Later we discover that Joe placed it there after supposedly killing Camilla. In this instance, the image of the blue key has to be shown three times in total, before it makes sense.
As De Rosa leaves, she tells Diane that two detectives are looking for her. Diane makes coffee and has hallucinations about Camilla being present in the room. In one hallucination, Diane’s coffee suddenly transforms into a glass of whisky, and De Rosa’s ashtray is shown to be back on the table, indicating that the hallucination is also a memory of past events. Diane’s hallucinations therefore break the film’s chronology, but this break is motivated psychologically, as we share Diane’s hallucinations. Diane begins to make love to Camilla, but Camilla asks her to stop, and tries to break off the relationship.
This conflict takes the spectator back to two moments in the 70
film: 1) The Silencio club, in which Roy Orbison’s lyrics to Crying, and why they are sung in Spanish in the film, take on meaning: the Latino Camilla is trying to break off her relationship with Diane. 2) The conflict takes us further back, to the moment Betty and Rita rehearsed Betty’s lines. Those scripted lines indirectly refer to this moment. The scene ends with Diane saying, ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’
Cut to a film set, with Adam directing Camilla in a scene, and then kissing Camilla as Diane watches. The temporal relation between this scene and the previous scene is unclear. Is this a memory image? The two scenes are primarily linked by Diane’s dialogue hook: she says, ‘It’s him’ at the end of one scene, and
‘him’ (Adam) is shown in the next scene.
Diane finds herself alone in her apartment, and masturbates.
Her point-of-view image goes out of focus, and she is
interrupted by the telephone ringing. We then cut to the ringing telephone, a repetition of the final shot in the sequence of telephone shots near the film’s beginning. The answerphone message is the same as the one Betty and Rita hear when they phone up Diane Selwyn: ‘It’s me. Leave a message.’ Diane then appears, but is dressed differently from the way she was dressed previously. The phone ringing in this scene is not a continuation of the phone ringing in the previous scene, even though the editing and ringing sound give the impression that there is continuity. Diane picks up the phone and speaks to Camilla.
Diane is to be driven in a Cadillac to Camilla’s dinner party.
The destination is Mulholland Dr.
The image of the phone ringing is just one of many repetitions that begin to inundate the film from this point onwards. The Cadillac that drives Diane to the dinner party lights up the sign for Mulholland Dr. and glides along the road in the same way it did in the credit sequence. Diane is shown in the back of the Cadillac. She is filmed in exactly the same way that the dark-haired woman was filmed in the credit sequence. As with the car in that sequence, this one suddenly stops, and Diane repeats the words the dark-haired woman uttered: ‘What are you doing?
We don’t stop here.’ The driver turns around, just like the driver in the credit sequence. However, he does not have a gun.
2 Film structure: narrative and narration 71
He simply informs Diane of ‘a surprise’. Camilla then appears suddenly from a concealed entrance to a pathway, and takes Diane up to the house.
They meet Adam Kesher, and then Coco, who utters the same line she did when she first appeared in Diane’s dream: ‘Just call me Coco. Everybody else does.’ However, she is now Adam’s mother, not the concierge of an apartment complex.
The dinner scene begins out of focus. Its coming into focus is co-ordinated with a drum roll on the soundtrack. This scene offers exposition and numerous links to previous scenes, as Diane speaks about her past: she won a jitterbug contest; she inherited some money from her aunt Ruth, so she came to Hollywood
to try to make a career as a movie star; she auditioned for the lead in a film called The Sylvia North Story, but Camilla got the part because the director Bob Brooker did not like Diane’s performance; she then made friends with Camilla. Other links: the blonde Camilla Rhodes who appeared in the photo in the boardroom scene and in Adam’s recasting of his lead later in the film turns up and kisses Camilla in front of Diane. Diane drinks some coffee, looks up, and sees Luigi Castigliane. The Cowboy then walks past in the background. Diane becomes agitated as Camilla kisses Adam (soon after kissing the blonde Camilla). In these few minutes, Diane becomes paranoid, and believes that everyone she sees at the dinner is conspiring against her. This is why they all reappear in her dream (section one of the film) and this is the moment Diane decides to kill Camilla. Diane hears a loud sound and turns around.
We suddenly find ourselves in Winkies (the third visit to this location). Diane hears a sound and turns around. The transition from the previous scene to this one takes place on a match on action cut: at the end of the previous scene, and the beginning of this scene, Diane performs the same action, of suddenly turning around to locate the source of a loud noise, but the location has suddenly changed. Diane is now in Winkies with Joe, the hired killer.
This is a key scene, with concentrated exposition and another turning point. Diane changes direction, for she is hiring a killer to eliminate Camilla. The waitress ‘Betty’ in Winkies serves 72
Diane coffee. This is a repetition of the action in the second visit to Winkies, in which the same waitress – but who was called Diane – serves coffee to Betty while she is sitting in the same place with Rita.
Diane then passes a résumé photo to Joe and says at the same time, ‘This is the girl.’ This is a repetition of events in the boardroom, when the Castigliane brothers pass out a photo of the blonde Camilla Rhodes and say, ‘This is the girl.’ The blonde Camilla is an amalgam of Diane (her appearance) and Camilla (her name), and the boardroom scene is Diane’s dream distortion of this moment in Winkies.
Diane then opens her bag to show Joe that she has the money to pay him. (This is probably the money Diane inherited from aunt Ruth.) Joe then shows Diane a blue key, and says he will leave it with her once the job is done. In other words, the money and the blue key exist in a symbiotic relationship: they exchange for one another. The money and blue key are linked in the scene in Diane’s dream when Rita opens her bag to find that it contains $125,000, plus a blue key. The dangling cause presented in the film’s first section is now given significance (if not clarity of meaning). Diane looks up and sees Dan, from the first scene in Winkies. Joe also has in front of him Ed’s black book that he killed for earlier in the film.
Finally, the scene ends with the camera going behind Winkies to show the homeless man holding the blue box that Betty found in her purse. The homeless man cannot open it, so he puts it in a paper bag and drops it on the ground. Miniature versions of Betty’s ‘parents’ emerge from the bag, moving quickly. The reason why the homeless man, the blue box and Betty’s parents are linked remains unclear. One can only guess that all three signify death – we have already surmised that the blue box represents Camilla’s death; the homeless man’s appearance literally kills Dan; and, in the film’s next and final scene, the parents literally drive Diane to suicide.
In Diane’s apartment. Diane stares at the blue key on the table.
This scene seems to be a continuation of the scene much earlier, when De Rosa left and Diane made coffee and began having hallucinations about Camilla. We now know that the blue key 2 Film structure: narrative and narration 73
signifies Camilla’s death. Diane hears knocking at the door.
Her miniaturized ‘parents’ crawl under the door, grow to their normal size and then confront her. The room fills with blue flashing lights, and Diane goes insane. She runs into the bedroom and shoots herself. The room fills with smoke. The film ends on a montage sequence: a shot of the man behind Winkies; an overexposed shot of Betty happy; and a shot of the Silencio club, where a woman in a blue wig simply utters ‘Silencio’.
Digdeeper
Bordwell, david, Narration in the Fiction Film (london: Routledge, 1985).<
br />
A long and wide-ranging book that discusses both how
spectators comprehend narrative films, and various historical modes of narration (Hollywood cinema, Art cinema, Soviet cinema, the films of Jean-luc Godard).
Branigan, edward, Narrative Comprehension and Film (london: Routledge, 1992).
this book is similar in some respects to Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film, in that it discusses how narrative is comprehended by film spectators. However, Branigan’s book focuses on more specific issues (such as ‘levels of narration’
and ‘focalization’) and discusses them in great detail; it is a very erudite, sophisticated and complex book.
Buckland, Warren (ed.), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
this volume identifies and analyses contemporary ‘Puzzle Films’ – a popular cycle of films from the 1990s that rejects classical storytelling techniques and replaces them with complex storytelling. Films include Lost Highway, Memento, Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays, Run Lola Run, Infernal Affairs, 2046, Suzhou River, The Day a Pig Fell into a Well and Oldboy.
Buckland, Warren (ed.), Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014).
A sequel to Puzzle Films (2009), focusing on contemporary Hollywood films that use techniques of complex storytelling, 74
including Inception (2010), Source Code (2011), The Butterfly Effect (2004), The Hours (2002) and films based on the science fiction of Philip K. dick, including Minority Report (2002) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).
thompson, Kristin, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, mass: Harvard university Press, 1999).
A detailed investigation into the narrative techniques used in contemporary Hollywood films. thompson argues that
contemporary Hollywood films use similar narrative techniques found in the classical period of Hollywood (1920s to the 1950s) –
techniques that continue to create clear, unified narratives. She then presents detailed analyses of ten contemporary Hollywood films, ranging between Alien, Back to the Future and The Hunt for Red October.
truffaut, François, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).
the most famous book on Alfred Hitchcock, based on more than 50 hours of interviews between truffaut and Hitchcock.
2 Film structure: narrative and narration 75
focuspoints
✲ A narrative is a series of events related to one another in terms of a cause–effect logic.
✲ The cause–effect narrative logic is motivated by the needs and wishes of characters.
✲ Narratives are structured in terms of a beginning (the initial state of equilibrium), a middle (disruption of the equilibrium) and an end (restoration of equilibrium).
✲ The progression from initial equilibrium to the restoration of equilibrium always involves a transformation (usually of the film’s main character).
✲ The middle period of a narrative can be called liminal because it depicts actions that transgress everyday habits and routines.
✲ In addition, film narratives are frequently structured using exposition, dangling causes, obstacles, deadlines and
dialogue hooks.
✲ Narrative events are not necessarily presented in a linear, chronological order.
✲ Narration refers to a mechanism that determines how
narrative information is conveyed to the film spectator.
✲ There are two dominant modes of filmic narration: restricted narration and omniscient narration.
✲ Restricted narration conveys the narrative to the spectator via one particular character (thus aligning the spectator to that character), leading to a sense of mystery.
✲ Omniscient narration shifts from one character to another, conveying narrative information to the spectator from many sources. This creates a discrepancy in knowledge between the spectator and characters, for the spectator knows more narrative information than any one character, creating scenes of dramatic suspense.
✲ Sometimes in omniscient narration, the camera will
disengage itself completely from all characters. In this case, narration is directly controlled by someone outside the narrative – the director.
76
3
Film authorship:
the director
as auteur
Inthischapteryouwilllearnabout:
33 an historical account of how and why some
film directors are raised to the level of artists
or ‘authors’ (auteurs)
33 the criteria critics use to raise a director to the
status of an auteur , such as the stylistic and
thematic consistency across their films
33 how Jean-luc godard developed the concept
of film director as auteur in his film criticism
and early film-making, and then later rejected
it when he became a committed political film-
maker
33 an examination of the stylistic and thematic
consistencies in the films of three well-known
auteurs : Alfred hitchcock, wim wenders and
Kathryn Bigelow.
77
The director is both the least necessary and most important component of film-making. He is the most modern and
most decadent of all artists in his relative passivity toward everything that passes before him. He would not be worth bothering with if he were not capable now and then of sublimity of expression almost miraculously extracted from his money-oriented environment.
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema, p. 37
One aim of Chapter 1 was to introduce the ideas of mise-en-scène and mise-en-shot. These ideas are important for this chapter, so I shall briefly summarize them here:
3
3
Mise-en-scène as it is used in this book refers to filmed events, what appears in front of the camera – set design, lighting and character movement.
3
3
Mise-en-shot designates the way the filmed events, the mise-en-scène, are translated into film images.
Spotlight
Most critics do not distinguish mise-en-scène from mise-en-shot, but are content to absorb mise-en-shot into mise-en-scène.
However, this distinction is crucial when discussing the director as auteur, as this chapter will attempt to show.
Chapter 2 outlined the key structures of narrative and
narration. It concentrated on the narrative’s cause–effect logic and the difference between restricted narration (narration tied to one character only) and omniscient narration (narration that jumps from character to character, or which shows the spectator information that no character knows about).
In this chapter we shall see how individual directors use mise-en-scène, mise-en-shot, and strategies of narrative and narration. In particular, we shall look at the rise of the critical approach to film known as the auteur policy (or la politique des auteurs, to use its original French name). The aim of the auteur policy is to assign to certain directors the title of artists, rather than thinking of them 78
as mere technicians. Auteur critics study the style and themes (or subject matter) of a director’s films and assign to them the title of artist if they show a consistency of style and theme.
Directors whose films show a consistency of style and theme are called auteurs. By contrast, directors who show no consistency of style and theme in their work are called metteurs-en-scène, and are relegated to the status of technicians rather than artists. According to auteur critics, the difference between an auteur and a metteur-en-scène is that an auteur can transform a mediocre script into a great film, but a metteur-en-scène can make only a mediocre film out of a mediocre script. Auteur critics made the evaluative distinction between an auteur and a metteur-en-scène because an auteur is able to maintain a consistency of style and theme by working against the
constraints of the Hollywood mode of production. Andrew
Sarris writes:
‘The auteur theory values the personality of a director precisely because of the barriers to its expression. It is as if a few brave spirits had managed to overcome the gravitational pull of the mass of movies’
The American Cinema, p. 31.
In other words, an auteur is able to transcend the restrictions imposed upon him or her by the Hollywood studio system.
But more central than the distinction between an auteur and a metteur-en-scène is the question: Is it legitimate to concentrate on the director as the primary creator of a film? Auteur critics acknowledge that the cinema is, of course, a collective activity involving many people at various stages of pre-production, production and post-production. Nevertheless, the auteur critics argue, it is the director who makes the choices concerning framing, camera position, the duration of the shot, and so on –
those aspects of mise-en-shot that determine the way everything is visualized on screen. And it is precisely mise-en-shot that auteur critics focus on, because this is what makes film unique, what distinguishes film from other arts.
3 Film authorship: the director as auteur 79
The origin of the auteur policy
The first half of this chapter will look at the origin of the auteur policy, which initially concentrated exclusively on the stylistic consistencies of a director’s work. Other auteur critics expanded the scope of the auteur policy by looking at an equally important consistency: the thematic consistency in a director’s work, the uniformity and coherence of subject matter across a director’s films. The auteurist’s emphasis on the consistency of style and theme is expressed in the statement that auteurs are always attempting to make the same film. The second half of this chapter will consider the dominant styles and themes in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Wim Wenders and Kathryn Bigelow.
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