Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  Scene 105 from the River Queen screenplay was included in full here because this was the last point in the film where it was going to be possible to draw the viewer into what it is like to be Sarah, the last moment to establish something that would make us care, the last available moment to ensure that the later scene of her shooting in the water wrenched our guts out. We have not been breaking down the narrative structure of River Queen as we did in detail with an earlier film, but this was what we can term the second turning point narratively. It established Wiremu's – and hence the Mori world's – invitation to Sarah. So it mattered.

  What is extraordinarily instructive though is the reason the scene falls short. The scene in the screenplay sets up a task situation (with reference to Elly Konijn's model). This task situation involves Wiremu giving Sarah an improvised bouquet of kawakawa tree leaves. This task situation has a role to play within the situational meaning structure of that part of the film and of the film as a whole.

  However, what we witness is one character's dramatic situation being directly addressed, bypassing the particular task situation, and through an inward-focused, emotion-plumbing moment of self-absorbed intensity. Samantha Morton looks totally convincing in frame 17, the emotion absolutely believable on one level. Who knows what personal experience or memories she tapped into here, and in the knee-touching scene, in order to express this moment of self-contained emotional truth. But it closes actor Cliff Curtis out along with his character Wiremu. The given task situation is bypassed in the interests of a free-standing moment of individualized “illumination” in the Grotowskian sense.

  What we see in frame 17 is extraordinary acting but the snarled “Get off me!” at frame 11 might as well have been directed at the spectator. By frame 17 we are like Alun Bollinger's camera – standing off in awe and detachment. So no, when Sarah is shot in the river after the actual and symbolic crossing over from the white world, we do not care enough, which is a small tragedy in terms of the film's commitment to classical narrative form. We have suggested, in referring to the scene where Sarah touches the boy's scarred knee, some of the reasons informing this withdrawal.

  Fired but re-hired for postproduction, Vincent felt compelled to look for ways of compensating: a diary-type voice over to tell us more about what it is like to be Sarah, with discarded diary pages filmed by Vincent himself in the River Thames, a lot of back-of-the-head dubbing of new lines during ADR (automated dialogue replacement) to add explanations, inserts shot with a double.

  The task situation in scene 105 with the bundle of leaves might have been like the dusty hair on a bathroom floor, a casual forward roll over a sofa in a hotel room, two people sitting on a park bench. And what-it-is-likeness might have become a shared and transferred quality. Cliff Curtis might even have been Samantha Morton's Beulah Bondi. Given a fully developed task situation here, with all its components attended to, we might have “got” how the situation functioned as a turning point, drawing us more engagingly into the immense drama of Sarah's marginalization from the white world and the invitation open to her. Instead, we observe an extraordinary actor digging deep into her own emotions. We have discovered here that what it is like cannot be left to depend on that alone.

  But rather than seeing this as a failure, we have to understand finally what it tells us about the tensions that are arising between classical Hollywood-style narrative film form and what we have been calling post-classical sensibilities in film. Both Vincent Ward and Samantha Morton have these sensibilities – an urge to find new ways of using film to express things that the classical form is now struggling to express. That is why Vincent gravitated towards Samantha Morton for the role of Sarah in the first place. An Irish-born British actor such as (for instance) Susan Lynch, with impeccable theater and film credentials, would have reclaimed the character of Sarah for a classical treatment and everything else in River Queen would probably have fallen neatly into place (including an Oscar nomination or two). But Vincent wanted something else: the “radiance” referred to by Elly Konijn but ratcheted up to a unique level of intensity, which is where Samantha Morton tends to abandon the masks of conventional character-making technique, as we have noted in discussing Mister Lonely.

  Vincent, however, is still looking for ways of hooking these kinds of postclassical intensity to the core classical form (right). So River Queen presented Samantha Morton with a series of task situations (we have just been describing some of these) that were thoroughly embedded within the classical narrative form. The most important connections did not in the end get made between her acting and those situations, in part because it was such a risky experiment to attempt (and she would have preferred to abandon many of the conventional task situations in favor of something else).

  Similarly, as we can now see more clearly, Vincent's pursuit of a visual intensity through images in What Dreams May Come ran into a disconnect with story and dialogue still thoroughly embedded in the classical form.

  Why does a brilliant filmmaker whose first three films were all Cannes official selections not repeat that achievement? Because those films consolidated his early intuitive post-classical sensibility as an artist and he then set out to discover whether he could connect the forms of cinematic intensity he was intrigued by with the classical form. To date there have only been partial successes with this.

  *Acting and images as the repositories of Vincent Ward's post-classical pursuit of intensity (“seeing too much”).

  But the attempt continues to be one of the most instructive we can find anywhere, not least as other filmmakers catch up and begin to explore post-classical alternatives. The development of “puzzle” forms has, to date, been the most successful partial solution to bridging the kinds of gap identified above. Vincent Ward has not been much interested in that particular solution, but this book has definitely been drawn to it in order to tell its own story.

  * * *

  Acting in Penny Serenade and Fail-Safe is discussed in Mamet (2008), 169-73

  Chambers in Konijn (2000), 8; figure simplified from Konijn (2000), 91

  New York Magazine online (nymag.com/listings/movie/expired/); Brabazon (2002), 80

  This is the final exercise in the book. Appropriately then, it concerns endings.

  Multiple endings due to disagreements between directors, producers and “studio” executives have become a fact of life in the film industry. Vincent's films Map of the Human Heart, What Dreams May Come and River Queen all have endings different from originally intended.

  This exercise is to script and plan another ending for Map of the Human Heart.

  In the film as we see it, Avik (the Inuk who follows cartographer and military planner Walter to wartime Europe) drops bombs on the city of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945 (which historically may have been the largest ever single-event killing of civilians). As the aircraft in which he is a bomb-aimer is hit by German anti-aircraft fire, Avik calls for his grandmother. The last time he did so was on seeing her commit suicide by tumbling into the Arctic waters from the Inuit boat that was leaving Avik behind as an outsider, tainted by the white man's world and no longer accepted by his people.

  Having seen too much at Dresden when he parachutes into the city where even the river is on fire – Avik returns to his Arctic homeland. He will die there alone on an ice floe after an accident on his snowmobile.

  As he dies, Avik imagines turning up at the wedding of the daughter he conceived with Albertine in wartime England but had never seen as a child, and taking Albertine away with him in a hot-air balloon. At the end he thinks he is in the sky with Albertine looking down at his own body on the ice as it sinks into the water.

  In the original screenplay, Avik and Walter meet one last time in Germany in the closing days of the war, before Avik's return to the Arctic. In the released film, the scene with Walter, Avik and the automaton that we looked at in detail is the last time they see each other. This leaves things unsaid between Avik and Walter and, in a sense, perha
ps lets Walter off the hook dramatically.

  So this exercise is to write a final scene between Walter and Avik, modeled loosely on the scene opposite from Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians.

  Written by Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), based on Arthur Kopit's award-winning 1969 stage play Indians, deals with William “Buffalo Bill” Cody's Wild West show and its attempts to turn Sitting Bull into a star attraction for paying customers. Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), who has his own reasons for getting involved, is reported to have been shot and killed by agency (reservation) policemen in South Dakota near the end of the film.

  In this extraordinary scene (right) Cody (Paul Newman) wakes in the night and thinks he is seeing the dead Sitting Bull (who appears motionless at various places in the room), to whom he tries to explain himself.

  So this exercise is to imagine a somewhat similar scene to end Map of the Human Heart – a coda after Avik's death on the ice – in which Avik “appears” to Walter. Let us imagine that Walter has become a senior military planner for NATO during the Cold War. Perhaps he is helping coordinate the nuclear submarine USS Queenfish's operations under the Arctic icepack? Perhaps it is a time of particular global tension (think Fail-Safe). In the middle of a sleep-deprived night (perhaps he has been drinking?) he “sees” Avik one last time. What would Walter and Avik have to say to each other?

  The exercise is to script the scene and then to block out its staging and camera positions and to make some notes on the use of color and light. But you could also give some thought to how you would want to see the scene acted. Is this an opportunity for emotionality in one or both performances? Is it about getting “inside” the head of one of the characters? Is it about situating them in some broader framework? What task situations will you set for the actors? Where will you set the scene? In other words, this exercise is about how you would construct a moment. There is an opportunity here to think about the gaze as a structuring factor in the visual organization of a filmic moment. And there is an opportunity to think about cinema's power to deploy intermeshed layers of time.

  Viewing Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson for comparative purposes after doing this exercise should prove instructive, especially if attention is given to the way the camera is used, the very limited use of tight shot-reverse-shot cutting, the “panoramic” approach to staging, even in interior scenes like this one, and acting that deliberately skirts opportunities for feverish intensity (even though we know that Newman, with his Actors Studio training, could deliver that).

  Jonker, Peter (1988) The Song and the Silence: Sitting Wind (Edmonton: Lone Pine). The biography of Canadian First Nations chief Frank Kaquitts, the Stoney Indian also known as Sitting Wind who played Sitting Bull opposite Paul Newman in Altman's film.

  Rain of the Children (2008) is a drama-documentary feature by Vincent Ward that returns to an area and a subject he first made a film about when still a student over a quarter of a century earlier. Back then, he had taken himself off into New Zealand's forested Urewera mountains, homeland of the Thoe (pronounced roughly “two-hoy”), the Mori tribal grouping that resisted European penetration longer than any others, refused to sign the principal treaty and remains determinedly hostile to white dominance.

  The early student film. made there over eighteen months with the help of young cameramen Alun Bollinger and Leon Narbey, documented the life of an old Thoe woman in her eighties called Puhi and (according to the outside world's labeling) her “schizophrenic” adult son Niki. Over the intervening years, Vincent had learnt more about Puhi's involvement in some key historical events and Rain of the Children, made immediately after his big-budget feature River Queen, embeds extracts from the earlier documentary in an exploration of that history, which is viewed as far as possible from Puhi's point of view. Rain of the Children goes back to the period of the land wars, New Zealand's civil war and the setting of River Queen, even including some out-takes from River Queen (far right opposite) as historical re-enactments. Then in several layers, with actors of various ages playing Puhi, the film builds an account of her life.

  One of these layers is Vincent's first visit to Puhi's long-abandoned house since he had filmed there years before (middle row right). Since a main objective of the film is to have us care about its subject, we can relate some of our findings from the previous section to how this is achieved in Rain of the Children.

  The old documentary material establishes the ordinariness of Puhi and Niki's daily lives (top row right). We watch Puhi cook for them both, we watch her hands, we watch the simple actions of putting food on a plate, we listen to the everyday sounds. We have seen in our previous examples how this very ordinariness affords a quality of what-it-is-likeness so essential to our starting to care. There is an element of “telegraphing” about this (shortcuts to sympathy) but it is deftly handled and persuasively genuine in its observational honesty.

  Then the film starts to construct its several layers. We saw how director Hiro-kazu Koreeda drew us into a series of initially unanticipated connections in After Life. Much the same happens here as the visit to the present-day location, the old film, historical re-enactments, and documentary material (including interviews in the community) reveal points of connection that gradually form a web within which Puhi comes alive for us as a multi-faceted person in history, not just an old stooped mumbling figure in the clips from the original film.

  The affective “charge” that this film starts to generate comes very much, initially, from observational acuity without emotionality. Although we watch Vincent trying unsuccessfully to find Puhi's grave in the long grass, and he is clearly moved by his return to the old house, it is the slow accumulation of details and the growing web of connections that draw us in, rather than any overt appeal to sentiment. As the film's construction skillfully works its way through the techniques for creating what-it-is-likeness that we looked at in the previous section, this becomes a “constructed” Puhi, of course – how could it be otherwise? – but it is difficult to resist the conviction that we will never come any closer than this to feeling what it was like to be this woman in this place at this time.

  The historical “layer” culminates in an attack by white police on Puhi's community in the hills in 1916. Puhi, at the age of sixteen, has married the son of Mori “prophet” and land rights activist Rua Kenana, and is living in a community he founded at the foot of Thoe's sacred mountain Maungapohatu. A police raid on the village, ostensibly to root out illegal alcohol sales there, replicates any number of colonial raids on indigenous communities in different times and places to root out difference on whatever local pretence was convenient. Puhi is caught in the middle of the raid (following pages).

  While the staging of the raid on the village is at the center of the web of connections through which we come to care about Puhi, the film also effects a powerful move that we have seen before in other examples. By observing Puhi caring for Niki, even in the simplest of ways (like painstakingly unwrapping his ice cream, right), the film slowly teaches us to care about Niki ourselves.

  Rain of the Children stages the raid on the Thoe village as a dramatic reconstruction. When gunfire breaks out, in which her young husband will be killed, Puhi along with many of the other women and children is caught in the middle of the confusion.

  Camera operator Adam Clark uses his camera with a long lens and handheld, so he can stand well back from Puhi (Mikaira Tawhara) but pull in visually on her face. The camera first moves right to left around her as she turns slowly in the opposite direction, crouching instinctively as if to duck the bullets. A cutaway shows the police firing, ejecting their shells, firing.…

  Then Adam Clark is moving the camera on the same arc but in the other direction (opposite), as Puhi counter-rotates. The visual effect is to capture the girl's disorientation almost viscerally. The background spins much faster than she does because of the relative movement
of camera and girl. In the blur, because of the shallow depth of field, we catch glimpses of the police and of other Thoe but they become her impressions rather than clear objects in the field of view.

  In fact the scene's power starts to derive from an unexpected quality of abstraction at this point. Puhi as a girl and the specific event in which she is caught up, while physically captured with a quality of dynamic naturalism, are also simultaneously lifted by these techniques out of the specifics. What we referred to before as an “elsewhen” is powerfully evoked – or rather a series of “elsewhens” in which this kind of event has happened to other people.

  And most powerfully of all, there is the “elsewhen” of a police raid in 2007 (right) on Thoe communities in the same area, carried out under the authority of a Terrorism Suppression Act brought into law with the encouragement of U.S. authorities in the post 9/11 global climate. The staging of the scene seems to spin out dizzyingly to connect with the village clearance depicted in River Queen and with the 2007 anti-terror raids in one web of historical interconnection. At the same time, canisters of compressed air were used to puff Mikaira Tawhara's strands of hair here, in synchronization with the sounds of passing bullets.

  Having drawn us deep into the life of Puhi, the Mori woman, Rain of the Children then takes our accumulated interest and our sense of what-it-is-likeness and transfers it to her troubled son Niki, especially after Puhi's death when he is left on his own.

  Niki at the outset is not an obvious sympathy-eliciting figure. A sullen, sometimes violent, overweight, non-white “schizophrenic,” whose rheumy eyes peer suspiciously at everything and whose talk, when he does talk, seems by turns paranoid and ominous. Try pitching that in a logline to a Hollywood producer. But by the closing stages of Rain of the Children, and not through any sentimentalized discovery that Niki is other than he is, we are heartrendingly interested in this person.