Cinema- Concept & Practice

by Edward Dmytryk

  To be sure, there are situations in which extensive movement accompanying speech is advantageous. For example, in The Young Lions, Hope’s father, a scion of old New England stock, meets her financé, Noah, and learns that he is from New York, poor, and a Jew. The father is not pleased. He is a man of untested principle, but decent, and he takes Noah for a walk around the small town square. Without obvious comment, he points out the old office buildings and stores which house fifth and sixth generation Vermonters, the church cemetery where several generations of Hope’s family lie buried, and the old school where more generations of WASPs have learned their ABCs. Here the walk works for the viewer; subtly, engagingly, cinematically. The father’s indirect but unmistakable effort to convince Noah that he and Hope are a social and cultural mismatch is much more effective than a direct attempt at verbal persuasion, and a good example of a proper wedding of words and images. But a long dolly shot of two people elbowing their way along Fifth Avenue, shouting lines which could be better said and more calmly considered in a quiet room, is a waste of time and money. “Taking it outside” does not, in itself, make a scene more cinematic, and adds nothing to the film if it doesn’t belong there.

  The tendency to play it close, play it long, but move it, has developed slowly over the years into the modem master shot, a useful set-up which frequently leads to sloppy filmmaking. During the thirties, directors working around the cinematic restraints of the new “talking pictures” developed a staging style that was in some important ways the antithesis of the best silent techniques of the twenties. Filmmakers like Capra, Wyler, and Stevens took little

  For years, long, unbroken stretches of dialogue were a significant part of successful motion pictures. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in a scene from It Happened One Night, a Frank Capra film for Columbia Pictures.

  advantage of the camera’s versatility and mobility.* Capra, especially, seemed to care little for technical virtuosity, but his stories were so engrossing and believable, his dialogue so entertaining, his humor so rich, his characters so absorbing, and his pace so finely tuned, that the viewer had neither the time nor the desire to analyze the film’s technical shortcomings,- he could only enjoy.

  With the exception of John Ford, the top American filmmakers of the period could, and often did, shoot unbroken scenes in which two immobilized actors, usually in profile, talked to and at each other for many minutes on end. Technically archaic, but who cared? The quality of their characters and the words they uttered usually carried the day. Then came Orson Welles. He had not yet made a film, but he loved the old, silent masters, and he soon reminded the world’s filmmakers of their cinematic heritage. He showed them they could accentuate the good things they were doing by using the camera to create rather than simply to record.

  Wide angle lenses, skillful lighting, and creative camera positioning now informed the viewer that rooms had ceilings and floors and foreground pieces and depth and dark comers. Moreover, the camera could move with the actors and diminish the risks of the film’s passage through the cutting room.

  Fear of such risks occasionally influences the choice of shooting techniques. Most directors have never had any hands-on editing experience, and some of them are uncomfortable with the cutting process—with reason. The cutting room is where much of the film is manipulated, and mistakes can be made there as well as on the set. Every good filmmaker knows what he wants in his final cut, but knowing what he wants and knowing how to get it are two quite different things.

  This editorial insecurity frequently forces directors to shun one of film’s most fertile attributes: shooting in bits and pieces. They believe that the longer take offers the actors greater opportunity for “getting into” their characters, and that they, themselves, can better judge the scene as a whole. The current prevalence of shorter sequences and more dialogue plus the ready availability of excellent camera moving equipment makes it relatively easy for the director to sublimate his fears and insecurities by staging and shooting the scene in a single set-up. When all the elements are right this can be a very useful and generally thrifty shot. It can even, in rare instances, be brilliant, as the opening set-up in Welles’s A Touch of Evil demonstrates.

  Unlike its progenitor, such a master shot need not begin as a long shot; in fact, it rarely does. And once under way, it can wander around the entire set, or a large part of town, limited only by the requirements of proper lighting and the capacity of the film magazine. It can pull back into a full shot or creep up into a choker; actors can walk up into close-ups or fade away into the sunset. Let us stage a hypothetical scene—only the movement, no dialogue.

  The shot begins with a close-up of a ringing telephone which rests on a side table. The viewer does not yet know that he is in a living room, but he soon will. On the third ring a woman’s hand enters the shot and picks up the instrument. The camera pulls back and pans with the movement of the arm, following the phone into a close-up of the woman. During the short, one-sided conversation, she casually takes a few steps away from the side table (for reasons which will shortly be clear) and the camera moves with her, maintaining the close-up. Her telephone chat is soon interrupted by the sound of a door bell. She glances toward the offscreen door, excuses herself, and the stationary camera now pans her back to the side table, where she puts the phone down without hanging up. Since we dollied with her during the phone conversation, her walk back to the table, away from the camera, has moved her into a full-length shot. Now the camera pans with her as she crosses the living room into the entrance hall and toward the front door. Perhaps it follows her, slowly, as we prepare for the next move, but now it frames her in a long shot as she reaches the door, opens it, greets her visitor, then leads him back into the living room. The camera simply pans with them until she stops at the couch, invites the caller to sit down, then drops down beside him. While this action is taking place, the camera moves toward the two, dropping down a little, and ends up in a close two shot or, more usefully, a close over-shoulder shot of the dominant character in the scene, which continues to play until we cut away to another scene or until the camera slowly, suspensefully, swings off them and onto the telephone which lies on the side table. Do we hear the buzz of a broken connection, or the silence of someone still listening?

  Long dialogue scenes with little accompanying action are the rule today. For such scenes the master shot can be a useful set-up, and a time-saver—but not always; even a fairly simple moving shot can present problems. The more complex the set-up the more hands are required to make it work, and the more hands involved the greater the chances of error.

  A satirical scene in Day for Night brilliantly illustrates a few of the difficulties inherent in this technique. In his film within a film, Truffaut shoots a master shot in which an aging, insecure, and over-compensating actress, who is also a bit under the weather, goes through her paces, losing her lines, muffing her moves, then making a confused exit into a china closet instead of through the proper door. After several botched-up takes she collapses in an emotional outburst. Though somewhat of an “in” routine, the scene is sad but amusing. In the real world, however, it is only pathetic. Occasionally, actors do forget their lines, even when sober—some because of advancing age, some because of other natural causes—and fear of failure dogs their steps. Under such circumstances a compassionate director will sacrifice his self-indulgent set-up in favor of several shorter, more manageable and, for the actor, less taxing shots. If he really understands filmmaking he will be more than repaid for his consideration. He will get a better scene, because an important source of the value and the delight inherent in film is its facility for examination, for impressing with the big and intriguing with the small, for capturing the most subtle response to an action or a word. The all-in-one master shot is often unequal to the task. It is no more than a scene from a play, only closer. It is incapable of showing different facets of a subject, be it a thing or a person, from several points of view that, when properly manipulate
d, coalesce into one.

  However, the master shot can be modified to eliminate its faults; one need only take advantage of the art of film editing. The solution is to make the master shot the “spine” of a scene, not its entire body. In this role it is similar to the old master long shot, yet different, and better,- it is amenable to the insertion of closer shots, yet never pulls away from the heart of the scene, as a long shot inevitably does.

  Crossfire was a chancy film; its subject, anti-Semitism, made it a box-office risk. To reduce the possible financial loss it was made with little money and in very little time. The film was shot in twenty days and, in what turned out to be a very successful effort both critically and financially, a total of only 140 set-ups, for an average of 7 shots per day.

  Perhaps a third of these were master shots, most of them running three minutes or more (one ran for ten). Spliced together they could have told the entire story, but a great deal would have been missing. The other two-thirds were largely close-ups and over-shoulder setups, reaction shots which brought out the nuances that the master shots had missed or glossed over.

  The master shot can be useful for scenes which are completely dominated by dialogue and in which the reactions are relatively unimportant, but when imagery and reactions play the dominant role the value of the unprotected master shot is questionable—with a few important exceptions. First is the mood-building shot so common in mysteries, suspense, action films, and, occasionally, in high straight drama. In such set-ups the camera follows a single character as she or he moves through an empty warehouse, a dimly-lit alley, or any of the dozens of variations of these settings, where the smell of danger, real or imagined, hangs heavily. Speed of movement may vary from casual to frantic, the character can be aware of the danger, frightened, and reacting accordingly, or the lurking menace may be known only to the viewer, who will cringe in the actor’s stead at every unfamiliar sound or wavering shadow.

  A relatively short scene can easily be accommodated in one unprotected set-up, but an extended sequence, such as the one recording Simone Simon’s suspenseful walk along an eerie, moonlit street in Jacques Tourneur’s The Cat People, may require a series of master shots, which may be stretching the definition a bit.

  The director who has no flair for cutting, and fears the editor, can resort to a technique which “invisibly” knits a series of short moving master shots into a complete sequence. First, the sequence must be broken down into several master set-ups, each concerned with an integrated portion of the whole. To effectuate a flow from one section to the next, each set-up may begin as a point of view (POV) related to the previous shot’s final frames. For instance, as the first set-up (I) ends, the camera moves into a close-up of character A, whose attention is drawn off-screen. On his “look-off,” a precisely timed cut to shot II shows the viewer that the object of A’s interest is character B, who is just entering the room. This POV shot is the beginning of a second moving master shot, which may eventually be integrated with shot I, or introduce its own characters and material. In its turn, shot II flows into shot III, either through another “look-off” or by following a character from the B group as she moves out of shot II and into shot III. This series of short, moving master shots is continued until the overall sequence has been accommodated.

  The advantage of such a series, containing two or more set-ups, is that each shot can concentrate on “telling it best.” If smoothly cut even the “sequence shot” buff (see Chapter 4) will see a continuous shot, while the “normal” viewer will enjoy a scene shown to its best advantage.

  However, the moving master shot may play its most subtle role when the actor in the scene apparently talks to an offscreen character while, in reality, he is delivering a specific message to the viewer. In such cases the presence of other actors on the screen would be completely unproductive. Here, the rationale is similar to that used in the better film musicals. Cuts of the on-screen audience may appear at the beginning of a staged number, but once the number is under way further shots of the on-screen viewers are detrimental; they would imply that the entertainment is being staged for their approval when, in fact, it is the real viewer who is now asked to judge its quality.

  But where a musical number can consist of many cuts (even a solo turn usually incorporates a number of angles and occasional special effect shots), in a dramatic scene of this sort any straight cut, especially a cut-away to another actor, will disturb the line of communication between the speaker and the viewer.* In such a situation a skillfully executed master shot is the ideal set-up,- a shot which moves and pans with the actor, but allows him or her to slip away into a full figure in casual moments and welcomes him or her back into close shots, even close-ups, when the scene needs punctuation.**

  The moving master shot achieves movement of the mind through movement of ideas, movement of the film’s characters, and the movement of the camera. However, a powerfully sensory movement which borders on the physical can sometimes be achieved by creative film editing even, perhaps especially, when the characters are quite motionless. The next chapter will demonstrate this particular technique.

  Notes

  * In 1940,1 was filming a Karloff suspense film, my first B for Columbia. I requested the “big crane” for my opening shot. The studio’s reply was short and to the point: “Capra never used a crane!”

  * For a more detailed analysis of a specific shot see Chapter 4, page 43.

  ** This set-up is sometimes called a follow shot, but when it encompasses the meat of the scene, master shot seems a more fitting appellation.

  7

  Look at Him, Look at Her

  Before the advent of film schools most of the terms used by theorists and academicians were quite unknown to the great majority of Hollywood filmmakers. Buster Keaton, one of comedy’s greatest technicians, never learned the rules of grammar, let alone the principles of cinematic syntax. And even today expressions like parallel action, separation, multi-angularity, Z-axis, and more than a few of their kin are rarely heard on a set or in a cutting room.* But they do serve a purpose; they point to the fact that a great deal of what is considered to be the art of the cinema has little to do with substance or performance,- the maxims of the art are discovered primarily through study of the film editing process.

  In film’s formative years the strange and special problems of film-making puzzled those whose knowledge and experience were derived from other disciplines. Eisenstein came to films from the theater, and he brought it with him. Even in the latter part of his career, when American and British actors like Tracy, Bogart, Colman, and Niven were “throwing away” their lines, Eisenstein’s professional actors were theatrical to the point of hamminess. His scenes, especially his long shots, betray his background as a set designer; they are masterpieces of still composition. An enlargement of almost any single frame would receive a warm reception at a showing of photographic art. By film standards his movements are often disorganized and confused. And although he could create exceptional sequences like the “Odessa Steps,” most of his scenes are static. As a young film editor at Paramount Studio I watched many of the rushes of his Mexican project. They consisted largely of innumerable shots of agave and colorful peons, composed in classic pictorial style. If there was any filmic action it escaped my attention.

  If there is one rule that should hold for film it is that the techniques of filmmaking must be at the service of the material filmed rather than the other way around. It seems to me that many film scholars have based their theories on principles of classic art (including literature) rather than on an understanding of the different, mobile, art of the screen. It also seems to me that the art of film editing was developed inevitably to correct that point of view, to bring cinematic vitality to scenes rendered lifeless by their fidelity to the principles of the more static arts. One of the better examples of this contention appears in Eisenstein’s drama of the modernization of a collective farm, The General Line.

  In brief, a machine whic
h separates whole milk into skim milk and cream is being introduced to a group of reactionary peasant farmers. In dramatizing his get-with-it message, Eisenstein completely ignored the fact that cream separators were common in the developed countries, that they were probably known and used in the more up-to-date areas of Russia, and that their ability to perform was beyond question. He and his writers cleverly contrived a rather long and suspenseful sequence—will the machine work, or is it a fraud? Can it really split milk into its main components? The viewer is kept guessing for several minutes while he watches the expressions on the peasants’ faces change from curiosity, to skepticism, to derision, to sudden surprise, and finally to joyous acceptance. But the changes are all offscreen!

  The cuts which are used to show emotional movement really don’t; they are nearly all static. We never see a peasant break into a skeptical smile or burst out in derisive laughter. Instead of onscreen transitions we see the fixed results of offscreen changes in a series of portrait-quality close-ups which are intercut with close shots of the gleaming machine, whose chief moving parts, the spinning flywheel and the whirling milk-containing centrifuge, rotate so rapidly as to appear frozen. Even the commissar who has brought the machine to this backward collective, and who must know that it delivers, mirrors, in several close-ups, the peasants’ doubts, near disappointment, and ultimate triumph.