Notes for a Future Manifesto

But it’s rare to find an American ready to keep the camera still and steady and to let the actors sculpt the action in continuous time, saving the cuts to underscore a pivot or heightening of the drama. Now nearly every American filmmaker is inclined to frame close, cut fast, and track that camera endlessly. I’ve called this stylistic paradigm intensified continuity.

As Los Angeles agent and former editor Larry Mirisch once put it in conversation with me: “They used to move their actors; now they move the camera.” Most of today’s prominent directors prefer kinetic camerawork and machine-gun cutting. This tends to make their staging rather simple and static: we get stand-and-deliver or walk-and-talk (subject of a blog entry here).

The result is a split in contemporary American style. Action scenes are often gracefully and forcefully choreographed (though sometimes the editing fuzzes up character position and overall geography). By contrast, conversation scenes, which could be choreographed as well, are handled either as a Steadicam walk-and-talk or simply as seated actors talking to one another, with cuts breaking up the lines and the camera on the prowl.

Bordwell, David. “Hands (and faces) across the table.” Observations on film art and Film Art 18 Feb 1008.

Bordwell’s comparisons of styles could be applied in many ways to breakdowns and compositions in comics. I think generally when someone says a comic is “cinematic” they mean in the sense of fast cutting/kinetic camerawork style of film. Compare just about any contemporary superhero comic to something like Louis Riel. That link to “intensified continuity” is also worth following and reading. I feel some sense of analogy between Bordwell’s intensified continuity and the conventional manga style of close ups and lots of panels per scene.

The principle technique of storytelling is “analytical montage” (Groensteen L’Univers des Mangas (1991)) in which the sequencing of plates [panels] is very resourceful in comparison with a rather constrained Euro-American montage and page layout. In manga, there is no textual interference. Analytical montage entails the “scattering” of a story event over different frames. A scene that would “normally” (at least, from a western point of view) be captured in a single pane - with the necessary (or if you will redundant) descriptive information - is now cut up over different frames. The isolated frames, with alternating “camera-angles”, are put together in a visual continuum. Especially fighting scenes provide excellent illustrative material to this technique. For instance, the narrative in Crying Freeman (Koike & Ikegami 1994) proceeds through a rapid succession of images in the visual chain. Manga artists are real masters in creating such sweeping visual arrangements. Story tension and atmosphere are effected through variation of the number of plates [panels] per page - while applying cinematographical techniques such as fade-out, fade-in and superimposition - ultimately resulting in flexible page layouts. The ‘mise-en-page’ shows endless variation and is baroque compared to prototypical Euro-American page layouts.

Aarnoud Rommens. “Manga story-telling/showing” in Image & Narrative 1 (2000).