How to Watch a Movie, page 11
So, perchance to cut is a perpetual threat. No such dread operates in theater, where we sit in a similar position with a spectacle contingent on physical possibility. In fact, in the theater (the fencing in Hamlet, say) the action tends to feel ponderous and stilted just because it is hobbled by pretending. But from the outset in cinema, infinite imagined (or undreamed of) possibility has been in prospect. The more a film cuts, and the more adventurously, then the readier we are for its astonishment. Some sense of dread or magic is never far away, not even in naturalistic drama. Those cuts can hurt, but they can transport and transform and they can heal old wounds.
On a cut, the man in the neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves has his worst fear realized: his bicycle is stolen—so he will lose his job. Could things be worse? Could the alien that menaced Sigourney Weaver all those years be lurking around the street corner? No, that seems far too fanciful an association for the Rome of 1948. But don’t forget that this impoverished man’s job is pasting up posters of Rita Hayworth in Gilda— life-size, voluptuous, fantastic, a cutaway in the same frame, and a surreal partner for his threadbare life, nearly as unexpected and “crazy” as the 1979 alien created by H. R. Giger. So edits can exist in the same frame. In Alf Sjöberg’s Miss Julie (1951; and a woefully neglected film), the past and the present coexist in the same shot, the child and the woman side by side.
Another way of handling that subtlety is in another lost art, the dissolve, where one image becomes another. At the depth of his despair in The Wrong Man, the falsely accused Henry Fonda character starts to pray. As he does so, the image picks up another one, a dissolve, of the real criminal walking down the street, coming toward the camera, until his face occupies the exact space that was Fonda’s seconds before. I don’t honestly believe in praying, but I believe in those shots and their slow cut. It’s also a moment in Hitchcock’s career where one cannot forget the fact of his Catholicism and the impact a sense of guilt and chance had on him.
The same kind of impending future waits in comedy, too. Thus, Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd (or M. Hulot or Jim Carrey) are all likely to encounter (or be) sudden and absurd hazards. What this entails is a constant promise of surprise and peril more akin to magic acts or sporting events than the deliberate advance and accumulation of stage plays and operas. It is one of the secret sources of an inspiring sensationalism at the movies; the other is the suggestion that “everybody” goes into that revealing dark for a miracle or a gotcha. For decades, that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion was a promise of unimaginable intrusions or wildness.
Yet, for every gotcha cut in the history of film, there are probably fifty smooth or invisible cuts. In the origins of the medium, the “matching” cut was far more a means of engineering transition or flow, and those things are a way toward subtlety. D. W. Griffith is hailed as one of a pioneering generation that identified the singularity of shots and then found ways of assembling them as building blocks in a sequence so that an audience reckoned steady time had passed. It’s akin to the realization that in a narrative you can put down one sentence and then move to another set somewhere else or in a different time, in which the gulf is bridged because interest or attention carries over from one to the other. Just read this passage from near the close of Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934). It’s a lesson in reading, that could only be filmed if read onto the sound track:
Nicole kept in touch with Dick after her new marriage; there were letters on business matters, and about the children. When she said, as she often did, “I loved Dick and I’ll never forget him,” Tommy answered, “Of course not—why should you?”
Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success. Nicole did not find what the trouble was, but she heard a few months later that he was in a little town named Batavia, N.Y., practicing general medicine, and later that he was in Lockport, doing the same thing. By accident she heard more about his life there than anywhere: that he bicycled a lot, was much admired by the ladies, and always had a big stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion. He was considered to have fine manners and once made a good speech at a public health meeting on the subject of drugs; but he became entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he left Lockport.
Notice how easily that short passage provides facts, as well as the unreliable report of facts, and the subsequent uncertainty, and the melancholy it leaves. It’s the kind of fluent transitioning that makes the cinematic adaptation of good prose so difficult. Even in abbreviated form, to show the entanglement and the lawsuit would be over-obvious; the cut from one to the other would seem clumsy and melodramatic. If actors said those lines—“I loved Dick …”—they would be pregnant and pressing; but on the page they are intriguingly quiet, or casual. An emphatic enactment would miss the poignant chemistry of Dick’s decline and Nicole’s glimpses of it. Just because film is so deliberately constructed—shot first and then cut and gathered—it has a problem with ease and suggestion. For in truth not everything is visible, and Fitzgerald’s opportunity to move in and out in a sentence is so light-footed and adroit. By contrast, the impact of editing often underlines an attempt at meaning or insight in a crude way. So filmmakers are always striving for the suppleness in writing. But it’s hard for an artful movie to seem relaxed.
You could see that a hundred years ago in Griffith. He moved in two directions at once with cutting. He felt the suppleness and flow with which he could convey an anecdotal incident: the shooting of Lincoln, the attempted rape of Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh), the great battle—all from The Birth of a Nation; surely that ease helped audiences in the test of sitting still for a three-and-a-half-hour story (so long as enough arousing things were happening). But in his next film, Intolerance, this naïve inventor yielded to the literary and philosophical ambitions he had felt in editing. He discovered lofty comparison and never realized it was dumb repetition and far inferior to the comparisons and allusions that Joyce, Henry James, and Kafka were making at about the same time. Kafka wrote Metamorphosis in the year Griffith made Intolerance, but the eery simplicity of its opening was so far ahead of what film could do: “One morning as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” Then again, could Kafka have been so swift and sly in words without the casual transitions he had noticed on screen? The ways in which writers started learning from film are so many and so likely to disprove reports of the death of the novel.
Griffith decided to have four stories in Intolerance that demonstrated … human intolerance: incidents in ancient Babylon; the time of Christ; the massacre of the French Huguenots in 1572; and a modern story (set in 1914) in which a young man is wrongfully convicted of murder and will be executed if word cannot reach the prison in that recent creation of movies, “the nick of time,” or what we might call suspense.
Even in 1916, the scheme threatened the vitality of any individual story. Intolerance was a failure commercially just as Birth of a Nation had founded a new business. The comparison of various intolerances was thought fatuous and long-winded, pretentious and silly, no matter that the Babylon sequence had a spectacular palace set built at great expense at 4500 Sunset Blvd.—but without any real idea of how to use it, so the camera (in a balloon) just drifts across the immense façade like a gaping tourist. Far too much of the historical episodes seemed dull excuses for costume, décor, and the preachiness of Griffith’s attitudes. But the modern story is a gripping display of conventional suspense in which the articulated rendering of action (through edited shots) is matched by the hectic or desperate crosscutting of the final race against time. Isolate that modern story (it stars Robert Harron, Mae Marsh, and Miriam Cooper) and it might be the most impressive work of Griffith’s career.
Suppose that the audience for Intolerance was disconcerted by the yoking together of far-flung periods, but riveted by the intensity of advancing action in modern storytelling. The lesson for commercial movies (which Griffith had done so much to inaugurate) was don’t be aggressively ambitious and let editing act as an accelerating force in story. We still benefit from that decision, in pictures like All Is Lost and Amour as well as television series like Homeland and Breaking Bad. In all of those works, we find ourselves wondering what happens next, even if some of the answers are fanciful (or absurd). But that is only part of the potential in editing, and now the adventurous filmgoer needs to understand the dynamic better.
Let me repeat, the cut is also a joining or a suture. Try this experiment: Select two items of a modest size that seem to have nothing in common and put them on the same table. Then invite a newcomer to study the table and suggest a connection between the two things. That person will never fail, because the human mind has a helpless but essential capacity for seeing connections or likenesses. The cut in film may serve as an interruption, a stroke or caesura, if you like; but the watcher will knit up the rift so quickly it is amazing. The filmmaker may break his own flow with a shot chosen at random. In the Surrealist literature, the classic absurd pairing involved a sewing machine and an umbrella—and the agility of the receptive mind finds a clue: they are both used in repairing appearance; in both, you press a knob and they come to life; they are companions in the hall closet…. They are metaphors!
It may seem far-fetched to consider a whole movie based on this kind of dissociation, though Un Chien Andalou (1929), by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, was made in such a reckless spirit. It is a sixteen-minute dreamscape on the theme of sexual awakening that obeys no kind of restraint or censorship. Primitive, childlike but intuitive, it digs into the subconscious like people in a desert seeking water. There is a modern surrealist who functions on the edges of the mainstream, David Lynch, who slips unaccountable actions into the narrative of his films: remember Dean Stockwell’s character, Ben, in brocade and heavy make-up, miming Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet; or Betty’s steamy screen test in Mulholland Dr., which manages to be comic, banal, and erotic all at the same time. It’s not that Mulholland Dr. “works” in the way that can be reduced to a map of itself, a listing of subtexual meanings. Far more, it exposes us to the wildness of association, without the frenzied atmospheric of horror. The magic of Mulholland Dr. is in its calm. In the long run that is the only way to disarm the shock in cutting.
Facing most of Lynch’s work, some viewers are likely to feel degrees of bewilderment or outrage. Some may stop watching. But for others, the digressions or departures only deepen the emotional power of his films. And if you need reassurance, just use the remote to surf through channels on your television and notice the arbitrary, incidental but sometimes haunting beauty you uncover. It’s often more captivating and liberating than any particular channel, and it’s a reminder that the Surrealists reveled in automatic or random associations.
If Picasso had looked at Guernica after he had finished and yielded to a passing whim by adding a prostrate odalisque to the frame, unaware of the air raid and its damage (she could be playing cards with that young man in Chardin), it would still be all Picasso. It might be a greater picture, or one in which the gravity and anger of April 1937 were pierced by unexpected inappropriateness. But what is trite about Guernica now (compared with Las Meninas) is that the whole damn thing is against air raids. Aren’t we all?
In François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, a gangster swears on his mother’s life that a story is true, and Truffaut nonchalantly interrupts his own narrative with a cameo shot of an elderly woman suffering an apparent heart attack. In the mood of the French New Wave of the sixties, there was a lot of blithe subversion. When Jean-Luc Godard assembled Breathless, he found the film was too long and so he went through it again introducing the jump cut. That saved time but it also undermined the articulate serenity of every shot and pronounced that film (even film that was the truth twenty-four times per second—a Godard axiom) was whatever the cutting made of it. So the film bumped and jerked along to a new time scheme rather as years later Douglas Gordon would replace the dread and suspense in Psycho by distending every frame and second until 24 Hour Psycho became a contemplation of the film process. Some say that remaking is ridiculous, but Martin Scorsese, for one, has had the habit for years of doing multiple printing of certain frames in order to stress one instant over another. This is stretching time, if you like, but it is a kind of cutting.
Cutting does reveal artistic character eventually, but it offers so many prospects. In The Magnificent Ambersons, in the strawberry shortcake scene with Tim Holt and Agnes Moorehead, Orson Welles trusted to do it in one shot. He may have filmed covering close-ups, but in the event he settled for duration, the actors, and even a kind of boredom. Not that he rejected shock cuts in his career—the huge mouth saying “Rosebud” at the start of Kane that cuts to the glass ball breaking on the ground; the alarmed cockatoo in Xanadu; and even the moment in the cabin scene in Colorado when the purposeful mother walks across the room, throws up the window, and the film cuts to a sudden close-up of her face looking out at the cold and her son with a reordering of the spatial rhythms in the scene. For the cabin scene had been shot so far in a way that had no close-ups or their direct confrontation with emotion. It is a scene about actual interior space and the way the mother controls it. It is still debatable whether that sudden cut to the mother is to push her sensibility into the story (we hear faint music and a mournful wind and Agnes Moorehead cries out “Charles!,” calling him and condemning him, as if the word had been torn from her) or to raise the unanswered question—what does her son think of her and of the way he was sold off? That implication is at the heart of the film’s elusiveness, for the viewer was asked to understand the complex editing scheme of flashbacks and be able to balance them like the different narrative voices in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. (That entirely unfilmable book was written by a man who was about to become a Hollywood screenwriter.)
So many films liked to reassure audiences with the notion that the wild screen was manageable and organized. The prospect of abandon, orgy, madness, and slaughter touched on in Un Chien Andalou, in Russian and German film, was palpable and alarming. In Hollywood, even, it affected Stroheim and Sternberg. But the business was always anxious to keep that energy reined in, or unappreciated, if only so that business could stay regular and businesslike. Stroheim’s Greed had been obstructed because it was excessive (it was cut from ten hours to two), but it was feared because of its direct assault on such a subject.
But in 1915, the editing ambition of Birth of a Nation had helped prove movies as a business and led to the building of theaters and the foundation of companies that would be household names. Yet if that picture is screened, for its anniversary, in 2015, in Memphis, in Atlanta, in Chicago, in Harlem, there will likely be demonstrations against its offensiveness. The phenomenon that established the show cannot be shown, except as a sign of history—and perhaps not even then.
For decades, mainstream filmmaking rejected cuts that might explore the full potential of cutting. That meant the denial of intellectual discomfort, and the elimination of a natural tendency for movies to seek the unknown. Apart from what it does to her in the shower, Psycho cuts Marion Crane’s ostensible life into another not dreamed of until it happens (has she ever thought of being murdered?). But Hitchcock had always had his superstitious faith in the unexpected: it can range from Henry Fonda’s being arrested in The Wrong Man to a plane dusting crops where none are growing in North by Northwest. In Vertigo, one can say that the James Stewart character sees a “cut” from one Kim Novak to another, but is slow in realizing how far the two women are married.
Any consideration of editing as a force that interrupts and fragments apparent order needs to take note of another condition in filmmaking. Very few movies are shot “in order,” or according to the line of the narrative. For reasons of economic expediency, the shooting schedule goes all over the place. So the plot is disassembled for the actors; it is repeated, sometimes with many takes; and it is subject to reshoots, and the careful filming of extensive sequences (even entire locations) that never get into the final picture. So there is a natural and cheerful climate of the haphazard in film production, and a feeling of collage and alteration going on all the time. There is yet another nuance to this: the crazy schedule plays fast and loose with time, so that the things shot seem to be floating in just the way in Kane, say, you’re never quite sure where or when you are.
At the very moment of Vertigo and North by Northwest, Alain Resnais made Hiroshima Mon Amour, expanding the reach in editing, and the right of film to use it. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) is in Hiroshima to make a film about peace. As she lies in bed with her Japanese lover (Eiji Okada) she tells him that she understands Hiroshima and what happened there. She has been to the museum. No, he says, she saw nothing. This is not a bitter dispute, but a calm assertion that Hiroshima cannot be understood in a museum or by looking at graves and signs. We assume a night of lovemaking between them. In the morning, the woman is up first. She has her coffee on the balcony and then she looks at the man in bed. His arm is rather awkwardly twisted against his body. There is a cut and we see another arm in a similar pose, but it is wearing a uniform. It is the body of the German soldier this French woman loved in a town called Nevers in a perilous act of collaboration for which she was punished when the war was over.
