The picture must be better to see the second or third time than it is the first time. There musty be more in it to see at one time than any one person can grasp. It must be so ‘meaty,’ so full of implications, that everybody will get something out of it.
Orson Welles quoted in Brady, Frank. Citizen Welles. Scribners: 1989. p. 356.
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.
As regards content, the persistence of certain key antinomies structuring all his work has already been noted [this is from the Conclusion of the book]. While these originate in an underlying opposition between the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual, they are realized in a variety of recurrent forms: appetite versus austerity, self-indulgence versus self-denial, artifice versus nature, betrayal versus fidelity, reason versus faith, fragmentation versus unity, part versus whole. In various ways the abstract visual parameters available to filmmaketers (inside/outside, up/down, center/periphery, as well as black/white and color oppositions) are emplyed to give form to these antinomies. The result is a thematic recurrence of contrasts between mountain and valley, city and country, Paris and the provinces, day and night.
The narrative structure within which these oppositions are realized is usually overtly or covertly circular, with an extensive central element constituting a “digression” or hole in time through which the temptation of the temporal intrudes. The digression will seem to promise escape from a trap which the protagonist feels closing around him or her, but will come to be seen rather as itself a trap from which the protagonist must escape–hence the circularity. In the course of closing the circle, a threatened distortion or inversion of the “natural” order of things will be corrected. (106)
…the narrative chain is not segmented into the ceaseless shot/reverse-shot clusters that are typical of psychological editing. There is little recourse to the “informative” close-ups of face, hand or object which standard filmmaking employs in order to “orient” the spectator and avoid any indecision or ambiguity.
This avoidance of the two more sophisticated sets of editing practice is characteristic of the technical discretion of Rohmer’s films. In fact, the avoidance of such “normal” practices as film music, optical punctuation, expressive camera angles, and most tracking shots is at times so marked as to register as itself a form of aggressive technical experimentation. Cumulatively, these absent techniques would have served to structure the spectator’s response to the profilmic material, and the contemporary spectator is accustomed to expect such subconscious orientation. Its absence serves to endow that profilmic material, in the spectator’s eyes, with something or the same ambiguity and indeterminacy which it holds for the central protagonist, who, craving certainty yet trapped in endless conjecture, is finally constrained to an act of largely irrational commitment, of faith.
[...] The reason is simple: Rohmer associates with his enigmas neither the plot elements (threat, deadlines, intercutting) nor the technical practices (close-ups, expressive editing, expressionist lighting) which construct suspense in mysteries and thrillers. This avoidance of the viewer manipulation inherent in dramatic narratives is perhaps the strongest evidence supporting Rohmer’s claim to be producing both a moral and a realist cinema. (108)
Crisp, C. G. Eric Rohmer, Realist and Moralist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
But the moment-by-moment texture of the scene allows the individual shots, gestures, and sounds to drift somewhat free. Each image takes on a more intrinsic weight, and the juxtaposition of picture and sound acquires a resonance that we usually call poetic. A shot of Eva in the sun playing with the Rubik’s cube, unanchored in time (during class? before class started?), invites us to apply metaphors, especially once we learn her name. Pascal’s thorny hair suggests not only extraterrestrials but the explosion of a nova. The silhouetted prof, detached from the mechanism he has set in motion, hints at an unknown deity watching the game play out according to his rules. Why do Godard films spawn long essays built out of erudite associations? Because the narrative progression relaxes and we can weave our own connotations out of what we see and hear.
If you don’t want to go down the expanding-association route, there’s another one open. When individual moments no longer accumulate ordinary dramatic pressure, we can savor the fugitive pleasures of the separate shots (light on face, lips by ear) and the patterns they form: flipover cuts, yellow hair and yellow facets, bookended shots of Eva at the window.
Those patterns, it should be clear, depend on our sensing a bump at every shot change, looking for a way to skip across the gap that Godard creates. The same belief that meaning and effect are born of gaps impelled Kuleshov too, and perhaps even Lloyd. If we pay attention to those gaps we can feel minds—both the filmmaker’s and ours—at work in them.
David Bordwell on Godard’s Je vous salue Marie and constructive editing. “What happens between shots happens between your ears.” Observations on film art and FILM ART. Feb 8, 2008.
Explaining anything involves analyzing it, at least to some degree. Analysis is a matter of breaking up whole phenomena into relevant parts and showing how they work together. [...] An academic film critic will divide a film into parts (scenes, sequences, “acts”) to see how the overall architecture works. Explaining something also involves describing it. [...] An academic film critic will describe a scene in detail, for that’s necessary to understanding why it carries a particular meaning or achieves a particular effect. Analysis and description are rare in ordinary conversation and in film reviewing because of limits of time and space, but also because the film scholar is interested in something that isn’t so pressing for other parties: explanations.
David Bordwell. “Studying Cinema” (2000) on the difference between ordinary film conversation/film reviewing and film criticism.
