her behavior fascinating to watch but hard to explain. And yet the actor delivers a mesmerizing performance of real emotional depth. The closest anyone has come to theorizing this kind of p
erformance was probably Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski in the 1960s who advocated acting which “necessitates the stripping away of ‘how to do,’ a mask of technique behind which the actor conceals himself, in search of the sincerity, truth and life of an exposed core of psycho-physical impulses” (Bradby and Williams, p.124).

  The only way to grasp what it looks and feels like when an actor makes this “core of psycho-physical impulses” available, while at the same time denying us the classical knowability of character, is to watch someone like Samantha Morton at work in a film such as Mister Lonely. If you can, watch the film and think about how the “mask” of character-making technique is abandoned.

  Mister Lonely is ultimately a playful conceit, but it was an available vehicle for Samantha Morton's acting which otherwise sits uneasily within the classical Hollywood narrative form where knowable character has to be hooked tightly into this kind of intensity in order to explain it. When “Marilyn” commits suicide in the woods near the end of Mister Lonely we are left instead with a puzzle.

  For a discussion of Grotowskian acting, see David Bradby and David Williams (1988) Directors’ Theatre (London: Macmillan)

  PART 3

  WHAT IT IS LIKE

  We have looked in considerable detail at staging the moment, at composition, at narrative, at color, light and music. What it is like is the last piece of this particular jigsaw. Hippolyte Taine in 1872 (right), who is also the originator of a concept of moment not unrelated to this book's, offers an almost geological picture here of the terrain of what-it-is-likeness, as we now want to call it. But he evokes an “underworld” of proportions well beyond the scope of anything we can consider here. So what we shall do, following the lead that previous material has given us, is to consider first what it is like to die, initially from the point of view of cinematic treatments of suicide. This will raise the question of emotion in acting, which we will move on to consider as an important aspect of what it is like more generally.