Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  When Niki (Waihoroi Shortland) is found drunk and naked in the middle of the street, the transformational moment is not a transcendent one. The white light is not heavenly but from the streetlights in a little town on the edge of Empire. It is not the Archangel Michael who comes to the fallen one but a neighbor's white horse to which he has been attached and which seems to understand him. And Niki himself is both just that – himself – and at the same time carries the awful weight of a history that has made him who he is. Our anguished interest in him is in part a felt recognition of the sheer magnitude of those crippling forces.

  So the illumination of the transformational moment when it comes is not derived from the intensity of a divine light in a Bierstadt painting or from the intensity of a revelatory performance that uncovers a depth of psycho-physical interiority. Rather, it is found in the surfaces of things marked by trauma, which is to say the wound that opens up between how things are and how they might be.

  Vincent Ward's instructive thirty-year project in pursuit of transcendence through film ends up for the time being on this street in this moment and with the realization that the transformational moment in film is here.

  CONCLUSION

  We are finally in a position to “model” the transformational moment in film (opposite). As we saw at the outset, staging broadly conceived is where the creative process that begins with loglines and screenplays proceeds to engage with the raw material from which the transformational moment will be constituted.

  The camera is always confronted by the persistent givenness of things. Whether it is that dog looking lost in Griffith's The Massacre or any of the details we have picked out throughout the book, the lens captures scenes that are fraught with background. Much of what is latent in the manifest detail is nowhere to be found in a screenplay and only appears in the staging, which is one of cinema's major differences from literature of course. At the start of the book we hypothesized, with Eric Auerbach, two styles of imagining defined in large measure by their attentiveness or otherwise to the resonances of such latency. As we have seen, the transformational moment as defined by this book re-balances things in favor of more attentiveness.

  The other major component of the manifest in these moments is the actors’ engagement with the particular task situation. “Manifest” implies little by way of required interiority in acting. We have seen how the actor's plumbing of interior emotion risks intensifying the performance to a point of disconnect with the kinds of task situation that typify classical Hollywood narrative. While that way of re-orientating acting from the manifest to the latent has its place, the moments we have looked at tend to be much less reliant on it than they are on the actualization of solutions to a task situation embedded in the film's larger situations at that point, where an actor arrives at appropriate externally connected solutions rather than turning inwards in search of something else.

  The solutions arrived at then connect across to the latent dimension of the moment, where what-it-is-likeness insists on drawing us in to the potential experientiality being offered. This is where, as spectators, we affectively connect with film (mediated, as we have seen, by aspects of staging such as the gaze).

  The other aspect of the latent dimension that we have discovered is what we have termed “elsewhens,” a virtual world of other times layered into the moment. Borrowing a phraseology from Gilles Deleuze, we have referred to these as “sheets” of time, some describable biographically, some historically, some cinematically (with reference to other films), and sometimes all three at once.

  For anybody hoping that there are generative rules for producing these moments, the news is discouraging. The transformation rules themselves are usually unique to the creative process in each case, which may mean unique to the situation of the creators. Vincent's work has demonstrated this for us, driven as it has been by the unique transformation rule that seeing, when it reaches a sublime intensity, risks seeing too much and becomes traumatic (in ways that can even spill over into the circumstances of production). Such “rules” are not invented by the filmmaker so much as derived from who he or she is and which, in turn, come into view as another aspect of the latent dimension above. So this book is making the point that there are no short cuts to film artistry, no “rule book” that can be slavishly copied. But it is also demonstrating the potential painfulness of the making, especially if the power of the image is being used as a means to work through a transformation rule by repeating it, which may be one of the characteristics of art.

  SUMMARY #2

  (q) Our affective involvement with the moment and the always immanent reversal of the gaze can connect with the screen as a field of potential intensity (primed by meta-compositional forces).

  (r) Intensity is not only about turning up the dial (visually or emotionally),

  (s) It is about what it is like and the intense affects this affords.

  (t) So the transformational moment in film is not in the end about transcendence

  (u) but about the manifest's articulation with the latent

  (v) and about artists such as Vincent

  (w) who “strike out over the hills of possible time” (Heinlein)

  (x) to imagine elsewhens

  (y) for us, and for those who share the post-classical sensibility,

  (z) even at the risk of seeing too much.

  The 26 points in the book's two summaries are in the end about the cinematic staging of affect in new ways, which is the basis of a filmmaking sensibility capable of renewing the form of narrative film today.

  AFTERWORD: A CONVERSATION

  This conversation between Perkins Cobb and Dan Fleming takes place at a sidewalk cafe in Cannes during the 2009 film festival. The cafe's white canvas-backed chairs have the names of film stars printed on them.

  DF: So, we're having this conversation at a point when you're finishing your documentary called Holy Boy: Looking for Vincent Ward and I'm finishing my book, which sees Vincent Ward's career in films both as an artist's journey to Hollywood and back and as what the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein called a journey over the hills of possible time. But we are both interested in broader topics about film. In your case it's the fate of the auteur. In my case it's what I call the transformational moment in film. I guess the first question is, why have we chosen to see these larger topics partly through the lens of Vincent's life and work?

  PC: Well, I'd say because of that journey you've just suggested. A lot of things about the nature of filmmaking today come into view when you follow somebody who goes all the way from film school to art-house success, the Cannes festival three times, big-budget Hollywood movie-making, back to the margins, and then a kind of border crossing in his latest work when he goes back into a non-First World, indigenous community where he seems to have discovered some of his film artistry in the first place.

  DF: And seemed to have been affected by the Mori way of thinking about time – that the past is in front of you. I think that's where some of the creative tension comes from – the interesting trouble his work often has with the determined forward movement of classical film narrative, perhaps even where his early intuitive post-classical sensibility has its roots.

  PC: So you can see film in a different way, whereas a filmmaker who is all small-budget art-house or all Hollywood blockbuster or all inter-cultural cinema only gives you one angle.

  DF: I'd add that Vincent's work over thirty years has been a major experiment. The writer Louis Nowra has said that Vincent wanted to make films that would “stun.” I think he wanted to see what kinds of intensity film is capable of. But I know you have a slightly different take on that. Do you want to talk about it?

  PC: Well, you know what my view is of the so-called auteur filmmaker in the mainstream system, especially since Coppola's attempt to run an auteur-friendly studio failed.

  DF: That at best they only have it in them these days to make the one great film and everything else is just repetition?

  PC: No
t just repetition, but a betrayal of their singular achievement.

  DF: Because of what I call Coppola's Prediction – that trying to make a film “one of a kind” leads to excess, over-ambition, self-identifying as an auteur in a way that becomes personal myth-making…?

  PC: Definitely all of the above.

  DF: But this is the point. You don't quite see Vincent in that way.

  PC: I do and I don't. I think he set out, whether entirely consciously or not, to try a series of experiments as you put it, after his extraordinary first film Vigil. Have you written about Vigil in your book?

  DF: Actually no, not until this point at least. That's partly because it's a perfect little crystal of a film (that's how its producer John Maynard described it to me) whereas everything that came after was reaching more riskily for something – the limits of narrative, a visual intensity through digital effects, an emotional intensity by pushing actors to the limit. So those increasingly big high-risk experiments are more instructive. We really can learn things about film from them.

  PC: Ah, that's the teacher in you coming through. But I agree up to a point. Anybody who can make a film like Vigil could have kept on just re-doing that, if they could get the money, though of course I don't see the point in doing that! What's interesting is exactly the fact that he didn't repeat himself in that superficial way. What attracted me to this, though, was the seemingly self-destructive element at work. The bigger, the more different the experiment, the more there was to go wrong. So the “Holy Boy” I've been looking for was that self-destructive artist who didn't play safe, as if he knew that superficial self-repetition was a different, slower, less dramatic form of self-destruction.

  DF: Did you find him?

  PC: Yes, I think so.

  DF: Where?

  PC: As a boy, in a sheep shearing shed on the old farm imagining he was about to be shorn for being different.

  DF: For being an artist?

  PC: Ultimately yes, though I guess he didn't really know that at the time. And a lot attaches to that – to do with the twinning of a visionary impulse with the self-fulfilling expectation of being punished for that impulse. If you really believe that, you can manage to find a lot of ways of being punished, of being shorn….

  DF: This relates closely to what I call in the book a traumatic reversal of the gaze – seeing too much. But that background is often seen as tying him specifically to a strand in New Zealand culture – in its national cinema – the isolated figure in the elemental landscape as source of a distinctively New Zealand sublime. Also maybe the punishment of pretensions.

  PC: But you've included most of his films in a book about film generally that's much broader and intended for a much wider readership?

  DF: Absolutely. I don't discuss New Zealand cinema at all in the book. That's because I see Vincent's work in film as concerned primarily with asking a sort of semi-religious question, which is whether film as a medium can be transformational of its raw material in the way Robert Bresson proposed and whether this is about transcendence. There have only been a handful of New Zealand painters and poets interested in that sort of question, so in that central respect he's profoundly atypical of the country that produced him. And in that central respect, he's been asking something of film as a medium that has much broader interest. His way of testing that question was to take narrative, light, color and emotion – very much the building blocks of cinema – and look for the limits, the breaking points in them all.

  PC: That reminds me of the scene in Vigil – do you recall it – where Ethan does that trick for the girl – remember, with the bottles and light in the old shed?

  To fill in some brief context here, Vigil, 1984, is often referred to as an “iconic” New Zealand film. It observes a period in the life of Toss, a young girl on a hill-country farm, whose father dies trying to rescue a ewe from a cliff face at the back of the farm. Life with her mother and grandfather is complicated by the hiring of Ethan, a poacher who found her father's body and brought it home. Ethan becomes involved with her mother. As plans are made to dispose of the farm and move away, Toss must cope with the threat of change, puberty, new insights into adult life, her own imagination unsettled by images in the old family Bible, and Ethan's presence, all against the unsentimentalized backdrop of a harsh natural environment.

  DF: Ethan draws the curtains of sacking over the windows in the old shed on the farm where they let him stay and he turns it into an improvised camera obscura. He sets up some bottles to catch the beams of light and creates a light show for the entranced Toss, all deep blues shot through with fragile rainbow hues, like light through a cathedral window instead of a half-derelict shed on a remote settler farm somewhere in the British “West.”

  PC: Of course, the name Ethan reminds us of Ford's The Searchers and how that mission ended with an attack on an Indian village. And Toss is that somewhat androgynous child who appears in Vincent's films – like the daughter in What Dreams May Come. They're “Holy Boy” as well, even if they're female.

  DF: But I don't see any of that as quirks of an auteur filmmaker's personal obsessions. I see that scene in Vigil as setting up everything else. It's about the question of cinema – of light through glass. The question then becomes how far you can take that light show and how to reach what it is like to be Toss at that moment. Those two questions drove Vincent's subsequent work, but they're also fundamentally intriguing questions about the inner workings of cinema for anybody interested in the medium's capabilities.

  PC: And the prototype of your transformational moment.

  DF: I guess so. The scene goes in two directions simultaneously – outwards towards the light and inwards towards what's latent in the manifest detail – the dusty bottles, the texture of the old sacking, the atmosphere in that particular shed in that particular place. That's the paradox of cinema. The association of those two styles of imagining.

  PC: Ecstatic truth, Werner Herzog calls it. The strange secret beauty of the latent in articulation with the manifest. You're making me think of Her-zog's penguin.

  DF: Ah, in Encounters at the End of the World?

  PC: The documentary about Antarctica. There's this one crazy penguin that insists on walking off on its own away from the sea and towards the mountains. For some barely comprehensible reason it's a really moving moment, even though there's almost nothing in the image except the one penguin in the empty landscape. (Laughs) So a director like Vincent is that lonely penguin?

  DF: Well, the post-classical sensibility that a director like Vincent always had is certainly a big part of what's isolated him while working in the mainstream. But we're now at a moment more generally when a much more widespread post-classical sensibility among filmmakers is desperately in need of workable ways to connect with and then transform classical narrative film form. This has a good deal to do with the intensities of experiencing film, which is what “cinema” still means even when removed from old-style cinema-going. So Vincent's remarkable pursuit of those intensities and those solutions is very instructive at the present moment.

  What did he discover? First, that cinematic intensity pursued through color and light too readily comes unhooked from classical screen narrative requirements rather than transcending them. Then that cinematic intensity pursued through an actor's interiority also easily becomes unhooked in much the same way. However, the third approach seems to work. Intensity pursued through building into a film an affective map of connections in time can really begin to transform the classical screen narrative.

  When Avik bombs Dresden and calls in anguish for his dead grandmother, personalized causality (the reduction of events to individual actions) is briefly but powerfully replaced by a post-classical intensity focused on time. As this book has illustrated, an affective mapping of connections in time may be the most promising way forward in bridging this gap (right), in order to extend the reach of classical narrative filmmaking and then to transform it.

  Below: in place of an inner sp
here of romantic success and an outer sphere of a personal mission achieved, Map of the Human Heart demonstrated the potential of a third sphere, that of affective mapping, intensified to the point of “seeing too much,” where Vincent Ward's own dream work intersected instructively for us with questions of cinema.

  FILMOGRAPHY

  After Life (1998) dir. Hirokazu Koreeda. Engine Film.

  Alien3 (1992) dir. David Fincher. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  A Matter of Life and Death (1946) dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The Archers; J. Arthur Rank Film.

  Apache Rifles (1964) dir. William Witney. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  Apocalypse Now (1979) dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Zoetrope Studios.

  Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) dir. Frank Capra. Warner Bros. Pictures.

  Avatar (2009) dir. James Cameron. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  Bunny (1998) dir. Chris Wedge. Blue Sky Studios.

  Burden of Dreams (1982) dir. Les Blank. Flower Films.

  Citizen Kane (1941) dir. Orson Welles. Mercury Productions; RKO Radio Pictures.

  Clear and Present Danger (1994) dir. Phillip Noyce. Paramount Pictures.

  De weg naar Bresson (1984) dir. Leo De Boer, Jurrien Rood. Prodimag.

  Dr. Strangelove (1964) dir. Stanley Kubrick. Columbia Pictures Corporation.

  DreamChild (1985) dir. Gavin Millar. Thorn EMI.

  Encounters at the End of the World (2007) dir. Werner Herzog. Discovery Films.

  Expired (2007) dir. Cecilia Miniucchi. Aga Films; FR Productions.