This opening introduces numerous elements, from the phone (which will become the judge’s surveillance device) to the omniscient camera, and from crossed wires (or missed connections) to chance encounters. The cinematography by Piotr Sobociński is an integral part of the story, as Red is structured through internal rhymes and haunting parallels. Less a linear construction than an intricate play of reflections, the third part of the Three Colors trilogy is punctuated by recurring images. These images include telephones, cars, flashing lights, and splashes of red, which suggest the desire for contact as well as the fear of intimacy. The camera’s elegant but deliberate movements suggest a benign surveillance. Like the judge, the camera seems to be aware of everyone simultaneously. For example, even before Valentine picks up the phone, the camera introduces Auguste in his apartment. A ringing phone leads the camera out of his place—past the red awning of the café—and into the window of Valentine’s apartment. The camera waits for her: we hear her voice on the answering machine while the movement of a red rocking chair suggests her vibrating presence. When she rushes into the frame to pick up the phone, the audience is as relieved as the caller. The camera’s intricate choreography, combined with the use of red, presents a world in which little has been left to chance. “Retroactive reasoning” is the term Kieślowski invoked to describe the enhanced repetition of images; as Sobociński put it, “There was no storyboard of course, just associations whose meanings must be hidden rather than disclosed.… Having then defined a network of subtle associations, we reversed the usual cinematic logic. Instead of omens forewarning of some future happening, we designed later scenes to show that some earlier, apparently casual events, were important to the story.”8 For example, the circular flashing bulbs of the opening set up the notion of light as movement, which will be developed throughout Red.
FIGURE 4.3 Valentine (Irène Jacob) in Three Colors: Red
Only on a second viewing do we recognize how the color red has connected characters, scenes, and perhaps temporal dimensions. As soon as Auguste goes into the street with his dog, a red car almost hits the animal. The red cherries on Valentine’s yogurt label are connected to the red ribbon on her TV antenna. The flashing red light of the opening seems to mean “Stop”: the phone call can’t go through because the line is busy. Red suggests the pulsating of blood in the body, a rhythm like that of telephone wires that physically transport the human spirit. Brown—the derivative of red that Sobociński visualized as the film’s dominant color—is part of this associative fabric. For example, the first shot of Auguste’s apartment includes a brown-toned painting of a ballet dancer. This idealized image of female beauty in motion will be “incarnated” when Valentine arches her back in the same position during a ballet class.
Ultimately, the judge and Auguste are reflections of each other, for as Kieślowski put it, “The theme of Red is in the conditional mood … what would have happened if the Judge had been born forty years later. How many better, wiser things we could have done! That’s why I made this film—that maybe life can be lived better than we do.” Red was voted best foreign film by the National Society of Film Critics as well as the New York Film Critics Circle. It earned Kieślowski an Academy Award nomination for best director (and Sobociński a nomination for best cinematographer)—a rare honor for foreign filmmakers.
While montage is often a function of hard cuts—whether imperceptible or jarring—dissolves are another crucial component of cinematic vocabulary, and they provide a haunting introduction to The Shipping News (2001). Directed by Lasse Hallström, this film is a tale of regeneration, from a script by Robert Nelson Jacobs adapted from Annie Proulx’s novel. Early in the film, rope being twined prepares for the ancestral ropes that keep a Newfoundland house locked into the earth, as well as the narrative braiding of tales of loss that grow stronger as characters connect. Kevin Spacey incarnates Quoyle, a flawed hero, a man who is lost. The opening scene, of a little boy forced by his harsh father to swim, is deftly extended into the introduction of our protagonist: the close-up of the child underwater dissolves into an older boy, and then to the adult Quoyle at various jobs, as if he were sleeping through them. The languid fluidity crystallizes the sense that Quoyle is in suspended animation. The theme of waking up is central to The Shipping News—literally when Quoyle’s boss (Scott Glenn) opens his eyes at his own wake, and figuratively when Quoyle takes action throughout the film. This is connected to the theme of ancestral curses, which are indeed broken by the end, allowing characters to move forward. We see Quoyle initially shaken out of his lethargy when Pedal (Cate Blanchett) runs away from a man and into Quoyle’s car. The rain is significant, given that water surrounds our hero from the first shot, invoking not merely a sense of drowning but fluidity more broadly. The very nature of a film dissolve graphically conveys how identity is a slippery process rather than a fixed entity.
FIGURE 4.4 Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) in the opening of The Shipping News (see clip)
The opening of Shine (1996) provides another beautifully crafted introduction to a hero whose sense of self is elusive. Directed by Scott Hicks from a script by Jan Sardi, this Australian drama is based on the real life of David Helfgott, a gifted pianist who went from child prodigy to institutionalized eccentric and then returned to acclaim. As the film opens on a rainy night, the camera settles on his silhouette occupying the edge of the dark screen: the composition portrays how he is off-center and marginalized.9 David (Geoffrey Rush in an Oscar-winning performance) speaks in breathless swirls—displaying a kind of logorrhea via repeated witty fragments, with the word “Oh” humorously descending five notes—and can hardly see through thick glasses obscured by raindrops. The credits unfold with slow-motion shots of David running in the rain before he stops at the window of Moby’s Bar. Although they are closing for the night, he enters, invasively friendly with the staff. His words tumble out:
Live, Sylvia, live—live and let live—that’s very important isn’t it? Molto, molto. But then again it’s a lifelong struggle, isn’t it Sylvia, Tony, to live, to survive, to survive undamaged and not destroy any living breathing creature. The point is, if you do something wrong, you can be punished for the rest of your life so I think it’s a lifelong struggle; is it a lifelong struggle? Whatever you do it’s a struggle, a struggle to keep your head above water and not get it chopped off.
Once he plays the bar’s piano, David’s talent is obvious (see clip). From this scene in the early 1980s, flashbacks reveal his story, beginning with the challenges of being the son of a tyrannical Holocaust survivor (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and suffering a mental breakdown. These flashbacks provide a musical structure appropriate to the tale of a brilliant pianist. It is not simply theme and variations, including a repetition of the opening scene in the rain; Hicks acknowledged in the press kit that Shine is like a concerto with three movements—exposition, development, and recapitulation.10 He also remarked in an interview, “The character Geoffrey plays is someone who has never defined who he is, so he doesn’t know where he ends and you begin. He just embraces you and flows all around you, an indefinite sort of person.”11 If we first see David soaked, tapping his fingers on the window of Moby’s (which has a neon aquatic sign), liquid permeates the rest of the film; it expresses not just the flow of his music—whether gentle or torrential—but the ebb and tide of his very being.
5
Singular Point of View
The Graduate, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Come and See, Lebanon, Good Kill
To the question “Who am I?” a movie adds, “Through whose eyes?” leading us to discuss the use of filmic devices such as close-ups and subjective camera. These devices invite us to identify with a protagonist, especially when we see through his or her eyes. Whether in three seminal American films—The Graduate, Taxi Driver, and Apocalypse Now—or two gripping foreign films about war—Come and See (Russia) and Lebanon (Israel)—our focus is “eyedentity” or perhaps “eyedensity.” Motion pictures explore characters visuall
y, whether “Who am I?” refers to a public being or a private one. The last film in this chapter, Good Kill, illustrates how the use of point of view shots creates a tense juxtaposition between the coordinates on a drone site and a character’s moral compass.
Given that movies reflect the time and place in which they are made, each major Hollywood genre has offered a particular kind of protagonist. As numerous scholars—notably Robert Warshow and Leo Braudy—have pointed out, the gangster and the cowboy of the western dominated the 1930s and ’40s, followed by the private eye of post–World War II films like The Big Sleep.1 During the Depression the gangster represented the aspirations (and dangers) of the American dream; subsequently, the westerner embodied a code of honor that often pitted the individual against the community. After 1945, heroes like Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade were investigators overcoming corruption and violence—darker aspects of human nature revealed by the war. In the 1950s On the Waterfront reflected the changing image of the American screen hero: the performances of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift revealed the anguished underside of the traditional screen protagonist. Only Brando survived into the 1970s, reinventing himself in films such as Last Tango in Paris and The Godfather. These movies dramatize a search for identity (particularly from the late 1960s through the 1970s)—a theme inseparable from the search for a cinematic language that expresses the quest for identity.
A few Hollywood films experimented with the camera assuming an almost claustrophobic point of view, limited to the perspective of a particular character. Although Orson Welles was not able to realize his vision of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—in which he would have played Marlowe while the camera incarnated Kurtz—a different Marlowe provided the source material for an entire film presented through the hero’s eyes: The Lady in the Lake, a 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel. Directed by and starring Robert Montgomery, the film showed events exclusively from the detective’s perspective, offering more of a gimmick than a sustained dramatic exploration. The opening of Executive Suite (1954) is a more successful utilization of the camera locked into a character’s gaze. Directed by Robert Wise from a screenplay by Ernest Lehman, it begins with employees of a corporation looking respectfully at Bullard, the person identified with the lens. As he leaves a Manhattan skyscraper office, descends in the elevator, and enters the lobby telegram office, we sense his power and control. His handwriting about impending travel is clear and strong, followed by his easy removal of a dollar from an elegant wallet. When he reaches the street, Bullard hails a taxi. Suddenly the camera keels over—the wallet flying into the gutter—as we vicariously experience his heart attack. Once Bullard is dead, the camera shifts into omniscient third-person narration: it acknowledges both the need to question perspective and the ephemerality of life.
The type of protagonist would change again when American movies came of age in the 1970s—nurtured by filmmakers including Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese—in the aftermath of the political upheavals of 1968. While film scholars tend to view 1939 as the pinnacle of American film history, I see 1974 as no less rich, boasting such titles as The Conversation, The Godfather Part 2, Chinatown, A Woman Under the Influence, Lenny, The White Dawn, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Parallax View, Thieves Like Us, California Split, Harry and Tonto, and Young Frankenstein. That year marked the center of a sophisticated era that began in the late sixties and led up to the explosion of independent American cinema later in the seventies. In 1974 Michael Ritchie was directing Smile, Miloš Forman was finishing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Hal Ashby was between The Last Detail and Shampoo, Arthur Penn was making Night Moves, Sidney Lumet was preparing Dog Day Afternoon, Woody Allen was directing Love and Death, and Stanley Kubrick was preparing Barry Lyndon. Foreign cinema was no less vibrant. In 1974 Rainer Werner Fassbinder gave us Effi Briest, Luis Buñuel had The Phantom of Liberty, and François Truffaut was preparing The Story of Adele H and received an Oscar nomination as best director for Day for Night. In Poland Andrzej Wajda was directing The Promised Land, and Wojciech Has finished The Hourglass Sanatorium. In Italy Federico Fellini had just released Amarcord, and Bernardo Bertolucci was preparing 1900. I heard Bertolucci propose a cogent overview of the maturation of cinema at a Cannes Film Festival symposium in 1990. He compared film to a baby born in 1895: it grew from infancy in the silent era, learned to talk during childhood, and finally entered adulthood when it became aware of itself. He saw this self-reflexive mirror stage as beginning with the French New Wave and developing through the 1960s.2 Technological advances—such as the lightweight camera and mobile microphone—facilitated more personal, improvisational, and idiosyncratic filmmaking.
The Graduate, winner of the 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture, was Mike Nichols’s second film after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Dustin Hoffman stars in the title role as Benjamin, a young man returning from his eastern college to California and an uncertain future. His parents’ friend Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) seduces him before he falls for her daughter (Katharine Ross). The opening expresses his lack of control (see clip). The only dialogue of this introduction is a flight attendant’s announcement about “beginning our descent into Los Angeles.” (In the DVD commentary, Nichols said he was proud that the entire theme of the film is encompassed in the first line.)3 The camera zooms out from Benjamin’s face, a mechanical movement of the lens that flattens space, which is appropriate to his experience of returning home. The conveyor belt that carries him toward screen left externalizes his lack of agency. The grid pattern visible on the white walls behind him adds to the sense of being boxed in. Even his suitcase herded into the luggage area rhymes with Benjamin, and the sign reads, “Do they match?” The glass in the airport prepares for the glass of his aquarium, emblems of enclosure. Mike Nichols called The Graduate the story “of a worthy kid drowning among objects and things.”4 Therefore, water is a recurring image, from the aquarium behind his head to the swimming pool where he will later stand underwater wearing a diving suit. Since he (and we) hear only his breathing, this shot renders the Simon and Garfunkel song that opens the film, “The Sound of Silence,” particularly appropriate. Although the lyrics begin, “Hello darkness, my old friend,” it is the flat light of Los Angeles that surrounds Benjamin. “The Sound of Silence” expresses the character’s sense of alienation and creates a rueful tone (while the SOS formed by the title is appropriate to his situation). Although the film was criticized at the time for not dealing with the political unrest of the late 1960s, perhaps Nichols’s focus on Benjamin’s subjectivity is what gave The Graduate its timeless quality.
FIGURE 5.1 Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) in The Graduate
Like The Graduate, Taxi Driver portrays the disaffection of a young man immersed in his surroundings, who disdains society for its empty affluence or depravity. However, Martin Scorsese’s film, set in a forbidding New York City as opposed to sunny Los Angeles, offers a darker and more unsettling portrait. His 1976 classic, from an original screenplay by Paul Schrader, stars Robert De Niro as the deeply troubled loner and cab driver Travis Bickle. The opening presents New York City from Travis’s perspective (and is reminiscent of Saul Bass’s title sequence for Storm Center [1956], especially in the abstracted close-up of eyes). The score is by Bernard Herrmann, whose film career began with Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane—and included Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo, among nine collaborations with the master of suspense. In Taxi Driver the score alternates between a relentless percussive clanging and a lyrical saxophone melody, expressing conflicting strands of Travis’s personality. The saxophone enters with the close-up of eyes, suggesting a lonely yearning for connection, following the snare drums that ominously prepare for danger. That danger is heightened by the yellow taxicab aimed at the camera before it swerves to the left. This is a nightscape of white smoke billowing against the dark sky. Our establishing shot identifies less a particular city than a li
mbo. All we know from the visual introduction is that this man will be our frame of reference. From his eyes darting left and right, a dissolve to a wet windshield—with unfocused lights beyond—places us within his subjectivity. The windshield is an internal frame that represents a movie screen: glass permits us to see beyond the taxi, while the wipers clarify perception. Slow motion of a rainy Times Square distorts time, while the use of a red filter for the next close-up of Travis’s eyes layers space with demonic tones (and calls back to the credit sequence of Hitchcock’s Vertigo). The images also contain a cumulative and encompassing elemental quality: from smoke (air plus fire), we move to rain (water) and, in this urban locale, earth (sidewalks and gutters). Travis’s voice-over diary will label the streets as dirt in the moments following the end of this clip; however, the rain visually provides a possible cleansing, if a temporary one. By the end of Taxi Driver Travis will have attempted his own violent purification of the city through another liquid, namely blood.
FIGURE 5.2 Travis (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver (see clip)
Cinematic Overtures Page 7