Atonement: That Tracking Shot Does More For the Theme Then Just Show Us the Intensity of Dunkirk7/21/2017 As Dunkirk is prepared to be released, film critics have started calling attention to the spectacular five minute Dunkirk tracking shot from Joe Wright’s Atonement. There’s been praise of the suspense and the harrowing images of the scene, but the Dunkirk sequence means much more in the scheme of the film beyond the initial setting and the events of the scene (1). Atonement, based off of the book by Ian McEwan, is often about interpretation. The pivotal moment of the film that changes everything for its characters is specifically focussed on the interpretation of one character, Briony, a 13 year old girl, that on top of being jealous, ignorantly accuses the housekeeper’s son, Robbie of raping and hurting both her sister Cecilia (whom Robbie loves) and her cousin. He did not, of course, the cousin was hurt by a family friend and Cecilia and Robbie are in love, but because of the interpretation of the events by young Briony, the whole affair goes up in flames and Robbie is sent to a prison and then a war. This sets the stage for the tracking shot to come, but before we actually discuss the tracking shot itself and how it fits into the thematic core of the film, we need to discuss how said tracking shot came to be because it almost wasn’t part of the movie. Director Joe Wright told David Gritten of The Telegraph, that the sequence was originally going to “...[include] air attacks from Stukas…” (2) , but that he needed four million dollars that his producer wasn’t going to give him. So after that, they decided to make it a scene of just the beach, with 40 individual montage shots, but eventually, due to time, the filmmakers changed their minds and decided to turn it into one take, a decision which would transform the meaning of the scene (2). To repeat, Atonement is often about interpretation and interpretation is often built into the thematic center of the film and the performances. Examples of this come in two fold, with Briony interpreting the love of her sister and Robbie as possibly harmful, but also tinged with jealousy, and there are also aspects of interpretation in the performances. Many of the conversations in the film are had with hidden intentions, whether it’s Benedict Cumberbatch talking to Juno Temple about her parents and his factory in the attempt to seduce her or Robbie and Cecilia’s own banter regarding their love. These subsequent layers of subtext, even working their way into the typewriter clicks of the score, always have us on the defensive looking for things to interpret and extrapolate on. This brings us to the Dunkirk sequence, which without a heavy bout of intensity brings us to that beach, just by showing us all of the pieces. As Robbie passes by men partying, thinking, shooting horses, and cooling car engines, and even a beached ship, we the audience are forced to put together the horrors that these men faced in our own heads. Wright, in lacking the ability to show direct action, shows us things that only suggest the wider action of the war. We can only imagine the events that transpired with what we’re given, matching Briony’s ability to only form the shape of her interpretation by looking at a few small pictures in the whole. The long one shot format seems to only emphasize the view of someone looking in with the tracking shot, this shot being one that tends to call attention to itself, breaking the sense that the camera is a diegetic player in the scene, meaning that the audience isn’t actually experiencing the scene, they’re watching it, detached from the events, only left to interpret the horror and the loss hanging over the moment from what little sections we are shown. (1) To those who know how the film ends this becomes especially important because, *spoilers* what we’re seeing isn’t necessarily an accurate account of the Dunkirk evacuation, as honest as the film may be in that regard, because the second half of the film exists vaulting between reality and the written material that an elderly Briony writes in her last book, which is attempting to, within an art form, give Robbie and Cecilia (who both died in the war), the happiness that Briony denied them by telling a lie based on her interpretation. This would suggest that we are in fact watching what is simply an interpretation by another party emphasizing the reality that the scene can only be shaped by our interpretation of a few visual and audio elements, a few details, hoping to give us the whole, layering our own experience of the film into the theme of interpretation. Atonement is about interpretation by both the characters and the audience and the Dunkirk sequence is an excellent example its integration into the film. Bibliography
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Shakespeare is the type of writer where the substance of the plays is so rich, incredible, and timely that one can’t help but automatically differentiate the works by the style employed to bring them to life. Shakespeare’s plays have in essence become all about style, and the versions that don’t employ some sense of interesting style seem to lack purpose. Take, for instance, the 2013 version of the Bard’s Romantic Tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. If the merits of a Shakespeare adaptation lies in the style of the film, then this film is a failure, a straight telling of the tale that finds itself extremely boring and lacking any sense of interpretation or comment on the work. This is, of course, unlike the 1996 Baz Luhrmann version, which stands as a towering achievement in Shakespeare adaptation, that should be held up with the best of Olivier, Branagh, and Polanski. Why? Because it understands what Romeo and Juliet is the same way that Shakespeare understood Romeo and Juliet, in that it has the balls to make fun of the material, while also stepping completely into the glorification and exaggeration of said material. It has become a common school of thought to think that Romeo and Juliet is in some ways so absurd that it suggests comedy (we are of course talking tone and not genre technically). On one hand, the lust of the two protagonists is beautiful and pure and nice, but on the other hand, that beautiful purity raises the material to a level of absurdity that can’t be supported by anything else than material that holds such a stylistic flourish that it both glorifies and trivializes the material, something that is found consistently throughout Luhrmann’s adaptation. The film, whether by author intent or not, seems to understand the play the same way that Shakespeare did. Shakespeare seems to understand the play as an absurdity, even creating an obvious parody, he placed in his play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pyramus and Thisbe. In actively trivializing his own work, Shakespeare accepts that it is, in some stripes, trivial, something that this very self away version of Romeo and Juliet does too. I recently wrote about the film, Bãhubali: The Beginning, another film that perfectly accentuates the strengths that Luhrmann displays here. That film is a ridiculous piece of art, a cheesy, but honest work that plays fully into its emotionality in a way that allows you to both laugh at the care put into such a corny thing, but also accept the badassery (yep that’s a word) of the emotionality on display. To be honest, Romeo + Juliet feels a bit like a Bollywood version of Romeo and Juliet, remixing the play into a music video, corny, yet so emotional that you can’t help but be sucked in. The best moments are those that you can laugh at wholeheartedly and yet indulge in dramatically. An example of this is found in the meeting of Romeo and Juliet. Luhrmann stages the thing like the nightmare of a soap opera hater. He puts up the soft light, he blasts the cheesy late 90’s love ballad and he goes to town showing us the immediate attraction of the titular leads. It’s the type of moment that on one hand is laughable. The music, the close ups, the ungodly naive looking players, they all suggest parody...but it’s not. Instead, that cringeworthy, blistering emotionality seems to create a self-fulfilling circle on itself, with each directorial choice both trivializing and strengthening the connection at the center of the scene. This rampant emotionality combined with the trivialization creates an odd balance. It makes us completely aware of the stupidity that can be found in the center of the connection, but also of the beauty. We as an audience know how this all ends, and trivializing the love only accentuates the tragedy of it, making the audience realize that once and for all, the death means absolutely nothing. If we ourselves can only interpret the love itself as something that is not to be taken seriously, then we cannot take the death seriously, increasing the pathos and sadness grounded in the death of these poor lovers. The most interesting thing about the film is the way that this whole idea would not exist without Luhrmann’s efforts, with his style dictating the interpretation. Romeo and Juliet, played the way it is in the 2013 version (which is to say straight) lacks the extra layer pathos. Now, productions of this play lacking this pathos, aren't technically lesser, they just lack an extra layer. Shakespeare played straight and done well can be a beautiful thing. My favorite of the films adapted from his work is Branagh's, Hamlet. But Luhrmann is a bit more interesting. Part of Luhrmann's style is the way that he cuts film, speeding it up, and slowing it down in the effort to both heighten the style of the piece but also create an exasperating, deflating, break in the verisimilitude of the piece. By doing this, Luhrmann is even calling attention to the fact that each time the film is getting close to feeling legitimate, he can’t help but ridicule the material, forcing the loop of catharsis around and pressuring his audience to understand the sadness in all of this. Looking at many modern interpretations it’s impossible to ignore the reality that Romeo and Juliet’s love is ridiculous and Baz Luhrmann, using his ridiculous style provides the audience with a manifestation of the ridicule we should place on the love at the center of the film and therefore make the story even more pointless, even sadder. Michael Cimino’s HEAVEN'S GATE is a film that seems to know that history has already forgotten the events at its center, or at the very least, the true account of those events. The film itself, though intimate and scathing, seems detached from the events that formed it, both by historical inaccuracy and the progression of the story. This, in any other movie, would stand as an overwhelming fault, a bug inside of a film that would eventually lead to its failure, both as art and effective storytelling, but the most interesting thing about HEAVEN'S GATE is that this fact seems built into the way that the film’s narrative progresses and the actions of the characters, who themselves, seem desperate to not be forgotten in the expanse of history and yet are confronted with the reality that keeping those rosy colored glasses will make them painful for the nostalgia of the past. This is most evident in the actions of the characters in the twenty minute prologue at Harvard.
In basing the first twenty minutes of his film that is extensively about the West in the East, Cimino has accentuated this longing to not be forgotten. In his book about the structure of the Western, SIXGUNS AND SOCIETY, Will Wright writes, “Hence, in spite of its actual and more prolonged adventure, the East could never match the social turmoil of the West as a context for fiction, and more precisely, as a ground for myth,” (Wright 6). As a culture we understand the idea of the West much more than we do the East, and the characters of HEAVEN'S GATE or at least William C. Irvine (John Hurt) seem to understand this fact. He seems to understand that he will be forgotten as well as the time that he spent with the protagonist of the film, James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) at Harvard. His actions throughout the scene engage the audience as we figure out what he is attempting to do, using irony to balm the pain that comes from being forgotten, but also that of nostalgia. The film, following its haunting credits, fades onto the screen with a smokey look where the bright white sky in the background almost consumes the picture itself. The church that steeples high into the sky is faded, almost gone and as the camera pans down to reveal the streets of Harvard, we see James Averill sprinting down the road, in order to make it to his oration. The film fading into the background is important because it gives us an idea of the way that they events work. This prologue to the characters, even in the moment is a thing of the past, that is painful in it’s lack of meaning and satisfaction. Averill sprinting after the procession is a moment of honesty, as we see this “man of Harvard,” having slept in or something of the sort, is now sprinting after the procession he’s supposed to have been at. That honesty goes a long way because it creates a disappointment, something that the audience has to live with a lot in HEAVEN'S GATE. As much as Averill and the audience want this moment to really be good, it doesn’t mean anything that Averill must sprint after the procession because soon, it won’t matter. It’s a thing of the past, yet Averill will hold onto those days until about the point that Irvine does, thick in the fog of battle in the Johnson County War. Averill thinks it matters now and will later, until the battle washes his understanding of humanities ways away. Conversely, Irvine seems to be troubled with this at the start of the film and does almost everything in his power to leave a mark, something that is easily juxtaposed with the conflicted nature of Irvine’s actions later in the film. He seems to be a nihilist in denial in some ways, accepting in many a way that the world lacks substance, but always, ironically trying to fight back against that meaninglessness. This is found paramountly in his speech given at the oration, following the highly elitist speech given by the Dean of Students. Irvine, in this scene, tries to ironically joke his way through the speech, reducing the oration to a trivial matter, so he and his classmates will not have to struggle with the indulgent memory of said oration.. His speech starts off explaining the uselessness of the intellectual ideals that the college environment offered the men, explaining a story in which a young man asks his friend why he is so upset? The friend responds that he was looking for something to write about, trivializing the ideals of the college, which most likely encouraged the writing and considering of ideas. He’s saying that the achievement of the men that day, doesn’t mean anything, doing so ironically in order to find some understanding of the meaning behind all of it. He, with the story, seems to be attempting to find peace with the fact that all of this doesn’t mean anything, but we still must strive on “...we must endeavor to speak with as much ability as we can, but we must speak according to our ability,” (1). He then recites a speech that seems almost for a child, rhyming and explicitly attempting to break the importance of the oration. All of this is, of course, delivered with sarcasm attempting to make all of this funny, and it is as Irvine endeavors to make fun of the Dean, but this tone seems much more like a cry for understanding than an actual joking tone. A smirk on top of the desperate clawing to be remembered or even worse the horrors of actually remembering. The film luxuriates in the past, in an indulgence that will be forgotten. Irvine in trivializing the moment simply softens the blow but strengthens the pain. The next scene has the Harvard graduates all dancing in a beautiful circle, all enjoying life the way that they hope to remember forever as the reality of their world. Of course, this isn’t the case. By indulging in the enjoyment too much they’ve indulged in the fallacy that the college is too much, and the memories of all of it will haunt them forever. They in their ignorance, want the moment to be of great importance, they want to indulge in the fact that they are having the best time of their lives, they want it to be important, but unfortunately, they do not know that it will all be forgotten, overshadowed by the mythology of the West. The struggle of whether or not to put importance in the past is at the center of the internal and external narratives of HEAVEN'S GATE. The events at the center are so violent and horrifying that we can’t ignore them and yet we may want to, as they might hurt us. The opening twenty minutes show us both characters reacting to the inherent meaninglessness of the moment, but also indulging in the moment in a way that will lead to harm. As the prologue come to an end, Irvine, drowned out by the joyful songs of his compatriots yells, “IT’S OVER!” with the type of unbridled sadness that it can’t be ignored. He knows that this moment will hold pain and the only way to keep it surviving is to live with that. Special thanks to the writing of Scout Tafoya and Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, who inspired me to write about HEAVEN'S GATE and especially the prologue, which has so much to write about in it. Bibliography
Many comedies fly by with no external layering to their stories. They are simply improv machines where characters truly say some funny things, but the whole situation doesn’t actually feel very interesting or affecting of the comedy itself, other than to deliver the characters to a place where they can say funny things. Take, for example, the excellent comedy, Bridesmaids, which is a really great film, but its frame of taking place at a wedding doesn’t do much for the film other than letting funny stuff happen at a bridesmaids party, a wedding dress fitting and of course at a wedding. But sometimes in a blue moon, you get a comedy that by simply existing is contextualized by history. As of recent, the film that partakes in this is the Coen Brothers Hail, Caesar, a film that just by existing is a commentary on the conditions of old Hollywood which enriches an otherwise simple Coen comedy. Hollywood in the time period that Hail, Caesar is attempting to parody was a machine churning out films of increasing size and gravitas. Hail, Caesar obviously takes place at said time because it specifically parodies, Ben Hur, with the subtitle of the film “A Tale of the Christ,” becoming the punchline to an incredibly funny joke, accenting the ridiculous nature of plugging Christ into filmmaking, just to appeal to a wide audience (and if we’re speaking frankly, in order to put more boobs and gore into the movies). This context though takes the whole creation of the film into a whole different level, as the joke of the movie soon becomes itself the extent that the Brothers delve into recreating the trappings of old 50’s Hollywood. In their own attempt to recreate the time period, the Coen’s, have highlighted the absurdity of the lengths that old Hollywood went to, to create pictures of such an epic scale. Said absurdity does the film itself a wonderful favor, bolstering the ever present comedic tone of the piece, and keeping it from feeling a bit shallow. Hail, Caesar is built on this absurdity, with most of the scenes consisting of elaborate, drawn of sequences, highlighting the now ridiculous trappings of old Hollywood. Early in the film, this is represented by the parody of Ben Hur, titled Hail Caesar. Ben Hur, was a thousand of extras movie, and that, in this day and age, is just ridiculous, but also noble in its scale. The Coen’s themselves employed a lot of extras, who highlight this absurdity by just being there. There’s an outer narrative to the film that is just as funny as the inner narrative of Hollywood idiots, and this narrative tells the story of the almost absurd and hilarious lengths that the filmmakers must go to make a movie the same way that they did in the 50’s. This is again found in the film’s next sequence recreating the films of old Hollywood. This one is a parody of a mermaid film that is spectacularly impressive but also absolutely ridiculous to the point that it leads to the audience questioning the Coen Brothers devotion to recreating it. Touches like a mechanical whale and the synchronized swimming, lend themselves to making the moment seem all the more absurd, all leading one to see both the glorification and ridicule of the methods of old Hollywood. Glorification is as much present as ridicule, with each sequence being choreographed to the point of being stupidly impressive. The synchronized swimming sequence is one of the most fascinating and beautiful sequences ever put to film. By modern standards, it may be absurd, but it is amazing and there’s a lot of work put into it. The fact that a sequence of such beauty can have so much fun with itself, enlivens the prose of Hail, Caesar and gives the hilarity context. Said story being placed against the idiocy of the main cast of actors, chiefly George Clooney’s Baird Whitlock and Channing Tatum’s Burt Gunnery and the incompetence of the Communists at the center, shown with their self-aggrandizing importance, creates a sense of the exciting if a bit stupid energy of old Hollywood. Upon watching Hail, Caesar for the first time, I found myself disappointed by the film’s lack of depth in its prose. It just seemed the actions of a bunch of idiots that didn’t actually have very much to say or be excited about, but when analyzing the contexts of what Hail, Caesar both loves and makes fun of, the comedy takes on a new light, of such incredible quality that it makes one sit up and realize just how amazing and hilarious this bygone era of Hollywood was. Bibliography 1. Hail, Caesar. Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Perf. Josh Brolin. 2016. DVD. Dario Argento’s masterpiece, Suspiria, welcomes you into its twisted universe with a loud cacophony of sound. It sounds like a storm coming in, and it draws the audience’s attention to said storm. Then, the storm calms and we listen for anything else and out of the blackness and silence grows a spine-tingling song. Goblin’s theme to Suspiria. What I find most interesting about this moment is that while the cacophony of noise should be the most shocking part of the scene, it plays much more like the calm before the real storm, which is the quiet tingling, whispering score. We experience the loud noise, which should traditionally give us fear, but there’s nothing inherently scary about it here. Suspiria only starts to become creepy, when we confront the silence and then the score, underscored by the incredibly creepy whispering. This is Argento telling us that even in the quietest of moments, even when we know that the storm has calmed itself, we are not safe. Instead, it is in those moments we are in the most danger. We are in the horror when the silence comes and the score starts to creep into our bones and there’s nothing we can do about it. Argento is a master filmmaker and this opening is a great start for his masterpiece.
This becomes even more terrifying when the score itself seems to occupy a large amount of the film. There is an interesting moment when the score cuts in and out as our protagonist exits an airport, almost compelling the camera forward and along the story. We know that outside of the airport offers some type of danger, that the school our protagonist offers some kind of danger because the score transports said danger upon us. It sounds like something out of a sinister fairy tale. The score than overtakes the film as the protagonist enters a taxi. There is no escape. In the calm between the storm, during the storm itself, the theme, the fear, is present. The theme itself has a driving force as well that seems to make even the most mundane of moments intense and a driving force in the story. Of course, all of this is combined with the expert direction of Dario Argento and the cinematography of Luciano Tovoli, who, during the airport scene, push the camera out towards the doors with the music playing to accentuate the way that the music drives the plot. The camera itself, almost always, near the beginning of the film, has a dynamism to it, and when it doesn’t, you can tell. When the camera holds on something, it’s almost as if we are not moving, but the cogs of the story are. Something horrifying is in the process of happening, but we as an audience are left ignorant of said horrors. When the score does finally cut out, it is at a moment of ignorance for us. We are transported into the POV of the main character, as Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) attempts to enter the school during a storm and is interrupted by a fleeing student shouting at the top of her lungs about something, we the audience do not hear. The lack of the score here is to allow us to transfer out of the dreamy haze of consciousness in the story that existed in the opening moments of the film and into the more clueless fear of the main story. The next more murderous moments also have a score, a pounding, haunting score of unbridled intensity, as the young woman who ran from the school before is going to stay in a new apartment. She is attacked, of course, and a similar pounding score is found, underscoring the chaos of the gruesome moments, but also the violence that lies in them. Again, as this attack is played out the cinematography and the direction are excellent. Argento starts the camera far back from the subject and from outside of a window, framing the subject inside the window as if to trap her in a cage. As soon as we see the next cut, which breaks continuity, of the victim sitting when we had seen her standing, we know that Argento is ramping up, creating jumps in time, ready to show us the horrors he has in store. Soon the victim’s face is being pushed against the glass of a window, physically distorting the victim’s face, and the music and sound create the noises of a guttural screaming. The touches like the distortion of the face, the guttural screaming of the music, and the cold symmetry of the building the scene takes place in, all serve to make the enhance the film’s ability to create a masterful carnival of fright. Argento, in cutting, oddly doesn’t match continuity again.. Argento transports his subject into a whole different place, a floor up creating a jarring, blend of an edit. He’s transporting his audience from moment to moment, cut to cut, but he’s cutting the time short bringing the events close and closer to the audience. We are experiencing chaos, and we are experiencing the fear of the moment, eventually leading to the bloody conclusion of the stabbing of a heart on screen, the breaking of the glass and the hanging of the woman. Argento, after providing us with a flurry of edits, slowly gives us a terrifying pan down and over of the victims of the attack, punctuated by the image of a woman with a piece of glass splitting her face. Argento has shown us the result of the calm after the storm twice now and it’s not too pretty either time. The opening minutes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria are some of the best in horror movie history and they do so by blending the effortless music, sound, and visual elements of many artists. This is a spectacular film and I had to write about it. I had to write about the terrifying heights of Argento’s Suspiria. Bibliography Suspiria. Dir. Dario Argento. Perf. Jessica Harper. RCS. Settore Quotidiani, 1977. ...yes, this is the part, where the seventeen-year-old (though technically eighteen years old in a few weeks) breaks down Steven Shainberg and Erin Cressida Wilson’s Secretary, and if all you can think is “GOD HELP THE CHILDREN FROM SEEING SUCH DESPICABLE CONTENT,” I kindly invite you to leave this essay. Anyone else mature enough to keep reading, I welcome it, and I hope you enjoy the things that I have to say. Secretary is a bit of a hard sell of a movie. It’s the story of a woman simultaneously giving up all the power that she has in the world to a man and yet at the same time, taking control of the life that she wants to have. That entire sentence seems entirely oxymoronic, but it’s true, mainly in that Secretary is about the development of a dominant and submissive relationship. Most people going to see a movie called Secretary, unless of course, they had done their research, would not be expecting a movie about a troubled young woman who meets a man who helps her “embrace her pain”, but also has his own paralyzing insecurities. So, how do you sell an audience said relationship? How do you keep an audience glued to their seats, even as an awkward and erotic film plays out in front of them? This isn’t the cool eroticism of 50 Shades of Grey. This is the messy, uncomfortable, and cringe-inducing type of just about the best kind. The answer as it almost always is the concept of audience engagement. Secretary is the type of movie where while the story finds itself very simple, each frame gives the audience something to look at and consider behind what is a straightforward love story. Take, for example, an early cut in the film, that while acting as a punchline also acts as a terrifying expansion of our understanding of the main character, Lee Holloway. Lee (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) finds herself in a house dominated by a drunk father and a subservient mother and after seeing her father hurt her mother, Lee takes a boiling tea kettle and does the one thing that she knows she can do. She hurts herself with it. The cut fades to Lee lying in a swimming pool, buoyed by eight floaties, two on each of her arms and two on each of her legs. The fade in lets us assume a lot of things. First, Lee drifts in the water, accentuating that Lee herself is simply drifting through life, not really sure what is real or not. This corresponds to a later line from her lover Mr. E. Edward Grey (James Spader) about how she hurts herself because “when [she] sees evidence of the pain inside, [she] finally knows that [she] is really there.” Lee doesn’t really seem to exist in the world, she just drifts through it. This fade in also prompts the audience to actively take part in watching the details of what Lee might be doing to herself. The previous scene depicted her burning her leg with a tea kettle, so when we see the buoys around her legs and arms, we assume that they are covering up something. We, however, only saw her burn one part of her leg, which then has us actively thinking about whether or not any of the other buoys are covering up other parts of her. There’s also the aspect of her hiding herself from the audience, not showing a true self, until, near that ending of the movie, she displays her true self to Mr. Grey, scars and all. That’s only one scene though and it lacks any of the great dialogue that peppers the movie. Let’s take a look at a scene later in the movie, where the dialogue itself becomes a vessel for audience engagement. Lee wants Mr. Grey to dominate her, but Mr. Grey is self-conscious about his want to dominate another person. This leads to a confrontation, at the end of which Mr. Grey fires Lee. The interesting thing about said scene is that Mr. Grey repeats the questionnaire that he offered Lee when he was interviewing her for a job, almost leading us to assume that he is attempting to reassure himself that this is the right decision. That he needs to run over the criteria one last time before he makes a decision. The audience in hearing these questions being rattled off, and watching the fearful demeanor that Spader lends to the character, as well as the slow zooming towards the face of Lee, is forced to read the subtext of the scene. This is great writing and direction because it forces the audience to actively engage in the scene, which is punctuated almost halfway through by Mr. Grey asking, “Do you want to be my secretary?” meaning, “Do you want to submit to me?” and Lee responding in the silence of the room, with a warm smile on her face, “yes.” The greatness of Secretary lies in what is offscreen, the subtext. We so obviously know what each character really wants out of the other that every single word doesn’t mean said word, it means “Will you submit to me or will you dominate me?” The same goes for the scenes of eroticism. As Mr. Grey spanks or does some sexual thing to Lee, while there is a very present surface eroticism, there’s also an implied eroticism. With each hit, we see the idea of the characters making love, we see a passion of the purest kind. There’s a stillness to the scenes where this happens. The sound drowns out and it is just the two of them experiencing the moment. The hypnotic loss of sound forces the audience to focus on the intensity of the relationship. To visualize the eroticism in its full force as only a little comes out on screen. The audience is actively taking part in the moment rather than just watching it. So, how do you sell any type of content to any type of audience? Well, I’d probably say that some types you couldn’t sell to any audience, especially when it is of such an erotic nature, but that being said, I think that keeping the audience actively engaged and thinking throughout is the best way to keep them from being offended by said content. Audiences want to be interested I think, even shown something of the pure spectacle, anything that can get them to feel that catharsis and even with “inappropriate content,” I think they’ll still watch the movie if it is interesting to them. Secretary, for as simple as its story is, has plenty to break down and is one of the most interesting movies out there. Bibliography 1. Secretary. Dir. Steven Shainberg. Eagle Pictures, 2002. While I myself have not experienced much of Indian cinema, what I have explored tend to be long films populated by multiple tones, at one moment being a badass action movie, at others being a silly comedy, and always having a few dance numbers of great energy thrown into the film for good measure. Tonal shifts often populate films, but they often do so in a negative way. Suicide Squad and more have all suffered greatly in this department but in Bãhubali: The Beginning the filmmakers, handle the tonal shift in a way that makes the film experience incredibly smooth by using the juxtaposition of character emotion and audience emotion, in some of the smartest tonal shifts I have ever witnessed. So, to properly look at the way that Bãhubali switches its tones on a dime, we need to take a look at the tones themselves. Bãhubali starts out as an intense action film, but only stays that way for a few minutes before it shifts into an entertaining, somewhat silly, movie about a young man who is trying to gain the love of a young woman. This tone, however, after showing us the niceties of the world of Bãhubali, sheds away into a much darker adventure story full of murder and chained up prisoners. The film will vault between the silliness and the darkness throughout the entire amazing experience, a move that would typically cripple the tonal palette of any film, due to the way that harsh tonal shifts can fracture the verisimilitude of an experience. That doesn’t happen in Bãhubali, though. Two scenes early in the film accentuate this strength greatly. Shiva (Prabhas) has found a mask that has dropped from a waterfall, giving promise to the fact that there is a beautiful woman at the top that he may seduce. The following sequence is an incredibly intoxicating but also ironic sequence of Shiva climbing the waterfall (like a badass) lured on, in song and dance, by his projected image of the woman at the top. She dances and sings to him about how he will come and sweep her up in love. The moment seems to be silly and hilarious because it is played so over the top that it seems to make fun of Shiva’s ignorance towards the ways of women. He sees her as an object that he can get if only he can climb the waterfall. This scene also serves to contextualize the jarring shift that will occur in the next scene, showing us a funny and overall exciting view of the heroics of our hero, but also the follies of his perception. He almost seems childish in his way up the mountain and it infuses this early moment with the sweetness that it needs to later provide us with an excellent tonal shift. The second scene comes once Shiva has made it up the mountain. As he explores the woods at the top, the same woman of his dreams appears, sprinting away fearfully from some armed guards. The moment that she appears on screen is just as Romantic as the perception of her that Shiva imagined on the mountain. It’s in slow motion, panicked, in need of his help. The filmmakers smartly play into our expectations of Shiva saving his female compatriot as he soon gives chase. This is the filmmakers teasing us with our expectations. By giving us exactly what we expected to see, they’re also luring us into a tonal trap, ready to spring it on us once the real action of the scene gets going. In a moment of jarring fluidity (that makes sense) the love interest, known as Avanthika (Tamannah) yells to her own compatriots to throw her a sword, which she promptly catches and stabs into one of the guards. The moment takes the movie from the silliness of the earlier scene into the darkness of the next few scenes, and it does so jarringly, but that jarring sense is perfect for the moment. The filmmakers juxtapose Shiva’s own shifting perception of Avanthika with the shifting of the film, therefore placing the surprise of Shiva on the audience. Our own surprise in said shifting tone matches the surprise of Shiva, making the surprise of the jarring tonal shift feel fluid and natural to the audience. This type of tonal shift, where the characters intense or tempered personal emotions drive the shift, is seen in other places throughout the film. Take, for example, the next one that happens in the film, in which the story transfers back into the more whimsical story of love that is driving Shiva’s ambitions. The moment where the tone is allowed to change happens as Avanthika considers who she is and the passions of her cause. Framed, beautifully by a puddle reflection she stares into her own eyes, but soon brushes her fingers through the scene dismissing the person inside. This too, much like the last tonal shift throws the audience off guard, making us wonder why the passionate, skilled Avanthika would be so underwhelmed in herself? Again, the audience is allowed the same emotions as the character present in the scene, juxtaposing our own confusion at Avanthika's self-consciousness with Avanthika's own self-conscious confusion in herself. This leading into the affirming view of Shiva coming to underwater flirt (yes, this happens) with her smooths the tonal shift between the darker tone focussed on more violent aspects of the movie and the fun courting part of the story. Filmmaking is paramountly about storytelling and conveying the emotions of a character to the audience. In Bãhubali: The Beginning by allowing for the emotions of the main characters to match the emotions of the audience, the filmmakers rectify the flaws that may grow out of the genre that they are working in (not that the formula of Indian cinema is flawed, just that there has to be some difficulty in balancing tones that come with said formula). PS: If you haven't seen Bãhubali: The Beginning, I really recommend it. Bibliography Bãhubali: The Beginning. Dir. S.S. Rajamouli. Perf. Prabhas. 2015. DVD. The use of irony in satire has become a relevant and overused tool throughout the modern age. The use of earnestness towards utterly frightening things has been used extensively to make fun of many things from the army to the acting police force that we have. All of this is fun, well executed and funny, but what happens when it means more? What happens when a director and writer make a film that takes the culture that people live in and use their own tailor-made assumptions to create a film that is both a celebration and a scathing criticism of said culture? In 1969, on the verge of the “greatest decade of film,” William Goldman and George Roy Hill did just that. The result was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Butch Cassidy follows the titular characters as they rob banks and trains and eventually run from what is referred to as the “Super Posse,” a group of men tracking them down to kill them. They eventually flee to Bolivia, where they are eventually killed by the Bolivian army and police force. The trick to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is that the two titular characters are the protagonists of the piece, but they aren’t the good guys. Hollywood was just coming out of an era of both “Romantic Westerns,” like Shane and The Searchers. These were Westerns that idealized the “lone gunmen” and the nobility of the West. The recent past had also provided people with the “Spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci which often framed the criminals at their center as good men put upon by the West itself. Blondie, of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for example, is a murderer and a thief, but he’s ultimately framed as the “The Good” that the title suggests. There’s no irony there, either. One of the reasons why The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, is so excellent is that Blondie, an ultimately noble man comes out on top. He’s a hero and he’s a badass of incredible proportions and when that beautiful final shootout happens, good ultimately succeeds. Butch Cassidy lacks that angle. Butch and Sundance (played by undeniable heroes Paul Newman and Robert Redford) may be bantering and funny outlaws that the audience is supposed to enjoy, but their funny dialogue feels a bit forced. You don’t have to go too far to realize that this is intentional, not only mirroring the forced earnestness of the Romantic Westerns but also forcing us to like these characters. But we know we shouldn’t. I often hear that Butch Cassidy demythologized by using the more realistic trappings than the Romantic Westerns or the Spaghetti Westerns, but it does so by showing us two absolutely despicable murderers and forcing us to like them, commenting on the Western in the process. This wouldn’t work without the almost forced dialogue because, without it, we wouldn’t be clued into the reality that this isn’t reality, but it is, in fact, a myth. The film opens with the line, “Most of What Follows Is True,” which would seem to contradict this, but it instead seems to force the audience to think about the way that the film is actually fabricated. What we see isn’t real, but the fact that we the audience want to see it as the only reality is almost the point. The film takes a moment to show us the characters in pictures as they travel to Guatemala. It’s the type of sequence that allows us to see the film aggressively telling us to believe what we are seeing yet is very regressively telling the audience to not believe all of this. The final shot of the film has the men both running out to face their deaths, but they are ignorant to the fact that they will die. They are ridiculous and they have just murdered many honest men. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a self-aware fantasy, where the emotionality of its fantasy is just as compelling as what that fantasy is making the audience think. The Old West was supposed to be a place where the nobility prevailed and Butch Cassidy hopes to trick you into thinking that, but doesn’t succeed. It never wants to really succeed, and by applying irony to the West, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid proved that we could never go back to the Romantic West. Bibliography 1.Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Dir. George Roy Hill. Perf. Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 1969. DVD. Zack Snyder is a genuinely good director. He doesn’t always make good movies, but when he does, he makes them with a great eye for visual and digital composition and an always present respect for the craft of filmmaking. His most recent projects have come under some scrutiny, and for good reason, but I wanted to take a moment to celebrate what I think is almost the best sequence that he has put to screen. It’s not even in a film that is particularly good, but it is a sequence that was powerful enough to reframe the film for me and actually for a while caused me to enjoy the wonders that it had to offer. I am talking about the Terraform Machine Takedown sequence in Snyder’s first foray into Superman, Man of Steel. The premise of the scene is simple. The villain of the piece, General Zod, has placed two terraforming machines on either side of the planet. Superman has dispatched himself to destroy one, while other armed forces will destroy the other one which has touched down over the city of Metropolis. The following scenes are thrilling beyond anything any other Superman film has to offer, and the peak of the scene is one of the greatest moments in superhero mythmaking ever put to screen. The sequence begins with the machines landing and shooting beams into the Earth. We sense the scale and danger in them because of the way that one towers above the large skyscrapers of a city and the way the other spews smoke and soot into the sky. These are giant machines, unfeeling, but always ready to destroy us. They are intimidating, apocalyptic, the type of thing only the efforts of a Superman could stop. Snyder clues us into their gravity altering power by allowing us to witness the objects that they lift in painterly composed CG shots. If any director can make the majestic danger (sublime) of a death tower into the sky, it’s Zack Snyder. There’s a grace here that is not found in the similar works of Michael Bay. There’s an understanding of the beauty of images and the horror that can come from said images. The minute or so of this image ticks by with a sluggish speed. What do the next seconds hold? What are the horrors about to be witnessed? Smartly, Snyder doesn’t hold that beauty long. By compressing that beauty into only a few images and then releasing the jarring horror of its loud destruction, Snyder does bludgeon his audience, but he does it with purpose. Now, even I can say that the inflated destruction of the sequence is a bit sickening, but there is some purpose to what he has done in adding some terrifying and sickening truth the near natural disaster that he has created. The grating sounds of mechanism rise above the score and the destruction unfolds, in all its sublime beauty and horrifying results. There’s a fear behind all of it, the feeling of being picked up and slammed into the ground hard, something that the Terraforming Machine is doing to the objects and people around it. If there’s a reason that Snyder has ultimately chosen to assault his audience with sound and picture, it is to place us in the mind space of the victims, ready to be inspired by the hero that will save us. Whether that has any place in a Superman movie is debatable, but that doesn’t mean that there is no value to what Snyder has done here. After a short exposition dump, the film transfers into what will make up the most of this action scene, Superman and the other army forces attempting to stop their individual terraforming machines (which is intercut with Zod turning on this weird chamber that is just bogged down in the whole dumb mythology). Suddenly, we enter a dark clouded sky, where our hero can’t even breathe, much less fly. Snyder’s thrilling camera swoops down with the Man of Steel only barely allowing him the chance to catch himself before he hits the ground. Snyder gives us a moment to see the power of the terraformer and what Superman will be fighting back against effectively setting up the stakes for the entire action scene following. The army's missile attacks on the terraformer over the city are especially well framed for an action blockbuster. Again, while his style reflects that of his colleague Michael Bay, Snyder is simply better at this dynamic and kinetic action. The motion of the camera is always squared toward the target and or attached to things moving toward the target, and the intercutting of wides and more dynamic shots frame the events well, especially as the gravity effects the missiles, pulling them towards the civilians. Again, contextually, for a Superman movie that kind of sucks, but it doesn't mean that the film is badly shot or directed. We cut to plenty of ground level shots to show who’s really in danger and we get one of the Daily Planet as they see a missile collide with a building across from them and decide to leave their building. This is one of the most important parts of the sequence because it is the part that is utilized at the climax of the sequence. The Daily Planet characters are the one’s who we as the audience are going to be concerned about dying, giving the scene even more stakes. The terraformer dispenses arms which will reach into the sky to grab Superman. It’s a terrifying image to see, especially in Superman’s weakened state, but it also corresponds visually with the terraformers themselves, which almost reach down to the planet. Superman himself is also wishing to escape being dragged down by his lineage in the scene, implying that the arms represent almost Zod’s grasp holding him down. Snyder’s camera allows for the height that we go to become evident as he uses lots of wide shots before cutting to an overhead shot of Superman being dragged down by the arms. The situation in the city is even more frightening. Buildings are falling, airplanes are being pulled from the sky, and even as things become more chaotic, Snyder’s direction still holds up in its compositional tact. Wide shots of airplanes flipping back from the terraforming machine, blends beautifully with the thundering score. The camera shoots into a close up of an affected plane and then, as the plane spins off, shoots back to give us scale. There’s narrative intention to these moves, even if they are dizzying. The pilots of those planes are being thrown around in the same horrifying ride that we are. Even when the camera gets to the shaky cam street level, Snyder still takes the time to establish the geography of the scene, as grim as that may be. A building is toppling over on top of the Daily Planet characters and they must run away from it. The building is established in a POV shot that eventually looks like a wide shot of the building, which is intercut with characters that can be seen occupying the street that is expanding behind them. Snyder is establishing where the rest of the scene will take place in the reverse shots until the characters actually run down the street with the building toppling behind them. Then, unfortunately, insert stupid shaky cam exposition mythology dump between Jor-El and Zod. Snyder really likes to do his POV shots, and the next is one of his best. The camera seems attached to the arms coming from the terraformer in a shot as it chases Superman. The best thing about this shot is that there’s some drive or purpose to it showing the speed at which the arms are going and providing us with the idea that Superman is not winning this battle, which recontextualized with the damage of Metropolis and the danger that the Daily Planet characters are in raises the stakes even more. Superman is thrown into the center of the terraforming beam and slams into the ground, which then dissolves into Perry White of the Daily Planet standing up and staring his death in the face, juxtaposing the fall of Superman with the existential panic of our stand in for humanity, but it’s the juxtaposition of the heroisms of both the human characters and Superman that will make the scene. Perry attempts to help a coworker out from the rubble of Metropolis as the gravity ray gets closer and closer. The stakes have reached a logical high. Snyder focuses us on the faces of the Daily Planet characters. We feel their fear. We feel their hope slowly dying. But then the music swells and the emotional climax of the scene is reached. Snyder uses a low angle shot to accentuate the importance of Superman rising. As he rises in this moment he lifts not only himself but the hope of the characters who are about to die. Of all humanity. Snyder cuts back to humanity, we fear for them, but our hope is rising. And suddenly as the camera zooms in, almost as if it personifies the cries of the humanity that Superman can’t let down, he rises to blast into the terraforming machine, as the members of the Daily Planet reach a peace in their soon to be avoided deaths. What I find most interesting about the climax of this scene is not the wide shots or the cool sweeping shots that Snyder employs, but instead the close ups that he utilizes. As well directed as the “roller coaster” action is, and as much intention goes into its overindulgent panache, Snyder as a director still understands that you need characters to connect with the action. You need us to feel the fear, the hope, the strength and the peace, that all of these characters do, or we just won’t care, and as uncaring as most of Man of Steel is, for a brief eleven minutes, leading to an emotional climax like no other superhero movie before, it comes to life, probably because of the work of Zack Snyder. Bibliography: 1. Man of Steel. Dir. Zack Snyder. Perf. Henry Cavill. Warner Home Video, 2013. DVD. The Essay covers from about the 1 hour and 43 minute mark to the 1 hour and 55 minute mark. Also, below I put the GREAT trailer to this film that holds the hope of the described moment. The first things we see and hear in Pablo Larrain’s excellent biopic on Jackie Kennedy, Jackie, seem to contradict each other. The film starts out in darkness and over said darkness plays a spine tingling chord, the first of Mica Levi’s (of Under the Skin) earth-shattering score. It’s the type of thing that you might see in a horror film in the darkness of the screen, and the screeching quality of the chords. But then we see the actual woman appear, rosy-cheeked, and against the beautiful view of a beautiful sunset. Jackie vaguely smiles as she walks vindictively, her back against the blood red sky. She’s leaving that part of her life now. It’s time to say goodbye. This is a fascinating moment that builds the expectations for the film ahead of us. Jackie is a film made of contradictions, a film made of the whirlwind of emotions of its central character and while the opening scene demonstrates this easily, structurally, the film needs to embody these emotions and it does so through the fragmented nature of its structure in both its scenes and overall narrative push. The next image that we see following the opening takes place on the day that Jackie will be interviewed by a reporter played by Billy Crudup. Chronologically, this is the last thing that happens, and yet we see it first. The Jackie in these scenes seems to be the real woman, bullheaded, but charmingly so. A woman of immense power both politically and in character. This opening allows us to contextualize her as just that. It allows us to see the power that this woman is capable of before both structurally and character wise, the film strips her character down in front of us. The structure of the film is nonlinear, but it is all focussed on the same character. While long segments of the film may be taking place in chronological order, the way that the pieces overall fit together is quite scrambled, but there is a narrative purpose to doing this. Jackie is effectively a character of contradictions. The drama of the film is often based on her hopscotching between burying her husband in peace, or creating a fanfare out of it, and if so, whether or not that fanfare was truly deserved. Her own emotional range is fragmented and constantly changed by the events that are happening around her and even deeper the ideas that fuel those events. By presenting the audience with a confused and fragmented framework, the film itself takes on the confused and fragmented emotions of its titular character. In practice, while the narrative segmentation works to reinforce the ideas behind how the people have interpreted Jackie’s actions, it is still based in nonlinear storytelling which can be juxtaposed with the shifting emotions of the central character. Each cut back to the interview is informed by an important emotional moment: laying in bed after the assassination. By continuing a flurry of scenes that are out of order, the film simultaneously disorients, yet informs us. We see the truth of the matter, even have it bluntly explained to us, but we are shown such truth through a pattern of scenes that confuse, much like Jackie, receiving reality but through an utterly confused lens. This doesn’t just extend to the overall narrative structure of the film but also happens during individual sequences. Moments that easily accentuate this fragmentation in scenes are found everywhere throughout the opening act of the film. In the aftermath of the death of JFK, the camera almost never leaves Jackie’s side putting the audience in her face and hard cutting consistently to disorient us. Each new frame, each new minute of footage has narrative importance, but each seems cut short, nothing ever gives a hint of satisfaction in the length of the scenes, nothing ever gives a resolution. They jump cut to the next one instead. Jump cuts usually travel across a short amount of time, and while these do, they play much more like disorienting jolts within the same continuous shot. The camera itself prepares us for unbroken takes as well with handheld work resembling the work of Emmanuel Lubezki, but Larrain and his editors still cut, breaking the individual moments into small pieces that Jackie herself and the audience are left to interpret emotionally. Jackie is in one way a horror film. It is a film about the horrifying emotions that can consume us after the death of a loved one and what better way of portraying that does the director have than creating a structure that is just as fragmented as the woman at the center. Bibliography 1. Jackie. Dir. Pablo Larrain. Perf. Natalie Portman. 2016. DVD. |
AuthorStephen Tronicek. Archives
July 2017
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