Cinematic Overtures Page 4
Kaufman’s locale is redolent of steam baths, where an off-screen massage evokes sounds indistinguishable from sexual moans. At the center is a swimming pool, where Tomas observes six men around a floating chessboard—an image of male strategy that is suddenly disrupted by the graceful dive of a female body. Tomas’s gaze follows her underwater glide through the pool, and then to the curtain behind which she dries herself with a towel. Watching the silhouette of her naked body, Tomas then follows her—through the mist-filled corridors of the spa—into the café where she is a waitress. There, her own eyes (in a subjective shot) find Tomas, who pretends to be reading. By the time they finally speak, the atmosphere is charged with the simmering sexual attraction between Tomas and Tereza. In a departure from the novel, their eyes suggest desire—or free will—rather than chance. Enhancing the novel, Kaufman anchors the metaphysical in the gloriously physical.
Using the music of Czech composer Leoš Janáček, he provides a structure that could be called musical: over its three-hour running time, the film moves from andante to adagio, from light—visually and thematically—to dark, and from quick cuts to longer takes. While Kundera’s book has a musical form as well—a kind of theme plus variations—the experience of the two works is quite different. Kundera urged Kaufman to “eliminate” whenever possible, aware that an adaptation of his novel could not be faithful. The director therefore enjoyed a degree of freedom that permitted him to shift the focus of the book from a philosophical rumination to a love story. Moreover, like Bertolucci with The Conformist, Kaufman explores not just voyeurism but perception as well. He adds numerous mirrors, windows, and curtains to the screenplay, making us aware of what is hidden as well as what is revealed. How much are we allowed to see—by the filmmaker? by the state? (After all, the setting includes the Soviet invasion.) And by ourselves? Tereza, for example, tells of her nightmare that Tomas made her watch him with other women (an involuntary voyeurism). And in the context of “the unbearable lightness of being,” the film also seems to ask whether to be seen is to be less light.
At the NYU symposium Kaufman articulated how he and Carrière arrived at the film’s opening by likening it to “the garden hose in my backyard that curls around. We said, ‘Let’s find out what these repeated motifs are,’ ” leading to “a structure like an overture at the beginning.” Indeed, a film’s introduction is an often self-conscious framing device that prepares the viewer for multiple motifs as well as a heightened awareness of the cinematic storytelling. The literally striking way All the President’s Men begins provides a fine illustration: director Alan J. Pakula enhances both the image and sound of typewriter keys, as words will indeed be weapons in his drama about Watergate. It was released in 1976, a mere two years after Nixon’s resignation as US president, a direct result of the Watergate break-in of 1972. The white screen is held blank and silent for an extra few seconds, creating an expectation. It is filled by words that register like gunshots, appropriate to the story of newspapermen. The soundtrack layers whiplashes and gunshots to heighten the intensity of typewriter keys striking paper. Similarly, when a teletypewriter prints headlines in the closing sequence, we hear in the background—from a television—cannon fire of a twenty-one-gun salute celebrating Nixon’s second inauguration.
FIGURE 2.4 From the opening scene of All the President’s Men (see clip)
Archival footage then situates us in a very particular historical moment, when Nixon—at the peak of his popularity—was returning from a historic trip to China. The rest of the film will be characterized by an urgent realism—for example, in the multitrack sound design of the massive Washington Post newsroom. Pakula reconstructs the investigation conducted by the reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman—that led to their book. Using William Goldman’s screenplay adaptation, All the President’s Men recounts a domestic political tale of the 1970s, utilizing a relatively classical style that links it to a Hollywood tradition boasting directors like Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and William Wyler. If the causality of events engenders a straightforward narration, other films of the 1970s tended toward a greater stylization.
Victor Brombert proposes that all openings, specifically in the realist novel, serve to simultaneously create an illusion of realism and to undermine the notion of mimetic representation.11 Cabaret (1972) offers a superb cinematic elaboration of this dual tendency. Directed by Bob Fosse, it was based on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye Berlin (published in 1939), from which John Van Druten adapted a stage play, I Am a Camera, in 1951; it led to a 1955 film version, and then a stage musical entitled Cabaret in 1966. To add another temporal layer, it is set in the pre-Nazi past of 1931 Berlin. This musical drama is entertaining, engrossing, and ultimately chilling in its stylized tableaux of spreading swastikas. Fosse’s Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey) leads us into the world of the film.
The credits unfold over a dark background that gradually comes into focus (like the film’s concerns), a distorted mirror that reflects the cabaret clientele like a grotesque painting by George Grosz. Into the eerie-looking glass pops the painted face of our depraved guide. He welcomes not only the patrons of the Kit Kat Klub but also the film’s viewers, especially when he sings “Willkommen.” Appropriate to the opening, the ensuing musical numbers reflect, comment upon, and often parody the growing influence of the Nazis. The distorted reflection corresponds to the musical productions, which are consistently crosscut with the political reality outside.
FIGURE 2.5 The MC (Joey Grey) in Cabaret (see clip)
“Life is a cabaret, old chum,” sings Sally Bowles, but the cabaret is also life, translated into spectacular reflection. Like the club’s patrons, we enter this musical world to forget about reality, only to find that it cannot be kept outside. The last image of the film will be the misshapen mirror of the first shot, now reflecting a profusion of swastika armbands on cabaret patrons. Like the other adaptations in this chapter, Cabaret builds on a gripping opening sequence that exploits a cinematic expressiveness born of literary articulation.
3
Narrative Within the Frame
Mise-en-Scène and the Long Take
Touch of Evil, The Player, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Piano, Bright Star, In Darkness
My understanding of film history and language was shaped by the theorist André Bazin, whose essays celebrate the unity of time and space in motion pictures.1 He opposed how montage fragments the world, especially in the Russian tradition of Sergei Eisenstein, and praised directors like Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini who utilized long takes. Because quick editing dominates moviemaking today—reflecting as well as feeding attention deficit disorder—I share with my students inspirational examples of uninterrupted long takes: these allow meaning to inhere and grow within the image, especially at the start of a film. The Godfather (1972) provides a fine example: Francis Ford Coppola begins with the words “I believe in America,” spoken by an Italian-American immigrant in close-up. As the camera slowly pulls back, we see that he is asking a favor of Don Corleone (Marlon Brando), initially identified only through a slight wave of his hand. The long take then cuts to the godfather, Corleone, elegantly seated at his desk, and later to the shuttered room, gradually revealing a few of his men who have been listening to the conversation. Corleone turns the situation to his advantage: this man will be in his debt. The scene has established the quiet and extensive power not only of the title character but also of the filmmaker: the rhythm of both is unhurried and cumulatively dramatic. This renders The Godfather not simply a gangster film but an epic exploration of the American dream.
My Bazinian appreciation of long takes is not mutually exclusive with respect for montage. For an evocative classic Hollywood opening sequence, see The Letter, directed by William Wyler in 1940. A quick shot of the full moon provides a cosmic frame for the introduction of a murder. After a road sign establishes the location as the Rubber Company in Singapore, the camera tilts down a tr
ee from which sap pours into a bucket, then pulls back into a wide shot of the plantation, tracking up and to the right, past workers sleeping. It continues to rise and circle as we hear the tinkling music of Max Steiner, which stops with the sudden sound of a gunshot. As Bette Davis’s Leslie shoots a man multiple times—descending the steps to her house—we hear indistinct sounds of men who work there and barking dogs. The camera moves into a close-up of her implacable face before clouds cover the moon. Wyler effectively creates not only tension and mystery but also narrative complicity: the protagonist’s lethal act has been heard by those who work on the plantation, but only we have seen her shoot. Will she get away with murder? From the moon to the fecund tree, nature is a witness.
The touchstone of uninterrupted long takes is Touch of Evil, even if Orson Welles’s dark thriller was initially dismissed when Universal released it in 1958. Reviewers considered it confusing, and while Welles’s pulpy B movie might still merit such an adjective, it is also now a cult classic. A star was needed to play the policeman Vargas, and Charlton Heston agreed (cast somewhat against type as a Mexican, given his other roles at that time—Moses and Ben Hur). The casting of Janet Leigh as his wife invites intriguing speculation about the degree to which Touch of Evil might have influenced Hitchcock in making Psycho with the same actress less than two years later. In both films an assault on Leigh takes place in a motel; moreover, the circular motif on the motel wall of Welles’s film becomes part of the imagery of Psycho, culminating in the drain of Hitchcock’s famous shower sequence.
Universal had editor Robert Wise cut Welles’s version while the director was in South America making another film. Forty years later, Walter Murch oversaw the 1998 restoration of Touch of Evil, using Welles’s original fifty-eight-page memo intended to bring the studio’s cut in line with the director’s intentions.2 The opening shot consists of a 3 minute, 20 second unbroken take that establishes the camera as a mobile narrator. There is not only self-conscious virtuosity here but also the introduction of stylistic and thematic elements that will be developed throughout the film. The black-and-white lighting is narratively organic: cinematographer Russell Metty often creates shadows in front of the characters. Their moral ambiguity is expressed by the intermittent illumination—the play of dark and light—around them. The camera actively follows a hand, a car, and then two couples crossing paths as they approach the border between Mexico and California. As the camera moves from a close-up of hands setting a bomb, it creates tension and suggests the forces that tick away under the surface of relationships. The man who sets the bomb runs away, followed by his shadow on a wall (an expressionistic detail that recalls film noir), and the camera then rises after the bomb is placed. It moves away from the car to reveal the Mexican border town, which gradually fills up with people: the frame expands to encompass pedestrians and even goats, establishing multiple axes of vision. The camera descends to follow Heston and Leigh, who pass the car. This intersection leads us to fear not only for the couple in the car (the targets of the ticking bomb) but also for the “innocent” pedestrians.
FIGURE 3.1 Vargas (Charlton Heston) and his wife (Janet Leigh) walking in front of a car in Touch of Evil (see clip)
The soundtrack is equally potent: the bomb is set in silence, interrupted by a woman’s off-screen laughter. The diegetic music emanating from the Mexican bars and streets is then juxtaposed with American rock music from the Cadillac. At the border, we hear overlapping conversations, like the woman in the car complaining of the ticking in her head while the officer asks about the Grande case. This is all in one take, maintaining tension and spatial unity. After the bomb explodes, the film shatters into fragments. If we assumed our protagonist would be either Heston or Leigh, Welles undercuts this assumption with the introduction of Hank Quinlan, played by the director himself as a grotesque, overweight, and possibly corrupt cop. Quinlan plants evidence in order to arrest a Mexican man—whose girlfriend is white—for the crime of the opening scene.
With the explosion, the film’s first cut is visually engendered by the kiss of Leigh and Heston, a blonde American woman and a Mexican male. The borders of this late 1950s film are not only geographical but ethnic, including Caucasian and Latino. The borders are also moral, legal, and always blurred. Ultimately, Touch of Evil explores a boundary between civilization and primitive instinct. Welles crosses visual and narrative borders as well, lacing a linear story with internal rhymes, like the intersecting couples of the opening shot. The last film Welles made in Hollywood, Touch of Evil is now recognized as a fusion of pulp art and continental sophistication, as well as one of the most formally rich American movies of the late 1950s. And it provides a connection to the French New Wave, given its showing at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair Film Festival. The jury included two young French film critics, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who voted Touch of Evil best film.
Robert Altman pays homage to Welles’s movie explicitly and implicitly in The Player (1992), where a security guard (Fred Ward) criticizes the “cut-cut-cut” of recent films and invokes the opening of Touch of Evil. The camera moves on a horizontal axis in an uninterrupted long take that is not only self-conscious but also inclusive. The fluidity of the camera constantly reframes, rendering the frame itself malleable rather than fixed. Altman’s provisional frame contains a myriad of characters, thereby emphasizing a collective protagonist, or interdependence, much as he did in Nashville. The camera eye is autonomous and self-aware: it fulfills our desire to see in long shot as well as close-up, encompassing totality and detail. Since The Player is set in a film studio, this self-consciousness is appropriate. Working from Michael Tolkin’s novel and script, Altman’s film centers on a Hollywood executive who receives death threats from a writer whose script he rejected. The shout of “Action” heard off-screen engenders the camera within as well as beyond the frame; it pulls back from the studio doors, rises, and then descends to the arriving car of Griffin (Tim Robbins), the executive to whom everyone will pitch movie ideas, including Buck Henry (who cowrote the screenplay of The Graduate) proposing “The Graduate, Part II” starring Julia Roberts as the daughter. A German poster of The Blue Angel can be glimpsed on Griffin’s office wall, suggesting that he has taste. Jeremy Piven (who would play the Hollywood agent in HBO’s Entourage) is the tour guide for a group of Japanese visitors. When the film was released, Julie Salamon wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “This brilliant satire, styled as a murder mystery, is the best insider’s view of Hollywood since ‘Sunset Boulevard.’ ”3
FIGURE 3.2 Buck Henry pitching a film to Griffin (Tim Robbins) in The Player (see clip)
From Altman’s horizontal axis of vision, we move to the vertical axis of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. A motion picture of lyrical as well as terrifying poetry, it was directed by Werner Herzog in 1972. He recreates a doomed expedition of 1560 into the Peruvian jungle by a conquistador who was searching for the lost city of El Dorado, city of gold. In 1979 the director said he had become increasingly obsessed by “a primordial innocence of vision.”4 Even if a few have questioned Herzog for risking lives in the pursuit of his visions, he was hailed as the leading filmmaker of the New German Cinema. His hallucinatory, quasi-anthropological movies have brought attention to remote cultures and marginalized individuals. Some are documentaries, such as La Soufrière—about a volcano that he personally explored, despite its imminent eruption—while others were fictional, like The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Herzog has been drawn to people on the verge of extinction, from aboriginal tribes in Australia, to the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua, and more recently to American inmates on death row. Aguirre is based on the actual diary of a monk named Gaspar de Carvajal. In the opening sequence, the images and music express a physical descent—and perhaps a metaphysical one—through a primeval natural landscape.
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FIGURE 3.3 The mountain descent that opens Aguirre, the Wrath of God (see clip)
Herzog’s slow pace allows each image to sink i
n during the elemental introduction: anchored by the mountain (earth), we see the sky above, the mist to the right invoking water, and finally fire after the crash of a cannon. The very shape of the mountain descent will be rhymed by a lightning bolt (which could be interpreted as the wrath of God). This locale in Peru is the most famous icon of Inca civilization. (The high priest and local virgins lived on its peak.) The physical effort of the actors making their way down the mountain fulfills what the filmmaker Barbet Schroeder once said on a Telluride Film Festival panel: all movies are documentaries in the sense that they record real people doing real things.5 Here, we see animals in addition to the indigenous people and the European men in heavy breastplates making the arduous descent. The scene anticipates Herzog’s 1982 Fitzcarraldo (also starring Klaus Kinski), the epic tale of a nineteenth-century Irishman whose attempt to build an opera house in the Brazilian jungle led him to lug a boat up a mountain (which we see recreated on-screen in painstaking detail, without the benefit of CGI).
The descent of tiny beings down the mountain of Aguirre is accompanied by the hypnotic music of Florian Fricke, using the name Popol Vuh (from the Mayan creation myth). Herzog explained to Roger Ebert, “We used a strange instrument, which we called a ‘choir-organ.’ It has inside it three dozen different tapes running parallel to each other in loops.… All these tapes are running at the same time, and there is a keyboard on which you can play them like an organ so that [it will] sound just like a human choir but yet, at the same time, very artificial and really quite eerie.” Moreover, throughout the film the score’s use of fifths conveys the sense of something missing in the middle. Herzog’s passion for music is evident in the hypnotic soundtracks of his movies, which often rise and fall alongside a character’s ascent or descent. Whether it is a mountain climber in The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984), a ski jumper in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974), Stroszek on a stalled ski lift, or Fitzcarraldo pulling a boat up the impossibly steep slopes, the scores of his films express a longing for flight or transcendence. (It is not surprising that Herzog went on to direct opera.)