I recently watched Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue (1993), the first film in his Three Colours trilogy. His style felt like something I’d never seen before: it struck me as daringly paced and elegantly shot with a confident manipulation of color that didn’t feel forced.

But suddenly, at the start of a sequence in which Julie (Juliette Binoche) drags her clenched fist against a rough stone wall, I realized I had already seen it. I’ve been haunted by that shot for years, but have always been unsure where it came from. I knew I had been half-watching something when I was much younger, but questioning the people I was watching it with provided no answers: the sequence immediately came to their minds too, but the film’s title remained unknown. It was quite a thrilling experience: to rediscover something I thought was long lost, to be suddenly connected very immediately with the (relatively) distant past. In a moment, the film and the experience of watching it changed.

After this latest viewing, the moment is joined by another in my head. In a short sequence, Julie is alone, gazing at a light fixture made of countless pieces of blue glass. She rests in a close shot to the left of this blue mass and dimples of blue light shimmer on her face. After a pause, she walks towards frame right, behind the light. Her face is now fragmented: separated and atomized by chunks of blue glass. The film cuts after a moment: the camera moves to a set-up perpendicular to the original position. Julie and the blue glass are suddenly disentangled: in a slightly tighter frame, she is, once again, to the left of the light.

For some reason, the interaction between Julie’s face and the glass made me think about 3D. The effect of fragmentation comes about, in part, because we’re watching shapes interact on a two-dimensional surface. The fleshy colored oval really is broken into pieces, studded by variously shaped and sized areas of blue. Of course, we are also aware of the spatial relationship that existed between the objects as they were filmed, that this particular oval is a human head and that it’s connected to a woman who stands behind a light. The result is a tension between what we actually see and what we understand is being depicted.

I think I mean something similar to what Tom Lubbock says when he suggests, “Painting remakes its world from scratch.” Though it sounds obvious, the product of artistic creation is not the same as the reality that inspired it. This suggestion is as true for photography as it is for painting. While reviewing a pair of the late art critic’s books, Julian Bell develops the sentiment: “The stuff of painting is not like the stuff of that other 3D world, even when painting pretends to be realistic.” I suppose we can rephrase, saying that the stuff of film is not like the stuff of that other 3D world, even when film appears to be realistic.

So, though I’m not sure the Three Colours trilogy is high up on any production companies’ lists for a 3D rerelease, let’s wonder for a moment what the effect would be if this sequence appeared in three dimensions. Rendered in 3D, the stuff of Blue moves closer to the stuff of that other 3D world, the set constructed to tell the story. We would see—through plastic glasses—a woman walking behind a light, and she would remain behind that light until the film cut. If the spatial relationships are actually played out before us, at the expense of the play of shapes on a single plane, then the sense of atomization is weakened. What means of cinematic expression are lost, if we add another dimension?

One of my contributions to the horrible festivities for October is a discussion of Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922). As we’re still relatively far from the main event on the 31st, it feels apt to look at a film that rests at the edges of the horror genre, not fully committing itself to blood, gore or psychological tension, though never entirely breaking away.

The film is certainly strange and unique. Part documentary, part fiction and part anthropological exposition, the structure of Häxan‘s narrative is tough to pin down. While slippery and difficult to handle, it is precisely the form of the film that makes the picture so engaging and challenging: detailed realism often transforms into disturbing psychological caricature, while consistently being framed by documentary objectivity and metatextual nods to the audience and the filmmaking process.

Christensen opens his picture by telling us that it’s “A presentation from a cultural and historical point of view in seven chapters of moving pictures.” The first shot involves an iris-in to reveal a photograph of the director (labelled as such); he stares right back at us, creating a distance between the viewer and what is being watched. This film is, the inter-title and titled photograph suggest, an investigation on display rather than a fiction. The aesthetic of a lecture is continued in the first chapter, which is composed only of inter-titles and a number of engravings and models. A pointer is used to indicate specific areas of the illustrations that the inter-titles explain. Christensen uses the first person singular pronoun in this section and, at the same time, consistently refers to other sources, generating in the process a conversation between different authorities: he points out, for example, that “The picture of a pyre as well as the following are from ‘German Life in the Past in Pictures’” and, on one occasion, hands over to “The English scientist Rawlinson and French scientist Maspero.” Christensen’s lighthearted comments make clear the objective treatment of his subject matter: we could not, with such ease, “Observe the eagerness with which the devils tend to fire under the cauldrons!” if we were terrified we could, at some point, end up in them.

The reconstructed scenes of medieval witchcraft are viewed in the light of this opening chapter’s scientific presentation of the origins of belief. The scenes are remarkable, using low-key lighting and convincing art design to generate an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion, itself complimented by understated performances. We see Christensen’s invention in his editing decisions: he drives scenes forward with a confident use of close-ups, point-of-view shots and changes in the framing size and angle. In the scene in which Maria (Maren Pedersen), the elderly woman accused of being a witch, is interrogated by two priests (apparently playing good-cop bad-cop), use is also made of the space immediately beyond the frame. Each of the men has Maria by an arm, and they begin to engage in a tug of war. Christensen does not shoot this as a static three-shot, but instead shares the action between two static medium shots that each contain a man and Maria but frame out the third. With this construction, she is always partially filling the space beyond the frame, being pulled between the two shots. Instead of being at the center, she is at the edge: this arrangement reveals more accurately the distribution of power.

Christensen creates some terrifying locations. For example, the pain of the torture chamber is accentuated by a rare movement of the camera. As a body lies supine ready to be stretched, the camera begins to pan left, following the chains that are tied to the feet. With the camera preempting the painful movement of the chains, the shot is dynamically lengthened and therefore, in this case, effective in a way that a static shot would not be. But Christensen undermines his own atmosphere in the final chapter of the film. Here, locations are revisited and comments are made both about the psychological causes of witchcraft and the filming process. The tools of torture are transformed into hilarious reminiscences about the shoot: he tells us that “One of my actresses insisted on trying the thumbscrew when we were filming these pictures.” Interestingly, this inter-title is then followed by a close shot of the actress, out of costume, laughing and undergoing the process. This shot, then, is a reconstruction of a moment that happened when the camera was turned off. Christensen’s lighthearted tone returns, when he says, “I will draw a veil over the dreadful confessions that I forced the young woman to make in less than a minute.”

This short section is illustrative of the larger play between fiction and fact in Häxan. While chapter seven seems to be conclusively demonstrating that witchcraft is a social illusion—a misdiagnosis—of the Middle Ages, Christensen also makes comments that challenge our clear-cut conclusion. Again he turns to another authority, though in this instance she is the “lovely old woman who plays the role of Maria the Weaver in my film.” He tells us that, “during a pause in the shoot“ (my emphasis), she said, “The devil is real. I have seen him sitting at my bedside.” The juxtaposition of this inter-title with a close-up of the elderly woman’s face, so expressive with age, is moving. (The aesthetic and emotion achieved by the shot reminds me of the famous CU from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc.) I’ve emphasized the fact that this incident happened between takes because it seems that Christensen regularly goes to the borders of filmmaking—the edge of frame, the instances when the camera is off, the props and style of an anthropology lecture—for his important moments of problematized exposition.

*

As for other horror films, I’ve written elsewhere on how, for me, the most terrifying moments in Paranormal Activity (2007) are the pauses, rather than the bumps: the moments, in other words, when first-time writer and director Oren Peli decides to let his scene linger.

In the latest episode of Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: An Odyssey, a TV show airing here in the UK at the moment, it was suggested that sight—the fulfillment that comes from seeing something—is one of the key underlying themes of the Hollywood films of the 1920s. More specifically, he notes that the studios briefly and tantalizingly delay the desired object. Ultimately, of course, we do see, and our wish is joyously fulfilled. In a scene in Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924), for example, we’re made to want to see the Princess (Julanne Johnston) clearly. It’s a simple and unambiguous pleasure when our desire is satisfied.

Though D.W. Griffith discovered an ambivalence in the action of cinematic viewing years earlier (as in his presentation of the final kiss in True Heart Susie in 1919), it seems that any moral qualms suggested by this particular sort of almost-voyeurism are put on hold, as the studio system moves towards a fully formed method of filmic narration. In this sense, the morals of seeing a story told are tied up with editing: as the cuts become more invisible and the force with which we’re moved through the scenes to certain details increases, the ability to look away—to choose not to gaze at a particular area of the room—becomes devalued.

We need only to play Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) to see enacted literally before us the violence that surrounds an attempt to watch an event from the shadows. The moral ambivalence of spying on people—fictional or otherwise—appears again. The days when we can gaze without shame through the mosquito net of a princess are gone.

Buzzing around cinema from its very beginning, then, is the question of what happens when we watch from the outside. The notion of an audience—a ghostly presence undetected by the objects which it spies upon—is used in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), though the emphasis is shifted from sight to sound. Crucial to this picture is the motif of mishearing: a particular spoken stress missed by the sneaks in the seats allows the narrative to present its ‘ta-dah!’ moment, when we realize that we weren’t listening closely enough. It warns us, perhaps, that we’ve got to be on our guard when we deal only with fragments of experience: a stolen glance or an overheard conversation are never the full story.

In a roundabout way, these paragraphs set up a comparison between Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006) and Coppola’s Conversation. The image of Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) excavating the threads of surveillance that laced his flat immediately brings to mind Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) sitting in his room, playing his saxophone, surrounded by the wreckage he’s made in his pursuit of a planted listening device. The effects of these two set-pieces are different: Dreyman, standing, pulls defiantly at the physical remains of a web of deceit—long dead—that he is now finally removing from his home; Caul, slumped and dejected, can only turn away from the situation and the uncertainty, surrounding himself with notes from his instrument.

These two moments present two differing views of the value of sight: Dreyman’s desire to see a ghost of sorts is fulfilled as he rips the chords from their hiding places. The action is steeped in the physicality of the thing: it’s an emphatic tear as whispers, suspicions and possibilities become corporeal in his hand. But Caul shows the despair that can occur if a hinted-at reality is pursued ad infinitum: surrounded only by wreckage and the invisible presence of his music, he sits as a warning against any hope that what we see is what we get. So, then, should we look through that mosquito net?

I want to celebrate Werner Herzog’s voice, one of my favorite noises in cinema. I don’t speak metaphorically here: I don’t mean his cinematic “voice,” revealed through things like his shooting style, editing technique or any recurring themes. Instead, I’m more concerned with actual sound: his tone (almost always monotonous), an idiosyncratic lexis (“erotical,” for example) and his use of his voice in his films. I’m sure, though, that there’s only so much talking I can do: I’ll provide only a few words and, instead, let him speak for himself.

I am not alone in my admiration. In the video below, the elderly director chuckles as he recounts how people have come to imitate his speech. As he holds a copy of Curious George, he acknowledges the uniqueness of his voice, speaking about “my kind of talking.” As the text has already been read on the internet by one of his shadowy doppelgängers (his phrase, from Cave of Forgotten Dreams), it feels like a bit of a joke: he does not indulge us with his own reading of the slim volume. One YouTube user comments: “I realize that it is not at all what this is about , but I was hoping, no, PRAYING, that Herzog would start reading out loud from Curious George.”

The withholding of details (be it a personal reading not heard or a shot behind a holy waterfall left out of the edit) seems to be a technique Herzog often uses in his films. He invites us to piece together clues and come up with our own understanding of his pictures. It is apt, then, that one of those doppelgängers reads Where’s Waldo?: like Waldo, Herzog is happy leaving us to ask, about one aspect or another, “Is that a scroll? Or merely a rolled up towel?”

Yet, at other times, his narration is used as a structuring principle. In his documentaries, for example, his comments often explicitly guide the viewer towards one interpretation. I recently watched Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998): it is a staggering film, perhaps even life changing. Among other things, I was struck by the number of times a shot of Dieter explaining his ordeal in his own words was quieted down and overlaid by the director’s summary.

Ramin Bahrani clearly enjoys such narration, using Herzog’s skill in his short film Plastic Bag (2010). Bahrani knows that Herzog’s “kind of talking” is taken seriously. It is authoritative and lends weight to the ecological message that is announced in the picture. At the same time, simply speaking, Herzog knows how to tell a story. He knows how to read aloud. Perhaps it’s his ability to perform that makes his voice so engaging.

I’m pleased that I’ve heard Herzog speak in real life. Not too long ago, I went to London to hear him “in conversation”:  he still has the intellectual rigor and bite that made him spit this venom when, as a younger man, he stood in the jungle, surrounded by decay and chaos.

As I finished some exams a few weeks ago, I’ve been able to watch a lot more films recently. In fact, I’ve probably seen more pictures over the last couple of weeks than I caught over the preceding couple of months. Here, then, are a few of the things that I’ve seen this week.

In the theater:

I’m glad I saw Asif Kapadia’s Senna (2010) before it left the cinemas. The biopic of the Brazilian Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna undeniably provides more than just a view of the man in the context of the sport at which he excels. Newspaper reviews over here in the UK have suggested that the the film transcends the concerns of motor racing, focusing instead on the personality of a unique and exceptional man—who just happens to be a driver. But I found that the excellence of the picture comes from its refusal to turn completely away from the cars: while Senna is a subtle and moving portrait of a faithful man, it’s also inextricably rooted to the oil and the computer-controlled suspension systems of F1 in the late 80s and early 90s.

Senna himself hints at such a split when he considers Ayrton the driver as separate from Ayrton the man. But the film suggests that he cannot be removed from his chosen profession, and that his character is thrown more fully into relief only alongside the context of the motorcar. This belief is revealed in the formal design, which uses only archive footage. Interviews are audible but do not interject the flow of these images: there are no shots of well-lit interviewees sitting in ominously black rooms. Instead, with such a variety of extant footage to use, the exciting narrative unfolds like live action, rather than being presented as an event long past. The effect—a wonderful portrait of a driver rich with internal contradictions—would be quite different (and I don’t think as successful) if the film had been constructed differently. I’ve written elsewhere about my favorite shot, which, coming in the funeral, is the culmination of the emotional effect achieved by this innovative and challenging use of archive footage.

On DVD:

If Ayrton Senna borders on madness in his devotion to God and his commitment to the racetrack, then, in comparison, Brian Sweeney “Fitzcarraldo” Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinsi) is emphatically nuts in the title role of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982). With a premise delightfully simple, childish and surreal in equal measure, the film presents a man moving a boat over a mountain in South America. The juxtaposition of the opera with the jungle is wonderfully inventive and allows each to provide comment on the other. There’s artfulness and there’s feeling in the Amazon, as well as pain and unpredictability in the voice of Enrico Caruso.

The Amazon jungle and the surrounding area seem to have a hold on Herzog’s imagination, providing the setting for his earlier film Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972)—which also stars Kinsi—as well as his documentary The White Diamond (2004). In Les Blank’s Burden Of Dreams (1982), a documentary detailing the production of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog reveals that the jungle provides him not only with a location but also with an ideology centered on chaos—which is in some senses admirable—as well as the misery that comes from it. As an expression of this ambivalent belief, the closing sequence from Fitzcarraldo is difficult to beat.

Here is a relevant clip. His deadpan delivery is amazing.

From LoveFilm:

On that topic, I’m very excited to watch Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990), as well as seeing Frank Capra’s Mr Deed Goes To Town (1936) and, for the second time, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968). Unfortunately, for now, these three pictures have to be put on hold, as I’ve lost the discs. Any comments on the quality of the films—and whether it’s worth trying to find them—would be appreciated.

It began, perhaps, the moment the deer flew into the air. Upon impact, when car and flesh collide, we move from within the cabin to a view outside. Shot in slow motion, the carcass rises with a lightness, unexpected because of its weight, and we’re allowed to watch each muscle move through ranges of motion that feel orchestrated (though we’re not sure by whom) before the deer slams—conclusively and ungraciously—to the floor. There’s a feeling of importance, maybe even mysticism, and it’s the result of exceptional cinematic craft.

The scene comes from Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (2009), and it marked, for me, the moment when I began to think the director was exceptional. Within the car, tensions grow, as Malik (Tahar Rahim), handcuffed, finds a gun in his face and struggles to explain his survival. As he stumbles over his words, punctuating his almost-answers with long pauses and false starts, a non-diegetic Arabic chorus unobtrusively begins to sound. The slow motion shooting starts soon after, while still within the car, and forces us to view commonplace objects in new ways. A triangular road sign that warns of deer glides slowly past the windscreen and ripples in a window on the side of the car. Borders usually relentlessly rigid, like those of the sign, begin to reveal newfound flexibility. We’re reminded of Malik’s earlier dream (in which he sees such a road sign), and the red of its edge becomes startlingly vivid when we connect these dots. We’re aware that something significant is about to happen, though we’re unsure exactly what.

The hue that presses at the boundaries of the sign is recast in the messier smear of the deer’s blood on the shattered windscreen. A rippling line breaks into a puddle as we, with the characters, reach a moment of realization. Caught in a flood of revelation, we understand that Malik’s dream is prophetic, and that we should pay more attention to road signs. Things are connected in mysterious ways, and yet, as the deer, now dead, gracefully slides upwards, we realize that we can know no more than that. Lattrache (Slimani Dazi) gives voice to our concerns when he asks, “What are you? A prophet, or what?” The desire for definition (and the understanding of a situation that follows an awareness of exactly who—or what—is involved) arises from witnessing a series of events happening that should not have taken place. Malik should not be able to predict the future. Lattrache is stunned, and we’re left with a new conception of how A Prophet operates.

The supernatural is hinted at earlier, as Malik is visited periodically by the murdered Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi). Like the Arabic chorus, the figure approaches quietly. He is not, in other words, a self-consciously ethereal ghost. He sits or stands but never floats. We slowly realize that smoke casually escapes from the open wound in his neck, the scratch that caused his death. There is no fanfare; we’re allowed no terror or slapstick. Reyeb absentmindedly pats away the hellfire that singes his shirt with a gesture that’s rooted in the mundane. He could easily be brushing away a few rogue crumbs, rather than a sign of his damnation.

Audiard teases us with the suggestion of realms beyond the visible—and the presence of connections between separate things—and then quickly pats it away, allowing it to resurface later in different forms. So while A Prophet is a stunning crime film, it is also, more generally and more importantly, a staggering work of cinema.

*

I’ve written elsewhere about Audiard: I’ve recently discussed the blending of genres in—and Hollywood’s haunting of—Read My Lips; I’ve also focused on the complex use of music in The Beat That My Heart Skipped.

To continue the MacGuffin’s discussion of film noir, I’m looking in detail at Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place (1950), a classic picture with a couple of cracking performances from Humphrey Bogart and Martha Stewart and a drunk man who recites Shakespeare.

In the apartment of Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart), when she is first unnerved by the bang of a shoe hitting the floor, Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart) hugs her borrowed copy of Althea Bruce all the tighter. After all, she is only lured to the building in the first place by an appealing narrative of a different sort. When she meets Dix, she is made to feel ‘real important,’ and the attraction of being able to tell Aunt Cora that ‘I told the story to the screenwriter’ is simply too strong to resist. As she begins to question why Dix has brought her back to his house (and the truthfulness of his design becomes flimsily suspect), she literally clings to the solidarity of Althea Bruce, to the firmness of the form of the book. She fears trickery, as Dix’s suggestion of (a small piece of) screen fame threatens to fall to the floor as quickly as his shoes. Mildred worries, for a moment, that her newfound ability to tell a tale is a sham, and that Dix only offers her this opportunity to get her into bed. The craft of story telling is at stake here, as well as the agency that comes from such narrating.

Of course, this scene in In A Lonely Place is uniquely poised in Nicholas Ray’s own retelling of Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel with the same title: for the other characters, all the ambiguity that surrounds the part Dix played in Mildred’s death stems from this meeting, from the undeniable fact that the pair go home together. Only two scenes later, the audience hears suspicion in Captain Lochner’s (Carl Benton Reid) voice: he thinks the decision to bring Mildred back home is a ‘rather eccentric thing to do’; throughout the film, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) suffers attrition from doubt, finally announcing to Sylvia Nicolai (Jeff Donnell) her belief that ‘There is something strange about Dix,’ demanding to be convinced by her absent lover that Lochner’s intuition is wrong. It is perhaps fair to suggest that most audience members do not suspect Dix as the murderer: they notice, for example, the lack of enthusiasm in his voice, as he changes the subject—raised by Mildred—as to whether he is ‘going steady’ with anyone. Though she cannot see his face, he nonetheless reveals that he is trying to make her leave with the nervousness of his eyes. It is as if he cannot even keep eye contact with a woman out of sight: his gaze moves briefly from pointing towards frame right to frame left before ducking down to his shoes (which he perhaps wishes he had kept on) and back up to its original position. He only looks up to her face when his suggestion of parting company is accepted with an enthusiastic (though slightly disappointed) ‘That’s alright.’

As Dix cheekily gestures her out of the door as quickly as possible, again without her seeing, he makes clear his desire to be separate from this woman. The non-diegetic strings also seem to will Mildred out of the house: her steps fall in time to the staccato notes, played at an allegro tempo. And yet the more relaxed and lulling wind instruments create a tone that suggests she is content. Furthermore, as she is stepping back into the courtyard, the instruments combine at a slightly slower tempo to produce a major-keyed mellifluous tune that leads the audience to believe that, while the evening did not quite go to any plan, both characters are happy. The fade-out that ends the scene marks Dix’s retiring to bed and gives no indication that a crucial moment in the narrative occurs. It is the behaviour of Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy), rather than Dix, that brings the serenity of suggested sleep to an end: the replacement of non-diegetic with exclusively diegetic sound begins with the harsh buzz of a doorbell.

While the viewer may believe that the saxophone-heavy jazz band that begins with the fade-in is part of the non-diegetic soundtrack, she soon sees that it exists within the filmic world, when Dix brings it to an end by switching off his record player.  Ray, here, may intend to trick the viewer, making her expect a sound to be non-diegetic before revealing it to be the opposite. This play with the soundscape allows a broader comment to be made with subtlety: the suspicion of Dix having committed the murder comes only from the characters within the film itself. The tone of the scene before (accompanied and generated by a harmonious soundtrack), is punctured by unseen actions—between the fade-out and fade-in—that take place within the film. With the seriousness of suspicion as the source of the scene (there is no other reason why Brub would visit Dix so early), it feels only fitting that the pragmatic question ‘who killed Mildred?’ does not allow room for non-essential elements. This particular morning is no time for music that sits outside the reality of murder.

The switch to a solely diegetic soundtrack comes to enact, at this moment, the different possibilities of interpretation afforded to the characters within the film and the audience watching it. While the viewer sees plainly that, in this instance, Dix cannot get away from Mildred fast enough, Brub is allowed no such luxury. Similarly, Lochner only has a hefty file of past offences and a suspicious set of circumstances from which to begin. Even Laurel gets nothing more than a fragment: the audience can only be sure that she hears Mildred’s dramatic ‘Help! Help!’ Ray employs a form of dramatic irony (as the audience does not see the murder itself, though they do see the last moment of interaction between Dix and Mildred) which produces related though not identical questions from characters and viewers. While Brub wonders whether Dix killed Mildred, the audience, unconvinced that he did, asks a slightly different question: they are left wondering, especially when watching the film again, whether or not he could have done so. Ray’s (and Edmund North’s) treatment of Hughes’s novel transforms a relatively simple detective story, in which Dix does commit a murder, into a subtle psychological study and an investigation of possibility. The scene in Dix’s apartment with Mildred becomes crucial, then, not as a fertile ground for clues that help to make sense of an answer already given, but instead because it allows the viewer to probe whether there is a method in Dix’s madness.

In other words, the scene allows the audience to see whether they think other outcomes could be possible: they are invited to wonder if, in a different set of circumstances, Ray’s Dix—a character distinct from his counterpart in Hughes’s novel—could actually murder Mildred. Indeed, the scene feels particularly loaded with stories left untold and choices not taken. Notice that Mildred briefly misconstrues Dix’s removal of his shoes as sinister preparation for flirtatious engagement. While the audience sees Dix seated and carrying out the action, Ray cuts back to Mildred before the first shoe hits the floor. In a close shot, the focus is on Mildred’s face, which at first turns abruptly, startled by the unexpected noise, before easing into quizzicalness with a slight scrunching of her eyebrows. As a result, with this perspective, cause and effect are visually separated for the viewer and there is a heightened sense that, in fact, like Mildred, she does not yet understand Dix’s motives.

(Cont.)

I’m sure that most readers of this film blog hoped that Father Christmas would have delivered at least one DVD to them for the 25th of December. A few may have gone to the cinema on Christmas day, watching the latest release as part of their celebrations. At home, over the holiday season, many enjoy the luxury of being able to sit in front of the TV without guilt. To watch a film from start to finish without moving—reaching for a chocy brazil or a different treat before another begins—is, presumably, quite a common routine. But what to make of this passive digestion of the film in front of us?

In the cinema, passivity is enforced: obviously, the ability to pause, rewind or fast-forward the picture is removed. The tale is told from start to finish (usually) without interruption. Even the desire for a bathroom break must be resisted or, at the very least, timed to perfection. There is, nonetheless, an appeal to this setting. The experience of going to the cinema—the large (but not that large) seats, too much popcorn, even more fizzy pop and the effect of an audience—certainly attracts at times. (Part of the enjoyment comes from the specifics of different cinemas. My local independent, for example, unlike the large nationwide chains, contains a much smaller number of seats and sells cups of coffee or tea, rather than Coke, and bulk-bought sweets, rather than popcorn.) The desire for this experience often leads viewers to see films they wouldn’t think about watching at home. A friend and I recently saw the awful Saw 3D (2010) simply because we wanted to spend an hour or two in front of the silver screen.

We may have been left, like Alex (Malcolm McDowell) in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), with our eyes wired open, powerfully entranced, overwhelmed by the environment rather than the picture itself. Yet even in more austere institutions like the British Film Institute, there is the advantage of  a large screen of high quality and an excellent sound system. In this atmosphere of almost academic calm (as in most libraries, the source of any noise—from rustling to chatting—is silenced), I find I’m better able to concentrate. It was in the BFI earlier this year that I saw, for the first time, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963). I benefited from watching the complex (and long) picture in these surroundings, free from distractions.

That is not to say, though, that certain films should be watched in certain ways: Saw 3D should not necessarily be bolstered by popcorn and hot dogs; The Leopard can be enjoyed wholeheartedly at home. Instead, it’s probably nearer the truth to suggest that different environments appeal at different times. But there’s a small problem in the living room: there’s the rub of a choice. The ability to control the pace of the story becomes available: we can pause the picture to think about what has just been said, rewind it to watch the camera pan again and even stop it for a time, if we wish. Alternatively, of course, we can click play and leave the film to progress from start to finish. This stop-start approach to viewing allows us to consider the small details that could pass us by during the linear march to the picture’s end. Equally, though, breaking a film up in this way—paying attention to individual fragments or instead a patchwork of many pieces—perhaps leaves us struggling to see larger thematic or structural arrangements. We could turn into figures that resemble Harry (Gene Hackman) from The Conversation (1974): endlessly replaying his recording of an individual utterance and, in so doing, isolating it from its context, missing its meaning.

Thankfully, though, we can watch a film more than once. Those that wish to can peruse at home favorite moments from films seen in the cinema. We can put a picture on in the background and saunter in and out of the room. We can wait with a notepad to jot down the subtleties of a shot that we’ve replayed several times. Especially with the extra time that the season allows us, along with a new DVD or two, we really can enjoy the show.

This is a post in celebration of Shane Meadows’ This Is England ’86. It finished earlier tonight in terrific style.

It’s interesting to consider how film directors would take to working in television, an obviously different context for a familiar medium. Here, for example, themes that run throughout Meadows’s work, as well as characters first introduced in his film This is England (2006), must both be developed as he picks up the narrative three years on and also reconfigured – restructured – for a way of telling that breaks the story into four discreet one hour sections, themselves, when first aired, subdivided into four. It seems that Meadows and Jack Thorne (the writers) answered this formal demand by making each of the episodes connect, using the same characters and continuing the larger narrative, while also remaining self-contained in their emotional structure. Episodes three and four are arguably the most satisfying television because, while they bring the grand narrative to a conclusion, they have a clearer internal structure than episodes one and two, each moving from tongue-in-cheek comedy to a powerful emotional climax. I felt something building in the first two episodes – the larger narrative of ’86 - but they both felt a little wooly. They each played like a quarter of a film, rather than a television episode. That my father could watch and enjoy episode three in isolation, having missed not only the previous two but the film as well, perhaps indicates what I mean. (This is no knock on Tom Harper, who directed episodes one and two.)

Despite certain reservations about the structure of the first two episodes, my favourite song from the series comes at the end of the second. It’s Ludovico Einaudi’s beautiful Berlin Song. The pianist’s haunting compositions provide another, more emotionally driven, means of connecting the series together. Used extensively throughout, his songs often occur at the most engaging and challenging moments. For example, at the end of episode three, Meadows uses Einaudi’s Solo as the non-digetic accompaniment to the violent raping of Trev (Danielle Watson) by Mick (Johnny Harris). This montage is really something. (The term’s used here in two senses: the more general description of a selection of shots accompanied by music and the stricter definition of the combined effect achieved through the juxtaposition of these shots.)

Four scenes are involved. There is the rape, using a staggeringly still camera, reminiscent of Kubrick’s portrayal of violence in A Clockwork Orange (1971). There are moments of joyous friendship, as Milky (Andrew Shim) mounts Gadget (Andrew Ellis) to celebrate an England goal. The football is also celebrated in the pub, in the toilet of which Lol (Vicky McClure) drunkenly ponders. Finally, there is the shock of Combo (Stephen Graham) falling through Shaun’s (Thomas Turgoose) window. The combined effect of the images is complex: for example, the action of thrusting is played out in a minor key by Mick but counterpointed in a major by the elated Milky; Lol’s isolated sadness is matched only a room away by the happiness of her sister Kelly (Chanel Cresswell), surrounded by the rest of the group; a close up of Trev’s hand gripping the sofa makes the wide shot in which she is confined to the left third of the frame, buried in said sofa, feel all the more empty. Einaudi’s piece is combined with two strands of digetic sound: the football commentary, including the memorable line ‘you can only stand and stare at English joy’, and Mick incessantly grunting ‘Fuck you’. It’s a powerful and poetic end.

Poetic is right: this montage is highly crafted, at once tragic, sickening and, it must be admitted, in some senses beautiful. Einaudi’s composition, an important part of the effect, is in the minor key but no less beautiful for being sad. In the final episode, Meadows moves even further towards carefully wrought visual poetry, throwing his gritty subject matter into a new and challenging light. At a larger level, he swirls narratives of different scales together: while the individual stories of Lol, Shaun, Milky and all the others are at the centre of ’86, Meadows demonstrates how connected they all are; he hints at lives once remembered, as characters central to the plot of the film only nudge their way into the series; the 1986 World Cup – watched by a nation following a national team – gently frames these individuals but only ever obscurely stands for the broader social feelings of the time; in turn, to a certain extent, still raw international tensions are revealed and played out in miniature by England and Argentina on the football pitch. We are brought once again to the individual level, when we remember that Shaun’s dad died in the Falklands War.

Artful in structure at a number of levels, this series is nonetheless emotionally powerful. The performances are super and the dialogue feels wonderfully natural in its funny moments and devastatingly sparse in the tragic. When, I wonder, will we see something like this on television again?

The thing that’s so impressive about Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) is that he takes an already great story and produces a new work of art that is entirely his own. In his interpretation of Macbeth (1606), Kurosawa is not afraid to alter Shakespeare’s design if the result is a more effective piece of cinema. He goes beyond a good screen version of the play and simply creates an exceptional film: to use Hitchcock’s phrase, we see Kurosawa remove a highly-praised piece of drama out from under ‘the proscenium arch’ and use all the techniques unique to cinema to recast it convincingly and powerfully in celluloid.

What, then, separates Throne of Blood from other attempts at adaptation, from, say, the Macbeths of Welles or Polanski (1948 and 1971)? There’s a clue in their titles: it’s something to do with words. While most directors attempt to respect the language of Shakespeare, Kurosawa’s Japanese script allows him to give his images more importance than his words in the narration of his inherited story. While an English modernization of the play is in danger of seeming intellectually weak, shying away from Shakespeare’s linguistic and artistic mastery, a translation cannot hope to render the same subtleties of semantics and word play and is, then, in a sense, freer to take the broader structure and transform it. While Polanski and Welles make their debt to Shakespeare explicit, Kurosawa draws a distinction between Macbeth and his Throne of Blood. (To be clear, though, I’m not suggesting that Polanski or Welles do not use cinematic language to tell their stories, nor am I necessarily suggesting that Kurosawa’s film is better than theirs. I only mean that it’s more difficult to make anything other than the words the most important element of an English presentation of Shakespeare, on screen, stage or otherwise.)

For me, the effectiveness of Throne of Blood lies in its rhythm and atmosphere. Both are rooted in the movement of Kurosawa’s camera and the editing of his picture. Take, for example, the scene in which Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) brings the body of Tzuzuki (Hiroshi Tachikawa) to Miki (Akira Kubo). The establishing shot is a wide shot (WS) which shows Washizu riding ahead of the coffin carriers and, as he approaches the castle, calling out to those inside. This part of the scene is constructed as follows: Kurosawa chooses to shoot a close up (CU) of Washizu, allowing us to focus upon the nervous uncertainty drawn on his face, revealed through the shape of his mouth and the creases around his eyes. He then cuts to a WS of the seemingly deserted castle. The wall fills the frame and parallels visually the silence that is oppressive and apparently perpetual. The few empty windows that stud the wall create a similar feeling to the two on the first floor of the house in The Amityville Horror (1979): with the castle anthropomorphized, we feel Washizu is being watched but we’re not sure from where or by whom. With these two shots established, the film moves between them.  The call and response is hypnotic in the emptiness it reveals. Just as we lull, Kurosawa introduces a shot of the coffin, which has now reached the castle, and then returns to the establishing WS. The editing decisions allow us to feel the emotions of Washizu, for a moment, before the cut to the coffin returns us to the wider course of events.

As the coffin reaches the castle, Kurosawa reveals the psychological and political shifts that take place. Miki, on horseback, sits just inside the entrance to the castle; Washizu, also on a horse, rests a few metres outside. The section unfolds as follows:

1. WS. As the gates of the castle open, revealing Miki, the camera is positioned about six foot behind Washizu to his left side.
2. The camera, maintaining a WS, moves to just over Washizu’s RIGHT shoulder. After a pause, Miki rides slowly forwards, stopping a few inches away from the other horse.
3. The camera shifts to a close shot (CS) in front and to the right side of Washizu.
4. There is, then, the reverse shot: a CS in front and to the left side of Miki.
5. As 3.
6. As 2.
7. In the same position as 1, though now the coffin fills the bottom third of the frame.

Two aspects of this arrangement strike me. To begin, it’s artfully structured. At its center, it is a shot reverse-shot sequence (3, 4 and 5). This center creates a mirror in which the rest of the section is doubled: in other words, 1 is paralleled by 7 and 6 parallels 2. It’s the earlier movement – the ebb and flow between Washizu and the wall – reconfigured to take us from far-away observations of the action to a series of close-ups and back again. Again the coffin breaks the tension that Kurosawa generates: it is only by set-up 7 that we know for certain that Washizu and his package have been accepted into Miki’s castle. Secondly, we notice that Kurosawa creates this tension partly by playing with the line between the two men (without actually crossing it). He makes the camera zig-zag towards the shot reverse-shot sequence, moving from beyond the left shoulder of Washizu (1) to the right (2) and back again (3). Just as the established conventions for shooting dialogue threaten to dissolve, there is also a wobble of uncertainty surrounding Washizu’s request to enter Miki’s castle.

(Cont.)