Cinematic Overtures

by Annette Insdorf

  4

  Narrative Between the Frames

  Montage

  Z; Hiroshima, mon amour; Seven Beauties; Schindler’s List; Three Colors: Red; The Shipping News; Shine

  One of the most famous extended openings of movie history is in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): an ape from the Paleolithic era hurls a bone into the sky after using it to attack an aggressor. As it twirls down in slow motion, director Stanley Kubrick cuts to a spaceship hurtling through space. His match cut crystallizes the power of editing to create provocative counterpoints (much like the work of Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s). Although the greatest motion pictures combine expressive editing with the richness inherent in frames, montage is often the key element in storytelling. This is true of the riveting opening juxtapositions of such master directors as Costa-Gavras (Z), Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, mon amour), Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties), and Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List), who grapple with European history. Montage also shapes the openings that introduce a rich psychological landscape, such as Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red, Lasse Hallström’s Shipping News, and Scott Hicks’s Shine.

  Editing is perhaps most crucial to political thrillers, whose rapid rhythm propels the momentum of investigation. The staccato editing of Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), an Algerian-French coproduction based on real events, led to the film’s critical as well as commercial success (and probably influenced the montage in The French Connection two years later). The first foreign-language movie to be named best picture by the New York Film Critics Circle, Z was also the first non-English-language film nominated for the best-picture Oscar since Jean Renoir’s unforgettable Grand Illusion in 1938. (Z won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, as well as a second Oscar for editing.) Costa-Gavras cowrote the screenplay with Jorge Semprún, based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos. The Paris-based, Greek-born director gave bold cinematic form to the true story of pacifist and social democrat Grigoris Lambrakis, including the investigation that followed his May 1963 assassination. But Z, which was made in French in the aftermath of the Greek military coup of 1967, never identifies its geographical setting.

  The film opens with hazy circular lights that come into focus, revealing a military ornament, followed by rapid shots of other symbolic pins—including Christian images—that seem to blend right-wing and religious iconography. The robust score of Mikis Theodorakis contributes to the escalating sense of urgency during the credits, culminating in the printed words “Any similarity to persons or events is deliberate”—signed Jorge Semprún and Costa-Gavras—which defiantly undercut the disclaimer that usually appears in movies. In the first scene a male official lectures an audience about how to eradicate a fungus, beginning with vineyards, before elaborating on the ideological virus they perceive from the Left. After he introduces the head of the police, extreme close-ups present isolated details like a man’s watch or a toothpick in a mouth: as with the first shots, this kaleidoscopic approach invites the viewer to actively piece the fragments together. This places us metaphorically in the perspective of the investigator even before we meet him: we must be attentive to detail, skeptical, and then capable of seeing the larger picture. Given the film’s incorporation of flashbacks as well, Z builds a cumulative sense of inevitability that the truth will emerge. It captures a particularly dramatic moment in history that linked Europe and the United States—the upheavals of 1968. One can feel the galvanizing spirit of the Prague Spring, where resisters battled the Soviet invasion; the Paris streets where workers and students demonstrated together; the Cannes Film Festival shut down by directors (including Costa-Gavras alongside Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Roman Polanski); riots outside the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention; and the anti–Vietnam War protests at Columbia University as well as other campuses. At the time of the film’s making and release, the right wing still controlled Greece. Z was therefore shot in Algeria, and the financing there led to its identity as the Oscar entry representing Algeria (see clip).

  Part of the film’s success was due to the casting of Yves Montand—the renowned actor and singer already associated with progressive causes—in the crucial role of the deputy marked for assassination. And for his performance as the scrupulous investigating judge, Jean-Louis Trintignant (who would go on to star in The Conformist and Three Colors: Red) won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. His character was based on Christos Sartzetakis, the prosecutor of the real Lambrakis assassins. Finally, the film’s producer Jacques Perrin plays the engaging photojournalist whose smart snooping helps to topple the generals responsible for the cover-up. The penultimate scene, in which typewriters in close-up tap out the indictments of top junta officials, would be echoed in All the President’s Men. But unlike Alan J. Pakula’s film, Z does not end on a triumphant note: a lengthy, sobering list of all that was banned includes Sophocles, the Beatles, Sartre, freedom of the press, popular music (notably that of Theodorakis, whose score pulsates in the background), and the letter Z, “which means He Lives in ancient Greek,” according to the film. In an interview decades after the film’s release, Costa-Gavras articulated his commendable goals (which are equally applicable to his subsequent films, such as State of Siege, Missing, and The Music Box): “Cinema is about seducing an audience to have them go away and think … the ancient Greek expression ‘to guide the soul.’ I think the role of entertainment is to do that.”1

  If guiding the soul requires lucidity on the part of creators as well as spectators, Hiroshima, mon amour provides an exquisite example of montage that both complicates and clarifies. In Alain Resnais’s 1959 masterpiece the actress played by Emmanuelle Riva says, “The art of seeing well has to be learned,” a line addressed to the viewer as well. For his first fictional feature, the director of the seminal short Night and Fog exploits cinematic language to teach us to see memory. This includes a tracking camera, the counterpoint of lyrical music with lacerating image, and the dislocation of montage. Hiroshima, mon amour explores how the past conditions—or painfully withdraws itself from—the present. He makes us see beyond chronological time, immediate space, and traditional verbal language into the realm of emotional fluidity. The stream of consciousness depicts an intense subjectivity, especially through exceedingly brief flash cuts of the female protagonist’s past.

  The film originated as a project for a documentary on the atom bomb. Resnais admired the novels of Marguerite Duras and suggested that she place a love story in the context of the bomb. Through parallel montage, he would juxtapose a love story in postwar Hiroshima with an event from 1944, and he asked her for a libretto to be set in images. The opening is purposefully ambiguous, forcing us to question what we see, what we hear, and what might be the relationship between the two. The scene fades in and out of fragmentary but formally rhyming shots that seem to frame parts of bodies. Discomfortingly, the flesh is initially overlaid with sand or ash, then glitter, and finally beads of perspiration.

  The voice of the French actress (Riva) insists that she saw everything in Hiroshima; the voice of the Japanese man replies that she saw nothing. Duras called this first conversation “an operatic exchange,” as it is impossible to talk about Hiroshima.2 When the actress speaks and the camera tracks down the hospital corridor, there are people in the doorway. When the Japanese man (Eiji Okada) speaks, the same tracking movement reveals an empty hallway. It becomes apparent through the images that she has visited the reconstructions of Hiroshima: what she saw is a representation of suffering rather than the actuality. Fellow French New Wave director Éric Rohmer called Resnais a cubist, because he reconstitutes reality after fragmenting it. The effect is one of opposition, but also of a deeper unity in which past and present, love and war, individual and cosmic, feed on each other. Indeed, Pablo Picasso’s perspective can be applied to Hiroshima, mon amour: “Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.… And from the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms w
hich are more or less convincing lies. That those lies are necessary to our mental selves is beyond any doubt, as it is through them that we form our aesthetic point of view.”3

  FIGURE 4.1  The abstracted bodies in the opening of Hiroshima, mon amour (see clip)

  The soundtrack is predicated on repetition and tension. Unfortunately, the subtitles cannot convey the incantatory quality of the woman’s voice repeating in French “quatre fois à Hiroshima” (four times in Hiroshima), or “faute d’autre chose” (for lack of anything else). There is a counterpoint between what we see and hear. About the soundtrack of both this film and Night and Fog, Resnais proposed, “The more violent the images, the gentler the music.” The delicate melody on piano of Giovanni Fusco’s score keeps the opening images bearable and then shifts to honky-tonk music with shots of the museum. When the actress speaks of Hiroshima after the bomb as being blanketed with flowers, we see an eye being removed. She tries to convince the Japanese man that she saw horrors, but the context turns out to be a bed, an erotic locus for a man and woman who met only hours before. About this first scene, Jean-Luc Godard found something amoral in using the same close-up to show love and horror; however, this yoking is part of Resnais’s vision: “The entire film was to be built on contradiction—that of forgetfulness, at once essential and terrifying,” he said.4 And he boldly explored the contradiction of a singular love story against the collective backdrop of atomic war.

  The stream of consciousness expressed by Resnais’s flashback structure influenced countless filmmakers all over the world, especially in its depiction of involuntary memory. One of the richest examples is The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet four years after Hiroshima, mon amour. In telling the story of a Holocaust survivor in Harlem, brilliantly incarnated by Rod Steiger, this independent American drama made the wartime past a palpable intrusion into the protagonist’s present and expressed his dissociation from those around him.5 When Lina Wertmüller made Seven Beauties ten years later, her opening proclaimed an even more audacious dislocation via montage, especially the counterpoint between sound and image. In this controversial black comedy, she juxtaposes archival footage of World War II with a popular song of the mid-1970s: a still of Mussolini shaking hands with Hitler is crosscut with bombs. At first we hear only jazz saxophone, before “Oh yeah” punctuates the historical images—a phrase that can mean many things, from approval to cynicism. These boldly satirical counterpoints are reminiscent of the end of Dr. Strangelove, where Kubrick ironically juxtaposes the image of an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud with the song “We’ll Meet Again.” The opening song in Seven Beauties, “Quelli che,” is by Enzo Jannacci, who is credited with the film’s soundtrack. He was a cardiologist as well as an Italian singer-songwriter, actor, and stand-up comedian. It is his voice that we hear proclaiming sarcastically:

  The ones who don’t enjoy themselves even when they laugh. Oh yeah.

  The ones who worship the corporate image not knowing that they work for someone else. Oh yeah.

  The ones who should have been shot in the cradle. Pow! Oh yeah.

  The ones who say, “Follow me to success, but kill me if I fail,” so to speak. Oh yeah.

  The protagonist, Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini), is first visible almost four minutes into the film, seeming to emerge from the archival footage (see clip). He and another Italian soldier escape wartime carnage and then peer through binoculars at Nazis murdering Jews. Their binoculars represent Wertmüller’s camera—permitting sight but keeping a distance. This helpless voyeurism prepares for Pasqualino’s relationship to others in an unnamed concentration camp. He is a prisoner who is made a kapo (a functionary with certain privileges) after seducing a grotesque female commandant (Shirley Stoler); the illusion of his power is shattered when Pasqualino is forced to shoot his friend. Most of Wertmüller’s movies explore the intimate connections between sex and politics. In Seven Beauties she goes a step further with a story of survival that tests audience thresholds of laughter and horror. Her 1976 Oscar nomination for best director made her the first female filmmaker to earn this distinction, all the more remarkable because the film was in Italian. Like all parts of cinematic speech, the effect of montage depends on the director’s vision. If Resnais used it in 1959 to address the shadow of a still palpable world war, by the mid-1970s Wertmüller was sufficiently distanced to employ audacious editing in the service of dark irony. The fragments of the opening sequence of Hiroshima, mon amour ultimately cohere in the film’s portrait of an actress haunted by the wartime past; those of Seven Beauties introduce savage buffoons of history like Hitler and Mussolini to prepare us for the cartoonlike Pasqualino.

  Steven Spielberg used a less intrusive montage for the opening of his Holocaust drama Schindler’s List, structured by visual rhymes that prepare us to understand the story. As in All the President’s Men, the scene is enhanced by the graphic charge of typewriter keys: they attest to the importance of the word, and perhaps to the challenges inherent in adapting a nonfiction novel. Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List is rooted in interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who were under the protection of Oskar Schindler.6 The book has less of a traditional dramatic arc—that is, a hero’s journey—than an accumulation of testimonies. Nevertheless, Spielberg and screenwriter Steven Zaillian rose to this challenge, focusing the motion picture on the enigmatic German businessman who turned from profiteer to savior during World War II. Released in 1994, it became Spielberg’s greatest critical success (earning Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director) and a surprising commercial hit as well. Its first few minutes brilliantly set the stage for the dramatic turns that will ensue. A hand lights a Sabbath candle, in color, as we hear the prayer in Hebrew. This image of continuity provides the frame of Schindler’s List—survival, ritual, and celebration. The candle burns, suggesting the passage of time, and the smoke denoting its end becomes the smoke from a train; the film turns into black and white. Color—connected to continuity—is then suppressed until the war is over. The film’s peaceful and timeless religious opening is immediately juxtaposed with the wartime chaos of the Cracow train station—embodied in handheld camerawork—where Jews arrive to be herded into the ghetto. Lists of names are being typed. The triadic introductory structure of Schindler’s List (which will be rhymed by the triadic concluding structure) moves from a candle to a list and finally to a man.

  FIGURE 4.2  Smoke from candle to train in Schindler’s List (see clip)

  We do not get to see Schindler right away. Spielberg effectively presents details that suggest a mystery. First we glimpse his hands in close-up as he gets dressed, culminating in the Nazi pin on his lapel. As he enters a nightclub, the handheld camera behind his shoulder, we still do not see him fully. When the camera is finally before his face, his hand hides it partly from our view. Cinematically speaking, the director establishes that his hero reveals little, especially about his motivation. Building on the premise of Zaillian’s script—in which Schindler is treated from an objective distance, through which we see only external behavior rather than rationale—neither Spielberg’s direction nor Liam Neeson’s performance attempts to penetrate the protagonist’s enigmatic nature. This might be a drawback: after all, we want to understand why Schindler changed from an opportunistic employer of slave labor to a protector. But it is perhaps the only authentic approach: no one can really state with certainty what led this German to such nobility. The ambiguity of the character is expressed by the lighting. During the first hour, many shots present Schindler’s face half in light, half in shadow—for example, as he offers Stern (Ben Kingsley) a drink for the third time. When he brings his wife, Emilie, to the nightclub, the darkness makes it hard to read his face. After his worker—a one-armed Jew—is killed by the SS, who have forced the Schindlerjuden to shovel snow, he complains to a Nazi official. To see half his face in shadow—at least until he makes a decisive choice—externalizes the possibly dual motive of profiteering and protecting.


  Finally, the music of the opening establishes time and place. A melody provides the sound bridge from the train station to a room where a man’s hands pick out clothes and accessories. We see a radio, which is playing “Gloomy Sunday,” a popular (originally Hungarian) song of the 1930s that allegedly led people to commit suicide. In the next shot, when Schindler tips a headwaiter (played by Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and one of the film’s producers), in the background are the strains of a tango to introduce the cosmopolitan nightclub: the song is Carlos Gardel’s “Por una cabeza,” composed in 1935 before the Argentine legend’s death. The diegetic music is one of Spielberg’s numerous cinematic elements that transform a verbal text into a rich audio-visual experience.

  Released the same year as Schindler’s List, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red explores a temporal layering less historical than metaphysical. The third part of his masterful trilogy invites the viewer to contemplate not only a contemporary yearning for meaningful contact but also the imperceptible connections between versions of our selves. It followed his Double Life of Veronique, a haunting tale of two incarnations of one woman. In Red a crusty retired judge (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) meets Valentine, a kind model played by Irène Jacob.7 He seems to be engineering her contact with a young lawyer, Auguste, who lives across the street from her, a man who increasingly seems like a younger version of the judge. The opening sets up the thematic and stylistic terms for the rest of this drama. Sound precedes image, as we hear a rumbling that will turn out to be from a man’s hand dialing a phone. (A second viewing makes clear that the photo by the telephone is of Valentine, and the caller is her boyfriend, Michel.) The sound includes rain, presaging Michel’s comment, “Typical English weather. It’s pouring.” The camera’s exhilarating physical trajectory begins with a whip pan to the left, following the phone wire, and then enters the filaments. It zips underwater, as we hear distorted voices and sounds, conveying the technological path that the human spirit must travel at the end of the twentieth century. Circular lights flash with the sound of beeping: the line is busy. The call is placed again, and contact is made. “Redial” could serve as the subtitle of Kieślowski’s oeuvre. The story of Red gives the character of the aged judge a second chance to be human, through Valentine; at the end of the trilogy, she is given a chance to escape a ferry crash and be “reborn” together with a younger incarnation of the judge (see clip).