We can see this happen in the last scene of Hitchcock’s 1946
film Notorious. Devlin (Cary Grant) rescues the undercover spy Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) from the house of the Nazi, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains). Alex has finally discovered that Alicia, his fiancée, is really a spy. Alicia is upstairs in her bedroom, suffering from poisoning. Devlin rescues her while Alex is in a meeting with other Nazis. Alex leaves the meeting and discovers Devlin and Alicia walking down the stairs, but he avoids intervening because otherwise Devlin will inform the other Nazis that Alicia is a spy, and that would get Alex into trouble.
So Alex has to allow Devlin to take Alicia out of the house.
1 Film aesthetics: formalism and realism 17
The action in this scene is therefore very simple: Devlin guides Alicia down the stairs and out through the front door, under the gaze of the other Nazis and Alex’s mother. So why does Hitchcock decide to use 51 shots in only 2 minutes 5 seconds in filming this action (from Devlin and Alicia exiting the bedroom door to them exiting the front door)? Throughout the action, Hitchcock cuts rapidly between five set-ups: Devlin and Alicia occupying the frame alone (15 shots), Alex occupying the frame alone (17 shots), Alex’s mother (5 shots), Devlin, Alicia, Alex and his mother together (5 shots) and the Nazis downstairs (9 shots).
The rapid cutting swiftly moves between the five points of action, giving the spectator optimal access to the events, as well as the reaction of each character to those events as they unfold second by second.
Surprisingly, the rapid cutting does not speed up the action; instead, it emphasizes the slowness of Devlin and Alicia as they descend the stairs. The rapid cutting helps to prolong the suspense (will Devlin and Alicia escape or not?). Furthermore, Devlin and Alicia are in love with one another, but they have been kept apart because of Alicia’s undercover job. If they escape from Alex’s house, they will be free to express their love.
A lot is at stake in this scene and Hitchcock expertly uses rapid editing to emphasize the gravity of the situation.
As a footnote, it is worth mentioning that, although Hitchcock is famous for his skilful deployment of editing, he experimented with the long take in the late 1940s in his films Rope (1948) and Under Capricorn (1949). However, during the 1950s he returned to editing as his preferred way of filming a scene.
In Chapter 3 we shall discuss Hitchcock’s work in much
more detail.
Spotlight
Barry Salt has observed that, in contemporary American cinema, film style has changed significantly: editing in recent films is much faster than in old Hollywood films, and directors prefer to shoot more scenes in close up.
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33 Editing in Jurassic Park
As a contemporary example of editing, we shall briefly look at the opening scene of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). The main action consists of a number of park wardens releasing a dinosaur into the park. But the dinosaur manages to drag one of the wardens into its crate and kill him. This scene lasts 2 minutes 30 seconds and contains 43 shots, making an average shot length of 3 seconds (or, on average, a change in shot every 3 seconds). The function of this rapid change in shots is to involve the spectator in the two main points of action – the wardens attempting to release the dinosaur into the park and the dinosaur in the crate. In the second half of the scene, in particular, Spielberg cuts rapidly between the two points of action – that is, from both inside and outside the crate.
The first thing that the opening of Jurassic Park tells us is that Spielberg, like Hitchcock, relies on editing in his film-making process. This is because Spielberg’s first concern is to involve the film spectator in the action, rather than focus on character psychology and the actor’s performance (which is what he focuses on when he uses long takes and deep focus shots, as we just discussed). Spielberg stresses the importance of action and spectator involvement with that action by storyboarding his films – that is, by breaking the final shooting script down into detailed pictures representing the frames of a particular scene.
These storyboards usually contain information about camera angles, camera movement, the placement of characters in the frame and so on.
Spielberg storyboards most of his films, particularly the action sequences, although he did not use storyboards for Schindler’s List (1993), for the film is (unusually for Spielberg) based on character psychology, not action sequences. Some critics argue that storyboarding stifles creativity and spontaneity, for the film’s look and structure is determined in advance of the shooting. The process of making the film ( mise-en-shot) is, according to these critics, simply a technical and mechanical exercise for Spielberg, because he has worked out everything in advance.
1 Film aesthetics: formalism and realism 19
Film sound
Before we leave this technical discussion of film aesthetics and move on to a more theoretical discussion, we can briefly review another important set of stylistic options and choices made by film-makers – those concerning film sound.
The options available to film-makers in the construction of sound are as rich as the options available in the construction of the image track. Here we shall look at only one – but nonetheless essential – question concerning the soundtrack: What is the source or origin of the sound? The following section will simply offer a classification of sound in the cinema; the basis for this classification is determined by the origin of the sound.
A crucial term that needs to be introduced in the discussion of sound is ‘diegesis’, which in film studies simply means the story (or narrative) world of the film.
The first term of classification is the most obvious: ‘diegetic sound’, which refers to sound whose origin is to be located in the story world. Diegetic sound includes the voices of the characters and the sounds of objects that exist in the story world. This includes music made by instruments that form part of the story world (for convenience, we can refer to this type of music as ‘screen music’).
We need to distinguish external diegetic sound from internal diegetic sound. External diegetic sound has a physical origin in the story world. The examples I gave are examples of external diegetic sound. By contrast, internal diegetic sound has its origin inside a character’s mind. In other words, internal diegetic sound refers to subjective sounds – either the rendition of a character’s thoughts or imagined sounds. These sounds are still diegetic because they derive from the story world, but they are internal because they cannot be heard by other characters.
The ending of Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) is very instructive from this perspective. ( Psycho will be analysed in some detail in Chapter 2.) Norman Bates has been arrested for killing his mother, her lover, Marion, and the detective Arbogast. Bates has now become totally psychotic, as he has taken on his mother’s 20
identity. In the police cell, we see him looking passive and hear him thinking to himself – but he is thinking to himself in his mother’s voice, and talking as if he were his mother.
Although spectators comprehend the technique of rendering thoughts (internal diegetic sound) as a voice-over, nonetheless, in the case of Psycho, the spectator needs to have listened to the psychiatrist’s speech in the previous scene in order to comprehend this unusual relation between image and sound, in which Norman is thinking to himself in his mother’s voice.
A comical play with internal diegetic sound is to be found in the film Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (Carl Reiner, 1982). The film is a spoof on films noirs of the 1940s ( films noirs will be discussed in Chapter 4). The first time we see the hero, private detective Rigby Reardon (Steve Martin), he is sitting in his office. Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward) visits and hires him to find the killer of her father. As the film progresses, Rigby falls in love with Juliet. In one scene in his office, he begins to express his love for her in voice-over (internal diegetic sound representing his thoughts). His voice-over ends: ‘… but how can I explain that a man in my business can’t take on a wife, have a bunch of kids?’, to whic
h Rachel responds, ‘We wouldn’t have to have kids.’ Clearly, the film is challenging – for comic effect – the convention of internal diegetic sound by suggesting that it could be external. Only the spectator should be able to share the internal thoughts of the character.
The final category of sound I shall introduce is that of non-diegetic sound, in which the origin of the sound derives from outside the story world. The music soundtrack of films is, of course, non-diegetic. In documentary films, the voice-of-God commentary (to be discussed in Chapter 5) is also non-diegetic, since the narrator does not appear in the film’s story world.
Theoretical analysis of film aesthetics
In the first half of this century, film theorists attempted to justify the serious study of the cinema by arguing that it is a legitimate form of art. They set about achieving this aim by trying to identify the specific property that defines film as film – that is, that distinguishes film from the other arts.
1 Film aesthetics: formalism and realism 21
The first school of thought to defend film as art were the formalists, such as Rudolf Arnheim and the film-maker Sergei Eisenstein. For the formalists, film’s specific property is its inability to perfectly imitate normal visual experience of reality.
It may at first sound odd that the formalists concentrated on the limitations of film to define it as an art. But they argued that these limitations define the expressive potential of film. The limitations of film offer the film-maker the opportunity to manipulate and distort our everyday experience of reality for artistic ends.
Filmic techniques, such as editing, montage, fast and slow motion, the use of low and high camera angles, together with film’s transformation of a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface and so on, prevent film from imitating our normal visual experience. By exploiting these limitations, film-makers can present a unique – a specifically filmic – vision of the world. It is this unique vision of the world, made possible by film’s specific properties (editing, etc.), that distinguishes film from the other arts and defines film as an art. For the formalists, film is an art because its specific properties, which prevent it from imitating reality, can be exploited by directors to express their vision. In Chapter 3 we shall see that directors who exploit the specific limitations of film for expressive purposes are conferred the prestigious title of auteurs.
In opposition to the formalists, the realists, such as Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer and, more recently, Stanley Cavell, reject montage and expression in favour of film’s recording capacity.
They begin by arguing that, by means of its automatic
mechanical recording of events, film does perfectly imitate our normal visual experience of reality. Furthermore, they argue that film’s ability to imitate reality is what defines film as an art. The realists therefore identified film’s specific property in its photographic representation of reality. Moreover, they identified the long take and deep focus shots as the elements of film style that realize film’s specific property. Deep focus allows for a number of actions to be composed in the same shot. By contrast, editing would present these actions one after another in separate shots. Deep focus therefore supports the use of long takes by reducing the need for editing, thereby maintaining the spatial and temporal unity of the scene.
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Bazin emphasizes the unrealistic nature of editing in a long footnote to his essay, ‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’
( What is Cinema? , vol. 1, pp. 41–52). He refers to a scene from the film Where No Vultures Fly. The film is about a young family who set up a game reserve in South Africa. In the scene that Bazin discusses, the young son of the family picks up a lion cub in the bush and takes it home. The lioness detects the child’s scent and begins to follow him. The lioness and the child with the cub are filmed separately and the shots are simply edited together. But as the child reaches home, ‘the director’, writes Bazin, ‘abandons his montage of separate shots that has kept the protagonists apart and gives us instead parents, child and lioness all in the same full shot. The single frame in which trickery is out of the question gives immediate and retroactive authenticity to the very banal montage that preceded it.’ In this particular example, the realism of the shot for Bazin is a matter of spatial unity – the fact that the child appears in the same shot as the lioness. Indeed, Bazin concludes his footnote by writing that: ‘Realism here resides in the homogeneity of space.’
Film’s capacity to record reality in all its movement was severely criticized by the formalists, who regarded mechanical recording as a hindrance to film’s attempt to be defined as an art. This is because, for the formalists, mechanical recording limits film to the (imperfect) imitation of reality, not to the expression of a new and unique vision of reality.
In realist aesthetics, Bazin understood that the filmed event (whether staged or not) dominates, as is evident in the use of the long take to allow the event to unfold uninterrupted.
Eisenstein instead emphasized the film-making process rather than the filmed event and developed – in both theory and in his film-making practice – a tendency towards editing, or more accurately, montage. Whereas editing simply refers to the joining together of shots, montage refers to the expressive use of editing to confer symbolic and metaphorical meanings on to the filmed events. For Eisenstein, shots simply constitute the raw material of film-making. From the raw material
of the shots, meanings are created that do not exist in the raw material.
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montage
Earlier in the chapter we discussed continuity editing, which attempts to create a coherent scenic space by means of a number of techniques: axis of action line, the eyeline match, the point-of-view shot, the match on action cut and directional continuity.
In relation to montage, continuity editing is simply sequential cutting. This is because montage does not attempt to construct a coherent scenic space, but attempts to create symbolic meanings.
It achieves this primarily by juxtaposing shots together, with little regard for coherent scenic space.
Eisenstein called the symbolic meanings created by montage
‘associations’. Montage creates associations (symbolic
meanings) that are greater than the sum of their parts. In other words, from the montage of two shots is created a chain of associations that does not exist in any of the shots.
Eisenstein explained how montage works by referring to Egyptian hieroglyphs:
The point is that the combination of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is regarded not as the sum total but as their product, i.e. as a value of another dimension, another degree: each taken separately corresponds to an object but their combination corresponds to a concept. The combination of two representable objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.
For example: the representation of water and of an eye signifies
‘to weep’. But – this is montage!!
Writings 1922–1934, p. 139
The crucial passage here is: ‘each taken separately corresponds to an object but their combination corresponds to a concept.
The combination of two representable objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically
represented.’ Hieroglyphs and montage create abstract and symbolic meanings by juxtaposing concrete objects.
As an example, we shall look at a celebrated scene in
Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925). After the Cossacks 24
have massacred the people, the famous Odessa steps sequence, the Potemkin battleship fires on the headquarters of the military.
This is followed by three shots of stone lions at the Alupka Palace in the Crimea. The first shot depicts a lion lying down, the second depicts a lion seated, and the third a lion standing up. (The lion is therefore used by both the realists and the formalists to put their arguments across!)
The
three shots of the lions create a montage unit. In terms of the content of each separate image, we simply have: a stone lion sleeping, a stone lion sitting and a stone lion standing up. Three concrete objects juxtaposed together. But what does it mean, and what effect does it create?
Due to the framing of the three separate lions, Eisenstein creates the impression that the same stone lion has moved from its sleeping position and has stood up. In terms of these three shots by themselves, Eisenstein has already created an abstract meaning that does not exist in each individual shot. The shots of the stone lions (the raw material), when taken in isolation, merely offer a representation of each lion. No shot shows a stone lion going through the motions of standing up. Such an action is impossible anyway. But the editing of the shots together creates the impression or the illusion of a stone lion being woken up. Eisenstein creates this impression purely and exclusively through the juxtaposition of the shots – montage.
But we can go further and consider the abstract and symbolic meanings these shots have in relation to the scene that these shots interrupt. Why would Eisenstein insert three shots in this sequence to give the impression that a stone lion is rising up?
There are at least three possible answers:
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The shots may be suggesting that even a stone lion would be shocked by the massacre on the Odessa steps.
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The lion could represent the Russian people who have finally risen against their oppressors.
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A clever film critic may say that the shots are modernist –
they draw attention to the cinema’s creation of movement from the rapid projection of still images.
1 Film aesthetics: formalism and realism 25
This is another point about montage: the montage sequences do not contribute to the creation of a unified story world. They interrupt the story world created by continuity editing.
Film Studies- An Introduction Page 4