Storytelling for Film and Television: From First Word to Last Frame [1 ed.] 0815371780, 9780815371786

Citation preview

Storytelling for Film and Television

Storytelling for Film and Television is a theory and practice book which offers a definitive introduction to the art of storytelling through writing, directing, and editing. Author Ken Dancyger provides a comprehensive explanation of the tools that underpin successful narrative filmmaking and television production. The book takes a unique approach by connecting the different phases of the creative process of film and television production. It shows how writing, directing, and editing all contribute to the process of storytelling and function together to advance the narrative goals of a screenplay, to tell the best story. A case study approach provides numerous examples of effectiveness and brings together the core areas of aesthetics and production to make these concepts more accessible. Case studies include classic and modern films, foreign films, limited and series television, with examples including Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Revenant, and Son of Saul. This is the ideal text for film and television production students at all levels. It is written in a style which makes it accessible to anybody interested in learning more about the storytelling process and is written for a global audience addressing a global industry. Ken Dancyger is Professor of Film and Television at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He teaches script and post-production workshops worldwide and is the author of seven books on screenwriting, editing, and production including Alternative Scriptwriting, 5th edition with Jeff Rush; The Technique of Film and Video Editing, 6th edition; Global Scriptwriting; and The Director’s Idea.

Storytelling for Film and Television From First Word to Last Frame

Ken Dancyger

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Ken Dancyger The right of Ken Dancyger to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-815-37178-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-815-37179-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-24598-2 (ebk) Typeset in TrumpMediaeval by Apex CoVantage, LLC

It is with great pleasure that I dedicate this book to my four grandchildren: Joshua and Maya Malka and Levi

Contents

Acknowledgments SECTION I

NARRATIVE

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Introduction The narrative tools The technical dimension The creative possibilities Three case studies of excellence

SECTION II

DIRECTING

Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

The directing tools The technical dimension The creative possibilities Three case studies of excellence

ix

3 15 29 37 47

57 74 84 95

SECTION III EDITING Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13

The editing tools The technical dimension The creative possibilities Three case studies of excellence

105 119 130 141

SECTION IV THE STORYTELLING EXPERIENCE FROM BEGINNING TO END Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Glossary Index

Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass Sidney Lumet’s Daniel Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul Conclusion

151 159 167 176 185 194

Acknowledgments

At Taylor & Francis, I would like to thank Sheni Kruger for commissioning this book with such enthusiasm and Sarah Pickles for her help these past many months along the way to completion of this project. The subject of storytelling has been for me a pre-occupation and obsession for at least 30 years. I have written individually about screenwriting, editing, and directing films in my previous books, and my ideas have evolved with each new edition of my screenwriting and editing books. The idea of a book about all three areas, while it has been brewing for some time, only came together for me during two international workshops which I was conducting in 2017. I would like to thank Dr. Wenshing Ho of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I taught these ideas in the Masters of Cinema Workshop; and Manuel Jose Damasio, who invited me to do a workshop for the graduate film production students and faculty in Kino Eyes, a program of three European universities  – the University of Lusofona in Portugal, Screen Academy Scotland, and Napier University – and the Baltic Film and Media School in Tallinn, Estonia, which hosted the workshop. The enthusiasm of the participants at these workshops about exploring how the different phases of storytelling connect to one another inspired me to write this book. I’d also like to thank my wife, Ida Flint Dancyger, for her ongoing support and active involvement throughout the lengthy process from initial idea for this project through the computer processing phases and up to the final manuscript.

ix

I Narrative

1 Introduction

The singular purpose of this book is to prepare future filmmakers to see each phase of production as storytelling. The key goal of preproduction, the writing of a screenplay or teleplay, displays narrative tools to best tell the story. The production phase, focusing on the director deploying directing tools, is to tell the story as he or she interprets that story. The postproduction phase, focusing on the editor, is to deploy the tools of editing, shots, and sounds to clearly and dramatically tell the story. Of course there are other craftspeople and artists helping all along the way. But in order to focus on story, we will focus on the work of the writer, the director, and the editor to tell our story. Each of these key creators tries to add value to the story based on their goals. When the process works optimally, the final outcome can be more than the sum of its parts. When the process works less well, it should reach what I will call technical effectiveness. Do you, the storyteller, wish for technical competence or do you strive for more – creative surprise? These options and the effort at each phase for the optimal outcome are the subject of this book.

The purpose of story Stories serve multiple purposes for their audience. At a general level stories have always been used to convey lessons – how to conduct yourself in a community, a society, a group. Stories very often are used to promote cohesion. The Bible is a series of stories, a cautionary tale about the dos and don’ts of behavior over time. How does a community survive or thrive or die? These lessons deal with personal and group morality and immorality. The stories that resonate most powerfully are simply the road to take going forward and the road(s) that have led to destruction. The next level of stories is the Fable, essentially told to children. Their goal is again the issue of behavior. In this case, Fables tended to be cautionary tales to prepare the child for decisions needed to proceed safely in the larger world. The idea that not all adults are benevolent, that adults might have an agenda that portends harm, even doom, seems at the heart of Fables. In addition, there also are stories whose messages are more benign, that appearances

3

4

Narrative

can be deceiving and that the real self beneath one’s appearance might promise a better, even loving outcome. Fables’ intentions can be positive or negative, but their purpose is to imaginatively pictorialize the road forward for the child. Good and bad exist in the world. A way to frame the purpose of Fables is to move the child into a more complex world ahead. On one level their purpose is to make the child less innocent, less vulnerable to the world. Stories then are imaginative tales to help acclimatize the individual to the world and to transmit values that would aid the child going forward. Adults find stories purposeful as well. The full range of human behavior is on display in stories. Looking to William Shakespeare for examples, Romeo and Juliet captures the twin feelings of love and hate and how the presence of one within a family can destroy the other. Macbeth is about ambition extremis and its consequences. Othello is a tale of envy and its consequences. King Lear is about sibling rivalry, ageing, and judgment. The tone of Shakespeare’s voyages into human behavior ranges from humorous to tragic. For an audience, you can choose your favorite playwright, novelist, or poet, and those choices will tell you how you feel about the behaviors addressed in those authors’ stories. Stories tell us a great deal about ourselves. Stories also tell us about individuals who have affected our lives. Biographies tell stories of power and powerlessness, of coping and overcoming adversities, of success and failure, and all states of being in between. In short, stories true and imagined set the landscape for individuals, families, communities, and nations. Stories tell us of lives lived and lost. They are measuring aids for the self, for families, and for groups who come together through geography, belief, or other values. Stories are nourishment, as critical to internal life as food is for external life.

Education Education presents itself in many forms  – family, school, church, books, and media. Education can be intellectual, technical, or emotional. Presumably the filter of education is an end goal – to prepare the young to be useful citizens, not just for the economy, but also as members of society. The role the media play in education has grown immensely in the past 100 years. For most of our history, family and church played the greatest role in education. In the past 200 years, schools have grown in their importance in education. As technology’s pace has changed with increasing rapidity, the media, the outcome of technological change, has itself grown in importance in education, to a point where its influence today is growing exponentially. Today, the media leaders, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Reid, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates, have replaced the heads of film and television who in turn replaced the heads of studios in the golden age of film and television as

Introduction

5

the gatekeepers of media influence. Technology rules content, and today content is king. So what education goals do these gatekeepers purvey to today’s audiences? Are good economic and civic members of society still the larger goal of education? If we look at the content of the most successful television shows of the last decade, we can extrapolate the values underlying these media events. The shows I reference are as follows: The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire, The Americans, Homeland, and The Handmaid’s Tale. The Sopranos focuses on a family head – Tony Soprano, a Mafia family leader and a family man. Often the personal and the professional clash, leaving Tony in need of help to reconcile the moral behavior gap he inhabits. In Mad Men, Don Draper is the creative director of a significant advertising agency in the late 1950s to the mid-’60s. He has lied about his identity, he is addicted to lying to his wife about having other sexual partners, and his family life keeps growing more complicated. Lying and deception and manipulation are at the heart of Don’s success in advertising and his failure in relationships. Walter White, in Breaking Bad, is a brilliant high-school chemistry teacher. When he discovers he has incurable cancer of the brain he turns to meth production to make money for his family. He survives cancer but cannot survive a new disease – he likes making money. Power becomes the dominant factor for Walter, and he becomes a killer to hold on to power. Set in an imagined land called Westeros in the Middle Ages, Games of Thrones is essentially the struggles of four leading families – the Starks, the Lannisters, the Targaryens, and the Baratheons – for the throne of Westeros. The death or murder of Robert Baratheon sets off the struggle. Dragons and witches are factors in this world where the worst of enemies are the undead and where an assassinated dead man, Jon Snow, a Stark, can be brought back from the dead by a witch. Sexual violence, physical violence, and torture co-mingle with patricide, fratricide, and every variant to win the throne. Bodies pile up faster than snow falling. The through line of Game of Thrones is to examine how much bad behavior exists in this world and to pose the question  – is there enough good to offset death, incest, and torture in this world? The answer seems to be, barely. Francis Underwood, a member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina, is an ambitious man and he has an extremely ambitious wife in House of Cards. He will rise to the presidency through manipulation and murder. Consider his wife Lady Macbeth. In this series, bad behavior knows no punishment, only rewards. The Western town Deadwood is presented as a nineteenth-century version of murder, mayhem, and madness, a far cry from depictions of the West as a pastoral challenge to civilization. The town and its occupants represent commerce run amok. Capitalism is the brothel and its agents are either whores or pimps. Murder is the law of Deadwood.

6

Narrative

Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire is an Atlantic City crime boss whose illicit empire is constantly under threat from local and national gangster rivals. He is an Irish family man who is often on the edge of ruin. He is not beyond killing off rivals, even friends. As in the gangster genre itself, he will get his come-uppance from the son of one of his own gang members who he killed. Elizabeth and Philip Jennings appear to be the everyday American couple. They have two children; they run a travel agency. But, they have a secret life. They are actually Soviet agents, deep plants meant to carry out the spying and killing of the decaying Soviet Union of the 1980s. How to juggle their surface life with their true agenda is the challenge for them and for their children in The Americans. Carrie Mathison works for the CIA in Pakistan, in the Middle East, and in Washington. She’s brilliant and bi-polar. Consequently, doing her job and living her life often collide. Her paranoia and her instincts guide her, and often she will save herself but lose the people (lovers) closest to her. Is she a danger or a savior? This question is the through line for the series Homeland. June Osborne/Offred is a young woman living in a futuristic United States, where women such as herself have been chosen to have children by the leaders of the male-dominated quasi-religious new authoritarian state. The wives of these men cannot conceive but are integral to the process of controlling the handmaid assigned to them. For Offred, she has lost her freedom and yearns for the husband and daughter taken from her. She obeys externally and resists internally. The state is all powerful and uses coercion and violence to maintain its power in The Handmaid’s Tale. Each of these series has had a powerful impact on its viewers. If we look to what they convey about adult life, whether modern or medieval, whether focused on a politician, a King, or a high-school chemistry teacher, whether male or female, bad behavior is on full display. Looking at the educational lesson communicated, the first observation is the difficulty in reconciling the private and the professional lives of the main characters. A second lesson is that there is no shortage of cruelty, violence, and transgression in the adult world. A third lesson is that civility and its larger reach, civilization, are a veneer. What lies beneath is desire run amok; a primal struggle between good and evil is ongoing and it appears, if we take these series literally, that evil is winning. To be more specific, there is a pliability to character that moves the perception of adults as not being fixed in their behavior. Walter White starts out being decent, caring, concerned about his family’s future. By the end of the series, the family and its fate matters less and he is a full blown narcissist whose lust for power seems bottomless; in short he started good and ended totally evil. Don Draper, on the other hand, began untruthful and manipulative at the outset and by series end has joined the confused ’60s generation looking for alternative values. Perhaps the most complex of these characters are Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings. Torn between idealized duty and belief as opposed to what is best

Introduction

7

for their children, these two characters seem to struggle between being practical and being believers. They disagree with one another about whether they are parents or patriots, citizens or sinners. Both are complex, have rich inner lives and fluctuate between doubt and duty. In their complexity, Elizabeth and Phillip seem exceedingly human and they know less at the end than they believed they knew at the beginning of the series. At a meta-level, these series point out that story forms come with a particular set of expectations. A series such as Game of Thrones is in the end a morality tale about the ongoing struggle between good and evil. A series such as Boardwalk Empire is about the rise and fall arc of the gangster. He will have success, but in the end, will die in good part because of his deeds undertaken to affect his rise. These series occupy one of three spaces – our wishes, our lives, or our dreads. Audiences seek out and stay with particular series for one of these three reasons. On one level, such series interact, stimulate, inform, and indeed educate those areas of our minds and emotions.

Escapism Whether one considers entertainment a distraction or a necessity, its value to viewers is indisputable. The popular arts have always included film and television. Often referred to as mass media, film and television could not have grown into national and international industries on the basis of their entertainment capacities. No brand encapsulates these values more than the Disney Company. It has grown on the basis of these values to a point that today, the company has secured Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar, all associated with positive, wish-fulfillment storytelling. Walt Disney would be proud that the values his small company represented 90  years ago has grown into the world’s largest and possibly greatest producer of escapist content. Escapism comes in various forms. Homeland represents escapism that is closer to its audience’s real life. The main character is bi-polar and on medication, and the stories are ripped from today’s headlines. From the war on terror that has marked the time since 9/11 to an authoritarian President who poses a danger to the country, Homeland steers close to our lives. The fact that the main character and the President are women pushes gender issues into the principal subtext of the series. Escapism also can be comfortably distant from our everyday lives. Game of Thrones, set in medieval times, where swords displace more lethal weaponry and where Kings and Queens are absolute in their power, displaces a modern era which flirts with absolution and clings to democracy. Sex, violence, and power connect us to modern times; however, Game of Thrones is distant enough for imagined enemies and powerful dragons to allow for easy identification and pleasurable conflicts. Escapism is in full flower in this series.

8

Narrative

Catharsis Together with escapism, story offers its viewers the opportunity for catharsis or remission of the anxieties and stresses in their lives. Walter White in Breaking Bad has financial issues, a young baby, and a disabled adolescent son. He also has, as the series begins, a cancer that is a serious threat to his life. He is easy to identify with and to care about. His real life stresses are reminiscent of the problems many face. As the series progresses and particularly in the early phase of his success in producing an illicit drug, life improves for him. His sense of relief brings a sense of relief to his viewers. This is what catharsis looks like. Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings have a teenage daughter who finds solace in religion. Their struggle with this issue is deep because both are atheists by choice and political persuasion. They tell their daughter the truth about themselves, and she tells her minister. Suddenly the daughter’s honesty poses a threat to her parents’ life. For the Jenningses, their teenager is a source of threat, posing even greater anxiety for them. As they bring the minister into their confidence, the threat diminishes but never goes away. This represents a degree of catharsis for the two main characters in The Americans.

Engaging an audience Escapism and catharsis depend upon the success of the audience’s relationship with the main character(s). There are multiple strategies the writer or director can use to engage us with the main character. The easiest path to the audience connection is the likeability factor; however, not all main characters are likeable. In Game of Thrones, the writers position the weakest person within each family to be the most likeable. In the Lannister family, this would be Tyrion, the dwarf. In the Stark family it is Eddard’s bastard son, Jon Snow. And in the Targaryen family, it is the daughter Daenerys. Each of these characters is positioned as the most powerless character in their family, but they do not accept the condition. Each wants power in spite of being a dwarf, or a bastard, or a young woman. And each has a strength. Tyrion is smarter than his siblings. Jon Snow is honorable and dutiful. And Daenerys has conviction. And we admire them for these qualities. Each also has a goal. Tyrion wants respect and his rightful place in his family. Jon Snow wants to prove he does belong in the Stark family. And Daenerys wants to be the monarch her father was and her brother could never be. These goals together with their positioning within their families engage the audience in their quests to fulfill their next to impossible goals. Another strategy writers and directors use is to make the main character charismatic in spite of their situation. Charisma is a mixture of intense belief and a powerful internal aggression easily called upon. Elizabeth Jennings in

Introduction

9

The Americans has this type of charisma, as does Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale. Don Draper in Mad Men and Francis Underwood in House of Cards have charisma to spare. Yet another characteristic operating in the case of both Don Draper and Francis Underwood is that both have a tragic flaw. Each is hugely ambitious, and that appetite leads to considerable bad behavior for both of them. Plot can also be used to position characters in such a way that they are victimized. You and I do not like to be victimized in real life, and we do not like to see characters we are involved with being victimized by the plot. Turning to Game of Thrones, we are accustomed to Tyrion being treated as the least favorite child by his father. But when his father and sister begin to compete for the throne left empty by Robert Baratheon’s death at the hands of Tyrion’s sister and Robert’s wife, Tyrion becomes the family scapegoat. Sister and father promote Robert’s son to the Kingship. What follows is the belittling of Tyrion by the new boy King and when the new King is poisoned, it is Tyrion who is arrested for murdering his nephew. This plot twist places Tyrion’s life at risk. In the case of Jon Snow, as the bastard son with no prospects, he is sent to become a member of the Knight’s watch. Responsible for the northern border, Jon Snow quickly recognizes the threats (winter is coming), and as he rises in the ranks, he is threatened by the Wildlings externally and by his colleagues inside the Knight’s watch. He falls in love with a Wildling and when he is promoted to lead the Knight’s watch, he is murdered by an internal group who disagrees with him. Both of these plot twists clearly victimize Jon Snow (at least until he is returned to life by the efforts of a witch). In the case of Daenerys, she is married off to a barbarian named Drogo and to be true to her vision of herself, she rises to be Queen when Drogo dies; she is surrounded by threats to her Queenship and to her principles. Only her dragons and Tyrion’s political advice save her from destruction.

Conflict Drama is essentially conflict compressed in a form that invites a heightened level of engagement with the characters who populate the story. In order to generate conflict it is easiest to pictorialize different characters in the narrative having opposing goals to one another. This is particularly the case in terms of the main character–antagonist relationship. Another dimension of the conflict is to consider the barriers to the main character’s goals. The more barriers, the greater the conflict. Finally, the plot and how it unfolds poses an ongoing barrier to the main character’s goal. Progressively through the narrative plot generates a growing level of conflict between the main character’s goal and the unfolding narrative. Let us get specific. In Mad Men, Don Draper is in conflict with his wife in his marriage. What each wants from the other is simply not forthcoming.

10

Narrative

Draper at work is in conflict with his partners about the objectives, practices, and power relationships of the partners. He has to contend with the firm’s sale to a British buyer and with the different corporate goals set for the new larger company. He is in conflict with the women who work at his company seeking to be more than handmaids to the male partners. And he is in conflict with clients over how he executes his responsibilities toward them. And most of all, he is in conflict with his inner self. He adopted the identity of his senior officer who was killed in the war. The difference between his past life and its relationships is in direct conflict with the new identity he has chosen. Existentially, Don Draper is living a lie and dreading that he will be found out. Most of these conflicts are relational. Walter White in Breaking Bad has many of the conflictual relationships that face Don Draper. He also has a plot – his career in criminal life that brings him into conflict with competitors locally and criminal organizations nationally and internationally. All pose threats to Walter White and his family. This situation only grows more menacing as Walter gains more power and money. Both plot and relationships are the delivery system for a growing conflictual level that keeps the suspense in the narrative growing.

Energy Energy is a partner to conflict in the screen story. Energy comes both from within a character, as well as the tempo of their pursuit of their goals. Carrie Mathison of Homeland is fueled internally by her bi-polar condition. She is also fueled by the intensity with which she pursues her goal. In the first season of the show, she falls in love with a man who is returning from prison in the Middle East and is an agent for terrorism in the United States. Her pursuit of the threat evolves into the love of her life and the father to her future child. Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale is a sexual slave in the home of Fred, the government official. Her status as a sexual slave is partnered with her mistress, the official’s wife whose craving for a child is so palpable that it energizes all the actions of the sexual trio. Offred also comes alive sexually with the official’s driver, who is enlisted when the wife feels her husband may be sterile. The relationship with the driver fluctuates between a love relationship and a threatening relationship; and alternatively a jealous relationship between the master Fred and Offred.

The importance of the technical There are particular technical requirements in the narrative, in the direction and in the editing that will assure a consistent clear sense of the

Introduction

11

storytelling in each of its phases. In a sense, the technical requisites set down baselines for each phase of the storytelling, and it is useful and necessary to set down those baselines. If they did not exist there would be no foundation to move forward to the creative possibilities that when they occur, stir the heart and remind us all where storytelling can take us. We turn now to the technical. On the narrative front, this means three areas of the narrative have to be addressed. They are character, structure, and tone. In terms of character, first and foremost is the main character: their goal in relation to the character population and their relationship to the genre their story lives within. If we look at Homeland, the main character, Carrie Mathison, works for the CIA. Initially we meet her in a Middle Eastern city doing her job. At the outset, she puts on her headscarf and goes into a prison where a prisoner she has been interrogating is shortly to be executed. To save his family, he answers her plea for important information. This information will kick-start the plot, to save the homeland from a post-9/11 attack. The main character’s goal is clear. This is technically critical. Does the character population seem to fit with the nature and purpose of the main character? From a technical standpoint a certain compatibility is necessary. In Homeland, the character population divides into CIA and governmentFBI, police and politicians, and would be terrorists and their organizations. There are also ancillary characters who flesh out the back stories for the main and the important secondary characters. What unites both sets of characters to the main character is that the presentation of their private lives brings them all together. All are sons or daughters, fathers, and husbands. A minor character in the population, a young well-to-do woman, has become a terrorist; she has rejected the values of her parents and embraced the other; her lover is Muslim. At the top of the terrorist hierarchy, Abu Nazir is presented as a brilliant adversary, but also as a father. Revenge for the drone strike killing of his youngest child, Aisa, motivates his drive to punish America. The primary antagonist, Nicholas Brody, turned United States Marine who will be Nazir’s instrument for revenge, is presented as a husband and father whose marriage troubles and his connection to his daughter, Dana, and his disconnect from his son, Chris, serve to humanize him and also create empathy for him. On the other side, Carrie’s father shares her medical condition; he too is bi-polar, and her sister, a psychiatrist, provides her with comfort and medication to control her condition. Carrie’s mentor at the CIA, Saul Berenson, professionally successful, is a failure in his private life. His wife, Mira, leaves him. And Carrie’s professional boss, David Estes, lost his marriage because of a fling he had with Carrie. The mix of personal loss and professional success seems to characterize both sides of the character population in the series. Structurally, Homeland is a Thriller, which means it should begin with the threat, an attack on the homeland, and proceed toward the execution of

12

Narrative

that attack. Prevention and execution should proceed along a time line that includes addressing the question – is this the real attack or a feint to hide a greater level of attack? Homeland progresses along this structure, adding the linear deteriorating personal status of both Carrie Mathison and Nicholas Brody, as well as the rising professional opportunities for Brody and the disintegrating professional status (in line with her emotional condition) of Carrie. The personal and the professional get equal attention, making plot and character move in unison, and the narrative more emotional and gripping at the same time. Tone throughout is presented realistically and whether a scene is from the past or in the present, it is presented in emotionally purposeful fashion to encourage audience tension as well as engagement with the narrative. At the directing level, the technical means consistency with the storytelling at the narrative level. If the tone is realism, the performances, the locations, and the visual presentation of the narrative have to be not only believable, but also work at the level of the complex interplay of character and plot. The audience has to buy into the bi-polar nature and behavior of the main character, as well as the PTSD prompted transformation of the antagonist from Marine patriot to Muslim terrorist with all the ambiguity of devotion to family creating, for Brody, a track to betraying his country. The level of performance for both Carrie and Brody has to convince us, the audience, to believe in these two characters. Nothing less will do; the alternative is to lose belief in this high stakes, high octane narrative. The secondary characters have to be just as convincing. At its heart, Homeland has to move us from experiencing the narrative as a struggle between patriots and their adversaries to a struggle between complicated characters who are all too human and who project their passion into the violent geo-political modern world where the future is put at risk by a present mired in a world of differing agendas and past grievances. Nor can the editing level of the storytelling veer from this level of believability. Pace, clarity, point of view, and the modulations of the feelings of the characters at each point of the linear narrative have to articulate the character journey and the plot progression into an emotional voyage on the Homeland version of present day America in the jihadist era of the twenty-first century. You and I have to suspend our belief system and enter into the belief systems of Carrie Mathison and Nicholas Brody. Emotionally we stand with one or the other or both as the editing unfolds on a moment to moment basis, how they and their goals clash. These are the technical requisites in Homeland.

The clash of the creative If the technical gives us the coherent telling of the tale, the creative surprises us and takes the experience of the story to a higher level.

Introduction

13

That level may be gratifying or disturbing. The ground has shifted away from our expectations. The creative alters our expectations of story, most often to our benefit. Our world becomes bigger, and the storytelling becomes more important. In Homeland, the writer-producer team of Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon, and Gideon Raff has used an Israeli series to create an American version of the struggle to protect a post-9/11 America from international terrorism emanating from the Middle East and South-East Asia. But they have not based the series strictly on exciting plots and perceptions about the heroism of overcoming such plots. Instead they have chosen to dive deeply into the characters and by doing so to pose moral questions about human behavior. They have not settled for the black and white, good and evil. Instead they have chosen to present all the characters as complex, as filled with paradoxical behaviors, with poor choices and brilliant insights. It is here where they have sought and found the creative. Examples will illustrate the point. Let us begin with the relationship between the main character and the antagonist in the case of Homeland, Carrie Mathison and Nicholas Brody. In the Thriller, the main character is an ordinary person and the antagonist is very powerful. In overcoming the plot in which the antagonist is embedded and driving, the main character emerges as a hero. As a woman in a man’s world, the CIA, Carrie is already in her own uphill battle. Her bi-polar condition puts her even more at a disadvantage. The first creative twist the writers introduce is that Carrie’s manic condition gives her an over-determined will power to find the threats behind the terrorist plot she believes Brody to be driving. When Brody is no longer viewed as the turned American Marine (his fellow captured Marine Tom Walker is identified as the terrorist), the plot turns to an assassination attempt on the Vice-President by Walker, and Carrie in her obsessive style concludes this attempt is only a cover for a larger scale attack. Her logic is that assassination alone has never been an Abu Nazir tactic. She proves right, but her interventions on behalf of this idea lead to her being fired by the CIA and in short order hospitalized to treat her mental condition. Although she will be proved right about Brody and his role, she seems at the end of Season 1 to be at a personal and professional low point. Another dimension of narrative daring vis-à-vis Carrie and Brody is that instead of remaining adversarial, they fall into an affair with one another, an affair that goes further for Carrie than for Brody. She has fallen in love with him and has hopes for a relationship, a relationship that will rekindle in Season 2 and lead to a pregnancy and a daughter for Carrie. The idea that the main character and the antagonist fall in love is daring storytelling and is counter-intuitive for the genre. Part of this boundary breaking is Carrie’s loneliness and impulsivity. The other part is the state of Brody’s marriage. After an eight-year captivity, he is reunited with his wife Jessica, but impotent, a very unsatisfying situation for the marriage. Flipping another boundary, Brody seems much closer to his 16-year-old daughter,

14

Narrative

Dana, than he does to his wife. All of these factors move us away from simply viewing the main character as positive and the antagonist as exclusively negative. Consequently, a whole range of questions are put forward. Do the main character and the antagonist always have to be opposed to one another or can they be more alike than different? Are all relationships consequently questioned? Do two Marines, a team captured together as Brody and Walker were, have to be the closest of friends or can they become adversarial, as they do become? Do colleagues always act to support a character who works with them, or can they become adversarial as Carrie and her boss David Estes become? In the world, all relationships shift. How do we feel about the world these characters occupy? The answer is a world where all characters, no matter which side, are, on a deep level, alone. It is an uncertain world, unstable. It is a world where one cannot even count on one’s own family. They too shift in their allegiances. This is a world that has moved far away from genre expectations. It is the creative world of Homeland. Writers can use plot or character or tonal modifications to achieve what I’ve described above. A good example in Homeland is to work with the idea that Carrie’s insights about where the plot is going or what will happen next is heightened when she is most agitated. In fact the writers imply that it is in moments of manic madness, an extreme outcome of her bi-polar condition, after coming off of her medications that Carrie is most insightful. This is far from the brilliant CIA operative capitalizing on the cadre of informants at hand. By taking Carrie into her troubled condition, the writers are opening up the idea that madness is as important as rational deductive power to forecast or prevent acts of terror. This is far afield from the skill set of a Jack Bauer in 24, or the deductive brilliance of Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock. What the writers are doing is implying that a main character’s dark side can be as important as his or her other strengths to achieve what the narrative requires them to achieve. Equally creative is the importance of children and family, the most personal of affiliations, in turning audience perceptions of both the good and the bad guys away from stereotypical expectations. Tom Walker, a primary assassin in Season 1 of Homeland, is discovered alive because a fellow terrorist identifies him. He is humanized because he calls home when he knows no one is there to hear the message on the telephone, recorded by his son and his wife. This yearning for connection humanizes rather than demonizes a traitor, a killer. Here again the writers go against expectations and alter our expectations. The creative solution once again deepens the audience experience of the narrative. Let us turn now to the detailing of the narrative tools that can be used to technically set out the story, in a creative way to surprise and to thrill the audience.

2 The narrative tools

A story is like a building. It begins with an idea and is developed into a screenplay, the complete verbal/visual architectural drawings for the screen story. The building itself is yet to be raised. This is the production process. Chief builder is the director and he/she uses a set of tools. The building/ screen story is completed by the editor using his/her tools. Like the building, the film can be functional or functional and exciting. Function implies technical proficiency; exciting implies creative surprise. Creative is the best, the most surprising outcome for what began as an idea. In this chapter, we are going to concern ourselves with the first phase, the screenplay, the architectural plan for what will become a fully realized screen story. Although the term, tool implies technical proficiency, in this book, we seek that pathway to the best story we can create. Deploying the mix of narrative tools that optimize your idea, we encourage the writer to reach for the creative. Clarity and surprise will help the writer achieve the compelling in his/her screen story. This is the space you, the writer want to occupy.

The premise Very often the term premise is confused with the term theme. Theme is too general a term to capture the meaning of the premise. The theme of first love does not tell as much about the struggles which Romeo and Juliet face. Nor does the theme of ambition tell you about the heart of Jake LaMotta’s struggle in Raging Bull. Premise has to be more specific than theme, and it has to be framed around the inner conflict of the main character. The deeper the premise goes, the more it becomes the heart of the narrative. The strongest way to capture the premise’s primal issue for the main character is to pose the question – will the character grow, improve, and be better, or will the character shrivel and die?

15

16

Narrative

Define the premise as two opposing choices the main character faces in the screen story. Will Chris Kyle in American Sniper become dehumanized by so much killing or will he hold on to his humanity in spite of so much killing? Will Bobby Dorfman in Café Society remain an innocent, a romantic in a relationship with a woman, or will he lose his romanticism and become a cynic about love? In each of these stories the plot and its relationship will help Chris and Bobby choose which option of the premise it will be. Once each individual makes his choice, then the narrative moves to the resolution. The premise is the central conflict of the screenplay, its spine. It will appear in each scene and be represented in one way or the other in each of the secondary characters. The screenplay begins at a critical moment, a crisis, where the premise is introduced. Only when the main character makes his choice and acts upon it does the screen story move toward resolution. An example illustrates the point. In the opening of Crazy Stupid Love, the main character, Cal, takes his wife, Emily, out for an anniversary dinner. He comments on her silence. Her verbal response is to say, ‘I want a divorce’. This presents a crisis for Cal, the end of a marriage he wanted to last forever. The premise becomes can Cal win his wife back or not in which case he will be bereft. On a deeper level, the premise goes to the deepest yearnings of the main character. Cal has had a successful marriage for 25 years. And now to his shock, he has lost it. He has children he loves. And he deeply loves his wife. But something has gone wrong. And the world he’s adored has fractured. He wants his family back, but he needs to understand why he lost his family and then take action. The premise takes us to the heart of what’s most important to the main character. It will take the rest of the screen story to understand why and to take appropriate action to resolve and regain what he has lost.

Character population The character population is the key group of people in the screenplay who amplify the premise. Generally, in a feature screenplay, this is no more than six to ten characters. Two groups flank the main character: those who represent option one of the premise and another group who represent option two. They can also be viewed as characters who help the main character achieve his/her ultimate choice and those who stand in the way of that choice. Right now, you are thinking that Game of Thrones has 30 such characters. And you’re right. But if you think of those who are sitting on the throne of the seven kingdoms or wish to, they share a premise. The balance of the character population cluster around that occupant or aspirant and either help that character or stand in his/her way. When multiple main characters share the same premise the larger narrative structure appears to be parts of the same larger story with different lines following different main characters.

The narrative tools

17

As previously stated, another way to break down the character population is to look at the secondary characters as two groups: those who help the main character and those who harm the main character. As the narrative progresses, secondary characters can move from one group to the other. In this sense, they can be a helper, but later be a harmer. Think of Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown or Fredo in The Godfather I, II. The most important harmer is the antagonist. This character plays a very important role in posing the greatest barrier to the main character. The more powerful the antagonist, the more heroic the main character becomes in order to overcome so strong an opponent. The character population need not be stereotypical; they can be compelling. Consider the secondary characters in Deadwood and Breaking Bad. They seem almost Shakespearean in their natures and in their complexity. Only a strong singular tone can keep such a cast of characters serving the needs of the premise, the struggles of the main character. Compulsivity and creativity set the narratives of these limited series on television at the highest level throughout this past decade. Notable is that in three of these series, the main character is his own antagonist. Walter White in Breaking Bad, Don Draper in Mad Men, and Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire are three of the most compelling characters we have come to know. By making each his own antagonist, the writers have internalized the dramatic struggle in each of these series. By doing so, the audience has been drawn into the moral world of these characters. Their immoral choices only serve to make Walter White, Don Draper, and Nucky Thompson irresistible to their audiences. All of the characters play a role in the articulation of moral choice in the immoral world of these three series. Each occupies a place in the narrative spectrum, and each acts to promote the better nature or the worst in each series’ main character. Some are more critical to the plot, others to the relational dimension of the narrative. Some offer a humorous quality, others a more serious interaction. Key here is the contribution of each member of the character population to the story’s momentum, although always through the prism of premise or choice for the main character.

Character arc Actors often speak about how their character changes in the course of their screen performance. In this discussion of the character arc, we will focus on the change in the main character in the feature length screen story and in the main character or characters in the limited series television. The characteristics of the character arc of greatest interest here are as follows: 1 The emotional state of the main character when we first meet them. To be more precise, what is the crisis that has positioned

18

Narrative

them in this emotional state? The crisis can be external or internal. The issue tends to be acute. An example from Splendor in the Grass is the emotional state of Deanie. She is hopelessly in love with her high-school sweetheart. The objections of his father to the economic imbalance between Deanie and his son, Bud, will destroy the relationship. 2 The main character has changed by the end of the screen story. How have they changed in the light of their emotional state at the beginning of the screen story? In Splendor in the Grass, Deanie, now released from a mental institution some years after her breakdown, revisits Bud, her former high-school sweetheart. It is clear from the visit that she has grown up and gotten over the relationship. 3 How has the main character’s change occurred? Has it been the result of a transformative relationship or because of the pressure of plot, or both? The change that takes place in the main character is visualized by the character’s movement from crisis to resolution. This change is the emotional spine of the screen story. The change is also the means the writer uses to invite the audience to identify with the main character. The character arc can work out positively or negatively for the main character. Outcome tends to follow genre expectations. In Situation Comedy, everything works out well for the main character, but it works out badly in Film Noir. Although the outcome tends to follow genre expectations, reversals do occur. In Ex Machina, a Science Fiction film, the main character Caleb Smith, is outsmarted and defeated by Ava, a robot. In Carol, a Melodrama about a same sex relationship, the main character, Therese, chooses to be with the older woman, Carol. In other films about the same subject, Victim, Sunday Bloody Sunday, and Lost and Delirious, the resolution for the main character is tragic.

Structure There is no single narrative tool more praised as the key to screenwriting success than structure. Since Syd Field’s book, Screenplay, the Foundation of Screenwriting in the early 1980s, the three act structure has become the eleventh commandment, at least when it comes to screenwriting. Although many books about screenwriting have elaborated with specific insights of their own, the simplicity of Field’s contribution to the ‘how to’ of screenwriting is unassailable. My own view is that a more complex approach to structure increases its usefulness as a narrative tool. I also believe that the three act structure is not the only useful approach in the narrative toolbox.

The narrative tools

19

For the screenwriter, it is useful to think of structure as four distinct layers of the screen story. They are: 1 2 3 4

The organization of the acts with definite turning points A plot layer A character layer A genre or story form that organizes the first three layers

More detail on each follows.

The three acts Act I Act I, the setup, has three important characteristics. 1 How you begin. I call this the critical moment. Think of it as the crises that opens your screenplay. 2 Ten minutes into your screenplay an event changes your story. I call this the catalytic event. Others have called it the point of attack, or the inciting incident. Often this surprise introduces the plot of the screen story. Often it is either a threat or an opportunity for the main character. 3 The first act break or the first major plot point is an even greater surprise than the catalytic event. It opens up the story possibilities for the main character. Suddenly he/she faces options. Act II Act II is the act of confrontation. Act II is twice as long as either Act I or Act III. There is a midpoint in the act that pivots the main character from option one to option two of the premise. These sections may be relational explorations or may involve plot. At the second act break a surprise will force the main character to choose either option one or option two. The decision will propel us into Act III. Act III Act III is the act of resolution. Having decided on a choice, the main character will try to attain that choice. This may or may not happen depending upon the genre in which the writer is working. Once the resolution is achieved the act is concluded.

The plot layer Plot is the second layer of structure. It is an external or in the world event that puts pressure on the main character. It is a voyage in Titanic. It is a career in Scarface. It is a crime in Dirty Harry. Plot is not a

20

Narrative

relationship, nor a psychological issue for the main character. Plot sensationalizes the screenplay while relationships and internal issues emotionalize the screen story. Plot is filled with surprise. The plot in Spartacus is a slave revolt against Rome. The plot in Raging Bull is Jake LaMotta’s career as a professional boxer. The plot in Silence of the Lambs is the hunt for Buffalo Bill, a serial killer of women. Key to plot is that it happens in the world, tends to be genre specific, and puts pressure on the main character.

The character layer As mentioned earlier, relationships serve to emotionalize the screen story. The two key relationships in the screen story capture each option of the premise for the main character. They are the two most important relationships for the main character. In The Revenant, the two most important relationships for the main character, Hugh Glass, are with his son and with his antagonist, John Fitzgerald. In Gladiator, Maximus, the main character, has powerful relationships with Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor, and with the new Emperor, Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius. Commodus murders his father and destroys the family of Maximus. Family and power are the mutually exclusive choices for Maximus in this screen story. These two characters and their relationships with Maximus emotionalize Maximus’ struggle in Gladiator.

Genre Traditional genres group in three categories – wish fulfillment, realism, and nightmare. Action-Adventure, Musicals, and Science Fiction exemplify genres of wish fulfillment. Melodrama, Situation Comedy, and the Thriller exemplify genres of realism. Film Noir, Screwball Comedy, and Horror exemplify genres of the nightmare. Wish fulfillment genres tend to be plot heavy, character light. Genres of realism tend to be relatively characterdriven, although most Thrillers have an elaborate plot. Nightmare genres have a mix of plot and character. In terms of tone, genres of wish fulfillment have a lighter tone. That enables a successful outcome for the main character. Genres of the nightmare as you might expect have a darker tone that prepares us for a tragic outcome for the main character. Realistic genres have a realistic tone leading us to outcomes somewhere between that of genres of wish fulfillment and of the nightmare. All of the above genres conform to a three act organization that the writer uses to lead the viewer from crisis to resolution. This narrative structure leading to closure is not typical of what I call voice-oriented genres. This group, about 10 percent of screen stories, does not lead to closure. In fact, all

The narrative tools

21

tend to be more open-ended stories. Since they have a different narrative purpose, they do not conform to the classic three act structure. They are: 1 2 3 4 5

Non-linear Satire Fable Docudrama Experimental Narrative

The voice or the narrative goal of the writer, rather than the use of a common structural strategy are what make these stories unified. 1 The Non-linear film Think of multiple main characters, each with their own story. Or another way of thinking about the Non-linear film is to think of a group of short films each about a single character. These films can be shaped around an event (Nashville), a place (Short Cuts), a mood post-9/11 New York (13 Conversations About One Thing), or one or two families and their members (Magnolia, The Ice Storm). The writer wants to comment about the time, place, mood, or family. The multiple story lines give greater dimension to his/her voice than a single story line or main character might. Non-linear stories are open-ended, two act films without an arc or resolution. No resolution invites the viewer to be active in imagining resolutions for the multiple characters in these screen stories. 2 Satire Satire and the Fable are the ‘ying and yang’ of narrative story forms. Both take on a powerful social or political issue and use it as a Rubik’s Cube, turn it in one direction or its opposite. Both forms see the issue through a highly imaginative treatment, but they see the outcome differently. The Satire sees the outcome as not just negative but catastrophically negative, and we the audience should be outraged. The Fable, on the other hand, sees the outcome as positive and invites the audience to be mollified in spite of the issue’s disastrous possibilities. Will the anger that Satire invites popular outrage and real world outcome through social action? Whether that will happen will remain to be seen. Television remains politically challenging on an ongoing basis in spite of the forewarnings of Network. Nuclear holocaust has so far been avoided since Dr. Strangelove but remains a possibility depending upon the mental health of world leaders. 3 The Fable The Fable shares all the narrative properties of the Satire, except for the outcome which is positive. In Children of Men, a child is born after almost 20 years of global infertility. Save the child, save the world is the voice of the writer in this film. In Pan’s Labyrinth, a similar

22

Narrative

message is centered in a world so terrible, the main character, a 12-year-old girl, must imagine an alternative world where a princess can exist and spiritually overcome the darkness of the real world. 4 Docudrama Docudrama looks like a documentary but is written and performed as much as a Melodrama. The look adds gravitas to this genre. The structure sets out a social or political problem, uses the main character as its victim, and serves to make the case that the audience should not tolerate the injustice being exposed by the Docudrama. The Kid with a Bike focuses on a 10-year-old boy at a foster care facility because his father is incapable of caring for him. Will this young boy become a social offender, or can he be regained by society through a meaningful parental relationship? The style – handheld camera, no dramatic lighting, and at times poor sound – necessitating subtitles, helps create the aura of watching a documentary in Ratcatcher, a Docudrama about poverty and alcoholism and their consequences in 1972 Glasgow. Two Days One Night focuses on the effect of job loss on a female worker in Belgium. Here, economics and self-esteem partner to humanize the effects of globalization. Docudrama, as John Grierson claimed about the Documentary, is not entertainment but rather serves the more important societal purpose, education.

The Experimental Narrative Traditional narrative emphasizes content while the Experimental Narrative emphasizes style. In the process, content is undermined or at the very least, rendered less important. The Experimental Narrative, as a result, moves away from viewer identification with the main character. Watch, but do not get involved emotionally with the main character. What invites involvement with the Experimental Narrative is the intense mood it tries to create. Let’s call it an overemphasis on feeling and style. Examples of the Experimental Narrative are In the Mood for Love, Run Lola Run, and Gainsbourg. The feeling Gainsbourg looks to create is the quirky creativity of its subject. In an autobiography of the French singer, the arc of his career would be the traditional approach. The narrative instead focuses on the mood that captures his unpredictable spirit. Neither chronology nor the attendant fame of stardom are addressed in this unorthodox biography. Instead, we have his restless unpredictable strangeness. The implication here is to recreate the inner life of a man who defies understanding but who connects in a special fashion with his audience; let’s call it inexplicable magic. In Run Lola Run, the writer seeks above all to highlight the artifice and playfulness of filmmaking. Tom Tykwer creates a video loop of a 20-minute rescue mission. A young woman wants to save her lover from the consequences of his failure to deliver money to his criminal employer. He tries to rob a retail store to make restitution. She wants to save him and her

The narrative tools

23

relationship from self-destruction. We see the rescue attempt three times, each at a different chronological time. Time determines her success or failure. In In the Mood for Love, the writer follows a relationship of a cuckolded man and a cuckolded woman in 1962 Hong Kong. Each is beautiful. Time passes (we are not told how much), but they have a child. Nevertheless, the relationship fails. Beauty is no help here. However, what lingers is the aesthetic of appearances. We wistfully wonder why it has failed. If they cannot make it given their appearances, what about the rest of us?

Plot and sensation Plot can be a very powerful narrative device. Often the vehicle in which the main character is opposed by a formidable antagonist, plot and antagonist are inextricable connected. Consider Buffalo Bill, the serial killer of women in The Silence of the Lambs or John Fitzgerald in The Revenant or the Catholic Church in Spotlight! Linking the main character to the plot is a first act responsibility for the writer. Rose boards the Titanic for her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. A man is accused and found guilty of killing his wife in The Fugitive. Is Richard Kimble guilty? He knows he is not. How can he prove his innocence? He must find the one-armed man who killed his wife, before he himself is captured and re-arrested. This is the plot of The Fugitive. A man is raised by Indians after his parents are massacred by another band of Indians. The time is the Seven Years War; the place is upstate New York. The main character, Hawkeye, must decide upon his loyalties in the midst of war. This is the plot of The Last of the Mohicans. Plot, an external event that puts pressure on the main character, must be filled with twists and turns, and the antagonist must be a formidable enemy to the main character. The renegade Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, trusted by the British, is such an antagonist. Another formidable antagonist is John Fitzgerald in The Revenant, a white trapper who is willing to kill anyone, Indian or white man, who obstructs his path to wealth. Plots can be highly personal as in the obsessive search for a kidnapped niece in The Searchers. Or they can be a small cog in a larger plot as in Saving Private Ryan. However they present, plot must become huge in their hold on the main character. For that main character, plot and its outcome truly becomes a matter of life and death.

Character change and emotional connection Watching a film or a play offers the audience the opportunity to watch characters in extremes. This is not how we like to view our own lives, but for a few hours, in a movie or a live play, we enjoy the suspension of our

24

Narrative

daily selves to escape into another life. The advantage in a film or a play is that the crises for the main character will resolve in a two-hour period. If only real life was so resolution-oriented. Character change in the screen story is a key reason our identification with a main character proceeds so readily. How he/she changes helps the audience to relate and to identify with, empathize with the main character. What is so difficult in real life, change, is a central feature of the experience of a screen story. The first step in our relationship with the main character is to meet him/ her at a critical point in life. We meet Star in American Honey at the point when she meets a man in a mall store and he offers her a job in Kansas City. To date, she’s been nowhere and her work is babysitting two young children while their mother is out partying. In Inside Moves, Roary, the main character, attempts to kill himself as the story begins. He fails, but the attempt leaves him disabled. In the Hungarian film, The Notebook, twin 10-year-olds are taken by their mother from Budapest to a rural town to live with their grandmother who they’ve never met. The goal is to save them from the depredations of World War II. The critical moment always poses the question: Will the main character survive the journey they begin at the critical moment? Will Star become like the mother she babysits for, a casualty of life? Can Roary make a life for himself in spite of being disabled? Will the twins survive the barbaric war in the East? The intensity of the opening implies a difficult challenge for the main character. Change in the screen story must have emotional credibility. This means that the secondary characters must be not only credible, but powerful in their own right. If they are, they can have the capacity to incentivize the main character to change. One of the principal narrative devices writers use to achieve believability in the change of the main character is to use a transformative secondary character. This may be the antagonist, but often it is not. In The Notebook, the grandmother is the transformative character. In Inside Moves, Dave, the damaged but talented basketball player, serves as the transformative character. The grandmother in The Notebook is not very receptive to her two young grandsons. She is angry, she is cruel, and she is withholding. Nevertheless, the grandmother’s will tests the wills of the boys. They are extremely willful and seem impervious to adult influence. Each boy fills the world of the other. They begrudgingly come to respect her willfulness and begin to comply, and she in turn gives them food and her form of tolerance. A bond, unlikely initially, forms, and the grandmother begins to harden (in a survivalist sense) her twin grandsons. The consequence is that their actions, as cruel as they seem, assure their survival. The last image of the two parting ways, after years of co-dependency, signals that strengthening attributable to their grandmother.

The narrative tools

25

In the case of Dave in Inside Moves, it is Dave’s aggressive belief in his own abilities in basketball that transmits a can-do attitude to Roary. Dave goes from a disabled person in Act I, to an able person, thanks to an operation on his leg funded by the basketball star, Alvin. As he becomes healthy, Dave becomes distant and aggressive toward Roary; in fact, he becomes the antagonist. But here too, he influences Roary to take a moral position to Dave’s exploitative attitude toward his former friend. Roary stands up to Dave, calling Dave what he has become – a self-absorbed unethical former friend. Roary has now been transformed from a cannot-do person to an emotionally resilient person. His transformation by a friend who becomes his antagonist also illustrates how the transformative character need not always be a friend to the main character. Transformative characters can emerge from unlikely sources. A materially successful young man hates his father, a university professor, for breaking up their family. When the son is recalled to Montreal to help support his father as he is dying from cancer, a change takes place. In The Barbarian Invasions, Sebastien is the son so utterly the opposite of his father, Remy. Sebastien is offended by his father’s hedonism as much as his radical politics. To Remy, Sebastien is a materialistic Martian. Proximity and a transgressive set of decisions to ease his father’s suffering change Sebastien who becomes not only close to his father by the time of his death; he also becomes more the kind of man his father has been. As we leave Sebastien, he is no longer steeped in certitude about his future. He’s become a man his father would recognize and relate to.

Genre organizes structure Every screen story is one genre or a mix of genres. Whatever story form is chosen will determine the mix of plot and character layers. Although the proportionality of each holds for most films in a particular genre, filmmakers and writers who specialize in a particular genre tend to stretch and at times challenge genre conventions. Claude Chabrol specialized in the Thriller as his preferred genre. The Thriller tends to be dominated by its plot layer. In his film, Le Boucher, a Thriller about a serial killer in a small town in France, Chabrol reverses expectations and makes it a character rather than plot-driven story. Who the killer has slated as a victim, is the principal of the local school. Instead of killing her, he falls in love with her. He does so, in spite of his drive to murder. And we find ourselves feeling badly for a serial killer, instead of for his stream of victims. Claude Chabrol – like Paul Schrader, Mardik Martin, and Alan Sharp – stretches genre expectations. Most writers do not. Consequently, when one is experiencing the Situation Comedy, the Romantic Comedy, and the Screwball Comedy, we expect a character layer dominant structure. When one is

26

Narrative

experiencing the Action-Adventure film, the Science Fiction film, and the War film, we expect a plot layer dominance in the narrative. Numerous genres such as Film Noir, Melodrama, and the Police Story are strengthened when they have both strong plots and character layers. Key here is that there are genre expectations that the writer begins with. There is, however, latitude in strengthening one layer or the other beyond what is expected. Clint Eastwood has often done this in his films. His Gangster-Police film, A Perfect World, has a far stronger character layer than expected, as does his Crime film, Mystic River. Taking this idea one step further, Eastwood uses a strong character layer to alter his sports film, Million Dollar Baby, and the result is memorable. So too, his War film, American Sniper. The result is that the audience has come to expect the unexpected from Eastwood’s work.

Three act or not? The dominance of the three act structure has not prevented the spawning of other structural variations. The four act structure plus teaser and epilogue is standard for one hour television. Another variation that has received some attention is to split the acts and call them either acts or sequences. For example, the seven act variant is actually a breakdown of an Act I into two acts, Act II into three acts, and Act II into two acts. Does this breakdown of three acts into seven acts or sequences make the task of writing the whole easier? It might. And then there is the issue of teasers or prologues. They have become an important part of recent James Bond films. Spectre has a spectacular 15-minute teaser that has nothing to do with the narrative that follows it. It simply warms up the audience and raises the expectations about what is to follow. This impulse is not new. In 1991, Emir Kusterica made his classic Time of the Gypsies. Kusterica spends 30 minutes introducing us to the gypsy culture before the three act story of his main character begins. Andrej Wajda’s Promise Land, Fatih Akin’s Edge of Heaven, Elim Klimov’s Come and See, and Nickolai Mikhalkov’s Close to Eden all illustrate narratives that are closer to three movements rather than three acts. Each ‘act’ has its own tone, and although the films have the same main character, the stories are driven by using each act to present a different state of mind of the main character and to use the acts that follow to illustrate the challenges to that state of mind. By the end, we see change but the style of the films is so changed that we could easily imagine we are watching three different films. Although the three act structure has remained the dominant form, many filmmakers have amended or altered the structure for their own creative intentions. The results pose the question: Is three act structure only a baseline for writers, a starting point to shape their narrative? Creative aspirations have often taken storytellers away from three act structure. John Cassavetes, Federico Fellini, and Michaelangelo Antonioni in their work, exemplify this impulse.

The narrative tools

27

Dramatic properties, the personal and beyond Generally, dramatic properties mean opposing goals among the character population. The clash of those goals provides the conflict, the energy that fuels the narrative. A primary characteristic of drama is goal-directed characters. Imagine the flatness of a narrative where characters walk about without goals. The central dynamic here escalates as the barriers to the main character’s goal rise. The more difficulty, the greater the dramatic level of the narrative. There is a tipping point where a goal is impossible; beyond where a goal is impossible, the main character will appear delusional in his/her desire. The writer should take his character as close to impossible as he can. Here the dramatic possibilities are greatest. Plot in its pressure against the main character’s goal can also be effective in raising the barriers against the main character’s goal. Plot and conflicting character goals organized along a rising action technically structure the screen story. How primal the main character’s goal is helps transport the viewer into the deepest emotions of the main character. This is where a stronger relationship between the main character and the audience can develop. This is where the writer often wants/needs to go. Another area of engagement for an audience is how the writer reaches out toward issues of the day to bring the story to his audience. A few examples capture how this works in the screen story. Male–female relationships are a long-standing contentious issue in most societies. Writers have used this issue since D.W. Griffith’s earliest films. Think of Cecil B. DeMille’s Why Change your Husband, Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living, and John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven to name just a few. More recently, Marlene Gorris, in her Oscar-winning Dutch film, Antonia’s Line, tells the story of an independent woman who only needs a man to produce a child. Otherwise, she’s the epitome of a satisfying sense of selfreliance. Male–female relationships all around her are marked, not just by inequality, but also by exploitation, disrespect, and cruelty. Looking around, her daughter decides to follow her mother’s example rather than that of the other women in their village. Mother and daughter live their lives satisfied with their choice. Another subject that has remained an issue of the day for over 200 years is African-American-white relations. 12 years a Slave and Race both center on an African-American main character, but their approaches to their subject could not be more different. 12 Years a Slave is the story of free black man living in the North, kidnapped and returned to slavery in the South in the period prior to the Civil War. Race is a biographical film about Jesse Owens, the multiple gold medal winner at the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi Germany. How does a black man who lives in a racist America feel about competing for America in racist

28

Narrative

Germany? In their effort to create a hero, the writers overlook the racial deaths of World War II that emanate from the same racial theories of America and Germany. The result is a narrative that sidesteps the dramatic potential of this story. It applies a hero–villain structure to a very complex story. The consequence is a story that is not as emotionally compelling as it might have been. In 12 Years a Slave, the writers do not apply a similar narrative matrix. On the contrary, they take us deeply into the nightmare of what slavery was and make the film unforgettable. How far can the writer go to bring the story to the audience? How far should the writer go? These are the choices the writer will make to engage his/her audience in their screen story.

3 The technical dimension

To explore the technical dimension in storytelling further, I am using a thematic approach. The thematic approach is on occasion confused with a genre approach. Themes are not genres or story forms. Nor are themes the conditions found in the narrative, nor are they the dilemma of the character or characters in the narrative. Some examples will illustrate my point and my purpose. Although The Handmaid’s Tale is about the oppression of women in a futuristic authoritarian version of the United States, it can be called a Horror story. It can also be called a cautionary tale about the results of gender inequality. Sense and Sensibility is also a tale of the oppression of women, but in this case, in a past society. But its tone is not horrific, it is much lighter, and the outcome is positive as the two main characters find love relationships that help them overcome the social conditions of the time. In this narrative, equilibrium is restored for the two women at the heart of the story. A third example of the oppression of women is The Ballad of Little Jo. It is a nineteenth-century Western about a woman who goes West because of a scandal at home in Boston. As the West is dangerous for women, she pretends to be a man and lives out her life as a man. All three of these examples are about the thematic idea of the oppression of women. But time, place, and genre all direct the stories toward a different tonal choice and a different outcome for their main characters. Theme then is a general device, a meta device to frame the central conflict for the characters. Genre and tone will shape the theme into what it will become. The usefulness of theme is as a starting point that will convey what the narrative at its core is about. Other themes can be relational – jealousy, envy, desire – or they can be social – class, mobility, gender, race. Themes can also be moral – lying, stealing, cheating, betrayal, altruistic – or they can be spiritual. The important observation here is that themes should be recognizable and apply to most people because themes are gateways in life and living. For storytellers, themes are shaping devices used to initially let the viewer know the core feature of the narrative. What theme does not reveal is the editorial position the writer will take. Nor does it allude to the story form that the writer will use to flesh out the narrative. 29

30

Narrative

Revenge Turning to the theme of revenge is useful to look at the topic across genres. What I do not mean about the theme of revenge is the third act outcome of the Thriller, retribution for the injustice that takes place because of the actions of the antagonist in Act I. Films such as Fritz Lang’s first American movie, Fury (1935), or John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1947). For purposes of these next two chapters, I will address narratives that use the first act catalytic event, the murder of a loved one, to set up the narrative that will dominate the entire story. A good example of this dominance is Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974), recently remade by Eli Roth in 2018. Another example is Chad Tahelski’s John Wick (2014). What is notable about the revenge theme is that the loss that takes place in Act I tends to be close to the main character – a wife, a child, a parent. The arc for the revenge story is closely linked to an antagonist, and the scale of the arc will vary from one genre to another. The classic treatments of the revenge theme are Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. The first deals principally with the emotional dilemma of the main character. Hamlet’s father has died; he believes the death was at the hands of his uncle, possibly with the help of his mother. The film treatments of Hamlet range from the internal struggle of the main character to revenge and to prove to himself that his father was murdered by his own brother. The time line for the narrative is at the opposite extreme, 20 years, in The Count of Monte Cristo. Falsely accused of participation in a plot to aid the exiled Napoleon, Edmond Dantes is accused and imprisoned at the hands of three men who lie for their own gain. Dantes escapes and comes back enriched, 20 years later, and plots and executes his revenge upon his three accusers, now rich and privileged in Marseilles. The time line and the scale of the actions to entrap and destroy his three persecutors give this revenge narrative an epic quality as well as a depth of feeling. These two great narratives form the parameters for the revenge story, the personal and the epic. Personal stories of revenge include John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Neil Jordan’s The Brave One (2007), the Coen brothers’ True Grit (2007), and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). The latter two are Westerns, and the first two are Crime stories, a variant between the Gangster Film and a Police film. The Boorman film is a tale of betrayal. Two criminals are personal friends and coconspirators. The heist they plan, a theft from a criminal organization, takes place at the deserted San Quentin prison. During the theft, one of the criminals betrays the other, our main character and shoots him. He believes he has killed the main character, but he has not. The main character recovers and seeks revenge against his former friend and the criminal organization he is part of. The narrative unfolds on a primal level, as if the main character is an avenging relentless angel of death.

The technical dimension

31

The Brave One is more existential. A robbery in Central Park leads to the pointless killing of the main character’s fiancée. She is heartbroken. She buys a gun and by happenstance begins to kill the violent under class in New York City. This film can be seen as an homage to Death Wish (1974). What is noteworthy about each of these tales of revenge is the level of passion of the main character in carrying out their destructive goals. Whether born of a deep sense of rage or a deep sense of purpose, these characters act out against betrayers and perceived enemies with an unusual and unstoppable sense of mission. The loss was personal and deep; only the blood of the perpetrators can purge and purify the main character. In the Western, revenge is affiliated with the genre’s underlying struggle between pastoral values and civilization. In True Grit, a young woman seeks justice for the killing of her father by a hired hand. In this story, a sheriff becomes the instrument of her revenge. He kills the hired hand and the gang of criminals he has joined. In Unforgiven, a former killer has tried to farm but is a failure. When a group of prostitutes, one of whom has been mutilated by a cowboy client, offers a reward, the main character, William Munny, takes up the opportunity, and this failed farmer reverts to his former self, a killer. Both of these films strip the veneer from the Western hero. It is as if killing is the drug of choice for these characters, whether they are representatives of the law (True Grit) or former killers (Unforgiven). In both the crime stories, the revenge theme seems driven by deep personal feeling whereas in the Western treatments, the issue of justice tempered and masked the personal passions of the main characters. In both cases the consequence is a temperance absent in the two modern crime stories. The epic treatment of revenge includes a complex narrative beyond the personal. Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot (2000) includes the progression of the American War of Independence. Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995) includes the Scottish fight for independence from England. And Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) includes patricide as a mode of succession within the Roman Empire. Although these complexities enlarge the scope of the narrative, they do not detract from the personal motivation that launches the main character on their quest for revenge. For Benjamin Martin in The Patriot, when Colonel William Tavington kills Martin’s son Thomas on the steps of Martin’s home, it launches the revenge story that ends when Martin kills Tavington during the culminating battle between American rebels and the British. Here the progress of the Revolution and the personal revenge narrative come together. In Braveheart, the precipitating event is the murder of William Wallace’s wife at the hands of a British officer. This launches Wallace’s all-out war against the British that only ends with Wallace’s murder and Robert the Bruce’s ascension to the leadership of the war against the British domination of Scotland. In Gladiator, the precipitating event of the personal war of the main character, Maximus, is the murder of his wife and son on the orders of the new Emperor of Rome, Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius. Only when

32

Narrative

Commodus is killed in the finale of Gladiator by the dying Maximus, does the narrative end. The rise of Maximus as a gladiator is the story arc that fuels the revenge narrative in the film. Although each of these epic stories has scale and complexity, they are emotional personal revenge narratives.

The outlaw Josey Wales Although a Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) combines the personal and the epic approach to the revenge narrative. Clint Eastwood is the director and actor who plays Josey Wales. The personal narrative begins with Josey Wales as farmer, father, and husband. Before the credits, his wife and son are killed on his farm by Northern irregulars led by a Captain Terrill. He buries them, practices with a pistol, and when invited, joins Southern irregulars in their war against the North. The prologue ends with the end of the war between the North and the South. The epic narrative begins with the surrender. Only Josey Wales refuses to surrender and what follows is the pursuit of Wales by now Union Captain Terrill. The pursuit ends when the wounded Wales kills Terrill in Texas. The war for Wales seems at last over. The epic escape and pursuit of Wales begins in the camp where his fellow irregulars surrender and are massacred by Union forces. Wales kills many in retribution, but only a wounded young irregular escapes with him. They cross Missouri in an effort to reach the Indian lands pursued by Terrill and his men. The young man dies helping Wales overcome two local bounty hunters. In the Indian lands, Wales rescues an old Indian and in short order an Indian woman captive of a local trader. Then, he rescues an old woman and her young adult granddaughter from Comancheros. They reach the Texas farmstead the old woman reclaims. Along the way, Wales kills bounty hunters, Comancheros, all standing up against him. He makes peace with the local Comanche, but Terrill has found him and the final confrontation leaves many of Terrill’s men dead. And finally Terrill himself dies by the same sword he used to wound Wales at the beginning of the story. Notable about the epic journey is how many marginalized Indians and women Wales rescues. By his actions, he seeks to protect them from the human predators that populate the American Southwest. The consequence is that Wales emerges as a classic Western hero rather than as a fugitive. And the values he represents are justice for those oppressed by the powerful civilizing force, represented in this film by the U.S. Army. Additionally, most white men are presented as predatory, oriented by material gain and exploitation of Indians and women. There is also a resonance of the outlaw as anti-establishment here in this film. The film definitely echoes the core idea that those in power define who is an outlaw. Jesse James and his brother Frank become outlaws because of the material destruction of their family homestead at the hands of speculators looking to buy land they can resell to

The technical dimension

33

take advantage of the expansion of the railroads into the South and into the West. Rooted in the victory of the industrial North over the agrarian South. Not so different for the outlaw origin of Josie Wales. The revenge story frames this national narrative. Together they express a yearning for justice and an earlier era where better times may or may not have existed.

Redemption Although redemption has a religious connotation, its meaning in this discussion of theme has a broader shape. I use it to capture the idea that past behavior of a character has been aberrant, or deficient, even morally repugnant, and that the character actively alters his or her behavior and in doing so becomes changed and admirable. In story terms, the prior behavior and the new behavior are linked. If revenge is all about the plot, redemption is all about the character. Transformation is often linked to an inciting incident or a transformational secondary character. In George Seaton’s The Counterfeit Traitor (1962), Eric Erickson is a Swedish oil trader who does business with Nazi Germany during World War II. As Sweden is neutral, Erickson’s behavior is not unusual. Because of past behaviors, he is blackmailed by the British to spy for them. He does so reluctantly. His contact person is a German woman who because of her Catholic convictions volunteers to be a British spy. Erickson falls in love with her and when she is arrested, he is imprisoned and has to watch her execution. The death of Frau Marianne Mollendorf changes Erickson from a reluctant spy to a willing spy. Marianne is his transformational character, the person responsible for his redemption. Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty (1940) tells the story of a grifter who when he affiliates with the political boss rises to be Mayor. A Mayor needs a wife and in a sham marriage, he marries his secretary. They fall in love and he begins to adopt her conscience. When he wins the Governor’s race, he breaks with the Boss. He will be a Governor for the people. The political boss brings him down and both go to jail. They escape and now McGinty supports his wife and children as a bartender working in South America. Although the tone of the film is lighter, it is nevertheless a tale of redemption. Edmond Goulding’s The Razor’s Edge (1946) is a post-World War I Melodrama, not quite as optimistic as Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). The Razor’s Edge, set in Chicago, focuses on the wealthy acquisitive class, who have poorer friends to remind them of what they never want to return to. Larry Darrell is about to marry into a very well-to-do family. He is in love with his fiancée Isabel, but he’s a disaffected character who has been unsettled by war and not reconciled to a future of material well-being. That evening he decides to go to Europe and eventually Asia, to find himself. Isabel,

34

Narrative

impatient, cannot wait. She marries a rich simpler man named Gray. She has a family while Larry studies and finally finds peace. Years later, they meet in Paris, after Gray lost all his money in the stock market crash, where Isabel’s poor friend Sophie has become a prostitute after losing her husband in a car crash outside Chicago and where Isabel’s uncle Elliot Templeton keeps up the veneer of class. All this is observed by Somerset Maugham (the writer of the novel on which the film is based). When Larry comes back into their lives, the clash of values is front and center. Larry marries Sophie to save her. Isabel destroys Sophie out of jealousy. Larry goes on, but Isabel and her family seem destroyed. Only Larry emerges redeemed from turning away from the curse of capitalism. The Razor’s Edge is a Melodrama of ordinary people losing their way. It is also a narrative that embraces the spiritual values that Larry finds. The implication is striking. Change or die. Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956) is a story set at the end of World War II. The war is over and Private Mizushima is sent to convince his fellow soldiers in a cave to surrender. Their refusal leads to the bombing that kills them. The private survives and taking the robes of a Burmese Monk, he begins a quest to bury the dead Japanese soldiers he finds. Late in the film, he is asked to return to Japan. He will only return after there are no longer dead Japanese soldiers unburied. This tale of mourning and the desire to give the dead the dignity of burial is a humanistic journey that seeks dignity out of the outcome of a brutal, cruel war and the death of millions. The act of Private Mizushima has another dimension: the turn to seek atonement among one’s own. Three of these four examples are War films, and two of the three characters seek a spiritual path to redemption. The great model for redemption themed narratives is Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Jean Valjean has spent his young adulthood in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. Released, he can find no work and overnights in a monastery. There, he decides to steal the silver candlesticks. He is quickly caught and brought before the priest who gave him shelter. He tells the police he gave the candlesticks to Jean Valjean as a gift. Freed, Valjean has found his transformational character in the priest. He is told by the priest he now has a chance to live a different kind of life. And he does. He chooses to help a dying farmer employee in the town where he is Mayor and businessman. He rescues the girl’s daughter but has to flee when the chief of police in his town discovers his former convict identity. Although the police chief, Javert, pursues him for 20 years, their paths cross in the midst of civil unrest in Paris. Through his care for others, his ‘daughter’ and her young impetuous love, Valjean proves that his path after prison has been appropriate and morally outstanding. He has been all the priest challenged him to be. He has chosen the road of empathy over exploitation. And because he has, hope lives again in his world.

The technical dimension

35

Imprisonment, war, and dark times all darken the beginning of these stories of redemption. The state of the world of these characters contributes to the sense of difficulty the road back from these conditions pose. The characters who can overcome the conditions that make the world as dark as it is, in the tale of redemption, generate the admiration we feel for them.

The Manchurian Candidate Raymond Shaw is the main character of the Thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). In the Korean War, Sergeant Shaw is part of a team captured by the North Koreans. There, he is brainwashed, as is the whole team. He is trained to be an assassin, and he proves he is by killing two members of his team. He then is sent back to the Army where he is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and is a sleeper assassin awaiting instructions from his handler. His handler is his mother who is married to a U.S. Senator. Together they publicize Communist infiltration into the United States. In fact, Raymond’s mother, Mrs. Eleanor Shaw Iselin, is the primary Communist agent in the U.S. The intention is to assassinate a Presidential candidate so that the VP candidate, Senator John Iselin, can ascend to the Presidency. Complicating the fact that Raymond is a sleeper assassin is the nature of his character. He is ill-tempered, anti-social, and aggressive. Not quite a spoiled rich boy, rather Raymond is the product of a powerful mother and an absent father. He is ordered about by his mother, always the handler. There is nothing maternal about Eleanor Shaw Iselin. The consequence is Raymond seems a ruined, unpleasant human being. No empathy for our main character in Raymond’s case. As an assassin and an unpleasant person, where lies the path to redemption? Part of the redemption comes from the fact that our main character is being victimized by the plot, a plot driven by the most powerful of antagonists, Raymond’s mother. This victimization by his mother makes us feel sorry for Raymond in a double bind created by his mother, the character, who in life all of us look to for nurture. But to achieve redemption, Raymond needs to change. This change takes place two-thirds of the way through the narrative. Raymond and his Captain on the patrol, Bennet Marco, are having a few drinks. Raymond, somewhat drunk, confesses to Marco that he knows he is not loveable but that was not always the case. He then proceeds to tell Marco how his mother broke up his relationship with the one woman he loved, Jocelyn Jordan, daughter of the progressive Senator Jordan. That summer, he tells Marco, he was loveable. His mother’s intervention and his joining the Army followed. After this confession, our view of Raymond changes. We now see him as a tragic figure. Marco now working with Army Intelligence breaks the codes used by Raymond’s mother to put him into her dangerous hands. What will Raymond

36

Narrative

do at the Convention? What Raymond does is rather than shooting the Presidential candidate, he shoots Johnny Iselin, the Vice-Presidential candidate, he shoots his mother and finally he shoots himself. Raymond’s redemption comes in Act III, when he subverts his mother’s plan and saves his country at the cost of his own life. The act completes his journey from assassin who is a threat to his country to a hero, on behalf of his country. The other dimension to Raymond’s narrative is its connection to the Cold War history of its time. The victory of the Chinese Communists in China in 1948, the evolution of World War ally of the United States to nuclear rival, its aggressive dominance over Eastern Europe, all fueled a fear of the Communist threat. Even in the Congress of the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy, public pronouncements of Communists in government, and the execution of the Rosenbergs for spying for the Russia led to a paranoia and fear about the future. All these real life elements permeate the narrative of The Manchurian Candidate. All the more important that the redemption of Raymond salved the public sense of doom that pervaded public life in America. Both revenge and redemption are important themes in American film. The assassinations of the 1960s, the unrest associated with the advance of Civil Rights, and the costs of an unpopular war being fought in Vietnam only exacerbated their importance. In this chapter, we have introduced these two themes in film on a technical level. In the next chapter, we look at the creative possibilities in films and television series immersed in these themes.

4 The creative possibilities

In this chapter, we will explore creative possibilities with examples relating to both stories of revenge and stories of redemption. Here the issues of subtext and of surprise are critical. Although stories of revenge range beyond the Western as illustrated in the last chapter, we will focus on the Western in our discussion in this chapter.

Revenge As established in the previous chapter, the revenge narrative functions on a very personal loss in Act I and can use a journey or plot layer to amplify and rely upon an epic structure to give stature to the third act achievement of revenge. The Western story form also buttresses the narrative with a frame for the struggle between idealized primitive forces which are articulated by the main character against civilized or modern forces, through which the audience affiliates with the antagonist. The history of the taking of the West is a violent history, and consequently the clash at the heart of the Western is violent. The revenge theme personalizes that clash between the main character and his antagonist.

Western motifs 1 Self-reliant main character, individuality, and freedom are important values. 2 Modernity and material success are values affiliations for the antagonist. 3 Open spaces and ownership of land mark the character as well as the struggles in the West. 4 Women are chattels in the West. 5 Native-Americans, Mexicans, and Russians are rivals in the West and its vast resources.

37

38

Narrative

6 The town is both an outpost and an incursion in the West because it implies order and organization, the enemies of individualism and personal freedom. 7 Reinvention and immoral behavior characterize power relationships in the West. 8 Immigrants are not welcome. 9 The nature of conflict resolution is violence.

The Western and subtext There are three unique American genres  – the Western, the Gangster Film, and the Musical. Many of Hollywood’s great directors have contributed important Westerns. In their early phase until 1950, let us call it the classical period, John Ford made Stagecoach (1939), William Wyler made The Westerner (1940), Cecil B. DeMille made The Plainsman (1936), and Howard Hawks made Red River (1948). In the 1950s, revisions of the classic began with Anthony Mann’s Winchester 73 (1950), Bud Boetticher followed with The Tall T (1957), Fred Zinneman’s High Noon (1952), and George Stevens’ Shane (1952). In the 1960s, Sam Peckinpah added The Wild Bunch (1969). In the 1970s, Robert Altman added McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Sidney Pollack added Jeremiah Johnson (1972), and Clint Eastwood added The Outlaw Josie Wales. In the 1980s, Michael Cimino added Heaven’s Gate (1981), and in the 1990s, Clint Eastwood added Unforgiven (1992). Recently, Alejandro Inarritu added The Revenant (2016), and Scott Cooper added Hostiles (2017). These films in good part form the canon of the Western film. Views of the main character, the antagonist, the setting, and the core issues have been modified, altered, and in some cases totally reversed the treatment of key motifs of the Western. When these reversals have occurred, they have opened the genre to subtext which in turn illustrates the creative breadth of the genre. In Mann’s Winchester 73, the main character and the antagonist compete for a rifle, the new Winchester 73. The main character wins the contest and the rifle. The antagonist promptly steals the rifle, and the pursuit to reclaim it carries us through the narrative. Only in Act III, we learn that the main character and the antagonist are brothers. This revelation reframes the meaning of their competition, their struggle, and its outcome, the death of the antagonist. In Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, McCabe is a businessman-gambler rather than a conventional Western main character. When a larger business tries to buy him out, he refuses and they send three killers to murder him. In the ensuing endeavor, he is cowardly but lucky – he kills all three of them, but not before he has been mortally wounded. The anti-heroic behavior questions the traditional characterization of the main character. This is subtextual narrative change in this film.

The creative possibilities

39

In Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil (1999), the main character is a first generation American called Dutchy or Jake Roedel. His father came to American from Holland. The film is set in Missouri during the Civil War. Raiders from Kansas under the leader Quantrill raid into Missouri to burn, pillage, and kill Southerners. Missouri has its own local militias that will raid into Kansas. A young group gathers around Jack Cull Chiles. Jake and a newly freed slave named Daniel Holt are the outliers in the group. The others brim with noblesse oblige; they are true Southerners. By the end of the narrative, only Jake and Daniel survive. The demise of the true believers in the Southern cause and the survival of the outliers allude to the reversal of expectations. The outliers are no longer victims of either side. Only the traditionalists pass away. Here again the subtext moves the film away from conventional expectations.

The Searchers John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) is widely considered by film critics and historians as one of the ten greatest films ever made. Its physical beauty is in sharp contrast to the horrific narrative. The main character, Ethan Edwards, returns home three years after the end of the Civil War. He shares a homestead with cattle with his brother Aaron and his family, a wife and three children. The next day, cattle have been stolen, presumably by Indians. Ethan joins the Texas Rangers, who set out to search for the stolen cattle. Sixty miles out they find the slaughtered cattle. The purpose is clear. A murder raid on either the Edwards ranch or on that of the Jorgensons. All rush back except for Ethan. He rests and feeds his mount. On the return, they find the burnt out remains of the Edwards home. Aaron and his wife Martha and their young son have been killed. Daughters Lucy and Debbie have been taken captive. It is Ethan who finds the bodies. He prevents Martin, a boy adopted by the family, from looking at the remains. For the search party that sets out after the Indian raiders, the dangers are apparent. They are far outnumbered. After a gun battle, the searchers fracture with Ethan. Martin and Brad Jorgenson, Lucy’s beau, follow Ethan. In short order, Ethan finds Lucy’s body. Brad is killed rushing into the Indian camp, and Ethan and Martin begin a five-year search for Debbie. In the end, they find Debbie, now a grown woman, married to the Comanche chief Scar, her original captor. Ethan is intent on killing Debbie but is prevented by Martin. In the end, Debbie is rescued and Scar is killed. The revenge taken ends with Debbie now joined to the Jorgenson family. The door closes, Ethan outside it. Ford’s The Searchers is unlike any other film Ford has made. It is a dark Western. There has been sadness and loss in Ford’s Westerns; in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and in Fort Apache, Rio Grande, and My Darling Clementine; but in the same films there was a proud collective strength about the United

40

Narrative

States Army and those who served. Other Ford films have dealt with racism, Sergeant Rutledge, and economic and social hardship, as in The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. However, here too, there were always offsetting features such as the strength and solidarity of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. Nothing softens the impact of The Searchers. The script by Frank Nugent and Alan LeMay is very powerful, and although Mos Harper and the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnston add the requisite touches of humor one expects in a Ford film, there is nevertheless, the overpowering rageful performance of John Wayne that goes to the core of the revenge narrative. But, there is also more. And here we discover the deep dark creative canyon that is The Searchers. That canyon is miscegenation. A race that mixes is a race defiled. In Act I when Ethan first meets his sister-in-law, Martha, there is a tenderness between them that alludes to past feelings and possibly a past relationship. It is Ethan who finds Martha’s body. He does not want Martin to see her body. The implication is that she was sexually defiled, as well as mutilated. Later, when he tells Brad that he buried Lucy in his overcoat, Brad insists on asking if Lucy was sexually assaulted. An angry Ethan screams, ‘Do you want me to paint you a picture?’ An undone Brad rushes off and dies in short order. Finally, when Ethan sees the 15-year-old Lucy, he pulls his gun to shoot her. Only Martin’s quick response prevents Ethan killing her for having slept with the Comanche chief. For me, it is the theme of revenge for the mixing of the races, as much as the crime needing revenge, the murder of Ethan’s family. For me, this is the thematic creative mix that raises this film to a higher level. The creative subtext is the issue of miscegenation in post-Civil War America. The Salvation The Salvation (2014) is a Danish film by director Kristian Levring shot in South Africa with a mixture of international actors, principally in English language. The location is the American West. It is a Western deeply shaped by the revenge theme. It begins when Jon Jensen, a former Danish soldier, and his brother, Peter, meet the train that carries Jensen’s wife, Marie, and their son. A stagecoach will take Jon and his family to a town a day’s ride from his farm. They are joining him for a new life. But this new life is short lived. Riding with them is a released convict and a companion. These characters drink to the three years the convict has been without drink or a woman. The two men overcome the Jensen family and throw Jensen from the coach. They kill the son and then rape and kill the wife. Jensen runs after them and with a rifle from one of the killed coach drivers kills the two men. Unknown to him, he has killed the brother of Henry Delarue, himself the cruel killer who with his men exploit the local town.

The creative possibilities

41

Delarue captures Jon Jensen, who the locals turn over to him. After escaping, the beaten Jensen takes revenge on all who have abused him from the Mayor of the town to Delarue’s men and finally Delarue. Although the story seems straightforward, it is less so upon examination of the Western. Generally the main character is an American regionally familiar. Here we have a main character who is a newcomer. If we look at the presentation of the immigrant to the West in Heaven’s Gate, for example, all are victims. As are the Chinese in the remake of 3:10 to Yuma. As are women in Westerns such as The Salvation. The convict’s wife, Madeline, who lost her tongue to Indians when she was a child, now belongs to the convict’s brother Delarue. Her resistance to him almost leads to her death. Only Jensen’s intervention saves her. I suggest that the creative intervention that makes this film unusual is to combine the revenge story with challenging the idea that an immigrant main character should follow genre expectations and be a victim. By making Jensen follow the path of a more traditional Western main character, such as Josie Wales, Levring has surprised us with a genre reconfiguration that overturns the stereotype. The Revenant The Revenant (2016) is both a Western and a revenge story. Hugh Glass leads a large group of trappers on a fur trapping expedition. His teenage Indian son, Hawk, accompanies him. The antagonist of the story is a fellow trapper, John Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is only interested in getting as many furs as possible back to the fort. Glass is expert in the land and its ways, and its dangers. He seems intent first and foremost to teach his son survival strategies in the antagonistic white world. An Indian attack forces the trappers first into their boat and then to land and return on foot to their fort in terrible weather. A crisis arises when Glass is mauled by a bear. He cannot travel, and his son, together with Fitzgerald and another trapper, Jim Bridger, stay behind. Impatient for Glass’s expected death, Fitzgerald kills Hawk and buries the not-yet-dead Glass. The two trappers leave. The rest of the narrative is about Glass’s survival, his return to the fort, the unmasking of Fitzgerald and then Glass’s hunt for Fitzgerald. The Commander of the fort is killed by Fitzgerald who is eventually killed by the Indians who attacked the trappers at the outset of the film. This dark Western, made by Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu, was photographed in a fall and winter in the Canadian West. What elevates this film to something beyond a revenge film set in the 1980s West is the presentation of the land. In the classical Western, the land is presented with a majesty that suggests openness and space for the individual to be more than he has been. No more the wild beauty of Monument Valley or of the open range and mountains of Montana. Innaritu uses the landscape to oppress, endanger, and diminish humans. Indians and animals are threats, but the scale of the trees, the endless winding rivers, and the icy hills that rush for height all threaten

42

Narrative

and diminish the characters in this film and make their world dangerous and deadly, the opposite of the open ranges of the classic Western. This is the subtext Innaritu has added in this film.

Redemption Acting badly is no stranger to film and television narratives. Indeed in television series from Deadwood to Breaking Bad, the movement from self-interest to mayhem and murder is short. Seeking forgiveness or absolution, acting to redeem the self, these narratives are more unusual. Our interest in narratives where the characters seek to redeem themselves through action can be deepened, enhanced by adding subtext to the narrative mix. Subtext can derive by drawing in more than one story form, or it can be marked by a tonal shift or surprise. It can also be created by making redemption a primary or difficult goal for a main character or in a mini-series, more than one main character. Examples illustrate how this works. In Deny Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal (1989), four actors, each unhappy or non-conforming in their professional lives, create a passion play outside on Mont Royal in Montreal as opposed to in a theater. A physical non-theatrical location is used to bring the theater out of an artificial setting into a real setting. The priest who commissions the play is also a non-conformist. He is a Catholic priest whose mistress is one of the four actors. When he sees the performance of the passion lay with its ecumenical references to history and its speculations whose goal is to bring Jesus and his story closer to the audience members, the priest cancels the future performances. But the actors carry on with the play in spite of the priest’s objections. The subtext here is that people who make art can change their world in the most positive sense and those who oppose artistic innovations (as the priest does) are the false prophets of this modern time. The four performers change our views about Jesus and about themselves just as Arcand in making this film challenges us, his audience to embrace spiritual values over material values. Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) is the story of a young man who cannot remain in the Army during World War II. Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith is the son of a hero who died in World War I. As a hay fever sufferer, he is discharged by the Marines, a month after his enlistment. He pretends he has not been rejected in letters to his mother. In a bar in San Diego, he buys a round of beers for real Marines. Their Sergeant knew Woodrow’s father. The Marines develop a ruse to pretend Woodrow has seen action and is now to be medically discharged. They go home with him, only to find the town has turned out for their hero. Before long they have torn up his mother’s mortgage and nominated Woodrow to run for Mayor against the corrupt current Mayor.

The creative possibilities

43

When Woodrow finally confesses the truth, the town ‘fathers’ decide he has just the qualities they need for Mayor – he’s an honest man. Woodrow’s redemption lies in his honesty in spite of potential personal humiliation and social backlash. What is more important, honesty or being called a hero? For Preston Sturges the subtext here is that personal behavior is more important than what people say about you. Who you are is more important than who people think you are. Is a woman defined by her marriage and children or can she be important in her society simply by standing on her own two feet? This is the subtext in Shekhar Khapur’s Elizabeth (1998). The narrative in its first third covers the struggle of Protestant Elizabeth to stay alive under the reign of her elder Catholic sister Mary. In the second act of the narrative, Queen Elizabeth’s ministers try to organize a good marriage for her. They fail. In the final act, Elizabeth having resisted Catholic attempts to assassinate her decides not to rely on marriage. Men offer counsel, but no more than that. As she puts it, ‘I will marry England’. Monarchy and men do not mix if you are a woman. Elizabeth’s redemption is to see the world as it is, a man’s worlds, and to choose to not rely on men. In a narrative tool sense, Elizabeth is a Biographical film with a Melodrama character layer. Elizabeth is the powerless character of the Melodrama, a woman in a man’s world, and she is looking for power in a man’s world.

A Place in the Sun Based on Theodor Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951) is a great tragic Melodrama. George Eastman, child of religious workers in the Midwest, is ambitious. At the outset, he arrives at his rich uncle’s factory in the Northeast. The Eastman elite is where George wants to be. He is employed in the factory where he meets Alice Tripp and begins a relationship with her. Months later he is promoted and invited to a party at the Eastman home. There he meets socialite Angela Vickers and begins a relationship with her. That very evening he finds out from Alice that she is pregnant. And his trouble begins. He cannot tell his well-to-do relatives about Alice, and he cannot tell Alice about Angela. Attempts at securing an abortion fail, and Alice threatens George to tell all if he refuses to marry her. Faced with a dilemma, knowing Alice cannot swim, he recommends a marriage and honeymoon on a lake to the north. The clerk’s office is closed so the couple goes off to the lake unmarried. George’s mind has turned to murder. He will take Alice out on the lake, an accident will happen, and she will drown. Following his plan, he rents a boat and takes Alice out on the lake. She can see George is distracted, his head down as he rows. She begins to suspect his plan. But he cannot go through with it. She stands up, destabilizing the boat and by doing so, her own position is endangered. She falls from the boat.

44

Narrative

George does not try to rescue her. Alice drowns. He returns the boat and leaves returning to Angela. A few days later he is arrested for Alice’s murder. He is tried and convicted and in the end executed for the murder of Alice Tripp. Angela is loyal to George to the end. The redemption of George is that in the end, he decided against murdering Alice. The subtext here is to pose the question, can a man be guilty for considering a criminal act? The answer in this narrative is in its conclusion. Yes, at this time and place, a man can be punished for the guilt of his thoughts which incriminated him.

Ride the High Country The redemption theme in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) works its way through the clash of the main character’s embrace of modern values with the more traditional values of the Western hero. Gil Westrum and Steve Judd were lawmen together many years before the narrative takes place. They were honorable men, predictable, honest, and reliable. Their dignity and their bond were based upon these shared values. As we join the narrative, Gil Westrum has become a huckster, betting any comers in the town to challenge his young partner, Heck Longtree, riding a camel while they ride a horse. The rubes who ride against them do not realize that they cannot beat a camel. It is a rigged race, and Gil is happy to take their money. Steve Judd has come to town to provide protection for a gold shipment from the mines in the mountains, days from the town, to the town bank. Steve needs the work. He has fallen on hard times. When he sees Gil, he greets his old partner with the observation that no horse can beat the camel. Although he sees his old partner has changed, his offer is taken up. The three men will provide stronger protection for the gold. And so begins the last journey for Steve. Overnighting with a preacher and his daughter, the group unwittingly offers the daughter, Elsa Knudson, an opportunity to escape from her father and his religious views. She follows the group and asks if she can join them. She has a fiancé, Billy Hammond, a miner in the camp. Steve reluctantly agrees. At the camp, they deliver Elsa to her fiancé. Meeting his three brothers, Steve is alarmed. They are rough men without boundaries. Each of the brothers lusts after Elsa. A marriage is arranged for the next day. Steve and Heck are so alarmed they challenge the wedding and before each brother has time to steal and preview the bride, Steve and his two companions take Elsa with the intention to rescue her from a disastrous marriage. The Hammonds pursue them, seeking the bride and retribution against the lawmen. Simultaneously Gil steals the gold from Steve but is stopped by his former partner and disarmed. Heck sides with Steve. Gil is now a prisoner.

The creative possibilities

45

The Hammonds await Steve and Elsa and their companions at the Knudson ranch. They kill Elsa’s father and hope to ambush Steve when he arrives. In the interim, Gil manages to escape. But he is not far behind. He sees what is unfolding at the ranch. In the ambush, Steve has been wounded, and Gil rides to the rescue. He suggests to Steve they call out the Hammonds for a gunfight in the open. They do so, resulting in the death of the Hammonds and Steve being mortally wounded. Gil says he will deliver the money as Steve would have. Steve acknowledges he always believed Gil would do the right thing. As the others ride off, Steve dies knowing his friend has reverted to classic Western morality. At least four extremes exist in Ride the High Country  – the extreme religiosity of the minister Knudson, the extreme barbarity of the Hammonds where no barriers to their desires exist, the naïve youth of Elsa and Heck, and the law-abiding Steve Judd. All four rage around Gil Westrum, a man with one foot in the past and one foot in the materialistic future. All these values combust one with the other producing violence, both emotional and physical. In the end, Gil’s choice to adopt Steve’s values casts him in the past when the world was better. For the rest, the future is chaotic and violent. It is clear that Peckinpah is embracing the past and its values. Simultaneously, he is conveying his view of the ugly present and a warning that what comes after, the future, bodes far worse.

The Americans Redemption does not come easily in The Americans. The series is about two Soviet operatives who have been in America for years posing as citizens. As a cover, they have a family and a travel business. But, in fact, what they are doing is the business of the Soviet Union. They are Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings. Ironically who moves in across the road is Stan Beeman, in counter-intelligence at the FBI. Is he an indication that the Jennings are under suspicion? The pilot for the series sets up its parameters and its core issues about Elizabeth and Phillip. From flashbacks, we learn that they were chosen by Soviet military Intelligence, but did not know each other. They were forbidden to share their backgrounds with the other, not even their names, and in the United Sates, they are ordered never to speak Russian. In the flashbacks, we are also told that during her training, Elizabeth was raped by a military man named Timoshenko. The plot of the pilot is to kidnap a Russian defector now being paid by the Americans. Elizabeth and Phillip succeed in kidnapping Timoshenko, but their car was spotted and although they change its plates, they feel in danger. They hide Timoshenko in their garage. Since the kidnapping went awry, they are cut off from their contacts at the Russian embassy and face a decision – to kill him or not. With Stan Beeman across the road, their sense of vulnerability grows.

46

Narrative

Throughout the unfolding of the plot around Timoshenko, we are introduced to family life for Elizabeth and Phillip. They have two children, Paige and Henry. We are made aware that Phillip is close and protective of the children, more so than Elizabeth. When a customer makes an inappropriate advance on 13-year-old Paige, Phillip does nothing. But shortly thereafter, in disguise, Phillip visits the man at his home, beats him severely and tells him to stay away from 13-year-old girls. Around the children, Elizabeth is the busy mom, but we understand her involvement with them is more superficial than Phillip’s. For Elizabeth, her work comes first. We also note that in her relationship with Phillip, she is cold to him, professional rather than personal. A flashback about their arrival in America lets us know Phillip feels more married than she does. She puts him off about sexual relations at that point. ‘I’m not ready’, she tells him. Redemption is focused around Phillip. He is committed to his family, although the family is in large part a mask for their work on behalf of the Soviets. This commitment grows when Timoshenko tells Phillip the Americans will pay him for Timoshenko’s release. They will also pay him to defect. Phillip’s positive response suggests he chooses the family and its well-being over being a Soviet spy. In this, he is the polar opposite of Elizabeth who rejects the option outright. He begins to take off the bindings on Timoshenko to go forward with his plan. At this point, Timoshenko apologizes to Elizabeth about his past behavior. Elizabeth begins to beat him, now freed from his fetters. But she does not kill him. She tells Phillip to do as he wishes. Phillip, outraged by what Timoshenko did to his wife, kills him. For Elizabeth, this is not a murder, but rather a sign that Philip loves her. This plot complication reveals his love and she returns the feeling. She changes toward Phillip. So many years after they married, she accepts him as her husband. Out of a murder, their professional duty, comes love, a personal revelation. This action also elevates Phillip as a character in our eyes. The pilot closes with Beeman checking the trunk of the Jennings Oldsmobile that held Timoshenko. He finds nothing suspicious. The shot pulls back to reveal Phillip in the foreground, pistol cocked, ready to kill his neighbor if necessary. Protection of the family is the most important goal for Phillip Jennings, father, husband, Soviet spy. The subtext here is that Phillip is more father and husband than spy. Family is more important than country for Phillip. The subtext complicates how the audience experiences these two Soviet spies. The title, The Americans, suddenly becomes an ironic title. Have the two main characters become more American than Soviet?

5 Three case studies of excellence

In this chapter, three case studies will illustrate excellence in narrative. That is not to say that numerous screen stories discussed in the previous chapters were not excellent. Rather it is to say that in these particular stories, we find a mix of the applications of the narrative tools to a particular theme that is functioning at the very highest level. I’ve chosen a range of genres sufficiently different from one another that the excellence principle overrides the story form, the character mix, the structural choice or the tone, as the basis of the powerful experience of each of these narratives.

The Kid with a Bike The Dardenne brothers have dedicated their career to a particular genre, the Docudrama. These Belgian filmmakers choose to make films about characters on the margins of society. Their condition is presented in a realistic intense fashion. Professional actors mix with amateurs. Their films are shot where they happen. Their theme is survival, but not of the fittest, but rather of those in emotional or physical trouble. Handheld cameras, minimal lights, and jump cutting all are the stylistic hallmarks of their films. They are the creative godsons of Direct Cinema, the creation of Jean Rouch in France, of the National Film Board of Canada, and of the Maysles brothers in the United States. The creative goal was to reveal the truth about events and subjects. Minimum interventions mixed with an observational style best describes the approach. The Dardenne brothers are best known for the film Rosetta (1999), about how a young teenager survives an alcoholic mother. She is driven to work to make money. Hers is a painful journey ending with an unethical choice; she resorts to a lie to get a job. Another film is called L’Enfant (2005), in English, 47

48

Narrative

The Child. Here a father sells his baby to get money against the wishes of her mother. The idea that he views the child as a chattel to be bartered says a great deal about the recklessness and desperation of this father. Two Days, One Night (2014) is about a union vote to displace a female coworker who has had psychological problems. She campaigns for a second vote to get her job back. The vulnerable work and personal lives of workers is the subject matter of this film. The recent film The Unknown Girl (2016) is about a doctor who works in a poor area of the town. A young black woman knocks on the clinic door at night. The doctor, a woman, does not answer. The next day, she learns that the young black woman was murdered. She begins to investigate on her own to find out who she was. Her search leads her into great danger. She is determined to learn about the girl so that in her own eyes, she will have a shred of dignity denied her in her tragic death. The Kid with a Bike (2011) is a story set around the theme of abandonment. Cyril is an 11-year-old boy whose father cannot manage him after the death of his own mother who looked after the boy. The film opens with Cyril running away from the public facility where he lives. He is caught but runs away again going to the apartment building where he lived with his father. Ostensibly he is in search of his bike. In fact he wants his life with his father back. At the apartment building he tries to pretend he is there to seek medical help in the first floor clinic. School officials in pursuit find him in the clinic where he collides and destabilizes a patient, Samantha. This is how he meets her. He also learns that his father sold his bike. Cyril denies the fact his father would ever do this to him. But he has. Samantha arrives at the foster home with Cyril’s bike. She has purchased it from the buyer. She gives it to Cyril. He is thrilled and pursues Samantha and asks if he can live with her. She says she will look into visitation. Samantha is a hairdresser and when Cyril comes to stay with her, she tells him she will help him make contact with his father. She does so, but the father is resistant. He does not show up to meet them. Cyril is justifying his father to Samantha, but she is more realistic. They go to his father’s home where the woman he lives with tells them he’s at her restaurant. They to go the restaurant and with some difficulty connect with the father. He is not straightforward to Cyril, but he tells Samantha he cannot handle the boy and does not want to see him anymore. She tells the father to be honest with Cyril. But he cannot be honest. Cyril is so angry he begins to harm himself. Samantha is awash with empathy for Cyril. But the boy is inconsolable. Two events follow that are important for the narrative. Cyril is unpleasant and disobedient to Samantha’s boyfriend. The boyfriend is so angry he tells her to choose – him or me. She chooses Cyril, ending the relationship. Secondly, a local drug dealer, only six years older than Cyril tries to enlist him into the petty larceny that keeps his reputation as a bad boy. The question is whether Cyril will follow the easy path to delinquency or will he respond to the authentic opportunity for a parental relationship with Samantha.

Three case studies of excellence

49

Through her authenticity and requirement for honesty, Samantha for the moment wins out. The film ends in the hope that Cyril will stay with Samantha. What elevates The Kid with a Bike to a different level is that the Dardenne brothers do not soften the portrait of the abandoned child, Cyril. He is angry, he lies, he does not listen, and he does not accept the feedback he gets from others. He is the authentic portrait of what an abandoned boy of 11 looks like without sentiment. This level of credibility forces the audience to enter his emotional space. Particularly tragic is the immature incapacity of his father to take any responsibility for his son. As the parent, he is a total failure and this only adds to the horrific situation Cyril finds himself in. Samantha in her honesty and her willingness to care about angry Cyril is as generous as a surrogate parent can be. She has boundaries, and she has a capacity to love. She offers Cyril the chance every child deserves. Although there is a minor theft plot surrounding the young local dealer who is enticing Cyril into his world, plot plays a very minor role in this narrative. What distinguishes this narrative is the willingness to jump deep into the theme of abandonment. Indeed all the actors, the father and Samantha particularly, present the polar opposites for Cyril  – abandonment from the father, love and support from Samantha. This triangle, Cyril, Samantha, and the father represent two choices – hope and self-destruction. They are clearly and emotionally presented in this film. The barriers to Cyril surviving abandonment are very high – his history, his father, his behavior, and his attraction to bad influences. All suggest failure. How the film ends is its greatest surprise.

Nightcrawler Surprise is the key ingredient for the success of plot in the narrative of Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler (2014). This dark narrative could easily be mistaken for Film Noir. It is a Melodrama with a negative main character. In the Melodrama, the main character begins powerless and his goal is to gain power from the power structure. As we meet Louis Bloom, the main character, he is a petty thief peddling stolen copper wire and chain link fencing to a construction company. Being an ambitious young man, he also is looking for a job from the manager, even an internship. He is dismissed. The manager tells him he does not hire thieves. When Louis witnesses a cameraperson filming a traffic accident, he asks for a job but is again dismissed. He enquires what he needs to do this job; he is told a mini-cam and a police scanner. He proceeds to steal a racing bike and hocks it for a mini-cam and a police scanner. In this way, Louis joins the

50

Narrative

world of nightcrawlers who film accidents, fires, and crimes to sell to local television stations operating in the Los Angeles area. Although Louis has little experience, a mediocre recording device and a junker car, he is enthusiastic and eventually makes his first sale to the local TV station with the lowest ratings. He asks $250. Encouraged he seeks out an assistant. Who he finds is Rick, who has a drug problem and is sleeping in local garages. After vigorous efforts to bring Rick in as an intern, non-paid, Louis agrees to a $30 a day pay level. The goal is for Rick to figure out the quickest route to a scene reported on the police scanner. Rick seems slower than Louis would like. Rick is always looking for more pay. Louis is looking for higher performance. More often than not they are beaten to the scene, by the more experienced, better equipped nightcrawlers. Louis tries to also establish himself with Nina Romina, the female news director at the local station. He proposes a job to learn the TV station business. She is dismissive but willing to buy more material from Louis, but only if it is a scoop on other stations and strong and controversial enough for airtime. Louis finally gets a story ahead of his nightcrawler rival. This gets his rival’s attention as well as Nina’s. It is sufficiently graphic that he sells it to Nina for a much higher fee, $1,500. Nina’s male coworker warns her of the unethical showing a dead body. She is not troubled by ethics. Louis buys himself a red muscle car and beats on Rick to improve the time to reach a fire or crime scene. Louis fluctuates between encouragement and threats with Rick. Handing the next story to Nina, he propositions her – dinner and more. She agrees to dinner but is not encouraging when he proposes a personal relationship. She is twice as old as he is. Louis is not discouraged. He will come back to the personal when the opportunity presents itself. The next time he sees the nightcrawler competitor, the rival offers him a job. But Louis is a lone gun. He refuses. But he does reinvest his earnings in better cameras for himself and Rick. A fallow period follows where the advanced technology his rival uses gives him the advantage. Nina is unhappy with the footage and will not use it. Louis’ knowledge that ratings week is coming up and that Nina has never stayed in a job for more than two years (length of her contract) makes her more agitated with Louis. She is as desperate at this point as Louis is. What follows will be the set piece of the entire narrative. It will take up 25 percent of total screen time. Louis and Rick hear of a home invasion in progress. They proceed to the home quickly enough. They see and hear shots fired. The house is large, elegant. Louis films the invaders’ exit and abandonment of a weapon, and he catches a close-up of their license plate. He then proceeds into the house and films three dead bodies. He also films in a baby nursery, but there is no child present. As he exits, Rick is rather undone asking about what’s happened. Louis tells him to look for himself, but he does not. They leave just as the first police car is arriving.

Three case studies of excellence

51

Louis makes a copy and takes it to Nina. It is just what she needs. She asks, what price? He names a $100,000. In the end they settle on $15,000, her monthly budget to buy footage. He then proceeds to outline to her his other demands. His company needs to be mentioned, Video Production News. He insists on meeting station personnel. He insists on no further negotiations. He will dictate the price. And he insists on a personal relationship with Nina. This time no objections are raised. Nina offers ways to mitigate station liability by distorting faces so they are not identifiable. Nina is determined to milk this story. And Louis is as well. When police show up at his door, he withholds information that he photographed the man as well as the license plate on their van. He turns a copy of the rest of the material over to the police. He tracks down where the owner of the SUV lives and he and Rick stake out the location. Rick wants more money and eventually they agree to a substantial raise. This is dangerous. Rick remains skittish. They agree to call police and video the capture. The SUV owner exits and they follow him. He picks up a colleague and they proceed to a coffee shop. At that point, Louis calls 911. He then prepares for when the police will arrive. He tells Rick to get out of the car and film the action from another angle. At this point, Rick says this is crazy dangerous; he wants half of the money Louis gets for the video. Louis reluctantly agrees and takes the camera and positions himself. One car arrives, and by the time another arrives, it is clear when we see that one of the men has a gun under that table, that a shootout will ensue, and it does. A policeman is shot, as is the shooter. The second man makes his way to his SUV and escapes, the police car in pursuit. Louis and Rick are also in pursuit. When the first car is sideswiped crossing a red light, another police car arrives from another direction. The SUV tries to crash the second police car and succeeds, but he also overturns. The whole scene is carnage. Louis tells Rick to film the driver of the SUV, who is dead. Rick does so. But the killer is not dead. He shoots Rick. Louis chastises the wounded Rick for his greed, as if getting shot is retribution. He then films the dead killer. What is shocking is Louis exhibits no sorrow at the death of his assistant. Louis is interviewed by the police detective who believes he set this all up by withholding information about the killers and the license on the SUV. But Louis sticks to his story. The film ends with Louis giving a pep talk to his three new interns. Initiative is very important. He has two new vans, his video Production News logo on their sides. The vans go off into the night. Louis has become a successful entrepreneur. Louis Bloom’s journey is a remarkable re-invention from petty thief to successful entrepreneur. But the journey was bolstered by his drive for success, which essentially derived from his confidence and his opportunistic approach. He also had no qualms about the ethics or lack thereof about what

52

Narrative

he was doing. This characterological piece was indispensable to our belief in Louis’ desire for success. From a narrative point of view the plot is structured for surprise. Although the parasitic nature of Louis’ mission is off-putting, the fact that his rival is aggressively a barrier for the limited resources available to film the horrific events that can happen in a megalopolis like Los Angeles. Fires, accidents, robberies, killings, plane crashes, and home break-ins are the prices of living in a city of massive inequality. Although Louis is on the poor end of the spectrum, his lust for improvement is as much a pastime in Los Angeles as bike riding. Louis is also in a shared vision about the newsworthiness of enactments of human misery. Television seems to thrive on misery of this sort. In a way Nina is Louis’ older female equivalent. Do anything to get the story. The set piece of the film is filled with surprise, beginning with the bloodiness of this particular home invasion. The next surprise is Louis’ willingness to film death and dying, not helping the victims, but visually exploiting them. The next surprise is that this is his economic ticket into the big time: misery, the more of it, the greater the success. The fact that Louis withheld the shots of the killers and the plate of their van suggest he now has aspirations for the potential of the story. He is scheming to create the next filming opportunity in this story. Louis is willing to manipulate Rick into dangerous situations relating to the pursuit and eventually the apprehension of the killers. He tells Rick the killer in the car is dead, go film the body. How does he know that? Or is he looking to destroy Rick who is now a financial liability? He is willing to film the dying Rick without remorse. Finally he and Nina are exploitation successes, horrific in their lack of caring about the victims. When she learns it was not a home invasion, but rather a theft of drugs by thieves from drug criminals, she couldn’t care less. The footage is all she cares about, and it screams home invasion. Louis’ ascension to success with his interns caps his ride to the top of the unseemly business of nightcrawling. The way to the top is littered with bodies. Ethics and success are mutually exclusive.

The Silence of the Lambs Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), written by Ted Tally from Thomas Harris’ novel, is the story of novice female FBI agent Clarice Starling, seconded to a tough first case, the pursuit of Buffalo Bill, a serial torturer-killer of women. What distinguishes this screenplay from other police procedurals, indeed from screenplays that rely on a strong plot, is that in Tally’s work the characterization and plot move forward together. Strong characterization and compelling plot make a hard combination to improve upon.

Three case studies of excellence

53

The plot is the investigation to stop Buffalo Bill, a serial killer. This is led by a senior investigator, Jack Crawford. He enlists FBI trainee Clarice Starling and encourages her to enlist an imprisoned serial killer, the psychiatrist Hannibal Lechter, to help her. Given her inexperience and his level of pathology, it seems to be an impossible task. Nevertheless, Starling proceeds first to interview Lechter and next to gain his trust. For that trust he gives her information that leads to a storage facility where the head of one of Lechter’s former patients is found. When the body of another Buffalo Bill victim is found in a West Virginia river, Starling is at the investigation surrounding the body and it is Starling who discovers the body contains a death’s head moth lodged in her throat. It is Lechter who tells Starling that the man who was beheaded was his former patient and Buffalo Bill’s lover. After the kidnapping of a sixth victim by Buffalo Bill, Lechter is transferred to Memphis under heavy guard. And here it is Lechter who tells Starling all she needs is in the case file. He coaches her on what to look for. Shortly thereafter, Lechter escapes from custody, killing two of his guards. But he has given her enough to deduce where the killer might live. It is clear Lechter sees Starling as a worthy mentor, honest in a vulnerable way but tough and relentless in pursuit of Buffalo Bill. While he is viciously killing his guards, Lechter is generous and supportive of Starling. She goes to Bellevue, Ohio, in search of insights about Bill’s first victim. Simultaneously, Crawford has found out the name of Buffalo Bill  – Jamie Gumb – but he is located outside Chicago. He and his team go to Chicago and break into the house, but no one is there. The killer in is in Bellevue, Ohio. Following up a lead, Starling knocks on the door, and Buffalo Bill answers. She is suspicious but asks for information. When she sees a death’s head moth she knows she’s in the home of the killer. She pulls her gun. He runs off into the basement where the sixth victim is imprisoned. Starling follows, finding the victim and telling her the FBI is on its way. She opens each door looking for Buffalo Bill. Suddenly the lights go off. Bill is wearing night-sight goggles and can see Starling. He comes close to her, while she is groping her way in the dark. Only when he cocks his gun, does she turn, at that sound, and shoots him dead. The film ends with Starling’s graduation. There she receives a call from Lechter. He is all but congratulating her. Then he tells her he must go. Dr. Chilton emerges from a small airplane. He’s come for a holiday from his work as warden of the psychiatric prison that housed Hannibal Lechter. In the last shot, Lechter follows him. As he told her, he has to go. He has a guest for dinner. What is daring about this police procedural is not only its female FBI agent, but that Tally and Demme have the courage to emotionalize this story with a very powerful character layer. The two characters who emotionalize this story are Hannibal Lechter and Buffalo Bill. Ironically, both are serial killers, but one of them, Lechter, acts as mentor almost surrogate father to

54

Narrative

Clarice Starling while the other seeks to victimize Starling just as he is victimizing other women. It is Lechter with whom she shares her fears emanating from the trauma of losing her father at age 10. It is Lechter who is the sounding board for her entire backstory. In a quid pro quo; as she shares her history, he gives her the clues that will lead her to finding the killer. This is an excellent example of a point of fusion where plot and character meet. What is also interesting about Tally’s script is that there is a second plot, the escape of Lechter from custody, but Tally makes sure again that such a point fuses with Lechter giving Starling the final clue that she will use to find the killer. As a result the secondary plot does not subsume the larger plot. Tally stays consistent by using Lechter in both the character story where he is transformative, somehow moving Starling to go forward more confidently as she pursues the plot to catch Buffalo Bill. Finally there is a tonal dimension that writer and director do not shirk away from. This is a story about serial killers. In the case of Lechter, he tends to eat his victims. The mask he is forced to wear hides is teeth, his instrument of violence. When he escapes, his first step is to bite one of the police guards. This attack on the guard is akin to an animal attack on a human. Later, he cuts the face off the other guard to promote a disguise for himself as one of the injured guards. Finally, he spread-eagles the eviscerated first guard. When he is found it appears he is missing organs. Lechter, it seems, has cannibalized the body. What we see is he has not changed, although maybe we were hoping that somehow he had, particularly in light of his relationship with Starling. In the case of Buffalo Bill, he is skinning oversized women in order to make a new skin coat for himself. Beside this, he stuffs death’s head moths into the mouths of his victims. All of these actions raise the horrific nature of these serial killers and implicitly the threat to those people, such as Starling, who are hunting for them. The Silence of the Lambs is a textbook of narrative excellence.

II Directing

6 The directing tools

If the writer is the architect of the screen story, the director is the builder. If I can use this analogy for a moment longer, I would say the director is the master builder organizing the actors as well as the crew. The crew consists of the cinematographer and his/her team, the sound person and his/her team, the art director and his/her team, and the special effects coordinators and his/her team which will include an array of specialties including animators and software operators. All these specialists will contribute to the film through a directorial lens focused by the director. This is not simply a matter of coordinating technical assignments. The director has to articulate a vision. All decisions in every area are filtered through this vision. But how does this vision arise? That’s what this chapter is all about. At the most basic level, the director has to organize images that correspond to the telling of the story. Not only do these images have to tell the story; they have to be presented so that the shots cover the story in such a way that the editor will have what he/she needs to tell the story clearly and with dramatic effectiveness. Beyond this basic level, the director can recognize subtext within the narrative that can and will deepen our response to the characters, as well as to the narrative. When the central character of Saving Private Ryan watches his hand shake uncontrollably, it can suggest he’s neither a war hero, nor a coward. For Steven Spielberg this recurring close-up reminds the audience that this main character is very human. All the more meaningful that this U.S. Army Captain sacrifices his life to save Private Ryan, a soldier whose three brothers have already died in service of their country. Beyond even this level of insight, the gifted director will funnel his passion and his belief system into his films. He will also amplify a singular idea that will reshape a story into something totally unexpected. In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Kundun, Travis Bickle and the young boy who will become the Dalai Lama both seek the elusive state of grace that all of Scorsese’s main characters seek. Whether they find it or not, this deepest of life searches yields an importance to Scorsese’s characters rarely achieved in cinema. 57

58

Directing

Directors then come in all forms of abilities and ambitions. I now turn to those tools that will enable them to exercise their abilities and fulfill their ambitions.

Script interpretation Stories, however brief or complex, are subject to interpretation. The better the story, the greater the range of interpretation it can be subjected to. Relational stories can by experienced from the point of view of one character or the other. The story can also be told form the point of view of a third party, as The Great Gatsby is. The story can be set in different time periods. The Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet is set in Renaissance Verona, while the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet is set in modern Mexico. Yet another version, West Side Story, is set in modern New York. One can imagine that a gender prism, an age prism, a political prism would alter each of these stories again. A genre prism would also alter each of these stories. The other factors that influence the director’s script interpretation relate to who the director is  – his/her background, interests, beliefs, culture, and class. The great British director Lindsay Anderson was born and educated in the British upper class. Although he portrayed a Cambridge Don as a snobbish conservative intellectual in Chariots of Fire, he was the opposite in his work as a director. He was experimental, poetic, and transgressive in his films. O Lucky Man, a Satire on capitalism, is filled with musical breaks to offset the blood and treasure capitalism thrives upon. Entertainment or expose? Both, artfully presented. Anderson’s radical interpretation of public school education in If is anarchistic and wildly creative. In these films, his background is the satiric palate for the films. As to Anderson’s role models, his work as a critic offers a remarkable clue. He admires and has written one of the best books on John Ford. His imagery and commitment to highly emotional music in his films veer away from Ford in his meta-commitment to Satire. Ford stayed the course with his character far more than does Anderson. Turning to another director, Ridley Scott, we see how deep interests such as design and the architecture of images trump human depth, unlike Anderson or Ford, both of whom value human values above all else. Notable about Scott’s films is the beauty and depth of his images. A battle in the German forest in Gladiator, or at the gates of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven, the rain soaked cityscape of a future Los Angeles in Blade Runner, the ostentatious wealth of the art scene and its patrons in New York in Someone to Watch Over Me and the home of J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World is impressive, ordered, and wrung dry of humanity. And the characters who occupy these worlds kill each other in merciless worlds where the human occupants are diminished. In these worlds, outsiders dominate and the most powerful are corrupt, immoral but endlessly fascinating. In Scott’s films,

The directing tools

59

the villains are more interesting than the ostensible main characters. Commodus is deeper than the revenge-bent Maximus. The replicants are more feeling than Deckard, their pursuer. And J. Paul Getty rather than his grandson’s Italian kidnappers is the real antagonist in All the Money in the World. Scott’s world view is that aliens rather than humans will have the last word in our future. And the women who are the main characters in his GI Jane and Thelma and Louise are as manly as the males who wrong them. Which brings us back to Scott’s world view. Perhaps the best summary of this view is his film Black Hawk Down. The film, set in Somalia, tells the story of a failed U.S. mission in Mogadishu. Memorable in the film is the failure of American technology to overcome or overwhelm the small arms weaponry of the rebel faction in the city. The beauty of the imagery, the chaos of modern combat, and the obtuse American reliance on their own superiority leads to the tragic results at the heart of the film. In the world according to Scott, the individual is more important than the society and its organized power centers, whether they be military, scientific’ or religious. But unlike the individual in a Howard Hawks’ film, where the character passes through a rite of passage and grows through the experience of conflict, Scott’s characters end up as sole survivors or dead as Maximus, Thelma and Louse, and Ripley (in Alien: Covenant) do. Scott’s world is a dark world, not quite cynical, but edging in that direction. His characters are very far from the elevated status of a Ford hero or an Alfred Hitchcock victim. The joy in Scott’s films is not abstract but rather embedded in the design of his sets and his images. They are powerful, impressive, but devoid of human feeling. Woody Allen, on the other hand, is a director whose films and characters are overwhelmed by their human feelings. Allen began as a writer, primarily of stand-up comedy. His capacity to create jokes for others launched his career as a writer-director. In the early 1960s, Allen began his career as a stand-up comedian. By the mid-1960s, he wrote his first screenplay, What’s New Pussycat? The following year, he wrote his first play, Don’t Drink the Water, and in the same year, directed his first film, What’s Up Tiger Lily? His fulsome career as a writer-director began in 1969 with Take the Money and Run. He’s made a film almost annually since then. Those films have mixed Romantic Comedies such as Annie Hall and Manhattan, Situation Comedies such as Bullets Over Broadway and Purple Rose of Cairo, with serious films such as Crimes and Misdemeanors with homages to Federico Fellini, Stardust Memories and Ingmar Bergman, in September and Patricia Highsmith, Match Point and Tennessee Williams, Blue Jasmine. The range of this career suggests the breadth of influence film and theater has had on Allen’s vision as reflected in his films. We could almost say, culture as addressed by the film and theater artists is integral to Allen’s world view and in good part forms the parameters of the stories he chooses to tell. Together with Allen’s skill with jokes is his embrace of being a performer in many of his films as well as the writer-director of those films. As a performer, Allen can step out of his role in the film and comment on his behavior or that of other characters. This

60

Directing

inside/outside view allows him to editorialize on behavior and enact behavior. Often that behavior is fueled by a mixture of fear and desire. He fears his own mortality and desires relationships that may be verboten in society. He fears his own anxieties and failures and desires’ actualization of his goals whether they are attainable or less so. Whether this is self-conscious obsession or whether it’s a confession of all too human vulnerability is less material to the viewer. The fact that a window is open to the soul of this character and his comic persona connects Allen to his audience in a unique manner. Whether it is an authentic insight or a clever manipulation to capture his audience is another matter. The strategy has worked for more than 50 years and has enabled Allen to become a significant artist, closer to Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers than any other contemporary writer-director of comedy. I thought to conclude these ruminations on script interpretation by focusing entirely on a new group of filmmakers, all American, and all in their late 40s. And there’s one more notable observation about this group of four. They each in their way seek out deep emotions in their characters. Whether we love them or hate them, these characters troll deep for feeling. None are immune to pain, injustice, or violence. The filmmakers are James Grey, Taylor Sheridan, Patty Jenkins, and Scott Cooper. James Grey made a huge splash with his first film, Little Odessa (1994), and has gone on to other genres in Two Lovers (2009), The Immigrant (2013), and the Lost City of Oz (2016). Family ties, social ties to gangsters and power brokers, and the quest to live just outside the norms typify the Grey characters. Taylor Sheridan, principally a screenwriter, has directed Wind River, a police procedural set on reservation land in the Northwest U.S. The marriages of indigenous peoples and a white man with an Indian woman yield deep feeling and tragedy for all concerned. Sheridan does not explain the cruelties of the land or its people, but the volcanic mix of whites, alcohol, drugs, and Indian youth overshadow the beauty of the landscape. The land and its characters hemorrhage pain. Will any survive, physically or spiritually? Patty Jenkins is best known for Monster (2003) and Wonder Woman (2016). In the first, a woman kills an abusive man and will die for it. In the second, a fictitious woman from an island of women leaves the island to save the world (World War I) from its most evil practitioners, the head of the German army and his scientific guru, an emissary from Mars, the God of War. The fourth filmmaker is Scott Cooper whose films Crazy Heart (2009), Out of the Furnace (2013), and Hostiles (2017) root his work in the themes of duty and redemption. What is striking about these four filmmakers is that they care deeply about their main characters, they care deeply about their secondary characters (not in a schematic or narrative-serving way), and they care to make the worlds they portray worthy worlds. In other words, they are not cynical as Ridley Scott can be, nor are they presenting an aesthetic vision of society or how it was or how it should be. These are filmmakers who put their characters in terrible situations, but neither beautify nor rationalize their behavior.

The directing tools

61

They let their strengths and their love and their values come through and help them prevail. To provide a more detailed sense of what I admire about all four, I turn to Scott Cooper and three of his films to explain. The films are Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, and Hostiles. Although two of the films are placed in a modern setting, the most recent is a Western, and all three films espouse the sensibility of the classic Western. The main character, an outsider, represents a set of values – loyalty, honor, and a moral code – while the antagonist represents modern, material values. The journey is to affirm the triumph of the main character’s values over material or modern values. At the end of the journey, the main character again is alone. Bad Blake, a former country singer star, in Crazy Heart, has fallen on hard times. Failed marriages, a non-relationship with an adult son, and alcoholism keep him floating in the shallow end of the material world. A relationship with a single mother journalist fails, a self-inflicted wound. His old manager encourages him to perform with a former singer he mentored, with the gold of the stardust rubbing off on him. Reluctantly he writes a song for the younger male singer, and it is beyond successful. The challenge is to transition into a songwriter and live without his alcohol as his crutch. He will try. Bad Blake is the portrait of the fallen from his pedestal Western hero. He has not managed to live in the modern world successfully. He is very much a man out of step with both worlds. In Out of the Furnace, Russell Baze is an Appalachian steel worker. He too is out of step with the modern world. Decent, hardworking, he cannot sustain a relationship and he’s out of step with society. He spends time in jail because of a truck accident that has been lethal to another party. But his life is by choice, a choir boy’s life, compared to his younger brother Rodney. Rodney, a war veteran, continues his war in bars and informal boxing matches. He’s 50, aggressive, and fighting is his only way to connect with his world. When Rodney seeks out a fight in New Jersey, his host, a criminal gang boss named Harlan de Groot, expects Rodney to throw the fight. He does, but to no avail. Harlan kills him and his manager. Russell is worried when his brother does not return. He goes to New Jersey to look for his brother. The local police warn him to leave before he creates trouble. In Pennsylvania, he learns his brother’s body has been found. Promising to repay his brother’s debts, he lures de Groot to Pennsylvania. And he kills him. Before he does, he tells him why – he is Rodney’s brother. For Russell, the only link to the past and the future is his family – his brother and his uncle. The killing of Harlan is an act of revenge; it is also the act of a man who sees his life shrinking before his eyes. He must assert in this shrinking world that in the modern world, there is nothing more important than to stand up for his family. He does so but he too is alone when Out of the Furnace ends. In Hostiles, the actor who played Russell in Out of the Furnace, Christian Bale, is Captain Joseph Blocker. A veteran of many years of Indian wars in the Southwest, he is about to retire from the Army. But his commanding

62

Directing

officer gives him one last assignment: to escort an Indian adversary Chief Yellow Hawk to the Montana foothills. The Chief and his family want to return, so he can be buried near his ancestors. Blocker hates the Indian but cannot refuse the order. And thus begins his 1,000-mile journey. Along the way, he encounters a widow whose husband and three children have been massacred by half-breeds who now look to attack Blocker, his soldiers, and the Indian family he is escorting. Blocker is asked to deliver a soldier for punishment (he killed and tortured an Indian). The women including the widow and the Indian women are kidnapped and raped by white trappers, the escorted prisoner escapes and kills one of Blocker’s soldiers; the soldier Blocker is closest to suicides and finally white ranchers in Montana refuse to allow the burial of Chief Yellow Hawk on their land. In the gun battle that ensues, all but the youngest Indian is killed as are the white ranchers. Hostiles is overflowing with violence and death. The gun battles between Blocker’s troop and the half-breeds is unlike any battles on film. It is up close, personal, and chaotic. And when death comes it’s swift and surprising to its victim. As to revenge, it seems unending. The widow peppers bullet after bullet into the dead half-breeds who killed her family. And when Blocker guts the patriarch who has shot up the Indians he has escorted a thousand miles, the act is presented in extreme long shot. Such violence is too violent for Cooper’s modern audience. In spite of the tone such scenes create, there are also moments of enormous feeling created in the film. The animus Blocker feels at the outset of the journey toward Chief Yellow Hawk yields to a profound fellowship and friendship by the end of their journey. The vision of Blocker as a military killing machine is offset by his formal gentleness toward the widow he has rescued. Always sensitive to her losses, he is particularly thoughtful toward her after she is raped by the trappers. By the end, he is loving but ever respectful toward her. Particularly affecting is his farewell to the wounded black soldier he has to leave behind to continue his mission. Blocker is deeply moved by their service together. The black soldier in turn is moved by the personal compliment Blocker pays him. They are two soldiers bonded by battle. Nothing else matters, but that bond. In Hostiles, the main character ends his journey, now a civilian, but Cooper implies he will not be alone. In the last shot, he slips onto the train that carries the widow and her ‘Indian son’ east. He will join this new family forged by the events on the 1,000-mile journey north. In each of these three films, Cooper has tested his character. They have survived, scarred but with their honor intact.

Directing the camera To look at how directors work with the camera, it is critical to look first at the type of stories they choose to make. I have chosen three

The directing tools

63

directors who are very interesting in their use of camera direction. They are John Frankenheimer, Kathryn Bigelow, and Volker Schlondorff. John Frankenheimer is attracted to narratives with flawed or weak main characters together with overwhelming antagonists. He is also attracted to dark Thrillers with lots of action sequences that offer powerful visual opportunity. Kathryn Bigelow is also attracted to narratives with multiple opportunities for action sequences. Her three most recent films are two War films with contrarian, individualistic main characters and a Docudrama about the shameful events emanating from the 1967 Detroit race riot. In each film Bigelow displays an interpretation of the narrative that forces her audience to consider where they stand on the issues of war and race. Volker Schlondorff is interested in outsiders and ordinary people who are victimized by the extreme actions of the state, political and social. The victim’s actions, exaggerated and often transgressive, are necessary for spiritual and physical survival. In spite of the systematic barriers faced, these characters are in their way heroic, for standing up to those barriers.

John Frankenheimer Over the course of his career, Frankenheimer has favored the Thriller as his genre of choice. The positioning of the main characterantagonist in the Thriller, the main characters as ‘ordinary’, the antagonist as ‘overpowering’ suits Frankenheimer’s preference for action sequences that pictorialize the inequalities of this relationship. The French train coordinator (Burt Lancaster) whose real task is to delay a train loaded with art being shipped to Germany is matched against a German Colonel bent on stealing the art for Germany in The Train (1964). It is the David vs. Goliath prototype for Frankenheimer’s approach to the Thriller. Frankenheimer uses a similar narrative paradigm in Black Sunday (1977) and in Ronin (1998). These three films represent Frankenheimer at his highest level of entertainment and pleasure for his audience. But there is another Frankenheimer we have to acknowledge – the dark master of the Thriller. In Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seconds (1966), the main character is a full-on troubled victim while the antagonist is beyond powerful. The main character in Manchurian Candidate is Raymond Shaw (Lawrence Harvey), and the antagonist is his mother, Mrs. Eleanor Shaw Iselin, wife of a red-baiting Senator and the key Communist agent in the U.S., seeking to reach next to its highest office through a public assassination of the Presidential candidate. Raymond is the assassin. His mother’s husband, Senator Iselin, is the Vice-Presidential candidate. In Seconds, the main character is Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) transformed into Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson) by the antagonist – the company who gives rich middle aged men in crisis a second chance through killing off the self and through plastic surgery allowing a totally new ‘physical self’ to be created.

64

Directing

In order to understand the range of Frankenheimer’s direction via the camera, let us get specific.

The wide angle lens Frankenheimer uses the wide angle lens to provide context particularly in action sequences. He frames his shot so that there is an object, i.e., a train, in the foreground, and action, movement, or the presence of the main character or the antagonist in the background. Good examples here are The Train and Ronin. He also uses this framing device to introduce a heightened state of conflict within the frame. In order to create a sense of the vulnerability of the main character or the ominous power of the antagonist, he resorts to using a fish eye wide angle lens in Seconds, both in the opening and in the sequence where the main character is being filmed ‘molesting’ a young woman. The distortion in both of these sequences through proximity to an antagonist and a sense of distance to the main character makes these sequences extremely tense and dramatically revealing.

Point of view Frankenheimer prefers to position his camera to see what the main character sees. Whether it is Raymond Shaw aiming his rifle at the Presidential candidate on the convention stage or the suspicious point of view of Ronin operative Sam (Robert De Niro) at the transfer of the arms purchased to execute the mission, a robbery from international criminals in Ronin. He looks at the river and the bridge adjacent. He sees a shooter and warns his colleagues of the trap unfolding. To assure our understanding of the details, Frankenheimer uses close-up details to punctuate the point of view.

The close-up As do most directors, Frankenheimer uses the close-up to establish the importance of the shot. The note handed to Arthur Hamilton in the opening scene of Seconds, the close-up of the telephone to emphasize the importance of the call Hamilton is expecting are presented as expected. What is interesting about Frankenheimer is when he resorts to unexpected uses of the close-up. A good example is the effort of Mrs. Hamilton to comfort her husband the night of the phone call. In close-up, she embraces him and kisses him. The moving shot implies she is initiating sexual activity. The muted response of Hamilton implies his incapacity or indifference, all in a close-up.

The directing tools

65

Frankenehimer is as inventive in an early scene in The Manchurian Candidate. A very nervous Captain Marco (Frank Sinatra) meets a woman, Rosie (Janet Leigh), on a train going to New York from Washington. He tries to light a cigarette but has trouble. Rosie lights the cigarette and instead of a cigarette being lighted up, it is the nascent relationship between the two that is established. Although the scene is principally shot in mid-shot, the cigarette lighting is shot in close-up.

The moving camera Generally directors use the moving camera to raise the level of excitement within a sequence or to elaborate the point of view of a character by seeing what they see. Frankenheimer often uses the moving camera in action sequences. He also uses movement in a more unexpected fashion. A specific example in The Manchurian Candidate is the post-brainwashing sequence, with all members of the captured patrol present including Captain Marco and Raymond Shaw. This sequence is leading up to the execution by Raymond Shaw of the youngest member of the patrol. This action will prove that Raymond Shaw is the trained assassin his Communist captors want him to be. Early in the sequence described by Captain Marco, the audience of the demonstration is a group of white, well-to-do women. Later when the same scene is described by the sole black member of the patrol, the women in the garden party presentations are black. Each of these reveals is presented by a circular movement of the camera initially showing the patrol on stage and circling to reveal their perceptions of their audience. A later shot will reveal that the audience is actually a mix of Russian and Chinese military commanders, whose presence is to witness this test of Raymond Shaw as the potential assassin to be sent to the U.S. to do their bidding. Frankenheimer’s use of the moving camera is a witty insight into the subjective mind-set of the patrol who have undergone intensive brainwashing. The use of the moving camera here is effective in a surprising fashion to a bone chilling effect.

Volker Schlondorff Volker Schlondorff’s films demand a great deal from his actors because the canvas of each film is so large, he needs actors who will not be swallowed up by the narrative scale of his films. Furthermore, those actors have to scale up their performances to present the distinct person trying to survive national or international forces that can easily dwarf the individual. The rise of an all-powerful state and press tries to crush a modest housekeeper in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). A young boy, Oskar Matzerath, decides not to grow at age 3, his protest against the rise of Nazism

66

Directing

and the war wrought by its leader, Adolph Hitler, in The Tin Drum (1979). A journalist in Circle of Deceit (1981) tries to lose himself in his work, reporting on the civil war in Lebanon, to avoid his domestic struggle to feel he is not losing himself in his marriage to a powerful, independent woman.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum The first and perhaps most important directorial decision when it comes to actors is to cast well. What does that mean? It can be as simple as casting actors who look right for the director’s interpretation of the narrative. More often it is the look plus the capacity of the actor to bring more to the role than appears on the page. This may be a subtextual quality or it may be the capacity to emotionally surprise. The muscular man who cries easily. The ultra-feminine woman who prefers women to men. The meek individual who is passionate and quick to attack others and lets the other know it. In The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Angelica Winkler as Katharina Blum is presented as a pragmatic, conservative person who has fallen in love with a fugitive from justice who is on the run from the police. They believe she knows who he was and helped him in his escape. Winkler is called upon to portray an inexperienced woman who meets Ludwig Gothen (Jurgen Prochnow) at her aunt’s Christmas party and in that instant falls in love with him. She is also called upon to kill the reporter Werner Totges, who in his articles portrays Blum as a vamp who leaves a boring husband, an indifferent daughter to her mother and brother, and generally is the opposite of the person she is. In this sense Blum as played by Winkler has to be a moral, decent woman pushed to the ultimate immorality, murder. The other actors/characters in the film also must exhibit/become extreme characters. Dieter Laser as the journalist, Totges, must be the ultimate immoral journalist. He is an exploiter of the characters in his journalistic articles. A liar, a sexual predator, he is an individual who is empowered by destruction rather than truth. And he looks the part and generates an energetic performance that convinces us he is evil incarnate. The other roles are equally convincing. Mario Adorf as the Kommissar has the physicality and aggression that embodies the power of the state. And Jorgen Prochnow as Ludwig, the fugitive and Katharina’s lover, is sensually physical, an ideal to empower Katharina’s love for him. He is her dream male.

The Tin Drum The Tin Drum is a Fable about a family living in Eastern Prussia from 1900 to 1945. The film revolves around Oskar, as the son who refuses to grow from age 3 until his half-brother hits him with a rock at the end of the war in 1945. At that point, his body begins its growth once more. As played

The directing tools

67

by David Bennent, he is odd, oppositional in the extreme, and small with piercing blue eyes. Oskar is called upon to be as eccentric as he sounds. He is utterly atypical as boys of his community are Nazified to fight for Hitler’s glory. But Oskar’s family is equally unconventional. His grandmother, Anna Koljarchok, is impregnated when her husband-to-be hides under her skirt to evade the military police and conscription into the army. Tina Engel as the young Anna looks and presents as a mother-earth woman capable of saving the small Joseph from a military fate. The child that ensues from the marriage, Agnes, is played by Angelica Winkler. Here she is far different than her role as Katharina Blum. She is obsessionally sensual and sexual. Her two suitors are a Polish cousin played by the sensual Daniel Obrychski as Jan Brodski and Mario Adorf as Alfred Matzerath. Here Adorf is not aggressive or powerful. His three loves are Agnes, cooking, and Adolph Hitler. He portrays a passionate but limited man who cannot satisfy his wife Agnes. As a result we do not know if Brodski or Matzerath is Oskar’s father. This ménage à trois is eccentric and each occupies an extreme position. Brodski is the passionate Pole and Matzerathis the passionate Nazi, and both cater to Agnes whose sexual needs trump motherhood and nationhood. It is no wonder Oskar decides to stop growing. Schlondorff, as did Gunter Grass, the writer of the novel, sees The Tin Drum as a parable about characters who cannot avoid passions that lead to conflagration and war. Grass’s characters are not so much the power brokers, as they are victims of the power brokers who stoke social passions in service of their national and international goals. In this sense, the characters in The Tin Drum are all victims of the larger passions of their leaders. And the actors are called upon to portray victims. Each meets a tragic end with the exception of Oskar. Only he has exercised free will and chosen not to grow to a size that would risk him being a participant and a victim of World War II.

Circle of Deceit In Circle of Deceit, the war ongoing in the film is the Lebanese Civil war in the latter 1970s. And the characters are also victims, but not because of the war, but because of the conflicts in their personal lives. Bruno Ganz plays George Laschen, an international journalist working for a German newspaper. He lives in the northeast of Germany. The sea dominates his geography and he cannot contend with an active wife. She is mother to his children, a photographer of some renown, and sexually active outside her marriage. A war assignment in Lebanon is almost a relief for George. As portrayed by Ganz, George is intelligent, attractive, and insecure. He must ‘rape’ his wife in front of his children to show he is liberal and the master. He does not convince us or his wife or his children. Gila von Westerhausen portrays his wife, Greta. She is very comfortable and convincing in what she is  – a powerhouse.

68

Directing

In war-torn Beirut, accompanied by Hoffman is a photographer played by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, George is more comfortable. Although it is dangerous in the curfew that acknowledges attacks from both sides of the conflict come after nightfall, George visits a female friend at her Beirut home. Arianne Nassar, as portrayed by Hanna Schygulla, is as sexually active as Greta Laschen. Her Muslim husband has been killed, but she has a military lover. When George reenters her life, George believes she may be different, more malleable that Greta, but she is not. She is as comfortable in who she is as George is uncomfortable. As the film progresses, the war grows chaotic, interminable, and beyond understanding. When George leaves, he has a story to file, but as a person he returns to his German home lacking any deeper understanding into the war or himself. The male–female divide is the internal war of Circle of Deceit, and the actors make us feel there is not an end in sight for this particular war. Schlondorff is a director whose films have a good deal of plot. But the most important layer of his films is always the subtext. The subtext of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is that too powerful a government and too irresponsible a fourth estate, journalism, is destructive to the individual and that individuals must claim their rights by equivalent means. In The Tin Drum, the subtext is similar, but rather than individual action that is equivalent, individuals must adopt irrational means including madness where the power structure they face is based upon madness. In Circle of Deceit, the subtext is that women are more free beings than men and that freedom allows for a more powerful self. Given these subtextual agendas in Schlondorff’s films, he requires actors of great agility, confidence, and intelligence. By no means does he face an easy task. But in his best work, his actors serve his narrative’s ambitions.

Katherine Bigelow Earlier we focused on the visualization style of Frankenheimer and the style of directing actors of Schlondorff. For this third and final case of Bigelow, we will look at her visual style as well as how she directs actors. Hers is a powerful and unique mixture of approaching the narrative as a series of set pieces, and of using an unorthodox obsessional main character to crystallize personal and professional behavior in war, whether international or local, as in her latest film Detroit. In The Hurt Locker (2008), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and Detroit (2017), she has worked with the same writer, Mark Boal, and she has adopted a tighter narrative construction than in her earlier work, such as The Weight of Water (2000) and Strange Days (1995). In the more recent three films, Bigelow abandons the more complex narrative structure she used in The Weight of Water and she abandons the main character/antagonist relationship she uses in Point Break (1991). And she abandons the abstract pyrotechnics of dystopian narrative she uses in Strange Days.

The directing tools

69

The result is a leaner, more taut narrative, focused on war, battle, and individual character. The subtext becomes more evident. Proof of existence depends on results rather than intentions or ideology, and if you are a woman or an African American, the stakes increase by an absurd factor. In these three films, there are no secondary stories nor background stories. The narrative principle of immediacy is front and center. The Hurt Locker is set in Iraq 2004 and deals with the last 38 days of the tour of duty of a bomb disarmament squad of three Marines. The film begins with the assignment that kills the bomb expert, Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce), in the squad. The narrative continues with the introduction of his successor, Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), and proceeds through the unorthodox behavior of James and the efforts of the two other members of the team, Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Elridge (Brian Gerhaty), to adjust to this ‘cowboy’ behavior and to survive. The narrative unfolds in set pieces of 10–15 minutes, each hair-raising in their own way. By the end, all survive, but Eldridge is hunted, captured, and rescued in the next to last episode. The film ends after James’ brief return home and his re-enlistment and return to Iraq. Zero Dark Thirty is set in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 environment. The main character is Maya (Jessica Chastain). The film divides into three distinct sections. The first introduces us to Maya and Dan (Jason Clarke) who are interrogating Middle Eastern prisoners for information about the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden and his senior Al Qaeda team. Waterboarding features prominently in this section. In the next section, the focus is on Maya’s search to find a courier close to Bin Laden. This is dangerous work as Maya loses a close colleague, Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), a victim of an Al Qaeda suicide bomber. The final section is the attack on the Bin Laden compound and the killing of Bin Laden by Special Forces. Maya’s determination and drive in no small part drives the film’s narrative. Detroit focuses on a single event during the race riots of 1967, the murder by police of blacks at the Algiers Motel. Baby-faced officer Krauss (Will Poulter) is the aggressive face of the police, while a young black singer, Larry (Algee Smith), is the face of the abused blacks caught by the police at the hotel. A second black man, Dismukes (John Boyega), plays a security officer – witness to the events. He tries to slow down the brutality. The film is organized in the first third, introducing these three men. Krauss is viewed as an inappropriate officer who kills a shoplifter and is under a charge of murder by a detective, a charge to which he is indifferent. Larry is a performer in a group whose performance is precluded by the riots. Dismukes works multiple jobs to make his way in the world. The second long sequence shows the events at the Algiers escalating from a racing pistol being fired by an occupant as a joke to the interpretation by police, state police, and national guard that they have walked into an incited attack on them and the consequent murder of a number of black occupants of the hotel. The third sequence is the trial of the police accused of murder at the hotel and their acquittal.

70

Directing

The set piece To illustrate Bigelow’s approach, we look to the opening of The Hurt Locker. The overall intention of the set piece is to create the tone of the film. Many filmmakers have used this strategy to scale up the intensity and create an epic feel to their approach to the story they are telling. Think of the opening bank robbery in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1967) or the attack on the train in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). No filmmaker has relied as exclusively on the set piece as has Bigelow in The Hurt Locker. The opening 10-minute set piece focuses on disarming an IED in Baghdad. It is the particular mission in which bomb expert Sergeant Matt Thompson is killed by the bomb being detonated prematurely before he is outside the kill zone. The bomb is cell phone detonated by the local butcher. The scene opens with seeing what the robotic mobile device sees via its camera as it moves toward the bomb. The low point of view moving shots are jittery and soft in focus. Gradually, Bigelow moves to tracking shots of the robotic and then introduces the team of three who operate the device and are responsible for disarming or intentionally detonating the device. Bigelow quickly moves into facial close-ups of the team members. By the banter between them, they have a strong, mutually supportive relationship. Cutaways of Iraqis watching them add tension and introduce the idea that any one of these civilians can be the enemy. A specific cutaway to the butcher shop and the butcher standing in front of it introduces the civilian who will later trigger the device that kills Thompson. After the robotic device pulls the cover and confirms that there is a bomb, the team sends the robotic device pulling a wagon full of explosives intended to set off the device. The wheel of the wagon disconnects and Thompson puts on his protective suit to place the explosives manually. Handheld point of view shots show us what Thompson sees. Increasingly he as well as his team eye civilian observers looking for the danger signs that will alert them for signals of sabotage. Thompson places the bomb and starts back. JT calls out how far Thompson is from the target. Suddenly, the specialist sees that the butcher has a cell phone. He alerts the team. Thompson begins to run, but the butcher keys in the call and the bomb explodes. Bigelow uses slow motion to show the explosion that brings down Thompson and kills him.

The Docudrama style Bigelow uses handheld camera shots, movement, and close-ups to lead the set pieces immediacy, intensity, and most important, a sense that what is being shown is happening now and it is all real. Bigelow’s resort to this particular style gives The Hurt Locker a kind of veracity that war documentaries, particularly post-Vietnam War films, cultivate. The consequence

The directing tools

71

is an intensity rarely captured in War films. Consider the sniper attack on the American platoon in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). This is one excruciating scene! Bigelow uses this approach throughout The Hurt Locker. She also manages to convey the centrality of death and survival in war, and the role attitude, skill, and luck play in either outcome in the film. The fact she manages to differentiate the attitudes of the three men on the team once James joins is a remarkable tertiary gain from Bigelow’s direction of the actors on the team.

Life as a mission Just as Sergeant James’ mission in life is to see war as the drug of choice in The Hurt Locker, Maya’s mission in life is unusual. Her mission is to kill Osama Bin Laden. Fred’s mission in Detroit is to sing, whether it is to a rock and roll audience as the film begins or to lead a church choir at the end of the film. In this sense, all of these characters find traditional life – relationships, family – insufficient. They need more and consequently how they go about achieving their mission can be quiet and honorable as in the case of Fred; or it can be epic, as in the case of Sergeant James and Maya. In order to create that sense of scale, it is all about the characters’ determination and the barriers they face. The greater the barriers, the greater the sense of a unique and epic character. In the case of Sergeant James, he faces death each mission and he proves victorious by virtue of his being alive at the end of each mission. For Maya, the trajectory is slower and more nuanced. In the first part of Zero Dark Thirty, the torture section, the camera is still as is Maya. She is learning, experiencing, and growing more at ease with the mission to extract intelligence from those being tortured. In this, she learns the name of Bin Laden’s courier and finding him becomes her goal. In the second part of the film, the search for the courier is set against the backdrop of reminders of terrorism – the London bombing in 2007, a hotel bombing in Islamabad, Pakistan while Maya and her friend Jessica are in the hotel restaurant, and the terrorist killing of her friend Jessica in Afghanistan. Another setback is the discovery that the courier El Ahmed was killed. Her determination to find him grows (his brother was killed and so the death was not of the courier); she threatens her station boss in Pakistan, and she forces his successor to assign eight operatives in Pakistan to track and find the courier. Finally, at headquarters, she is the constant voice of certainty that the courier lives in a compound in Amadabad with Bin Laden there as well. After more than three months of casting doubt, her superiors let an attack be planned and executed. In the third part, Maya travels to Afghanistan with the Special Forces unit who will attack the compound. And there too she is the voice of certainty. The film ends with Maya alone being transported to the United States,

72

Directing

intelligence in hand, and Bin Laden dead. We are left wondering how Maya will now proceed in life, given that her mission has been achieved.

Scaling up and down – history and the individual struggle A single tour of duty in Iraq in 2004, the beginning of the insurgency is presented through the experience of a single team of three Marines whose assignment is disarming IEDs, in The Hurt Locker. By making one of the three a risk taker who finds the challenge of facing death daily a thrill while his two colleagues do all they can to conserve their own lives, an intense personal struggle is at the heart of the narrative. The Docudrama style lends veracity to our experience of the film. A single goal, the capture and killing of the leader of El Qaeda is the through line to the ten years of CIA efforts to protect the post-9/11 homeland from another attack, the narrative of Zero Dark Thirty. Although the style is not a replication of the style of The Hurt Locker, the arc of the performances emotionalizes and personalizes the challenge Maya and the CIA face. In Detroit both strategies, the use of a Docudrama style and strong performers cast for those strengths, are used to achieve Bigelow’s narrative goals for the film. In this film, she tackles the central issue of race and racism in the homeland. Whereas Bigelow does not editorialize about the war in Iraq or the methods used to reach Bin Laden including torture, she does take a strong editorial position in Detroit – racism causes racial conflict. Bigelow opens the film with a police raid on an after-hours club catering to black customers. The riots have not yet begun. This raid is the precipitating event for the riots. The Docudrama style is her tool of choice. Handheld camera movements, jump cutting, mid-shots, and close-ups that look poorly framed simulate documentary footage capturing the moment. She also uses archival footage of the 1967 unrest in Detroit. Governor George Romney announces he is calling in the National Guard. Audio of President Lyndon Johnson addresses civil unrest and a prescription of national force in the face of this insurrection. The analogy to war on the streets of America is established. The raid on the club is led by a black officer. He is egged on by his white colleagues. The growing crowd witnessing the raid throws rocks and then begins to loot neighborhood businesses. Having established the context for her narrative, Bigelow introduces the three characters who give faces to the riots and their aftermath. Two of the three are black men. Larry wants to woo the white world with his music. Dismukes has made his way in the white world working as a security guard. When he sees a cadre of National Guard troops across the street from the business he protects for a white boss, he takes them hot coffees.

The directing tools

73

When he tries to rescue a black teenager taken by the police the youngster calls him Tom (an Uncle Tom). The third character is Krangs (Will Poulter), a baby-faced policeman whose behavior is very aggressive towards a black shoplifter and later toward the blacks captured at the Algiers Motel. He is actively involved in the killing of some of the captives and the beating of others. He is the face of the antagonist in Detroit. By his behavior, he shows no remorse and no mercy. He is the face of racism in this film. To those who hoped racism was a historical aberration that ended with the election of the first African America as President of the United States, Bigelow’s powerful recreation of 1967 history in Detroit, a film produced at the end of the Obama Presidency, is a stark reminder that racism has never really disappeared from the America landscape.

7 The technical dimension

The themes I have chosen to explore in this chapter are justice and injustice, and love and hate. Turning to these themes, I note that these are primal themes. What I mean is that all of us, you and I, are touched in our lives, possibly many times, by these themes. To evoke these larger themes, the director must feel and transmit a sense of their importance and a passion about their outcome. We look at justice and injustice first.

Justice and injustice First and foremost, justice and injustice put enormous importance upon the performers, since the point of view of the character(s) suffering from the consequences, is central. The greater our identification with the character, the greater the impact of the narrative upon its viewers. The character may be the main character or it may be an important secondary character. Whichever it is, the emotionalization of the narrative will center on this character. It is also essential that the atmosphere surrounding that character supports and is suffused with the theme. That support will permeate the narrative in the subject of justice and injustice. Finally, the structure of the narrative should be organized along a rising action, so that by the conclusion, the audience can experience a climax suitable to the provision of catharsis. Specific examples will explain how this works. William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola (1937) is the second of four biographical films Dieterle made at Warner Bros. studio. These films shifted the studio from being known for social progressive issue films to large scale biographies steeped in universal importance rather than national and/or local significance. Dieterle, an actor-director émigré from Germany, arrived in Hollywood in 1930. Within ten years, he was one of the most prestigious directors in Hollywood. But his fame was short lived. By the 1950s, he returned to Europe. For Hollywood, he was too liberal by half. In 1938, he made a pro-Republican 74

The technical dimension

75

film Blockade, set in the Spanish Civil War. The Red Scare that infected Hollywood by the late 1940s short-circuited his American career. The four film biographies for which Dieterle is known began with The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), which won the lead, Paul Muni, an Oscar as best actor. The Story of Emile Zola followed in 1937, and the film won an Oscar as Best Picture. Juarez (1939) with Paul Muni as the lead was the third biography. All had Muni as the actor at the center. Dieterle’s last biography, Dr. Erhlich’s Magic Bullet, had Edward G. Robinson in the lead. All four films were progressive, humanistic, and directed with an emotional and visual richness that marked Dieterle’s works as exceptional. The Life of Emile Zola is framed by Emile Zola’s life and death, but the majority of the film is devoted to the plot, the trial of Alfred Dreyfus for treason as a member of the French General Staff who spied for Germany. He is found guilty and sent to Devil’s Island off the coast of South America. The case unravels through efforts to exonerate Dreyfus, but in spite of proof that the actual spy was another officer named Major Esterhazy, the army General Staff officers who brought the charges perjure themselves. The reason is that Dreyfus is a Jew. Only when the first appeal fails does Zola join those defending Dreyfus. He writes his famous J’accuse public letter. Dreyfus is exonerated and re-instated after years in prison. He is virtually a broken man. But justice, at last has been served and it is the French army that bares the stain of dishonor and injustice. The actors who play Zola, Paul Muni, and Dreyfus, Joseph Schildkraut, carry the emotional burden of the film. Zola has to represent the highest level of respect for the truth, that is justice for Alfred Dreyfus. Muni in his restless endless commitment to justice in French society is quite remarkable. This is an actor who, in Scarface (1932), portrays ruthless violence and a charismatic desire for his woman of choice (the mob boss’s girlfriend) and for his sister, and is the same actor who is a hardworking Chinese peasant in The Good Earth (1937), and an Aztec Abraham Lincoln in Juarez. He has that rare capacity to lose his star quality and immerse himself in the role he is playing. Only Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro have displayed this breadth of range as actors. Muni’s capacity as an actor and his sense of conviction makes Zola become what Dieterle strives for in The Life of Emile Zola. The same level of passion and conviction is there in Schildkraut’s performance as Dreyfus. He is a man for whom honor is everything. Dieterle pushes him to be more French than the French General Staff. They appear brittle and inelastic in their sense of honor. It does not matter if you destroy a Jew. Their anti-Semitism is clear and constant in spite of the external pressures put upon them. It is clear that scaling up concepts such as the honor of the army, their loyalty to Esterhazy, a scoundrel, matters little. After all, he’s not a Jew. Truth and justice are not even distantly related to the General Staff. Dieterle brings a wonderful irony to their behavior without dishonoring the traditions of the military in France. We see ceremony through the eyes of Dreyfus. He

76

Directing

respects, above all, those traditions in spite of the humiliation he personally must bear. Schildkraut and Dieterle together achieve this and more in the performance and the epic surround of military tradition in the performance. Carl Dryer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) takes the issue of performance to the next level. Using a theater actress, Falconetti, the film made in France was based on the transcript of Joan’s trial. The time frame is the trial leading to her execution. She was burned at the stake, a heretic according to the church officials who tried her, in accord with the wishes of their English masters. To intensify the narrative, Dryer chooses to shoot at least 90 percent of the film in close-ups. Imagine, no establishing shots, no contextual shots. The result is an intense disorienting experience focused on Joan’s face and her reactions to her inquisitors. She is young, they are old and male. Her judges and her English guards look down upon her. From an age and gender point of view they are the powerful and she is powerless. Nevertheless, she speaks with grace, humility, and belief that she is acting in God’s will on behalf of her people. The injustice done to her is clear and motivated by earthly issues of power and its maintenance. Joan in her simplicity is strong in her conviction. In her performance, Falconetti creates a spirituality that is in sharp contrast to the judges who are keen to rid the world of this simple maid. Dryer is a man who made few films in his 50-year career. Nevertheless, this particular film is not only considered a classic, it has endured as a film that illustrates the power of filmmaking. It is a remarkable narrative on the theme of justice and injustice in our past and in our present. Women and the young remain unfairly treated in too many parts of our world. Each of these examples of our theme revolves around a trial, as does our third example, Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Although both The Life of Emile Zola and The Passion of Joan of Arc revolve around the injustice of putting an innocent on trial, our third example revolves around a predator, a man guilty of pedophilia and the murder of his child victims. There is probably no one who goes on trial more deserving of justice in the form of punishment. How Lang brings about a trial in the last third of the film is to use a highly unusual plot twist. Since the police cannot capture the killer, the task falls to the city’s criminals. He’s giving their profession a hard time and so they find him, try him, and punish him. To understand this approach, one must look to Lang, the director. In his silent period, he took up themes of religion, totalitarianism, criminality, and transgression. He is most famous for Metropolis (1926), a futuristic film where workers live underground, imprisoned by a totalitarian ubermeister who uses a female robot to sow dissension to maintain his power over them. The revolt that follows empowers a woman to lead the workers to freedom. Power and the role of women and men in society are presented in a highly ordered world where robotic behavior captures visually the conflict ongoing between the elite masters and their worker slaves. After his move to America in 1935, Lang made 20 films in Hollywood. The important Film Noir Scarlet Street (1945) and a dark Police Story, The

The technical dimension

77

Big Heat (1953), illustrate a cruel world where justice is hard to come by and injustice and cruelty are baked into the power structure. Lang relies less here on the main characters, and his villains, Dan Duryea in Scarlet Street and Lee Marvin in The Big Heat, are far more memorable. They coincide with Peter Lorre’s portrayal as the murderer in M. Lang’s world is a disordered world, chaotic, cruel and unjust. Only by accepting disorder can justice or at least remission from violence be found.

The Verdict Sidney Lumet began his career as a child actor and never lost his interest in acting and its importance in films. The consequence is the string of unforgettable performances in his films – Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker (1964), Peter Finch in Network (1976), Mandy Patinkin in Daniel, and River Phoenix in Running on Empty (1988). Paul Newman’s performance in The Verdict (1982) stands high in this circle. He is Frank Galvin, the main character in David Mamet’s screenplay of The Verdict. Frank Galvin is a failed alcoholic lawyer, an ambulance chaser. A former colleague reminds him of a case upcoming; it is a real money maker. The victim is a young woman in a vegetative state after coming into the hospital to have a baby. Galvin meets the sister and her husband. He visits the woman in the hospital, hooked up to life support tubes. He takes pictures. When he meets the Bishop to hear a settlement proposal, he holds up the pictures and says he cannot take the money. If he does, he will only be a rich ambulance chaser for the rest of his life. Galvin is looking to claim back his dignity into his life, and he wants to use this case to do so. What he does not realize is how much he is up against  – the church, a high powered legal defense team, and his own meagre resources. His key expert witness, Dr. Gruber, backs out and suddenly Galvin feels very vulnerable and foolish. He relies on a divorced woman for support. She is actually in the employ of James Mason, the defense lead referred to as The Prince of Darkness. The young woman, Laura, is being paid as a spy for the other side. And Galvin faces a very pro-defense judge. He tries to resuscitate the offer he refused, but it is too late. Galvin’s replacement expert witness is an elderly black General Physician clearly outmatched by the accused star doctors. An operating room nurse is hostile to Galvin. He represents the establishment for her, just as the accusers to Galvin’s mentor discover a check from the Prince of Darkness in Laura’s handbag. When Galvin goes to New York to interview the attending nurse who left the city and the profession two weeks after the disastrous operation, his mentor tells him about Laura. His reaction is to punch Laura in the face, in public. Galvin learns from the attending nurse, she will testify on behalf of the plaintiff. In court, her testimony becomes the critical factor. One of the defendants forced her to falsify her affidavit. Although the judge has her testimony

78

Directing

removed, the jury finds for Galvin’s client and asks the judge if they are limited in the size of the settlement. They are not. Galvin in his speech to the jury has spoken in almost sermon-like terms to the issues of justice and injustice. This speech prior to the jury decision captures the issues at stake for his client and for himself. Several decisions made by Lumet support the justice–injustice theme and elevate the film to something more. Just as Dieterle was able to elevate The Life of Emilie Zola to a narrative where national and international values dominate the personal, Lumet and Mamet raise the bar. Lying, cheating, and exploitation are not acceptable strategies to maintain the prevailing power structure. The search for truth and justice intertwine here and imply that without both, all suffer. The first strategy Lumet uses in the direction is a visual strategy. He chooses to visualize Boston and the world Galvin lives in is seen in dark blues and greens. It is not a bright world. It is a world in which it is hard to see and to be seen. Potentially it is a tragic world. In this world, injustice prevails. How to find the light, justice, becomes the visual motif of The Verdict. A second directing strategy Lumet chooses is to keep the camera close to the main character. In this decision, it is Galvin’s decision-making and his journey toward the light that becomes central. When he decides to reject the offer from the Bishop, the camera stands before Galvin and above him, looking down, victimizing him, conveying how hard this choice is for him. In the shot, he is not a hero but rather a man who is a victim, but is professing as in prayer, he no longer wants to be a victim. A third directing strategy is to use interiors over exteriors where possible. The consequence is to give The Verdict a claustrophobic feeling. Galvin is trapped inside a failing life, in an environment that promotes few options, and in a class of failures and drunks who are also trapped in their lives. Galvin’s local bar, his office, and his apartment offer no relief from the sense of being trapped. Finally, in his direction, Lumet carefully modulates the performance. Most often, Galvin is quiet, jokey in the bar, occasionally breaking out for a brief moment when he first approaches Laura in the bar. When he is helpless, he hides or lashes out, alone in his office smashing a frame whose shattering naturally punishes him – he cuts himself. And in court, Galvin sits as if praying rather than being out in the world. When he gives his closing statement it is in the form of one last prayer. The power of the performance is in no small part to this careful modulation by Lumet. The theme of justice and injustice requires such orchestration to modulate and orchestrate such a powerful filmic impact.

Love and hate Love and hate, universal feelings, are the next theme we explore. What happens when the themes are carried forward in a love relationship? Do

The technical dimension

79

they always coexist or are they a dramatic initial construct used to mine the idea that opposites attract? As with most narrative constructs, these themes establish energy fields within narratives. Often they are the avenue into understanding character. It is in this narrative sense, that we use love and hate. The first example to illustrate how these themes embed into narrative is Homeland. Love and hate are embedded in the main character, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), and in the antagonist, Nicolas Brody (Damien Lewis). She is the CIA operative who initially suspects that Marine Sergeant Brody returning from eight years as a prisoner of El Qaeda in Iraq has been turned and will be instrumental in an attack on the homeland. In the course of trying to get close to Brody, she finds herself attracted to him and they have a sexual encounter. At this stage, when he discovers her true view of him, he feels played by her. This becomes their dynamic, but after she enlists him to work for the CIA or face treason charges, the relationship intensifies and they fall in love. After the bombing of CIA headquarters, she accuses him of being the bomber; nevertheless she helps him escape to Canada. At this stage, he has become totally dependent on her and separated from his family. The theme of love and hate is also played out in Carrie’s relationships with Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend), and David Estes (David Harewood). Brody professes a similar intense set of relationships beyond Carrie. His wife, Jessica (Morena Baccarin), his Marine partner, Tom Walker (Chris Chalk), and his relationship with his captor, Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban). How to portray credibly the love–hate dynamic between so many characters requires a range of performance particularly from Danes and Lewis. It is hard to imagine that a character can by highly sexualized as well as unpredictably violent, but that is precisely what happens in these two stories. In part, both characters are given a historical condition, bi-polar for Carrie and PTSD for Brody. In each case, the psychiatric condition explains the labile emotional swings each of these characters go through. We see Carrie when she goes off her medications and we see Brody hide in a corner of his bedroom when he is reliving his traumatic past and despairing. We also see each when they attack the other. The range required to make Carrie and Brody credible as characters is far wider than we usually encounter in TV characters, and it is the prime reason the series is as successful as it has been. This level of credibility is an acting issue and it is a directing issue. The directors rely on the surrounding cast, Quinn, Berenson, Jessica; even their children in the narrative are emotionally extreme, and their performances support the emotional peaks and valleys of the two principals. But the directors follow the writer’s lead in giving each of the characters a weakness. For Carrie, it is her obsessiveness in performing her job. For Brody, it is his embrace of the religion of his captors. For Quinn, it is his capacity for violence. During interrogation, he stabs Brody in the hand. For Berenson, it is his humanization of friend and foe. John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945), written by Jo Swerling, takes a different approach to love and hate in the narrative. The visual presentation

80

Directing

beginning in New Mexico moves to Georgia, where the main character’s young disabled brother is living, to Maine where the narrative concludes, and all convey a ravishing beauty that overlaps the story of a relationship between Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) and Ellen (Gene Tierney). They meet in New Mexico where Ellen breaks off from her fiancé to marry Richard. She is very charismatic, but we learn that she is impulsive, controlling, and in the case of Richard’s young brother, lethal. Quite why Ellen is so possessive and jealous is characterological, consequently her condition grows worse. She feels Richard is paying too much attention to her half-sister Ruth (Jeannie Crain). Her mother suggests perhaps if she had a baby she might mature into the relationship with her husband. She does become pregnant, but late in the pregnancy she intentionally falls down the stairs killing the fetus. Her fixation on Ruth and Richard deepens when she sees that he has dedicated his new book to Ruth. Richard can no longer deal with her and tells her he will leave the marriage. Ellen’s response is to plan her own death by poison and to assure that Ruth will be charged with her murder. Even from the grave, she acts to possess Richard. In the ensuing murder trial, Richard’s testimony exonerates Ruth, but he is charged with withholding evidence and has to serve two years in prison. Leave Her to Heaven is a story of sociopathic behavior leading to three deaths. Ellen’s mother explains this as Ellen being too close to her father. Gene Tierney as an actress is called upon to conjure a possessive love that is so powerful that it turns to hate. This is a difficult role because of the range of behavior. Tierney captures the beauty and the charisma but is less convincing in projecting the rage that turns to destruction. In this type of role, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987) captures the sexual fixation and rage needed to create the sense of irrational danger such a character poses for others and herself. In Leave Her to Heaven, the narrative actions, letting the invalid Danny drown, the fall down the stairs (fatal to her pregnancy), and poisoning herself to destroy her half-sister are plot turns that imply the madness of such a character. Unfortunately, the performance of Tierney does not deepen these plot points. A baseline for getting the best performance from actors is William Wyler. He is working with actors who do have the range to convey the hate as well as the love in his film Detective Story (1951). Kirk Douglas is Detective James McLeod who has a sadistic streak with criminals. He does his job almost too well. With a Dr. Karl Schneider (George MacCready), McLeod has not only threatened the accused, he beats him in spite of warnings from the doctor’s lawyer and his own superior officer. The other side of McLeod is that he desperately loves his wife, Mary (Eleanor Parker). The lawyer threatens McLeod with a secret – that his wife had previously received an abortion from Dr. Schneider. At the time, she was seeing a known crime figure. When McLeod learns of his wife’s past, he goes crazy accusing her of being a slut and more. She sees him in a different light and decides to leave

The technical dimension

81

him. That very day, McLeod is killed in the police station by Charley Ginnini (Joseph Wiseman), a criminal with a long history. Wyler is well known for his pursuit of the highest level of performance from his actors. As a consequence he is among a small elite of directors who has won multiple Academy Awards, as have his actors. Both Kirk Douglas and Eleanor Parker more than exhibit the range their roles require. Both tenderness and toughness are emotions operating with a remarkable credibility and power. Wyler knows that two extreme and opposite characteristics makes characters more credible and complex. He uses this strategy to energize and humanize his characters. Wyler also uses the police station set as a microcosm of humanity lending the metaphor of family to this particular community. Wyler also captures the subtext that McLeod was a mistreated child who is now a judgmental, mistreating policeman, who cannot in truth get away from his personal past. Love and hate coexist deeply embedded and out of balance in McLeod, and it costs him his wife, the only person he truly loved. Parker is very strong in portraying a woman who has learned from life and moved on, unlike her tragic husband. Notable about Wyler is his capacity to get equally strong performances from female and male actors. Both are on full display in his films The Heiress (1948) and Wuthering Heights (1939).

Caught Max Ophuls’ Caught (1948) is a Melodrama about Leonora Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes), a naïve young woman who wants to marry rich and does. She marries Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) who proves to be a sadistic monster who really hates her. She leaves him and finds a job in New York working for two lower East Side doctors. One of them, the pediatrician Larry Quinada (James Mason), has a strong work ethic and a commitment to helping his patients. He falls in love with Leonora, but a complication ensues. Ohlrig comes to visit her in her walk-up and says he was wrong and for a day she believes him. That night she gets pregnant. Dr. Quinada pursues her, but in the end she goes back to Ohlrig to protect her child. But Ohlrig the monster is punishing and in the end she has a miscarriage and finally leaves her husband for Quinada. This is the kind of basic story that could easily be banal in the hands of a lesser director. But it is the opposite. With a screenplay by Arthur Laurents (who wrote the play West Side Story), the director Max Ophuls, whose European reputation preceded him to Hollywood, and three consummate stage actors, Caught is a film of great feeling and intelligence. Barbara Bel Geddes as Leonora has a simple honesty as a character caught between a nightmare and a dream. Robert Ryan scales up the obsessive neurosis of the rich immature but dangerous Ohlrig. He captures the sense of man who thinks people are only interested in him for his money, and once possessed by him

82

Directing

he punishes them for being so easily bought. His bouts of panic and somaticized heart attacks are frightening and in their instants we find ourselves feeling sorry for the poor little boy inside of Ohlrig. Ryan’s acting is a tour de force. James Mason, thoughtful, passionate, and overwhelmed with love for Leonora is simply put, the exact opposite of the character he became, the prince of darkness, in The Verdict. The range between these two performances staggers the mind. Beyond the performance we have in Ophuls’ camera choices a master at work. Before Ohlrig’s first heart attack we have a wide angle shot with Ohlrig in the foreground; the camera is low, emphasizing his power over his welldecorated, empty of humans, oversized den. His sudden realization of what is going on in his body is terrifying and his desperation to get water to take the medication that will stop the attack is shockingly powerful. Later on Leonora and Quinada’s first date, the camera is high and close on a crowded dance floor as if the camera is trying but cannot reach them to record what they are feeling, that first hint of grasping for love and trying to draw it closer to you. This is filmmaking at the highest level. Ophuls is also the master of small transitional scenes. When Leonora begins charm school, the emphasis is on paying for the school. The secretary is in the foreground and she is close to the camera. It presents the importance of the financial reason the school exists, rather than what it means for Leonora. She lives in a world where money makes the world go round, but she will discover that money is just money and not in the least the key to the happiness she believes it to be. Another scene that is equally revealing is the scene where Ohlrig decides to marry Leonora. He is seeing his psychoanalyst who is trying to help him. Ohlrig is in the foreground with the analyst in the background. Ohlrig smokes and is surly about Leonora. When the analyst says she seems different that the others, Ohlrig says she is the same – they are all after his money. To prove the analyst has no control over him, he calls his assistant from the analyst’s office to tell him to book a flight to Reno, so he can marry immediately. When the analyst tells him this will only hurt both of them, Ohlrig cuts off the analyst and announces he is leaving him for good. In this short scene, we learn everything about Ohlrig and know what will happen in his marriage. Finally there is the character of Franzi (Curt Bois), front man for Ohlrig. He is playing the piano, and Leonora is utterly exhausted as both await the middle of the night return of Ohlrig and his business associates. As Leonora complains to Franzi about his playing the piano, he plays it louder and is aggressive and unsympathetic to Leonora. She rushes over from the couch and slaps him hard. She is so angry about him and her life situation, the slap comes out of nowhere. And she is immediately filled with regret. At that instant Ohlrig arrives and the real fight shifts to the married couple and then

The technical dimension

83

the guests. Ophuls seems to capture these emotional lows and their consequences with an ease. Yet the love–hate nexus he has captured is anything but easy. For him, performance, writing, and camera movement each contribute to capturing the theme and fully breathing a life and death paradigm into the narrative.

8 The creative possibilities

What is notable about stories devoted to the themes of justice and injustice is how many of them focus on a trial. In this chapter, two of the three stories use a trial as their plot. In terms of the themes of love and hate, one of the three examples discussed focuses on a relationship and the third focuses on the impact of a health condition and its influence on a set of relationships. As in the narrative creative examples of this chapter, it is the subtext of these narratives that open up the creative possibilities for the director.

Justice and injustice Justice–injustice as a theme can be explored in stories of everyday life, or they can be explored in narratives at the extremes of human behavior. Since two of the three films are related to war, during or after, it is useful to begin this chapter with a brief overview of the War film. The earliest example would be D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation (1915), set principally in the Civil War. This was followed by a series of films set in World War I. King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1927), G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930), and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1931) stand out. In the case of Pabst’s film and Milestone’s film, both took an anti-war stance. Perhaps the greatest anti-War film of the early sound era was Jean Renoir’s Grande Illusion (1936). In the next phase, the War film is typified by two films made by Howard Hawks, Sergeant York (1942) and Air Force (1943). In both cases the heroism of the main character or characters was the emphasis. These films mark a notable shift. William Wyler’s contributions to this pattern focus on the home-front and returning soldiers. His films, Mrs. Miniver (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), do not take a pro-war position, but rather humanize their characters by emphasizing the human consequences of going to war. These two strains continue in Alan Dwan’s The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and George Seaton’s The Bridges of Toko-Ri (1956) on the heroic-humanistic 84

The creative possibilities

85

side and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1956) on the anti-war side. A third area of exploration opened up in the late 1940s with Fred Zinneman’s The Men (1950). Here the subject matter was the psychological impact of going to war on the soldiers. Along this line, Anthony Mann’s Men in War (1957) and Robert Aldrich’s Attack (1956) were important. These three sub-themes, anti-war, the heroic vision of the main character, and the psychological dimension of soldiers in combat, organize the War films that will follow. Important filmmakers who gravitate toward the War film include Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket, 1987), Clint Eastwood (American Sniper, 2014), Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan, 1997; Schindler’s List, 1992), Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen, 1967), Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now, 1997), and Oliver Stone (Platoon, 1987). Variants on these themes on the War film include films that focus on the civilian populations and address the consequences on their lives. Notable filmmakers include Pavel Pawleski (Ida, 2013) and Agnieska Holland (Europa Europa, 1990), and the French TV series, Une Village Francaise, which focuses on a town in France in the German occupied zone, not far from Vichy France. Each season deals with one year of the occupation. Also notable is the fourpart German TV series Generation War (2011) which follows five friends, male and female, and the impact of the war upon them. The plot of the War film is war, a battle, a patrol. The main character is a soldier or civilian. The antagonist can be the enemy but can also be a fellow soldier. In Platoon, the antagonist is one of the Sergeants in the main character’s platoon. In Attack, the main character is a Lieutenant very concerned about his men and the antagonist is the Captain who happens to be a coward. Generally, the goal of the main character is to survive and the film is shaped around this question. The tone is realistic, but it is the editorial intention of the writer and director that shapes the film. But this can be quite elastic from utter realism in Men in War to a Hieronymous Bosch vision of war in Apocalypse Now. In terms of the justice–injustice dimension in the War film, the court martial in Paths of Glory sets the template. An attack by the French on a German position during World War I fails. Three French soldiers are chosen to stand trial for cowardice. How they are chosen and why are the pivot points for the injustice of the outcome of the trial. They are executed for cowardice. The natures of the main character and of the antagonist are the key pivot points for theme. These two characters direct us toward the positions the writer and director take on the theme.

Breaker Morant Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980) is set during the late stages of the Boer War. The main character is an officer, Lieutenant Morant.

86

Directing

He and two other Australian officers serve in the Bushveld Carbineers, a unit devoted to fight the Boers in their home territory in the Transvaal using the same guerilla tactics as the Boers. This is not set battles between the British and the Boers. It is uncivilized warfare. These three officers are put on trial for killing Boer prisoners as well as a German minister. This military court martial will end with two of the three, Harry Morant and Peter Handcock, being executed. At its core the justice– injustice theme relies on a verbal order to the Captain, kill all prisoners. Since the Captain is dead, it is their word against the British officers who are trying them. The idea is that to buy the coming peace, it is important to kill these Australian officers to show British willingness to make peace with the Boers. The trial itself is interspersed with the backstory, the killing of the Boers and the Minister, and the killing and mutilating of Captain Hunt, the leader of the Bushveldt Carbineers at the hands of the Boers, later captured and executed. Their defense is managed capably by Major Thomas. The three Carbineers on trial are Morant (Edward Woodward), Handcock (Bryan Brown), and George Witton (Lewis Fitz-Gerald). The performances are very strong. Here casting is impressive. Each of the three accused are distinctive personalities. Woodward is the passionate poet, quick to anger, deeply pained by the mutilation of his friend and superior, the Captain. Handcock is a tough, in your face Australian and a ladies’ man. Here Brown fills the role with a rebellious spirit loaded with charm. Witton on the other hand, is young in every way and loyal. Fitz-Gerald has the look of naivety that implies innocence. Beresford is a director who has always been strong with actors; Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and Lothaire Bluteau in Black Robe (1991) are good reminders that Beresford reaches great heights with his actors. Finally, Beresford is masterful at integrating the past and the present in his work. The past, the ambush of Captain Hunt and his men and the pursuit by the Carbineers of Hunt’s killers, takes place at nights and is shot with blue filters to make the darkness almost a character in the film. The present on the other hand is shot in brilliant sunlight, precisely the opposite of the past footage and ironically not a setting for the execution of the minister and his killer. Again, Beresford makes the environment a character in his narrative.

Music Box The film Music Box (1989) does not take place during a war but rather 40 years later. Nevertheless the issue of what happened in Hungary during World War II goes to the heart of this narrative. As the film opens, Michael Laszlo, a Hungarian American citizen, is accused of lying on his citizenship application. He is to be taken to trial to decide if his citizenship should be taken away and if he should be extradited back to Hungary for war

The creative possibilities

87

crimes. The prosecution claims that he was a member of the Special Section called Arrow Cross, a part of the police force, and that he commanded a unit that rounded up and killed Jews in the latter part of 1944. Laszlo (Armin Muehller-Stahl) denies he is this man, although he’s an active anti-Communist. He asks his daughter, Ann Taylor (Jessica Lange), a well-known Chicago litigator, to represent him. Music Box, directed by Costa Gavras, is essentially the trial of Laszlo. It is also the journey of his daughter into his secret past. She is our guide and our emotional point of reference in this film written by Joe Esterhazy. Costa Gavras as a director has made the justice–injustice theme the center piece of his 50 year career. His best known work is Z (1969) about political murder in Greece, Special Section (1975) about political murder in Vichy, France, and Missing (1982) about the disappearance/murder of an American aid worker in Latin America. All of these films address the absence of justice in a character or place, leading to dire unjust consequences in the country/time frame the narrative is set within. Costa Gavras believes personal accountability goes to the heart of whether justice will prevail. And this is the core issue in Music Box. Laszlo never accepts responsibility for what he did, but his daughter does and that becomes the emotional frame for the story. Gavras is aided considerably by casting a powerful antagonist in Muehller-Stahl whose charismatic physical performance creates a three-dimensional portrait of a man of conviction who can be a powerful father as well as a powerful liar. In Lange, he has a woman whose deep feeling for her father is matched by the depth of empathy she feels about his victims who testify that he was a sadistic monster. The supporting cast is equally feeling, particularly two wounded men, the prosecutor, Jack Burke (Frederic Forrest), and the ex-husband Dean Talbot (Ned Schmidke). Given the intensity of the charges against Laszlo, it is surprising that the subtext Gavras opts for is the effect of the charges and the trial on the father–daughter relationship. At the beginning of the film Gavras focuses on father and daughter dancing together. At the end of the film, there is a lengthy conversation between father and daughter as she accuses him of lying to her about his past. She tells him he was being blackmailed by a friend about his past. After the friend dies, she does not explicitly say he murdered the friend. Instead she tells him she has the pictures the friend had taken of Laszlo killing Jews and enjoying his power. She is very explicit, and she tells him she will never see him again. To register the betrayal on the most personal level she is hugging her father, as she shares what she has learned about him. The love and the hate are both a presence in the scene. The other choice made in Music Box is what is not included in the film. After Poland and the USSR, Hungary had the largest Jewish population in Europe. Until March 1944, none of Hungary’s Jews had been killed, whereas most of the killing of Jews in Europe had already been achieved. The killing, when it began in Hungary, was rapid and lethal. In four months, 400,000

88

Directing

Hungarian Jews had been killed, half the Jewish population in the country. The speed and lethality was staggering. Instead of getting into the facts, Esterhazy and Gavras focus on four personal witnesses and the focus is upon the cruelty exhibited by Laszlo against either their neighbors or their family. This level of personalization is unusual in films about the Holocaust. Scale is sidestepped for the personal, just as it is in the father–daughter relationship. To intensify the personal Gavras films these scenes in close-up. In the scenes, he cuts to reaction shots in close-up of the judge, Laszlo, and his daughter. In this way he ramps up the emotions of these witness scenes and the reaction of the principals to them. Gavras sidesteps the dynamic editing he used in Z and the journey epic performance of a conservative father, performed by Jack Lemmon, investigating and reacting to his findings in Missing. Instead, he lets the personal element of all the characters take over. It is a simpler directing strategy, but it is very effective.

Brute Force Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (1947), written by Richard Brooks, is not a War film. Rather is it a harsh indictment of American justice focused on the penal system. Although the main character is a criminal convict, he is portrayed in the film as a Spartacus figure. He is a leader of men. He bristles at the injustice, in this prison. The focus of that injustice is the Captain of the prison guards, a Napoleon-like figure named Munsey, portrayed by the classical actor Hume Cronyn. The main character, Joe Collins, is portrayed by Burt Lancaster. At the beginning of the film, Collins is released from ten days in solitary confinement for carrying a knife that was planted on him by a prison acolyte of Munsey, one Wilson. Wilson will pay the ultimate price. And Collins will never be broken. Instead, because his girl is dying of cancer, he will break out and take his crew with him. He tries to enlist a senior criminal named Gallagher (Charles Bickford) who is number one prisoner with his own gang. He is waiting for a parole that never comes. The break is planned, but Collins has a stool pigeon in his crew. Munsey knows all and plans to kill them all, but not before the system fires the benevolent Warden and replaces him with the sadistic Munsey. All die in the breakout but not before Collins kills Munsey. The writing of Brute Force is rather literary. Consequently each of the men in the Collins crew gets a backstory vis-à-vis an important female relationship. And there is also the drunken doctor philosopher who is the narrator of this Greek tragedy about men and imprisonment. This is not to say the script is overly literary. Brooks, the writer of the novel and screenplay of Crossfire (1947), Key Largo (1948), Blackboard Jungle (1955), In Cold Blood (1967), and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), was an exceptional screenwriter, strong on character and plot, and an exceptional dialogue writer and later

The creative possibilities

89

director. Consequently, the screenplay is firing on a number of pistons. And he is an interesting match with director Dassin, who is admired for his work in the U.S., as well as in France (Rififi, 1955) and Greece (Never on Sunday, 1960). Dassin, a former actor in the theater, came to Hollywood in 1940. There he made a number of films that are distinctive. What’s interesting about Dassin is that he was a very physical director. By that I mean, his actors have an emphatic physical presence and they move in ways that emphasize the physical. Lancaster as Collins is intense but moves as if he is avoiding hot coals. Munsey on the other hand always has a stick or a leather truncheon in his hand. He is always cleaning a gun or touching a prisoner with his stick. One of the Collins crew is a former fighter. Another is a vain swindler who likes to show off the build of his body even though he is in prison. Dassin’s prisoners have no weapons but in their hands, blow torches and shovels become weapons. And Dassin orchestrates their moves. The effect is to emphasize the aggression these men feel as well as the resentment at being contained by the justice system. They all bristle to move. Dassin’s attention to their bodies as expressions of how they feel is an idea that gives these convicts a power that speech alone cannot intimate or imply. Another directorial touch is to pit the wounded dying Collins, large in size and in will, against the small Munsey. Their struggle is the epitome of violent intent, and again it is all physical. In the end, Collins lifts Munsey over his head, carries him to the edge of the tower and throws him down into the inmates. It is a physical struggle to the death for both men, a remarkable tribute to the outcome of constraining men unnaturally in a prison. These moments of violence, the end for each man, in the Collins crew are bloody and designed to shock. They are different for each man but also an extension of the person they were. The stool pigeon tied to the rail-mounted container is machine gunned by Munsey’s guards. The mixture of movement of the container along the track together with the pitiable pleas of the stool pigeon make this one of the most powerful moments in the film. Dassin in his work with his actors and his camera framing and movement has choreographed a disturbing vision of the outcome of injustice in the prison system. The film is the perfect marriage of writer and director about the theme that remains vivid and relevant, 70 years after it was made.

Love–hate The pairing of love and hate in a narrative poses certain dilemmas for the director. Is it best to embed love in the main character and hate in the antagonist? Or the reverse? Or do the qualities coexist in a single character? In the end, the answer lies in what best serves the story. In this chapter, we will look at three examples that seem to turn these questions on their head and in the end surprise us with the creative solutions put forward.

90

Directing

These examples also illustrate that what the director can do is bring an unexpected subtext to the narrative, a subtext deeply embedded in the actors and their performances.

Secrets and Lies Mike Leigh, the writer and director of Secrets and Lies (1996), has a goal in his film. His goal is to say that secrets and lies within a family are corrosive and destructive to the members of the family. His film is all about owning the past behavior, sharing it and trying to move forward into a future that is better, for the well-being of the family and all of its members. At the core of this narrative is Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), a middle aged failure in her personal life. Self-loathing and self-blaming characterize Cynthia. She has a daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbreak), who is approaching her 21st birthday. She has a brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), a successful photographer. He has a large home he lives in with the complaining wife, Monica. They rarely see his older sister, but Monica proposes a birthday party for their niece Roxanne, a moment of unity for this family that is fractured. Enter Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a young black optometrist who has just lost her mother. We learn Hortense was adopted, and she sets out to find her birth mother. She gets the documents and discovers her birth mother is white. In short order, we discover that Cynthia is the birth mother. Contact is made by Hortense, and initially Cynthia reacts according to expectation. But Hortense urges a meeting. It happens and Cynthia denies she could have a black daughter, but Hortense urges her to look at the documents. And they begin to reach out to one another. Hortense has the exact opposite effect on Cynthia. She begins to grow in confidence and eventually Cynthia invites Hortense to the birthday party to be held at Maurice’s home. All gather and it is Roxanne who explodes when Cynthia shares that Hortense is also her daughter. A long scene follows where all the secrets and lies are shared. And to the surprise of all, healing takes place. The film ends in a scene with Cynthia and her two daughters, Hortense and Roxanne, having tea together in the backyard. All seems calm, normal, and positive. Hortense has been the character who has transformed the family from damaged to improved, integrated. This is the great narrative surprise of Secrets and Lies. Leigh has directed the film with very little camera movement or rapid cutting. The emotional power of the film comes from the remarkable acting and the writing. Both are audacious. First Leigh modulates the performances. Cynthia, Roxanne, Monica, and the social worker all offer loud emotionally labile performances while Maurice and Hortense are quiet, strong, and emotion avoidant in the pitch of their performances. Leigh is also very brave in his scenes. The first encounter between Cynthia and Hortense takes place in a diner. It is a long, important scene in which Cynthia is struggling to deal with even admitting Hortense is her daughter. A mistake has

The creative possibilities

91

been made. Simultaneously Cynthia is utterly overcome with the idea that she is sitting with the child she refused to see/hold when she was born. This is the nasty secret in the family – an illegitimate birth when Cynthia was hardly 16. The shame gradually shifts to fear and very moderate acceptance of the fact. Using a medium close-up Leigh does not even move off the shot. By staying with the two women and the performances we can also see Hortense sitting on all that anger toward this woman who abandoned her. The scene takes our breath away. Earlier in the film, Hortense has a scene with her friend Dionne. They talk about their parents and their sexual lives sipping wine in a lengthy medium shot. This is a moment when Hortense can relax a bit, but in her general talk about how she manages her sexual life, we have a portrait of a conservative, modest woman who loved her parents but saw them as older people. She is most relaxed with Dionne, but she is not as free and expressive as her friend. Although the scene is not necessary to the overall narrative, it does give us a sense of who Hortense is. Later in the film there is a scene between Maurice and the former owner of his shop, Stuart (Ron Cook). Stuart’s life crashed personally and professionally, and he is an alcoholic. He is trying to squeeze Maurice for recourse, a job, anything, but Maurice pushes back stating he is responsible for the success of his own photography business, due to his own hard work, rather than the relatively unsuccessful business he bought from Stuart. This is the first time we have seen Maurice fully in charge. Until now, his wife and sister have seemed to dominate him. The purpose of the scene is to show Maurice as a stronger person than we thought him to be. The importance of the scene is to illustrate Maurice as a realistic person whose social strength and emotional awareness make him an active rather than reactive force in his family. This is important for his role in being supportive and strong when Cynthia blurts out her personal secret at the birthday party. This lengthy scene contributes to the idea that although his family has had many setbacks, it is actually capable of emotional strength in this latest crisis. Leigh has taken a brave and deeply understanding position toward the characters in this film. He has tolerated rather than exploited the emotional lows of individual and familial crises, and he has celebrated that people can help each other (as opposed to destroy each other) in times of crisis. Family is important, and honesty is important. The strength of Hortense and Maurice strengthen the more wounded, and all gain as a result. Love and hate do coexist, but the mix need not destroy. That’s the subtext in Secrets and Lies.

Fire Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996) is a contemporary film about a middle class family in New Delhi. The love–hate issue is beneath the surface but emanates out of the tradition of arranged marriage.

92

Directing

The main character is Radha (Shabana Azmi). She is in a loveless marriage to Ashok (Kulbushan Kharbanda). He devotes himself to a guru to whom he gives all surplus funds. The family is well-to-do and are devoted to work and sustaining the family. Since Ashok resists passion, the marriage is asexual. To promote family values he has organized a marriage for his younger brother Jatin (Jared Jaffrey) to Sita (Nandita Das), a lively young woman with modern ideas. Jatin is deeply in love with his Chinese mistress, Julie, and so is utterly indifferent to his new bride. Their return from their honeymoon to the family home in Delhi kicks off the narrative. Fire is the story of the two women, Radha and Sita. By the end of Act I, Sita has kissed Radha romantically and Act II moves along the new relationship. They are found out by Mundu (Ranjit Chowdhry) and denounced in order to keep his job with the family. Act III addresses two questions  – what will the men, Ashok and Jatin, do and what will the women, Radha and Sita do? In the end, they leave the marriages to go off together. They have flouted convention to embrace love. The two husbands differ in their response. Jatin offers to have a baby with Sita. Ashok simply rages against Radha. Although his rage could become hate, it defaults to the impotence he has embraced to this point in the marriage. Deepa Mehta has written and directed a feminist film set in a traditional conservative society. For her, as Radha says, a life empty of desire is not a life worth living. Mehta’s career has principally taken place in Canada, although beginning with Fire she made three films set in India. The second is Earth (1999), and the third is Water (2005). Each has been more controversial than the last and consequently least seen in India. Each film has been literary, artful, and impressive. Mehta in her casting has been astute. Both Shabana Azmi as Radha and Nandita Das as Sita are visually arresting presences, and they are very capable actresses. Radha is older and more traditional, and Sita is young and modern. Each woman inhabits a different cultural space and yet the common ground between them is their loveless marriages and their desire, in Radha, repressed and in Sita, bursting, to get out. Each uses irony to deal with their life situation. And we care for them both. Their society has put them in a position, and in the end, they have the will and self-respect to transcend it. Mehta also uses humor in the character of Mundu to caricature male hypocrisy. He is supposed to be a caretaker but he is not capable, as he is too selfish. Chowdhry’s performance here is masterful and energetic. Unlike the rebellious, somewhat depressed Jatin, Mundu has bile to burn and he is very enjoyable to watch. His humor lightens the film at the outset and lightness helps prepare us for the positive rather than tragic ending. Finally, Mehta in her work with cinematography Giles Nuttgens has created a visual style best addressing light and how it elevated the Taj Mahal, and the crowded roads of New Delhi to epic scale. Even the interiors have a sensual layered light that gives the overall look a richness beyond the budget. The visuals also contextualize the subject, love between two lovely people in Fire.

The creative possibilities

93

Breaking Bad Vince Gilligan is the writer-director of Breaking Bad (2008– 2013) set in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The main character is Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and in Breaking Bad, the theme of love and hate resides in this main character but does not end with him. The theme does not solely reside in the drug culture in New Mexico. It moves freely through many of the characters on both sides of the law. Tonally Breaking Bad is highly original in that it fluctuates between a light eccentric tone and a dark violent tone. The tonal elements also move freely among the characters. Walter White turns 50 in the first episode. He also finds out he has terminal lung cancer. As a chemistry genius, he is an underachiever. He is a high-school teacher and has a part-time job in a carwash. He is worried about his family’s future and turns to the production of crystal meth to provide the money his family needs. He has a pregnant wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), and a disabled adolescent son, Walter (R.J. Mitte). He turns to a former student, now in the drug business, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) to help get him into the drug world. The love Walter exhibits is towards his family – Skyler, Walter, and the unborn baby who we see on an ultrasound. Although Walter seems distracted in the opening episodes, we believe his not telling his wife about the cancer or about the humiliation he experiences at the car wash was his strategy to protect his family from these terrible life situations. The outside world, however, is where Walter’s hate enters. But it is not a traditional form of hatred; it seems more defensive anger leading to action against the party that threatens him. In the classroom, he exhibits the love he has for chemistry. Chemistry is the metaphor for life and change in the best sense. The fact that his students are indifferent is hurtful to Walter. He does not berate them for their indifference. That is not the case in a clothing store where his son is trying on jeans. He has to help the son get the jeans on over his waist. The son then shows the jeans to both parents. In the background, three adolescents laugh at Walter Jr. Skyler is quick to intervene. Although Walter counsels they walk away, he himself attacks one of the bullies, injuring him in the knee. This attack on the bully is an expression of defensive aggression, in this case, on behalf of his son. A third example occurs when Walter’s first sale to a meth distributor goes awry and it appears the distributor and his cousin are intent on killing Walter. He tells them that he’ll show them how he makes his high grade product. Instead, he adds a chemical that explodes and the fumes kill the cousin and immobilize the dealer. Again, his defensive aggression rescues Walter. This is a quality that will grow in importance and lethality as Walter moves up the drug food chain. This quality actually strengthens in Walter as the series progresses. Gilligan uses particular characters to inject humor to soften the tone of Breaking Bad. Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) is Walter’s brother-in-law, a DEA

94

Directing

agent. His braggadocio behavior is a source of humor until the latter portion of the series, as is Walter’s lawyer, Saul Goodman (Bob Odernkirk). But no character is more humorous than Jesse Pinkman. His mixture of stupidity and cunning is the main spine of the tonal variance in the series. It is clear that this mixture of humor into a dire situation for Walter and his family is part of an overall strategy. Gilligan is trying to soften tragedy and harden comedy at the same time. The tonal clash makes unpredictability and surprise coexist in a thrilling way. A good example is a scene between Skyler and Jesse. He is dragging the wrapped body of Emilio into the house. She arrives to tell him to stop selling marijuana to her husband or she will turn him into the DEA where her brother-in-law is an officer. The scene buzzes with tension. Will Jesse get caught? Is Skyler always so interventionist when her husband lies to her? All of the actors will at one point or another walk this line between comedy and tragedy. And they have to be able to maneuver and make both credible. The mixture of good actors, good characters, and droll dialogue makes Gilligan the master of tonal variation and a shrewd judge for casting. The actors are extremely capable of charm and shock, an irresistible and fresh combination. The other production facet that is startling is how well used New Mexico the state is, as a Hispanic-Caucasian-black-Native American template. What happens is simply post-eccentric. It is a land where any crazy character or characteristic takes on an excessive life force. New Mexico becomes an energy field of imagined excessive behaviors and consequences. Gilligan also conveys a sense of drugs in the air that infects the inhabitants. They are off in an indescribable way. The writer Gilligan reminds me most of, are the Coen brothers via Preston Sturges. His Walter White epitomizes love and hate for the twenty-first century.

9 Three case studies of excellence

In this chapter, we discuss three examples of excellence in directing. Different directors achieve excellence in directing in different ways. Adding or developing a subtextual dimension of the narrative is certainly a pathway to excellence. Some directors are committed to exploration of the moving camera or of the close-up. Directors can be resourceful in pushing an actor toward a level of performance counter to the actor’s screen persona. In the three cases highlighted in this chapter, each is excellent because of a different directorial strategy. In the case of Steven McQueen in Hunger (2008), he has chosen a powerful visual style to capture the human spirit. In Rachel Getting Married (2008), Jonathan Demme has decided to use an energetic performance style punctuated by jump cutting to portray his main character’s state of mind. In Regarding Henry (1991), director Mike Nichols achieves a level of authentic feeling in a world of false feeling. How each of these directors achieves these heights is the subject of this chapter.

Regarding Henry Mike Nichols is a director for whom feeling goes to the core of intention and for whom revelation of who a character truly is is central. In Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf (1965), a corrosive lie in a marriage becomes the basis for emotional murder for George and Martha and their guests. In The Graduate (1967), a university graduate has to work out his values in his upper middle class community brimming with hypocrisy. In Working Girl (1988), women and gender operate to self-actualize in a world where men see women as sexual pawns or secretaries. In Angels in America (2003), Nichols’ interpretation of the American psyche in the age of AIDS, for Roy Cohn, the irreconcilable identities of homosexuality and aggressive Republicanism all are goals. It is no wonder angels are needed to try to rescue the humanity of 95

96

Directing

corrupted characters. In this production and in his staging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Nichols reminded his audience of his commitment to language, actors, and civil values so absent in American life throughout Nichols’ long career. Regarding Henry is a form of Fable. An aggressive lawyer, successful professionally and a failure personally, goes to buy cigarettes late one evening. The local store is being robbed, and the robber shoots Henry twice. Henry (Harrison Ford) is in a coma then convalescence for months. He has lost the capacity to speak and the capacity to walk and forgotten everything that happened in his life. He has forgotten who he is. The film follows Henry’s rehabilitation helped by his physical therapist, Bradley (Bill Nunn). Walking and talking develop, but Henry resists going home. He does not know his family, and he is afraid. Eventually he goes and gets used to family life. His old partners try to bring him back into work, but he is not the person he was. He reads his old files and disagrees with the outcome. Here, values intervene. He does not believe in what he did before the shooting. Coming to a head in Act III, he learns who his wife, Sarah Turner (Annette Bening), was and who he was before the shooting. She had an affair with his partner, Bruce. He had an affair with his partner, Linda. The marriage was failing, and both he and his wife do not want it to fail now. Henry admits he does not like being a lawyer. Before he leaves, he gives a document not revealed in his last trial. It will help poor people who lost their case against his client, a big hospital. He and Sarah decide to move, and the film ends when they pick up their daughter Rachel (Kamian Allen) from private school. Henry tells the headmistress he was away for Rachel’s first 11 years, he does not want to miss any more years. The film ends, the family integrated and more whole than they were before the accident. In a sense, Regarding Henry is a modern Fable written by J.J. Abrams who has himself become a formidable director. In his treatment of the Fable, Nichols has opted for realism. The pre-shooting trial Henry wins on behalf of the hospital, the shooting, the hospital scenes, and the recovery scenes are detailed and presented in scenes shot quietly in images where the camera is at the character eyeline, neither heroic or victimizing. There is also an economy to these scenes where the stage of recovery is clear and the difficulty for the main character, Henry, is not glossed over. The Turner home, the hospital, and the rehabilitation facility are the locations, and each is treated to establish what the Turners have gained from Henry, the hot shot lawyer, and what they have lost when he is shot. His brain damage has been such that it is impossible for him to come back to the person he was before. The second directorial decision Nichols makes is to signal how different Henry is. He hugs people to express his closeness to them. This for a person who would not even hold hands with his wife before the shooting. When Henry comes home, he hugs the doorman to his building. In this phase of the rehabilitation, Henry seems child-like in his vulnerability and in what he knows. His daughter teaches him to read from a children’s book. Nichols

Three case studies of excellence

97

takes his time in these scenes to emphasize Henry’s limited capacities and the notion that early learning would take time to be credible. Similarly, Nichols’ introduction of Henry’s former life into the narrative is slow and awkward. Again it feeds into Henry’s perceptions at that time. Henry’s partner Bruce (Bruce Altman) comes to visit him. He brings him a present, suggesting Henry open it. It is a picture frame from Tiffany. Henry’s nonresponse is appropriate because he knows nothing about the material world he himself used to inhabit. Only when Henry reaches a stronger point in his rehabilitation can Sarah raise an issue such as their sexual life. Nichols deals with this with great sensitivity as Henry states his nervousness. Ford’s performance here is so convincing that the delicacy of the moment is neither maudlin nor overdone. For Nichols, he sees this phase of Henry’s rehabilitation as important to make the dignity of husband and wife, and Nichols achieves that dignity. In these stories the antagonist is important. What happens when the antagonist is the pre-shooting Henry? Nichols deals with this issue by using both Henry as well as the world he occupied, especially his old law firm. Two characters, Charlie Cameron (Donald Moffat) and Henry’s partner Bruce, represent stand-ins for Henry as antagonist. Most of these behaviors present in Act III. Henry and Sarah are walking in the park holding hands, and they bump into old friends of theirs who invite them to a party. At the party they overhear the couple saying that Henry has gone from being a top notch lawyer to being an imbecile. They realize that the moneyed set’s most durable quality is contempt for those lesser than them. Bruce’s affair with Sarah is uncovered by Henry, and Henry feels betrayed. He runs off and finds himself checking into the Ritz Carlton. In short order, Linda shows up. How did she know where to find Henry? Linda and Henry before the shooting spent every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon checked into the Ritz. His affair with Linda was another piece of Henry before the shooting. Henry decides he should let people at the law firm know that he has decided to no longer be a lawyer. He did not like how his former self was in the world. What he is not putting into words is that he longer shares the values with his former self. Capturing these conflictual moments offers the director the opportunity to come down on the antagonists and the values they represent. Nichols decides to avoid this option. Instead in the spirit of the new Henry Turner, he walks away from the life toward his new life in gentle steps, as the new Henry would.

Rachel Getting Married The weekend marriage of Rachel Buchman (Rosemarie DeWitt) shapes the narrative of Rachel Getting Married. But the main character is her sister Kym (Anne Hathaway), who is released from a rehabilitation facility for the weekend. The parents are divorced and remarried. The wedding will

98

Directing

take place at the father Paul’s (Bill Irwin) home in Connecticut. The mother (Debra Winger) is introduced at the Friday night dinner. The father has an African-American wife (Anna Devere Smith), and the bride is marrying an African American, Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe). For Kym, there will be drug tests and local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. There she will meet Kieran (Mather Zickel) who is to be the best man at the wedding. The family is affluent but Kym’s family are all nervous around her. The reason is that at age 16 Kym, drug-addled and drunk, was babysitting her young brother Ethan. In the car crash that ensued, Ethan was killed. Kym has never forgiven herself and it may be the reason for the parents’ divorce and the familial tension the weekend of the wedding. By the multi-cultural guest list, the implication is of an ultra-liberal household. Rachel, a PhD psychology student, has had a rivalrous relationship with her more clever, former model sister Kym. Paul, their father, is a music industry executive but a highly anxious father. He is always asking Kym what he can get her to eat. Abby, their mother, is remote, superficial, and quick to anger. Just before the wedding itself, she punches Kym who is looking to offload the guilt she carries about her young brother’s death. Kym punches her back but is totally undone by her interaction. She has a car accident and looks quite facially bruised when she appears at the ceremony. Demme in his work with his actors is very strong. Hathaway, DeWitt, and Winger stand out because of their approach to emotionality or avoidance of emotionality. Each works with a subtext. Hathaway is wounded and self-revealing to the point of embarrassment. She is the open-wound in the family. DeWitt, on the other hand, deeply resents her sister taking up all the oxygen particularly on this weekend which is her special time. Winger, on the other hand, is avoidant and mouths what is expected rather than being honest. The film focuses on one of life’s happiest moments, a marriage. And yet all the characters have a profound sadness, possibly a chronic depression around a loss that happened years earlier. Demme needs to show the character surfaces as well as what lies beneath. He is also making a film that is trying to reach the audience. Audiences need energy when seeing a film and getting involved with the film. Demme uses specific tools that will inject energy into our experience. He uses first and foremost a handheld camera that jitters and also moves. He uses jump cuts in static scenes where people are sitting around the table, eating or toasting the bride-to-be. And he uses lots of close-ups. The consequence is a highly energized experience of the depressed Buchman family. When Kym makes her self-revealing toast, he holds on her in a ¾ shot as if to see her so revealing in close-up would be too much. We would be as broken as Kym tells us she is. Rachel Getting Married cannot be all pain. Demme films the postceremony dancing in cinema-verite style. It becomes moments of relief after the ceremony and its prologue, the fight between Kym and Abby. But the pleasure does not last. When Kym says goodbye to her sister and mother, the next

Three case studies of excellence

99

morning, Demme holds on Rachel hugging Kym and her mother, in close-up. The shot is touching but awkward as Abby tries to get out of Rachel’s grip. That instant reveals a great deal about Abby and about her relationship with her daughters. It is all too much for their mother. For a moment we think maybe this was the real problem in the family, the mother’s incapacity for closeness with her children, rather than the death of Ethan. Demme lingers on this shot knowing how it makes his audience cringe. Later Kym says goodbye to Kieran. They kiss and Kieran embraces her with a depth of feeling. He tells her she should visit him in Hawaii. She says she will. This short intense scene is a relief compared to parting with Abby. The social worker from the rehab center arrives to pick up Kym and the weekend and this remarkable film ends. Whether this is hopeful or not, we ask ourselves. Demme offers no answer.

Hunger Hunger (2008) is the first feature film by British Steve McQueen who until this film was best known as a visual artist. Since then, McQueen has also directed Shame (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). Hunger is about the imprisonment of Bobby Sands, an IRA commander, in the Maze Prison and his 66-day hunger strike in 1981 that ended in his death. Sands (Michael Fassbender), Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), and a prison guard Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham) are prominent in the film. McQueen is very specific about how he treats his actors, and it is very different from conventional performances. Father Moran and Sands have a long dialogue scene, 23 minutes, four shots, the main one a medium shadowed two shot, about politics and Sands’ intention to go on a hunger strike with the priest trying to talk him out of it. The nature of the shot and the dialogue’s intensive quality are untypical of the rest of the film. Before the scene, we have a number of intense short scenes mostly in the prison, and after the scene, focus is on Sands at different points in his hunger strike. The prison guard is principally shown washing his own fists, at times bruised and bleeding from beating prisoners. The film opens with the guard at home, having breakfast, dressing, opening the garage for his car, looking each way down the street, looking under the car for a bomb, and then carefully driving off. At the station he changes in the locker room into his prison uniform. Twice in the film, he is shown sweating outside the prison on a snowy day, having a cigarette. He is shown beating a prisoner and before the film midpoint he visits his mother in an old age home, where after greeting her he is assassinated. Sands, the main character, is not introduced until about 20 minutes into the film when he is shaved, his hair is cut, and he is bathed forcibly. Then the bruised Sands is visited by his parents. In the earlier shots the focus in on his nakedness. In the parental visit, the focus is on his battered face. In the

100

Directing

scene with the priest the focus is on his determination and on his fondness for smoking. Finally in the last third of the film, the focus is on his wasting body. His body ulcers, his emaciated frame, and his determined eyes are each features of this part of the film. With each of these characters, McQueen focuses on one aspect  – the prison guard’s knuckles, the priest’s lyrical voice, and Sands’ body. We do not get to know any of these people in a dimensional way. We get to know them in the way McQueen wants us to get to know them. Ironically for such a visceral film each of these characters presents objectified. In keeping with the notion of objectification, McQueen will present whole scenes from an objective point of view. There is a lengthy scene in one shot. A prison guard is cleaning a hallway littered by the prisoners’ dumping of their own waste, principally urine from their cells. The shot is taken from one end of the hallway. The guard walks down with a mask over his mouth and nose dumping cleaning fluid into the waste. He walks back and begins to mop up the mess pushing it toward the camera. The shot goes on until he has completed the unpleasant task. At the other extreme, McQueen will film a scene in cinema-verite style and in close. The guards have called in extra police. They are armed with clubs and translucent shields. They beat their shields and utter menacing shouts, then they pull the prisoners from their cells and the beatings begin. The scene is ominous and bloody. Other scenes are rife with subtext. McQueen films a visitors’ day. The prisoners are dressed and cleaned up. Mothers have brought babies. Parents visit sons. Wives visit husbands. But instead of the scenes being simply visits, they become instigations of contraband brought by these visitors for their loved ones. Whether they are messages or illicit deliveries of things, the exchange focuses or implies the orifice of source and the orifice of delivery. The scene is astonishing for how personal and important these deliveries are. Later in his cell, one prisoner unravels the delivery. It is a form of transmitter, a radio, of sorts. Although Hunger is a less direct or conventional political film than expected, the power is more directorial than narrative. McQueen has included individual images that transcend linear storytelling, that transcend individual performance. And they remind us that the director’s toolbox can include more than convention implies. Here McQueen the visual artist comes into play. Just as Julian Schnabel dared to do in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), McQueen dares to do in Hunger. A few examples will serve to illustrate this point. Early in the film, a new prisoner is induced into the prison. He refuses to wear prison clothes. He strips and is taken to the cell he will occupy for the next six years. He is given a blanket. His cell is decorated with feces. Barely any wall is free of fecal matter. Then he proceeds to have an exchange with his cellmate. We cannot hear because we are consumed with the walls. How could open rebellion against

Three case studies of excellence

101

the British come to this? What does the will to join the Irish state to the South have to do with fecal matter? Later we will hear a statement from Margaret Thatcher. At a few points, in the film, she makes statements on the Irish rebels. Still later a guard with a high-powered water gun will try to clear the walls of fecal matter. Is he destroying the art of rebellion? The images are so strong that we are overcome that men can exist in such a place. McQueen’s willingness is to go to the visualization not of life and death but of man’s will to resist. What he is saying is that will is bottomless. And when one civilization faces a will so indomitable it must bend, it will bend. If it does not, it will break. This is the place where McQueen, visual artist and film director, is willing to take us in Hunger.

III Editing

10 The editing tools

Narrative clarity and dramatic emphasis, the twin goals at the heart of the evolution of editing tools, have guided the development of those visual and sound options. Secondarily, the core issue theoretically about the uniqueness of film editing as the source of art in film has actually bifurcated to two choices, editing and the avoidance of editing. Montage and mise-enscene are the terms thinkers about film have designated for those choices. In this chapter, we look at those individual filmic and sound options. They have become the editing tools the makers of film and television have worked with. The tools themselves have evolved over the short history of film. For each filmmaker these tools have become, over time, the context for their own choices. Although having a history of 125 years, the contextual choices keep expanding based on the fresh approaches, particularly in the experimental and documentary areas of film and television production. A useful model that illustrates this kind of expansion is the use of the jump cut. Initially the jump cut, which breaks match cutting as an editing strategy, was simply a mistake. The New Wave filmmakers in France such as Jean Luc Godard in Breathless (1959) used the jump cut to jar the audience by introducing a discontinuity into a scene. Godard’s goal was to make the audience reflect on the content being viewed, to question the power of the medium itself. Within a short time, filmmakers such as Alan Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959) and Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, 1964) were using the jump cut to invoke the introjection of past memory into the present. In the same era of the 1960s, Mike Nichols used the jump cut in The Graduate (1967) to energize ordinary (slow) scenes. Richard Lester used the jump cut in A Hard Day’s Night (1964) to capture the anarchistic joy of the Beatles. Four decades later, Paul Greengrass used the jump cut in his Jason Bourne films to reference his films to the documentary where realism was a core goal. In The Bourne Supremacy (2004) Greengrass wants his audience to experience and interpret his fictional films as a documentary. Unethical? Perhaps. Convincing, certainly! As we can see, the jump cut and its use in film has broadened considerably since Luis Bunuel used it extensively in Un Chien d’Andalou (1929) to weave the idea of discontinuity into the heart of that film.

105

106

Editing

The image An image has a foreground, mid-range, and background. These three planes will yield different interpretation of objects or people depending if they are viewed in the foreground rather than in the background. If the camera is placed near the image rather than distant from the action, a different interpretation of the image will follow. Similarly if the camera is placed above the image to be photographed, it will yield a different result than if the camera records the image from a low placement. Placement of the camera close to the action together with placement of the subject in the foreground yields the maximum emotional connection with the image. Placements in the background of the frame together with a distant camera placement is the least involving image. Since the goal is often to optimize emotional engagement, the placement of camera proximity to a character is clear.

The shot Shot lengths are determined by the length of the film magazine (10–30 minutes) or the digital hard drive used for digitally recorded images (under 2 hours). Although Alexander Sukorov made Russian Ark (2002) in a single shot of under 2 hours, most films vary the length of shots. Laszlo Nemes uses principally 2- to 3-minute shots in his Son of Saul (2016). Even this length of shots is considerable. Most shots are 10 to 30 seconds depending upon their purpose.

The extreme long shot The extreme long shot, frequently referred to as an establishing shot, is used to convey where and when the film is taking place. They are memorable in Westerns to establish the vastness as well as the aloneness of the West. Filmmakers such as Inniratu use their location shots to emphasize the dangerous role nature plays in their version of the West while others such as David Lean skew their location shots of the desert for example in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), with an epic mysterious appeal. Filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein create a sense of power in the design of their location shots. The epic presentation of Middle Ages Russian in Alexander Nevsky (1937) produces an unforgettable context for the heroic challenges for the Russian leader. Although the urban landscapes of San Francisco and New York open the various Clint Eastwood iterations of the cowboy-policeman in Don Siegel’s series Dirty Harry that preceded Eastwood’s career as a director, more often modern directors have sidestepped the extreme long shot to open their films.

The editing tools

107

Francis Ford Coppola chooses to open The Godfather (1972) on a close-up of the godfather greeting a supplicant asking him for a personal favor.

The long shot The long shot is generally used to follow action or to transition from one location to another, chases, investigations, or meeting another person or character; all lend themselves to long shots. How to make long shots interesting is to secure an interesting location that contextualizes a meeting or an investigation. This is particularly meaningful if the location is integral to the narrative that unfolds. A particular area of Boston, Charlestown, is highlighted in Ben Affleck’s The Town (2010). Charlestown, where the banks they rob are located, is home to the gang as well as to one of the FBI agents in pursuit of the gang. The town, its geography, its roads, and exits from the town are presented in long shots. Bangkok, the city plays an equivalent role in Tony Gilroy’s Bourne Legacy (2012) as the Dakotas do in Wind River (2017). Another more specific purpose for the long shot is to capture a tonal element that highlights the premise of a narrative. The ordered impregnable quality of a French ski lodge under challenge when mother nature unleashes a snow avalanche in Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure (2015) is presented in a series of long shots. Here long shots are needed to suggest the scale of threat unleashed. Ostlund resorts to a similar strategy in his next film, The Square (2017), where a modern advertising campaign for an art exhibit at an ultrachic museum is challenged by the primitivism social media unleashes, an unintended consequence of the advertising campaign. Again long shots are used to capture the haute culture as well as the barbaric reactions to the campaign.

The mid-shot The mid-shot is often the shot of choice for conversations between characters in the narrative. This does not mean relational scenes between soon-to-be lovers. Think of the assassination scene of a corrupt police captain and his criminal boss by Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and the scene between the police pursuer and the pursued criminal in a diner in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995). Both scenes have strong subtextual tensions, and both are presented principally in midshot. The key here is that it is the subtext that is driving our involvement in these scenes. Another purpose of the mid-shot can be to mask surprise. In the opening scene in Crazy, Stupid Love (2011), husband and wife are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary dinner in a nice restaurant. But the conversation seems husband-driven. He asks his wife to join in the conversation; she

108

Editing

announces she wants a divorce. Needless to say, the husband is as surprised as the audience. Since this scene kicks off what will be a romantic comedy to win back his wife, the scene is critical.

The close-up The close-up fills the screen. It offers no background context. It is principally used to register emotion or emotional reaction. It is a shot that has a dramatic purpose. Implicitly the shot is important. In Deepa Mehta’s Fire, close-ups of a new bride and of her sister-in-law are used to say their relationship to one another is important, more important than their relationships with their husbands, who are rarely presented in close-up. In the classic Odessa Steppes sequence, Sergei Eisenstein in Potemkin (1928) introduces in close-up young mothers, poor and rich women and their children who will become victims of the military used to suppress public support for a sailor rebellion aboard the ship Potemkin. When death is meted out as the sequence unfolds, Eisenstein goes back to close-ups of those he introduced earlier. A good part of the power of this famous sequence is the introduction and then the execution of a cross-section of civilians. Although we do not know much about these people, their deaths emotionalize the sequence in an overpowering fashion. The sequence shows us the power of the close-up. As with all the editing tools, filmmakers have occasionally opted to explore the limits of relying on a single editing tool. Carl Dryer when he made the film The Passion of Joan of Arc decided to focus on the trial and the execution of Joan of Arc. Because this was so intense a subject and he wanted to explore as closely as possible the spirituality, as well as the humanity of the woman, who claims she was God’s messenger, he shot 95 percent of the film in close-ups. He knew he was foregoing context by using this strategy. The result is one of the truly experimental and most important films ever made. The power of the film is built out of the performance of Joan, together with the power of the close-ups of the church officials who try her and her reactions to them. Other filmmakers who favored the close-up include John Cassavettes and Paul Greengrass. In the search to simulate a Docudrama approach, Steven Spielberg has also relied on the close-up.

The extreme close-up In Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1937), the antagonist is missing the tip of one of his fingers. Only when the main character, in seeking out help, sees an extreme close-up of a hand with one finger, index, missing does the audience understand the main character’s mistake and the dire consequences.

The editing tools

109

Due to its specificity, the extreme close-up has a very particular use, dramatic emphasis. This is not the sole shot used for dramatic emphasis, but its use signifies a meaning that is in itself extreme. One thinks of the small cup being stirred in Jordan Pele’s Get Out (2017). Hypnosis will soon follow as will danger. Or the shoulder tattoo in The Town. Seeing the tattoo will mean the main character is a bank robber, rather than a potential lover. Recognition could upset everything. The extreme close-up is not used as often as are other shots, principally because of its specificity. When it is used, it is a powerful device.

The reaction shot Generally presented as a mid-shot or close-up, the reaction shot is a record of one character reacting to the actions or speech of another. If the reaction shot is a close-up following an initiating shot, that is a mid-shot; the message is clear. Pay attention. Something different than initially thought is going on here. The reaction shot can be used to introduce subtext, as in Ang Lee’s mahjong game near the opening of Lust Caution (2007).

The cutaway As a scene proceeds, if the editor wants to introduce a new idea, he or she uses a cutaway. The cutaway may indicate the subject of the next scene or a shift in location. It can also introduce an element of danger into a scene, taking the audience’s focus away from the character in the scene. In short, the cutaway can alter the meaning of a scene. During the opening of robbery in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Peckinpah uses a cutaway of a group of children surrounding a scorpion with small pieces of wood. In a subsequent cutaway the children set the scorpion on fire. Although the robbery is itself a cruel and violent sequence, Peckinpah’s cutaway introduces the idea that children too are as violent and cruel as the adults. This metaphor supports the notion that all levels in society, not only criminals and bounty hunters, are violent and cruel. A cutaway can also introduce a new idea that pays off later in the narrative. In Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), the main character, a Soviet negotiator just arrived in Paris, sees a very feminine hat in a display case in the lobby of her hotel. Later in the film when she falls in love with her capitalist ‘enemy’, the hat serves to indicate her anti-capitalist defenses are being challenged. Later on, when she buys and is wearing the hat, the audience knows that she’s swapped politics for love. A third example of a cutaway occurs in Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1987). A 15-year-old boy has volunteered for the Partisan army in Belorussia, during

110

Editing

World War II. The Partisan camp is bombed by the Germans and the main character and the Camp Commandant’s mistress escape. The boy recommends a hiding place near his mother’s cottage. They return to the cottage. Food is still warm. He is anxious to find his mother and sister. He leads the young woman to the island hiding place. As they leave, the young woman looks back. The cutaway to the back of the cottage shows multiple bodies, stripped and simply left where they died. She knows the mother and sisters are among the dead. She says nothing to the main character, but we know from the cutaway the fate of his family. The cutaway is the shock Klimov intends for it to be.

Juxtaposition It was Sergei Eisenstein who in his work of the ’20s to glorify the Russian Revolution and to embrace the idea of the dialectic as an editing strategy, put into practice the principle of juxtaposition. Juxtaposition means the bringing together of opposites. For Eisenstein opposites visually capture the essence of conflict. For him, juxtaposition is both about life (revolution) and drama. Eisenstein explored these conflicting forces in his theories of montage or editing. Conflict between shots was articulated in the differing lengths of consecutive shots. More subtle but no less important was conflict within the frame. This occurred by design within the frame. Eisenstein also used the juxtaposition of shots to create emotion. All of these ideas about editing became guidelines in the editing of his silent films. Although he did abandon these ideas about editing in his sound films, the ideas live on in the work of those filmmakers who view editing as the aesthetic guide in their films. And consequently juxtaposition, conflict, is at the core of their work. The most consistent proponents of this approach are Peckinpah and Oliver Stone. The strongest examples are The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs (1971). For Stone, the examples I recommend are JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994).

Continuity vs. discontinuity The tools that promote continuity began in the first decade of the twentieth century. Initial films had been single shots, the most famous being The Kiss and Train Entering the Station. Although George Melies chose to move his work toward fantasy, his colleague Louis Lumiere opted for realism. In both cases, the choice to tell their stories in multiple shots meant resolving the question of how to organize those shots. Edwin Porter used a stratagem that has come to be called parallel editing. Different locations, actions, even characters populate each different location. By intercutting between them, the filmmaker is alluding to relating one strand of the story

The editing tools

111

to the other(s). Eventually they reveal that one strand and the other(s) are connected. Although this strategy did not fragment scenes to the extent that became the norm, parallel editing did begin the movement towards editing as we know it today. Another observation about this early innovation is that it did not include moving the camera to a changed position to record the action. The consequence is that Porter’s early work resembled filmed theater as much as it implied a new art form, film. The next innovation was the match cut to imply continuity. Principally developed in the early work of D.W. Griffith, fragmentation of long shots, mid-shots, and close shots included moving the camera to a different angle to record the action. What remained was to find the point at which to move from one shot to another. Seamlessness was the goal. Once this was achieved how to move from one scene to another, that is a transition, became the goal. Fades and dissolves became the tool of choice for these transitions. Once sound entered the mix in 1927, sounds could be used transitionally or within a scene for dramatic purposes similar to the close shot or the long shot. With these options, the uses of fades and dissolves for transitions were used less. Today both are used rarely. The issue of discontinuity was not solely dependent on the jump cut. Just as past/present/future and fantasy/reality elements became more useful to storytellers, the issues of transitions resurfaced. However, as often as not, filmmakers would straight cut between these dimensions and allow the viewer to decide – was this really happening, or not, or maybe? The goal of narrative clarity also softened when filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino or Robert Altman used a non-linear structure for their stories. The principle of discontinuity became a feature of films such as Shorts Cuts, Magnolia, and The Thin Red Line. The world portrayed in these Non-linear films was a less certain world, a more troubled and confused world. Discontinuity as an editing idea served this story form actively and invited their audiences to subjectively invest themselves and resolve the different strands of the Nonlinear film in accord with their own sensibility.

Context Essentially the issue of context can be seen as the location for the narrative, the character population, the artifacts, whatever will inform the behavior of the main character. As mentioned earlier, the absence of a context as in Dryer’s Passion of Joan of Arc leaves us both disoriented and claustrophobic in the absence of the spaces, places, and people who made up Joan’s world. It also made the audience feel how very much was against Joan. It may be these are the director’s goals, but more often context helps the director in articulating his goals for that narrative. Context can be presented within the shot, particularly the wide angle shot, or it can be presented using reaction and cutaway shots within the

112

Editing

scene. Context gives the viewer the information to assess and draw conclusions about the behavior of a character. In many ways, it can be used to foreshadow behavior. Two directors who use the frame to contextualize behavior are John Frankenheimer and Anthony Mann. Context reveals the skill set of the main character as a marksman in Winchester 73 (1951). The character stands in the foreground, with the target in the background. His skill leads him to win, only to have his opponent steal the prize, a brand new Winchester rifle. The theft sets up the pursuit of the thief that dominates the balance of the film. In Side Street (1952), a postman delivers mail door to door. In one office, a client drops a file. $200 falls out. He puts the file into a locked cabinet. This all takes place as the postman watches in the background. The theft of the file by the postman sets off the dangerous pursuit of the money he steals from the filing cabinet. In both of these examples, Mann uses visual context within a shot to trigger the dynamic that will dominate the film. Good examples of context within a scene include the vaudeville scene in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1937) where a performer displays his photographic memory. When the main character witnesses the show, he does not realize this performance/performer will later prove his innocence to the charge of murder.

Point of view Initially when the camera was placed directly in front of the action to be filmed, the experience of the film was akin to watching a filmed play. D.W. Griffith experimented with a variety of camera placements. He was very effective in using subjective camera placement in Broken Blossoms (1922). An abusive father looks to punish his daughter. She locks herself in a closet. The shots focus on his anger and her fear for her life. In each case, subjective placements close to each of their faces capture his anger and her feeling trapped, giving the whole scene a particular intensity. E.A. Dupont in his film Variety (1926) used extremely subjective low and high placements to give this murder story set inside the marriage of two trapeze artists tension. The older husband’s jealousy of his wife and her relationship with a younger trapeze artist drives him to murder. Although the story is banal, the extreme camera shots give it a thrilling, dangerous tone. Subjectivity is taken to an extreme in the opening of Reuben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). In the scene we only see what the main character sees. We see him as he looks in a mirror. The effect is powerful. In Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1946), the main character is heard but not seen (unless he walks by a mirror) throughout the entire film. The experiment distracts us from the narrative itself and consequently undermines the effectiveness of the device. Hitchcock found in subjective camera placements and movements a powerful tool for his affinity to the Thriller as a story form. He used these

The editing tools

113

shots to make films, such as Blackmail (1929) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), more exciting. He continued to use subjective shots in most of his films, but none has been more memorably associated with a particular point of view than Rear Window (1954). A photographer has broken his leg and is confined to a wheelchair. Looking out his window onto the apartments of his neighbors, he believes he has seen one of them get rid of his wife, murder her, dissemble the body, and get rid of the evidence, of her body. The entire film is presented from his point of view. Although it sounds laborious, even boring, the film becomes a story about extreme voyeurism and makes voyeurs of us all, in the audience. The consequence is an uncomfortable classic that chills and thrills. Subjective point of view has been central in the work of Roman Polanski, particularly in a trilogy of films with female main characters. In Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and Tess (1982), powerless women are pursued by less than well-intentioned men. In each of these films the subjective camera both invites us to identify with them and illustrates how very alone each of them is in their world. Polanski is a powerful proponent of the subjective camera placement and movement to tell their stories. The objective camera placement or movement presents a third person point of view. The audience observes in a less involved fashion the narrative as it unfolds from an objective or third person point of view. Here the point of view of the filmmaker takes precedent. A good example is Jean Luc Godard, who is always undermining narrative devices in order to provoke the viewer out of his involvement with character into the idea of considering what is happening to the character and why it is happening to the character. Godard uses a long objective camera movement to track a traffic accident in Weekend (1968). He tracks alongside hundreds of cars stopped, passengers exiting to amuse themselves and their children as they wait. The camera reaches the accident site brimming with human carnage, then it begins to move back into the traffic jam. The implication of the shot is not to care that all these cars and their families en route south for their vacations are indifferent to the carnage; the travelers care only for themselves. This shot questions the selfishness of the travelers and implies the success of the society has not made its beneficiaries civic minded. Rather it has undermined societal values and overvalued individual values. Godard is taking a moral position on modern values in this objectified camera movement and judging the society negatively. This is a doomed civilization for Godard and he uses an objective camera movement to say so. Objective camera placement is not always dominated by lofty intentions as in the case of Godard. Films which emphasize performance require that the audience and the performers be presented from a third person vantage point. Milos Foremen’s Amadeus (1984) and Robert Altman’s The Company (2003) illustrate this strategy. Films that require an epic scale, Anthony Mann’s Fall of the Roman Empire (1963) and Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1962), illustrate this strategy. An example from Cleopatra fleshes out

114

Editing

this editing decision. Cleopatra is introduced to Julius Caesar when her manservant brings a carpet, a gift for Caesar. He unfolds the carpet on the floor revealing its contents to be the princess, Cleopatra. Aside from the dramatic introduction of these two key characters to one another, Mankiewicz is interested in the scale of the Egyptian palace, its lofty ceiling, its spaciousness, its scale dwarfing the humans in the image. To achieve all of the above he resorts to the objective long shot. Not only will it be a powerful contrast to the close-ups of the characters, it also conveys the expensive production values of this film. In its day, Cleopatra was the most expensive film ever made. It is also the film which almost brought down the studio that produced the film, Twentieth Century Fox. A more dramatically potent use of the objective placement is the objective camera placement in Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist (2002) of Jews crossing a bridge built from the Warsaw ghetto to the city of Warsaw. The Jews who cross the bridge are prisoners who traverse from one world (a prison) to work in the other world. The image is objective, but its contents powerfully capture a tragic moment that foreshadows what will happen to these workers. The objective and subjective placement serve different dramatic purposes. But each can be a powerful tool in its own right.

Movement Movement within the frame has different editing consequences than movement of the camera itself. Movement within the frame depending on its direction dictates the direction within the next shot. As the subject exits right, she enters left in the next shot. Motion within frames can lead to closer motion shots, also in the same direction or alternatively; once the subject leaves the frame, a cutaway can also be used as the follow-up shot. An alternative to this pattern of screen direction is to follow movement on a more diagonal line within the frame. Using this pattern, an option is to cut to the reverse shot to pick up the movement. This particular variance can imply that someone is watching the subject. If one person is following another, a more horizontal movement across the frame allows cutting from one to the other. In this case, it is not necessary to wait for one subject to exit the frame before moving on to the follow-up shot. In the case of moving the camera, the range of possibility is greater. Subjective or objective, mounted on a tripod or truck or handheld are the decisions to be made. Subjective movement is exciting, involving, and elegant. Such movement typifies the Thriller and the Horror genres. If heightened realism is important, handheld movement is most often preferred and frequently used in the War film. The notion of set pieces based on camera movement is as prominent as set pieces based on the use of pace. Memorable set pieces based on movement

The editing tools

115

include the opening sequences of the following films: Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2014), Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1957), Miklos Jansco’s The Red and the White (1966), and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1993). In each case the filmmaker is taking the opportunity to throw us into his narrative. The movement sets a tone or creates a situation that presents a narrative problem that the main character must deal with for the balance of the story. None of these sequences make the main character seem extraordinary – quite the opposite. Another purpose of movement can be to capture the mood of the set piece. In King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1927), American soldiers march through the woods, their first encounter with the German enemy. Vidor’s moving camera focuses on three American soldiers, one of whom is the film’s main character. Vidor’s camera moves with the soldier, in front of the soldiers, in midshot, then close-up, then long shot. The set piece captures their excitement and their fear and their optimism. The camera movement energizes the set piece. This sequence is often compared in its editing to Eisenstein. I agree that its rhythmic character is reminiscent of Eisenstein, but its emotional quality is all Vidor, far more individualistic than Eisenstein and in the end, romantic rather than political in intention. Although the set piece based on camera movement is exciting to watch, it can also disturb. Oliver Stone uses a handheld camera in the diner set piece early in his film Natural Born Killers. Usually handheld implies realism, but realism is not the goal in this sequence. Ostensibly, it introduces the two main characters, the lovers, Mickey and Mallory. They are the killers in the film title. She is undiluted dangerous sensuality. He is unadulterated vicious killer. Both characteristics are in full display in this set piece. At times playful, always unpredictable, the scene is a massacre of the hunters who patronize the diner and of the waitress who serves in the diner. Although Stone uses ornate art direction, switches from color to black and white, and then back to color, it is the camera movement that orchestrates killing and dying. Here is a set piece that shocks, always engaging, often revolting, endlessly powerful in the evocation of the power of evil.

Pace When Eisenstein made shot length part of his editing strategy (metric montage), he unleashed the notion that the physical length of shots has an impact on his audience. Ever since, filmmakers have been asking questions about length. How long does a shot have to be? Can I present a very brief shot in my scene? What is the impact of that brief shot? How many brief shots can I use? At what point are too many short shots confusing? Does that confusion serve my narrative purpose? All of these questions and their answers have shaped the use of pace in narrative films. And the consequence of pushing pace and its use to new boundaries is one of the prime stories of film editing ever since.

116

Editing

Although the real story about pace changes with Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1965), its handheld, free-wheeling dynamic quality can be attributed to the cinema-verite influence on the documentary in the 1950s and 1960s. The advent of light 16mm cameras, together with the capacity to link camera and sound equipment enabling the recording of synchronous sound in the documentary, was key. Films emanating from the National Film Board of Canada are particularly pivotal. Les Raquetteurs (1957) by Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx, Pierre Perrault’s Pour la Suite du Monde (1963), and Lonely Boy (1962) by Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroiter all stand out. In the independent narrative film, John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) is also important. The strategy of using pace was also important in the production of television advertising. The consequence was that films were cut faster, and faster pace became an industry standard. Very quickly pace was a major component in films such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967). Both films used the beginning of the film to illustrate a new more free-wheeling style of editing and the conclusion to be marked by a very rapid pace. Both the killing of Bonnie (Fay Dunaway) and Clyde (Warren Beatty) and the rescue of Elaine Robinson (Katherine Ross) by Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) from the marriage her parents had organized for her are marked by very rapid almost jarring editing notable for how different these endings were from existing editing norms of that time. Very rapid pace marked the psychedelic space time travel in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Sam Peckinpah’s opening and closing sequences of The Wild Bunch (1969). The sequences then became the benchmark for the car chase in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968) and the main character’s pursuit of his would be assassin in William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971). Each of these sequences was marked by a particular shot strategy. Kubrick’s sequence had as an idea a psychedelic trip. Speed and changing light patterns were predominant. In Peckinpah’s films very rapid close-ups of the Bunch and those being killed or killing the Bunch predominated. The editing idea here was to focus on the violence ongoing. In the Yates’ film, the chase was smooth and elegant; speed and its look was the editing idea. Friedkin’s chase, on the other hand, focused on the passion and chaos of the pursuit. Handheld shots dominate, the unsteady camera actively creating chaos to be punctuated by jump cutting. Whatever the idea, each of these sequences contributed to the idea that such a sequence would be a staple of Science Fiction and Police stories, going forward. The 1980s contribution to pace was the appearance of a fast-paced set piece in the Action-Adventure film. The opening and the effort to hijack the truck carrying the Ark in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) exemplifies the compatibility of rapid pace in this genre’s set pieces. The dominance of Action-Adventure films ever since is in no short measure a result of such sequences becoming a staple of the genre.

The editing tools

117

Spielberg expands this approach to the set piece in his War film Saving Private Ryan (1998). The D-day invasion scene lasts over 20 minutes. The sequence represents the possibilities for pace. Handheld camera, subjective and objective movement, close-ups, and the use of sound all contribute to making the sequence one of the greatest and most effective war scenes filmed up to that time. In 2004, Paul Greengrass directs The Bourne Supremacy and changes pace as we expect it to present in the Thriller. Coming from the documentary film, Greengrass is accustomed to using lots of close-ups and overlapping sound, together with an establishing shot to locate the action and to mark its progress either for or against the main character. He uses these strategies in his narrative work to borrow the sense that the scene is unfolding in real time as happens in the documentary. These editing strategies not only lend an air of realism to his films, they are also viscerally exciting to watch. The consequence is the realistic set piece unfolding using close-ups, handheld brief movements, and the notion that the camera is looking for the shot that will explain the set piece. Sufficient close-ups are used to detail specifically what is going on. Quick cutaways rapidly introduce new ideas and dangers into the set piece, and the rapidity of the pace tells us where we are in the set piece. The slowing down of the pace tells us, thank goodness, we are near its end at last. Greengrass has applied this strategy to United 93 (2006), a Docudrama about one of the hijacked planes on 9/11. Here the details pay off without a main character to identify with. Instead, he follows the event from the beginning with the terrorists to the end when the plane crashes in Pennsylvania. The film is a remarkable use of pace to hold us in a complex story without feeling narratively lost. Other filmmakers who use pace powerfully include Mel Gibson in Apocalypto (2006) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016), and Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Detroit (2017). Gibson is very interested in his main character and his position against a plot that seeks to make him a victim. By overcoming the challenges of plot, in each case, the main character becomes a hero. Bigelow, on the other hand, seeks to emulate the Docudrama strategies of Greengrass. She is also interested in her main characters. They do prevail, but not to be a hero. In The Hurt Locker, the main character is simply an individual who thrives in war. In Detroit, on the other hand, the plot changes her African-American main character. In the end, he withdraws from the dependence on white society to define himself. Both Gibson and Bigelow use pace as a powerful tool in their stories.

Editing and story forms To close out this chapter, we turn to the issue of how editing varies depending upon the story form that holds its narrative. Earlier in this chapter, I noted the changes in pace in the Science Fiction film, in the Police

118

Editing

Story, the Action-Adventure film, the War film, and the Thriller. Each of these story forms is plot driven and pace whether it elicits excitement or identification with the plight of the main character or the level of menace represented by the antagonist; each requires an editing style that the goals of the story require. Romantic Comedy, and the other character-driven story forms, such as the Melodrama and the Situation Comedy, require a slower, more deliberate editing style. Since each of these genres is driven by interior issues for the characters rather than the external machinations of plot, time and detail lead us to an understanding of these internal issues and preferences as required. This means shots give us insight into what those internal issues are. One of the best examples of these internal characteristics is Ernst Lubitsch’s Romantic Comedy Shop Around the Corner (1941). Lubitsch and his screenwriter Samson Raphaelson are very attuned to the contradictions in the human behavior of their two would-be lovers. The best examples from specific story forms often lead us back to directors who have great insight in the contradiction of human behavior. Look no further than Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) and Joseph Mankiewicz’ All About Eve (1951) to see these human contradictions on full display. They will serve as excellent guides in how to edit your Situation Comedy or your Melodrama. The editing of voice-driven genres such as the Experimental Narrative and the Non-linear film also require special attention. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood (2007) is an Experimental Narrative. In this particular genre, mood is everything and consequently it is mood rather than content that should drive the editing style. At times, this may seem nonchronological, or even not rational, but it is what the genre requires. Think of it as poetic choices rather than prose editing choices. Similarly, the Non-linear film is driven by the through line of voice. Although Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts (1994) follows eight main characters and their relationship in Los Angeles of the early ’90s, the through line is that all the relationships are dysfunctional and consequently lead to tragedy for these characters. No one can be saved by anyone in this film. This idea has to drive the editing choices. In both the Experimental Narrative and the Non-linear film, the story may or may not have a plot. There also has to be time allotted for the audience to interpret what is unfolding. For both reasons, the pace will be slower than in other more familiar story forms.

11 The technical dimension

In the edit, the first obligation is to assure a consistent tone. This primarily means to focus on the performances and to assure that the characters do not step out of the zone that assures consistency. A scaled up performance is essentially a character who is always performing. It may be over the top, it may be based on offending the other, or it may be goaldirected. Where a performance veers away from these characteristics for a particular performance, the editor has to peel away the shot or scene. This is the case in each performance. The editor early on establishes a stereotype for the character and gradually builds away from it as Mike Nichols and editor Sam O’Steen do in The Graduate (1967), and they make sure when Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) makes a change it is plausible or in reaction to another character – Mrs. Robinson, for example, demanding a different Benjamin. The editor will always be on the lookout for physical or emotional observations that reveal where the character is at a particular stage of the screenplay. The editor will also look for a way to strengthen the opening and closing of the narrative. In between he or she will be looking to integrate backstory into the body of the film as well as any perceptions that speak to the past or to the future – flashbacks and flashforwards. These can be treated seamlessly or as shocks, whichever better serves the build of the film. By looking at stories of sacrifice the resounding question is who gains and who loses and secondarily at what cost? Is the person taking conscious action on behalf of another or doing so to enhance his or her standing in the eyes of another or of the community? Does the sacrifice taken yield an enhanced stature for the person or the other, or is the act without consequence? Audiences have embraced stories about taking acts that have consequence, while the dark side to this is no result from the action taken. Stories of this sort take on greater meaning the closer the instigator of the actions is to the beneficiary. These stories can be set in the past, the example of Charles Darnay in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, or they can be modern in the case of the mother in Mildred Pierce (1945) taking action on behalf of her older daughter.

119

120

Editing

Interestingly, the older examples yield nobility while the modern examples yield futility. The examples we now turn to yield a variety of results. The first, Goodbye Lenin (2004), is a dark situation comedy about a German family in East Germany at the time the Wall comes down in 1989. The main character, Alex Kerner (Daniel Bruhl), is a young adult. When he was a boy, his father fled to the West. And now, just before the Wall comes down, his mother has a life threatening heart attack. She is in a coma for the eight months during which the Wall ended East Germany’s isolation. When she awakes, Alex is told any excitement would be harmful. He pretends to her nothing has happened and takes her home, where the environment can be controlled. In doing this, Alex is sacrificing his own future. He does this until his mother dies, some months later. He will even enlist his father (Burghart Klaussner) back into her life before her death. The sacrifice Alex undertakes is to keep what is left of his family alive, in this case his mother, no matter what. This is born from a life with too many losses to his family. This seemingly impossible goal requires all of Alex’s ingenuity and energy. He enlists his work friend Dennis, his girlfriend Lara, his sister Ariane, and her new husband as well as neighbors and children to support his scheme. And for a time he succeeds in holding back time, at least for his mother. What makes this noble is that success and Alex’s attitude. For Alex, he’s doing a good necessary thing. The sacrifice he is making is apparent. His mother’s happiness makes this apparent. The lightness of tone towards the modern additions of the Wall falling, Alex brings pickles from Holland, pornography from West Germany and the creative energy of his Friend Denis, making videos Alex’s mother can watch as the daily news, moves the film far from the tragedy it could be. The consequence is that Alex’s sacrifice on his mother’s behalf is seen as positive and noble. Regis Warnier’s East/West (1999) is self-sacrificing but tragic. Alexei Golovin (Oleg Menshikov) is a Russian doctor who with his French wife Maria and son move back to Russia from France in 1946. They want to contribute to the country but by coming to Odessa, they discover they arrived in a jail. Marie’s passport is destroyed. The rest of the film will be about her attempt to get out. It will take many years. First Sasha, grandson of their landlady in Kiev, offers to help Marie escape. In doing so, as a swimmer he almost dies and when he does get away, he is sent to Canada and attempts suicide. His sacrifice for Marie is considerable. But not as great as Marie’s husband, Alexei. In the end, he arranges her escape with their son through Bulgaria, but he will spend more than 20 years in the gulag as a result. Although he will be released, he will be an old man and he will have sacrificed most of his adult life to help his wife. Was his sacrifice worthwhile? The cost is so great, the answer to the question remains open. Important in this story of sacrifice, the stakes, what Alexei and Marie are up against is critical. First the antagonist, the state, has to be omnipresent and punitive and dangerous. The Russian guide on the boat coming over to

The technical dimension

121

the USSR is friendly, but as soon as they arrive in Odessa, he beats Marie and tells Alexei to get a Russian wife. Later in the film, he reappears to accuse and arrest Marie for helping Sasha escape. Besides this character, Sasha’s swimming coach and Marie’s employer in the army orchestra both represent authority figures who appear as if they may help, but in fact, get in the way. Spies in the home lure and betray Sasha’s grandmother for speaking French with Marie. She is taken away and not seen until her funeral. It is very important that the power of the state and the lack of power in Marie and Alexei’s lives be emphasized. The casting of the powerful and the casting of the powerless are both important to maintain how much Alexei and Marie are up against and implicitly how great Alexei’s sacrifice on behalf of Marie will be. Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair (1999) presents sacrifice of a different order. The main character, Maurice, is a writer not unlike Graham Greene (the writer of the original novel). He has a friend, Henry, a civil servant. And Henry has a wife, Sarah, who Maurice falls in love with. The time is World War II London, a city suffering periodic bombing attacks by the Germans. The bombing goes on until almost the end of the war. Sacrifice comes from Sarah, the most religious of the three characters. During a bombing, Maurice is badly injured, possibly dead. Sarah, seeing him, prays for him. If he lives, she promises to give up the relationship with Maurice. When he walks into the room, she sees he is alive and she promptly leaves. Near the end of the story, Sarah recounts and spends the evening with Maurice. She tells him she is dying. Both he and Henry take care of her until her death at which point, Maurice renounces faith and embraces hatred. A private detective has been watching the affair for each. Sarah and Henry have a son who has a red birthmark that covers the left side of his face. He tells Maurice how Sarah kisses the boy on his birthmark and the birthmark disappeared. One of the last shots is of the boy cleansed of the birthmark. At this moment, Maurice is left with the question. Did Sarah have a spiritual power? Was her willingness to love and sacrifice so great, she saved his life? No definitive answer is given except that Maurice gives up his active hatred. Jordan and Greene embrace a religious frame for sacrifice and the actions in the film imply sacrifice as central to faith and faith as central to living. The three lead performers as well as the investigator, Parkis (Ian Hart), are powerful and they each suffer from dual states – a mesmerizing love for Sarah and a skepticism in belief whether about their work or their relationships. One state of being undermines the other. In terms of the performances both states must be on display. This is the editing challenge for Jordan and his performers. Constant rain, close-ups, two shots of Henry and Maurice, all create the sense of internal rather than external struggle with the two contradictory states. Jordan also supports a romantic overlay to the look of the film and resorts to primarily close-ups to intensify the feelings of each of the characters. In

122

Editing

this meditative aura, sacrifice, spirituality, and possibility exist, and the question of their futility fades into unimportance.

Prison Break (2005–2010) Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) is a man on death row. He will be executed in 60 days for killing the President’s brother. He claims to be innocent. Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) is a structural engineer. He is Lincoln’s brother. He is dedicated to breaking Lincoln out of jail. To do so, he first has the structural plans of the jail tattooed on his body. Then he robs a bank to get arrested and sent to the same maximum security penitentiary holding Lincoln. Is this sacrifice by Michael noble or futile? The goal seems impossible. At this stage of the series we know nothing about Lincoln and Michael’s parents although both will appear and be important late in the series. Another dimension that unfolds as early as the first episode is that a CIA operative, Paul Kellerman (Paul Adelstein), is killing people who are trying to prove Lincoln is innocent. What does the CIA have to do with Lincoln Burrows? In order to instigate the breakout, once Michael has managed to get into the prison, he will need two things. First is an affiliation with the infirmary, the closest location to the walls. He pretends to have diabetes so he can visit the infirmary. Second, he will need another drug to block the insulin. And he will need to develop a relationship with the doctor in the infirmary, Sara Tancredi (Sara Wayne Callies). She also happens to be the daughter of the Governor of Illinois. Michael will also need a gang with different skills and connections. Always watching him is Brad Belllic (Wade Williams), chief of the guards in the prison. He is sadistic and corrupt. Those who Michael turns to for help include his cellmate, Fernando Sucre (Amaury Nolasco). Sucre needs to get out to keep his fiancée true to him, rather than to a former underling on the outside. He also needs John Abruzzi (Peter Stormare), a gangster with means on the outside as well as in prison. He also needs Charles Westmoreland (Muse Watson) who has a fortune buried on the outside. This will provide the money the group will need to survive on the outside. Helpful on the inside is the Warden Henry Pope who realizes he could use a structural engineer to create a special gift for his wife, as well as his Doctor Tancredi. On the outside Veronica Donovan (Robin Tunney), Lincoln’s former girlfriend, is looking into legal ways to halt the execution. A late entry into helping Michael and Lincoln is a mad psychopath named Theodore Bagwell (Robert Knepper). He will force his way into the escape, but always remain a threat to the escapees.

The technical dimension

123

With the situation set, the issue will be the plot barriers that stand in the way of the prison break, as well as those barriers that exist on the outside. These barriers will carry Prison Break through five seasons of tension and thrills. At the core, however, will be the sacrificial relationship of Michael on behalf of his brother Lincoln. From an editing point of view, the key is to keep the plot unfolding. The time pressure of Lincoln’s scheduled execution is the first plot priority. The audience needs to understand this puts maximum pressure on Lincoln. To put this front and center, Lincoln has a lengthy dream in which his jailers wake him from sleep, a month before the scheduled date. They drag him into the room where the execution is to take place. They strap him into the chair. They attach the head covering. They attach the electrical connector. He looks to the next room. They cover his face and pull the switch. At this point, he wakes up in a sweat. The internal fear of what’s coming in a month’s time is now concretized. Looking at the plot as it develops, the first issue is to give credence to the plan for breaking Lincoln out of jail. This means Michael being tattooed with the prison plans. He is seen with the tattoo artist finishing her work. Michael is seen with Veronica urging his belief in Lincoln’s innocence and her skepticism at that point. We then see Michael’s feigned robbery. He fires the gun he holds into the ceiling. He goes into court with no defense. The judge would be willing to go lightly on this his first offense, but for his firing that gun. Jail time is thus assured. He requests to be sent to Fox River penitentiary where Lincoln is being held. His request is granted. Each of these plot points get Michael closer to his goal. In prison, it is clear that Brad Bellick, the head of the security guards, will be his primary antagonist. But two officials in prison will be helpful to Michael: the prison doctor, Sara Tancredi, and the Warden, Henry Pope. Each of these relationships has to be established in action. Sara will have frequent contact with Michael around his feigned excuse to get in the infirmary. She will also tend to him when he is beaten and later when the fellow prisoner Abruzzi has two of Michael’s toes cut off. The doctor’s interventions and concern on Michael’s behalf underscore his interest in her. He asks her for a date when he gets out. Although thwarted, this sets up the relationship that will develop between them. In the case of the Warden, his interest in Michael as a structural engineer leads the Warden to ask Michael’s help in a personal project – building a model Taj Mahal as a gift for his wife. Michael agrees only when he sees he needs the Warden’s help in getting a mad cellmate out of their joint cell. Later, he will turn to the Warden when the CIA attempts to have Michael transferred out of Fox River. The plot will also turn on gathering the right men to help him break out of Fox River. Each of these men has a backstory that makes it imperative that they get out of the prison. But each poses at least initially a danger for Michael. Only Sucre poses no such danger. Abruzzi, Westmoreland, and

124

Editing

Bagwell each are a danger to Michael and consequently to his plan to rescue Lincoln. Each of these relationships has to proceed from threat to uneasy partnership. Both Abruzzi and Bagwell are ruthless killers, and the pathway to shared interest in escape is fraught with danger and violence. In each case, the story arc between Michael and Abruzzi and Michael and others has to be fully developed and worked through. Abruzzi is thuggish and violent. He has Michael’s toes cut off in order to reveal himself. Bagwell on the other hand is violent and a sexual predator. His efforts to destroy Michael only stop when he sees Michael as a path not just to freedom, but also to riches (the cache Westmoreland has buried). There are two other threads of the story that are distant but related to Michael’s plot to break out of jail with Lincoln. One is Veronica becomes Lincoln’s lawyer and begins to look into his case with a view to proving him innocent. The other is the Paul Kellerman-CIA piece of the plot. We are not quite sure, but Kellerman is intent on killing anyone who might prove Lincoln innocent and he is intent on thwarting Michael in prison. He is responsible for the order to transfer Michael out of Fox River. All of these story strands need to be clear and progressive as the story moves along a time line toward Lincoln’s execution. The edit has to use surprise to set up barriers to Michael’s goal and twists/turns to overcome each of those barriers. The barriers have to be more intense and severe the closer we get to the execution date. The edit also has to move the stories of Michael and his relationships with those opposed to him and with those who will help him. And these story threads must contribute to the build leading to the breakout.

Surviving the family Oedipus, Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet, King Lear, Othello, each struggled in relation to their family. Some survived, others did not. Henry VIII kept killing his wives, almost until his own death. Monarchs killed sons to eliminate rivals. George V went to war allied with his cousin Czar Nicolas against their common cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. In the First World War, one part of the family was pitted against another. That is not to say that every family is fratricidal or patricidal, but family life is not always idyllic. Consequently, family strife is often an issue for each of the members. In taking up the theme of ‘surviving the family’, I will use three different examples to illustrate strategies for dealing with this universal theme. The first and perhaps the most orthodox is Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) which is about an adolescent, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), who is misunderstood at school and at home. He has a poor relationship with his step-father, and his mother seems more self-absorbed than is good for her son. Much of 400 Blows is modeled upon Truffaut’s own life. Eventually a petty theft leads the young Doinel to an adolescent detention center, where

The technical dimension

125

he is interviewed. Doinel runs away from the center and the film ends with him running away to water’s edge. Is he considering suicide? Or is he simply expressing his frustration at his life situation? The 400 Blows is not only about a troubled adolescent; it is about mischievousness, it is about parental absence, it is about schools that are too regimented, and it is about a boy’s search to be free from familial and social fetters. Above all, it is about a demand for respect in spite of being an adolescent. Truffaut uses certain camera and editing strategies to underpin the humiliation of Antoine in the classroom and to underscore how misunderstood he is in the family. These days we would call this a portrait of an abused child, but the film, made in 1959, is about a different set of expectations around family and school. Truffaut uses a lengthy interview on Antoine never showing the interviewer. He uses tracking shots and movement to capture the energy and the curiosity of Antoine. Truffaut uses the jump cut to energize what could easily become a portrait of adolescent depression. Truffaut does not resort to pace or to the handheld camera. He does use static long shots and reaction shots giving his film a formal style relative to his colleague Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). By the end of The 400 Blows, there is no question in our mind that Antoine Doinel will survive family life. Looking at the four follow-up Doinel films moving him through marriage, children, and failure, we know he has paid a cost for his early family experience. Marlene Gorris’ Antonia’s Line (1995) is a Fable that proposes the best way to survive the family is to exclude men from the family. The story frame is the life cycle of the main character, Antonia (Wilkke van Ammelroy). At the outset, she returns to her village after World War II. She returns with her adolescent daughter, Danielle (Els Dottermans), for her own mother’s funeral. For the rest of the film, she will choose to live on the family farm. What is clear is that the village has many eccentrics and the village can be divided between artists and hypocrites. Antonia hates hypocrisy. There is a family with a daughter who is mentally limited. The sons in the family not only belittle her, they also rape her. Antonia takes the daughter under her wing and physically assaults the brother who has been most cruel. As the film progresses, Antonia takes other characters mistreated in the village into her home. When Danielle, now a young woman, wants to have a baby, it is Antonia who takes her to the city, honors her choice of the father, and organizes a weekend tryst for the conception. When the deed is done, Danielle and her mother return to their village and await the birth. When they go to church, the minister publicly criticizes the out of wedlock pregnancy. Antonia and Danielle publicly leave the church forever. Antonia raises Danielle’s baby, while Danielle leaves to further her studies in art. The family thrives. A local widower with multiple sons offers Antonia marriage. She does not need him, but they become friends and have a sexual tryst periodically. His sons help Antonia on her farm.

126

Editing

The life cycle ends with Antonia’s death. She has had a happy fulfilling life by creating an unorthodox family structure. She has survived conventional family life by being unconventional. The edit of the film emphasizes a positive tone, magical, imaginative rather than realistic. When Antonia’s mother’s funeral is occurring, the mother sits up in her casket and sings ‘My Blue Heaven’. When Danielle looks around, she sees posed images of nature and of people. Imagine, playful images present her point of view. When she is having sex with the bikerider she has chosen to father her baby, the same playful tone infuses the scenes of impregnation. Village inhabitants bay at their windows to the nights’ full moon. Eccentricity is embraced in these scenes. The result is that the film is about what lies below the surface in the people of this village. Gorris has created a tone that implies Antonia and her family have chosen to view men functionally rather than as central to the survival of family life. Gorris’ tonal choices are ennobling rather than escapist. Her people can and do survive conventional family life by choosing to be less conventional. Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2001) focuses on two families, one French Caucasian and the other French Moroccan. Helene (Catherine Frot) is married to Paul (Vincent Lindon). He is cruelly indifferent to his wife. The night they are driving and a prostitute being beaten seeks refuge in their car. Paul refuses and the woman is almost killed. His wife is appalled. The second woman is Malika (Rachida Brakni), the prostitute who is beaten. We learn that Malika became a prostitute after running away from her father who had sold her to a much older Moroccan man for marriage. These two women survive their treatments at the hands of their family by helping one another. Serreau has taken an exaggerated TV sitcom style to tell her story. This means stereotyping all the men. Because the two lead women are oppressed by the men, the presentation of all the men is selfish, self-centered, and cruel. In the case of Helene, the key men in her life are her husband and her son. Both are narcissistic and cruel: the son to his fiancée and Paul, the husband to his mother as well as his wife. In the case of Malika, her father is materialistic about his older daughter and her younger sister Zora. At 15–16 years, each becomes an object to sell. The other men in Malika’s life are her pimp and his boss. Both have only a material view of her earning capacity. They are happy to drug her with heroin and sell her on the street until she is used up. And if she betrays them, by lying to them about clients, they are willing to kill her. The extreme nature offers only two choices to the two women – submit and be a slave to the man or men in your life or fight back. The women chose to fight back. Chaos is not a realistic feminist Melodrama. It is a Fable whose core idea is that if women do not help each other and take power from their persecutors, there will be no future for them. To do so requires extreme unrealistic measures.

The technical dimension

127

To make a story like Chaos coherent and viable, Serreau adopts a tone that is exaggerated, accelerated, and humorous. The style of filming, TV sitcom, is accelerated. To fit with this style, the acting is over the top and again exaggerated. To create performances that have a serious and comic dimension, Serreau relies on Vincent Lindon and Catherine Frot as Paul and Helene. They visually portray the humor as well as in Paul’s case, the cruel indifference toward the women. He is also very credible as instantly falling in love with Malika with its payback consequences. Beyond casting, Serreau has used the Malika story of amassing wealth from one of her victims to source her means of revenge against her family, as well as to buy the freedom of her sister, Zora. This sleight of hand plot device is not at all realistic, but Serreau does not intend to use it realistically. Revenge requires money which requires artifice. The speed of these actions and the fun inherent in the exercise of revenge against such mean-spirited men is sufficient to go along with this narrative construction. The pace of the edit gives the film a breezy quality that is compatible with the fairy tale elements of the film. Serreau’s message, on the other hand, is anything but breezy. If the women of the world, regardless of age or religion or wealth, do not help each other, no one else will. Underneath this TV sitcom style Fable is a very serious idea. You can survive family life, but you will need to resort to others for help, in Chaos, to the women of the world.

The Good Wife (2009–2016) The Good Wife takes place in Chicago. The main character is Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies). In the first scene, her husband, Peter (Chris Noth), resigns from his position as State Attorney in Illinois. He is leaving in public humiliation; he has been caught on tape with prostitutes. He has humiliated his family. Alicia stands beside him, but when they are alone, she lets her true feelings be known. She slaps him. She will not seek a divorce, but she leaves the marriage. She goes back to the profession she left for the marriage, the law. She joins a large litigation firm, Lockhart Gardner. She joins as a junior associate because she went to law school with Will Gardner (Josh Charles), one of the partners. She will shortly find out it is a six-month trial. The competition is the other junior associate, Cary Agos (Matt Czuchny). She will also have to deal with a quick to judge office investigator, Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi). In short order, Peter is arrested and jailed for professional misconduct and Alicia becomes the sole provider for her two adolescent children with the help of a very partisan mother-in-law. The series proceeds with Alicia’s personal story and a legal case in each episode, each revealing the character, strength, and weakness of Alicia. Both stories follow an arc of victories and defeats for the main character.

128

Editing

The Good Wife is considerably strengthened by a very strong group of actors. Each is charismatic in roles that call for intelligence, quick wit, and the capacity to surprise. Although in later seasons, the cast was joined by Nathan Lane, Michael J. Fox, and Alan Cummings in intriguing secondary roles, the cast of even the first season exhibits quality and charm. The most important are Alicia and Peter Florrick. As Alicia, Margulies is hidden and open, communicative and a problem solver. Peter (Noth) is constantly charming and confident even when he is in prison. It is these very qualities that got him into trouble and will get him out. Before I leave the subject of the acting, I should add that even the judges who adjudicate the cases that occupy the trial portion of the show exhibit a distinct individuality that is in keeping with the general smartness of this show. Each is different but memorable. In terms of the edit of the show, there are distinct qualities that mark the unusual combination of the personal and professional stories, but also set the show apart. First the prologue section of the show is 25 percent of the entire screen time of an episode. Teasers, which open shows or act as prologues, tend to be quick and pithy. That is not the case in this series. In the pilot, the prologue begins with the resignation of Peter in a public news conference and his wife’s response privately to what he has done professionally and personally. Their life seems to be in ruins. Six months later, Alicia is starting her first job in 13 years, time taken off to have her two children and to help her husband in his career. At Lockhart Gardner we are introduced to all the players, the partners Will Gardner and Diane Lockhart. Alicia is at the bottom of the totem pole. We are introduced to Cary Agos and to the investigator Kalinda. Via phone calls we are introduced to her teenage children and her mother-in-law, and finally she is introduced to her pro-bono client, Jennifer, accused of murdering her ex-husband. The first jury could not come to a decision so Alicia attends the hearing as to whether her client will be released on an electronic monitor to assure her compliance. Both prosecutor and judge are introduced. One worked for her husband, and the other dislike her husband. Without saying a word, her client is allowed to be electronically monitored rather than incarcerated. A date is set for the trial, and the prologue ends. There is more story and characterizations in these 10 minutes than in most TV episodes. Granted there is always a great deal to convey in the pilot episode. It is ground zero in television writing. Nevertheless, the pattern of 10-minute prologues becomes a template for the series. A quick look at episode 9 entitled ‘Threesome’ offers a second example of the content of the prologue. The primary frame is a TV interview. Chelsea Handler is presenting the prostitute Peter was seeing. The interview is related to telling the real story – why Peter saw the prostitute, that he was seeking a threesome which his wife was too prudish to entertain, and that he was a very good lover. The interview is seen by Alicia, her kids, and her coworkers. Peter is trying to get ahold of his wife, but she is not taking his calls. Alicia’s case in the episode is to defend Stern, the senior partner at Lockhart Gardner who has been arrested

The technical dimension

129

on a DUI. Stern is introduced as an eccentric legal guru with an outsized ego. He decides to defend himself with Alicia backing him up. The TV interview and the case are the substance of the prologue and so public embarrassment and professional embarrassment are the subtext of the entire prologue. The second notable editing strategy has to do with the pace of the edit. People move, the camera moves, and the cut moves between the different narrative threads of the personal and the professional. The pace gives an energy to the people and the subject matter. All that energy makes the content more important at least to the participants, the characters of the narrative. All this energy makes this series more fun to watch. A third strategy used in the edit is the use of close-ups to register emotion. This is particularly the case with the family. The children, Grace (Mackenzie Bega) and Zach (Graham Phillips), and the mother-in-law, Jackie (Mary Beth Pell), get the majority of the close-ups. The result is that the directors and editors are telling us exactly who is most important in the story. Other characters get their close-ups but not to the degree of the family members. Because The Good Wife is the story of the survival of the members of the Florrick family under very public pressure, it is appropriate that the edit guide us to their emotional reactions to all the forces attacking them from within and from the outside. Finally, I would like to take a closer look at the introductory few minutes of the pilot. It represents the edit stage of storytelling at the very highest level. The sequence opens with a couple walking in slow motion toward a conference room. The camera is closely focused on their holding hands. The assumption is the closeness of their relationship. As they enter the conference room the husband, Peter, makes his way to the microphone setup. The shot remains handheld and it swings around to see his face in close-up. It is a strong image. He speaks about resigning from the office of State Attorney for Cook County. Then he launches into his personal failing – his betrayal of his wife and family. As he says this, a side close-up, we in the foreground and Alicia in the background. She is obviously in great pain. As he speaks about his infidelity there are quick cutaways out of focus of him in bed with someone, presumably, the prostitute. These quick shots give visual substance to his confession. We cut back to Alicia in great pain trying to focus on a string on her husband’s suit jacket. As if there is a strategy that can hide her humiliation. Finally, it is over, they walk out crowded by the questions from the crush of reporters. A jump cut. They are out of the room, aides at his side, and then they are alone. He tries in close-up to say, ‘Thank God that’s over’. Alicia looks at him and slaps him in close-up. For her, it is not over. It is just the beginning of the end. The sequence cuts to six months later. Rarely has the survival of the family been presented in such jeopardy in so short a scene. This is the brilliance of The Good Wife.

12 The creative possibilities

For this chapter we will explore our two themes: sacrificenobility or futility? And surviving the family. Sacrifice implies the other – society, gender, country. Surviving the family implies a more personal, self-directed story. On a narrative level, the first implies a more plot intensive story while the second implies a more character intensive narrative. What can expand these stories from technically effective to a more surprising pathway? And how can the edit lead us to that surprising pathway? That is our goal in this chapter.

Sacrifice-nobility or futility? To flesh out our exploration of the theme we turn to three unusual War films. Attack (1956) which is directed by Robert Aldrich. Too Late the Hero (1970) is also directed by Robert Aldrich. They were Expendable (1945) is directed by John Ford. Robert Aldrich is one of Hollywood’s most underrated directors. He’s had multiple commercial successes and even more critical successes. Among his commercial successes are the Prison film The Longest Yard (1974), the War film The Dirty Dozen (1967), and the Horror film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Among his critical successes are his Film Noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), his War film Attack (1956), his Action-Adventure The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), his Western Ulzana’s Raid (1972), and his Thriller, Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977). What marks his films is his powerful interest in men’s behavior under pressure. Whether it’s war, prison, or crime, he tests his character’s belief system and the centrality of having a code to live by. Whether that code is country or survival, Aldrich is interested in nonconformity and the challenge to prevailing belief systems – religion, the military, patriotism, all are scrutinized and tested and often found deficient in Aldrich’s films.

130

The creative possibilities

131

Attack Robert Aldrich has transformed the play on which the film is based into a War film in which the four key figures in the film have agendas which clash profoundly. All four are American officers. For Lt. Colonel Clyde Bartlett (Lee Marvin), the war is all about political opportunity post-war. For Captain Erskine Cooney (Eddie Albert) the war is about proving to his father back home that he is a worthy son. For Lieutenant Harry Woodruff (William Smithers) it’s about respecting the chain of command while upholding respect for the men under his command. For Lieutenant Joe Costa (Jack Palance), the main character, it’s all about saving the lives of his men. The problem is that Captain Cooney is a coward and his refusal to support Lieutenant Costa’s men as the film begins leads to the death of 14 of Costa’s men. This is the last straw for Costa. If Cooney screws up again and more of Costa’s men are lost, Costa warns he will kill Cooney. The film takes place in late 1944. The war in Europe is ending. But in December 1944 Hitler launches his last offensive effort, the Battle of the Bulge. The attack is unexpected and initially seems a serious threat to the Allied forces. This is the battle offers Cooney a second chance to fail and gives Costa cause to kill Cooney. In Attack the antagonist is not a German as one would expect but rather an American Captain whose accomplice is an American Lt. Colonel. Attack is not so much an anti-War film. It’s an attack on the corruption that puts a Captain Cooney in a position of responsibility for men’s lives. In Attack Cooney doesn’t kill men physically but his actions and non-actions lead to their deaths. Aldrich’s first job is to show Costa’s success with his men and Cooney’s indifference to sending men to their deaths. A third element here is to show that the deaths could have been avoided. In order to achieve this Aldrich adopts a wide angle lens approach to provide context. Joe Costa often appears in the foreground close to the camera. His men are in the same shot but in the middle of the frame implying their relationship to one another. These shots also imply that Costa has the most power but for him it’s always about the men he is leading. When presenting Cooney, initially Aldrich does not even show his face. His back is to the camera and the image implies his do-nothing reaction to Costa’s radio message, ‘Help us’. Later when we do see Cooney’s face it’s boastful and angry at Costa’s implications and behavior toward him. In terms of the killing of American soldiers Aldrich uses a subjective camera position and a close-up of a machine gun or a sniper’s rifle. He then cuts away to the Americans being killed by these weapons. The close-ups and subjective point of view show the power of the weaponry but the killers, for Aldrich, remain faceless. The progress of the edit suggests this didn’t have to happen this way. If only Cooney would have done his job it wouldn’t have happened.

132

Editing

The other notable feature of Aldrich’s directing is to scale up the performances. The key subtext for each actor is passion for Costa, cowardice and cruelty for Cooney, and cool clarity and corruption for Bartlett. In the edit of Attack, these features are emphasized and to make sure there’s no mistake of perception, Aldrich shifts into close-up to reveal these characteristics. The example of how Aldrich manages Lt. Costa in the last act of the film will illustrate how far Aldrich is willing to go in pushing the subtext of passion with regard to Costa. On the second patrol in the film Costa and his men are cut off in a farmhouse at the edge of the village. They see tanks, and they capture two Germans in the basement of the farmhouse. They are in a precarious position. The German SS officer threatens the other captive soldier not to talk. Costa assesses the only way to assure information is to get rid of the SS officer. He pushes him out of the farmhouse and he is killed by German machine gunfire. Costa learns from the other German prisoner that there are numerous SS panzer tanks in the village. He needs to get this information back to his U.S. superiors. His calls to Cooney for help have gone unanswered. He assures Cooney by radio he is coming back. Tensions run high. Costa slaps an inattentive lookout on the village. This scene suggests Costa will do what he has to in order to get information and his troops out of their dangerous situation. A scene follows of the men running uphill to escape from the farmhouse. Few make it. It’s unclear at this point if Costa survives. His second in command, Sergeant Tolliver, does get back to U.S. headquarters with his German prisoner. Cooney is anxious to punish the prisoner. He punches him and threatens worse but is stopped by Lt. Woodruff. A German breakthrough threatens all of them. Suddenly all are in danger. At this point a wounded Lt. Costa walks in, pistol in hand. He is going to kill Cooney. He is told Tolliver and others of his men are trapped in an adjacent building and are threatened by tanks. Costa postpones his moment of reckoning with Cooney. Costa grabs a bazooka and ammunition. He destroys one tank and grenades its crew. A second tank however traps Costa against a door frame. It moves against Costa. He can’t position the bazooka to destroy this tank. The tank rolls on and crushes Costa’s arm under it. It seems over for Costa. In the basement where Tolliver and the others are hiding Cooney has decided to surrender. The others are shocked. Cooney now threatens them with a machine gun should they try to stop him. As Cooney begins up the stairs, Joe Costa bleeding, horribly wounded enters. He holds a pistol. His last act will be to kill Cooney. He makes his way down the stairs but he simply has no strength left. At the base of the stairs he collapses. Cooney pushes Costa’s gun away from his hand. Costa dies screaming a curse begging God for the ability to kill Cooney. Costa dies as Cooney begins to make his way up the stairs. At that instant Lt. Woodruff shoots Cooney. The other soldiers also shoot Cooney.

The creative possibilities

133

When the Colonel arrives he tells Woodruff he will write up a citation so Cooney can get a medal. This is too much for Woodruff. The film ends with Woodruff’s call to the General. Close-ups are critical throughout this sequence to emotionalize this sequence in which Costa’s men finish Cooney, Costa’s last wish.

Too Late the Hero If Joe Costa’s sacrifice in Attack had a sense of nobility, Lieutenant Sam Lawson’s (Cliff Robertson) sacrifice in Too Late the Hero (1970) is futile. It is set in the New Hebrides in 1942 when the British are losing the war to their enemy, the Japanese. The main character, Lt. Sam Lawson, is an American Navy officer and an expert on the Japanese. And it’s this skill that gets him seconded reluctantly to a British unit on an island dominated by the Japanese. He is to accompany a British unit across the island to destroy the Japanese transmitter on their base camp. His assignment will then be to broadcast a message in Japanese so that the listeners will be unaware of what has occurred in the base camp. Fourteen men are assigned to carry out the mission. Their commander, Captain Hornsby (Denholm Elliot), is unpopular with his men. And the men themselves are an extremely divisive lot. Private Tosh Hearne (Michael Caine) is the outspoken medic. Private Campbell (Ronald Fraser) is a thief, a liar, and a shirker. He has a self-inflicted wound that fails in getting him out of the mission. Private Jock Thornton (Ian Bannen) seems half-mad. The consequence is that this patrol is certainly no ‘band of brothers’. They are certainly not heroes. Aldrich makes a point of showing the flaws of each as quickly as possible. In the case of Captain Hornsby, the group runs into a Japanese patrol. Rather than organizing the men in such a way that they don’t shoot each other, Hornsby tells them to hide, leaving his bag in plain sight. One of his soldiers scoops it away. In the ensuing skirmish which Hornsby initiates, two of his men are killed by their own men. Responding to the wounds of the Japanese, Hornsby himself kills the wounded, illustrating his cold blooded nature as well as his carelessness. In the next skirmish Private Campbell robs a dead Japanese officer. Unable to take off the dead man’s ring he chops it off with his machete. This mutilation eventually will lead to Campbell’s own cruel death in Act III of the narrative. By the time the British reach the Japanese camp Hornsby has managed to lose half of his men. He also has lost the radio to be used for Lawson’s Japanese transmission. On the spot Hornsby suggests they can use the transmitter in the Japanese radio hut. Lt. Lawson refuses, accusing Hornsby of not following orders. In the ensuing attack, Hornsby and his own radio operator are killed.

134

Editing

On escaping the six men who remain alive discover an airstrip already equipped with attack planes. For Lawson the mission shifts to getting back to base camp with this new threatening information. Lawson is now senior officer among the survivors. A schism breaks out among the survivors. Private Campbell encourages surrender. When the wounded Private Thornton objects, Campbell kills him while the others sleep. Two of the men slip off with Campbell to surrender, leaving Tosh and Lt. Lawson on their own. Tosh and Lawson are pursued relentlessly but finally realize their only chance is to kill the commanding Japanese officer who is organizing their pursuit. They do kill him and in the ensuing confusion try to make a run for the British camp. Lawson is killed and only Tosh survives. Looking at the totality of the narrative, Aldrich is making an anti-War film but not one similar to other anti-War films. Aldrich seems to believe war brings out the worst in people and at best they may be reluctant or accidental heroes. The British soldiers pictorialized in Too Late The Hero are nasty human beings and the American Lawson is at best risk-avoidant and survivalist. Aldrich faces numerous issues in realizing his narrative. The audience has no one to admire or wish for them to have a better fate. To emotionalize the narrative Aldrich uses an abundance of close shots of the characters. He also emphasizes their shortcomings. Here too he uses close-ups, particularly in moments of death. The consequence is an intensity to the film, particularly the idea that in war all roads lead to death. Quite different from the pace and dynamism Aldrich uses in The Dirty Dozen, in Too Late The Hero he slows down the action sequences. He also uses multiple extreme long shots when the patrol is moving. The consequence is distance from the characters in potentially dynamic situations. And contrary to sharing private views on war as David Lean and writer Carl Foreman do in The Bridge Over the River Kwai, no such revelations of character or belief here. The closest Lawson gets to expound his views are when he speculates to Captain Hornsby whether the youngest casualty had ever had sex before he died. The priggish Captain is shocked that an officer would talk as Lawson does. The consequence of all of the above points to the futility of sacrifice in the war as pictorialized. Although admirable in his directorial skills, the film is desperately in need of something positive to hold on to as we experience the film, a requisite Aldrich denies us.

They Were Expendable John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945) is about doing your duty as opposed to doing what you want to do. In this sense Ford is pointing out that duty trumps desire in war and that the sacrifice the individual makes is for the larger good. The sacrifice is a noble one, according to Ford.

The creative possibilities

135

The consequence is an elegiac quiet tone to the film. Characters care for each other, but they also want to be counted as standing up for their country and its values. In this sense They Were Expendable is far from the tone, issues, and beliefs on display in Aldrich’s Attack and Too Late the Hero. The film closest to the experience of war and the characters who fight in war in They Were Expendable is Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Both films find the nobility in the acts of sacrifice their characters make. In terms of the editing strategies in They Were Expendable, there is an emphasis on low camera angles (looking up at the characters), the choice of shots that include multiple characters (the idea of being on the same side and supportive of one another), and sharp shadows that emotionalize non-combat scenes – hospital scenes (a colleague’s death) as well as the romantic scenes between Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) and Sandy (Donna Reed). The second strategy John Ford uses is to render his battle scenes at night. The sea, the smoke of the battleships’ guns, and the torpedoes of the PT boats are not edited for pace but rather to create an epic scale to the scenes. They seem larger than the boats themselves. The result is a poetic feeling, quite the opposite from the battle scenes in Too Late the Hero. These scenes elevate the characters as well as their actions. Finally John Ford moves away from direct expression of feeling in the scene of an officer’s death in the hospital. His fellow officers and seamen gather about him. All know that death is close. But their words and their actions are about life and being together again soon. The level of feeling Ford manages in this scene is heartbreaking. And once more the emphasis is on the nobility of these men, more than denial, more than just sentiment. Such is sacrifice in John Ford’s They Were Expendable.

Surviving the family Most often the theme of surviving the family is framed within the Family Melodrama. The main character is one apex of a triangle of mother, father, and child. Whoever is the main character is the most powerless within the family. The other two characters represent the two choices for the main character. One choice represents survival, the other destruction. To deepen the stakes, issues of class, gender, or race are added. There may or may not be a plot in these stories. For the director the key is to energize the story and where possible to join the narrative to an issue of the day. On the stage, famous examples of the theme are Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. In novel form strong examples include Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickelby and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The character arc of these stories, if they are more positive, is often referred to as a coming of age story. If the story has a darker arc, the loss of innocence arc frames the narrative. Among the more famous films that address the theme of surviving the family are: Frank

136

Editing

Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), and Hirokazu KoreEda’s Nobody Knows (2004).

Once Were Warriors Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994) takes place in a Maori family in urban New Zealand. The main character is the mother, Beth (Rena Owen). The antagonist is her husband, Jake (Temuera Morrison), and the other piece of the triangle is her children, particularly Grace (Mamaengarea Ker-Bell) and Nig (Julian Arahanja) and her oldest son Huata (Joseph Kairau). There are also two additional younger children. The film opens with Nig, the second son, being charged with being an accomplice in a theft. Being his second offense he could be removed from the home. Shortly thereafter Jake, the father, is laid off from his job. Jake’s response is to have a drinking party at the family home. There we see Jake does not get on with his oldest son, nor does he express much interest in any of his children. The only person in the family he cares about is his wife, Beth. His interest is possessive and sexual. Beth, on the other hand, is concerned about the family and its future. In a drunken rage at the end of Act I, Jake physically assaults his wife and then rapes her. Because she is unable to appear the next day at her son’s hearing, Nig is sent to a reform school. The family tragedy doesn’t stop there. In Act II the daughter, Grace, is raped by Jake’s friend, Bully (Cliff Curtis), during the second drunken home party. At the end of Act II Grace hangs herself. Her death forces Beth to act to save her living children. In Act II we also learn that Beth was born into a high status Maori family while Jake was born into a lower class family. Beth’s rebellion against her family’s wishes is now deeply regretted. The film ends with Beth leaving the marriage to preserve what remains of her family. Tamahori has, across the board, demanded strong acting from his actors. All the characters are extreme, either aggressive like Jake or sensitive like Grace. Tamahori has cast for energy, sexuality, and charisma, and the edit emphasizes these qualities in the performances. Second, Tamahori has used loud rhythmic sounds and music to give the Maori characters energy that runs counter to the depressing events in the family. Manhood and womanhood matter to Tamahori, and both are vigorously embraced in the edit. Tamahori also uses camera movement and close-ups in the most violent scenes in the film. The consequence is that the violence is palpably shocking for his audience. The result is a film that is tragic but emotionally rich. This family has to and will survive the destructive character of Jake. The children will circle their mother and help her survive as well.

The creative possibilities

137

Character Mike Van Diem’s Character (1997) is a son’s story of survival as the son of a withholding mother and a sadistic father. The pregnancy that leads to the son’s birth is a rape of a servant by the master. The mother leaves the father’s employ and raises the son, Jacob, on her own. As an adult, Jacob borrows money so he can leave home. He buys a business with the loan. At this stage he doesn’t know his father, Dreverhaven, a bailiff, owns the company that gave him the loan. Jacob’s business fails, and Dreverhaven sues him to repay the debt. Jacob taught himself to speak English. This skill secures him a clerking job in a large law firm. From his clerk salary he repays his debt. However when he decides to go to school to study law he knowingly borrows the money from his father. The father has the right to recall the loan at any time. Jacob does complete his studies. He visits his father to tell him. Dreverhaven claims he has made his son what he has become. Jacob, angered, fights with Dreverhaven. Later that day he will be arrested for Dreverhaven’s death. We learn that the death was a suicide and the film ends. The subtext of Character is that Jacob has been emotionally deformed by his parents. He is consumed by proving they have had no impact. But his obsession with this idea has thwarted him in his relationships with other people. Jacob is likeable but has been unable to sustain any meaningful relationship. He is professionally a success but on a personal level, a failure. The most important antagonist is Dreverhaven, his father (Jan Declier), the most feared bailiff in all of Rotterdam. Dreverhaven has been a sadist evicting tenants and sadistic to his own son. As a boy Jacob is taken by the police as a thief stealing bread. Under duress he tells them the bailiff is his father, claiming the same name. They summon the bailiff, but when he appears, he denies knowing the boy. On one level the father-son story is core but Van Diem is interested in enlarging the scale of the story, suggesting that in Calvinist Holland cruelty and callousness make the man. To generate this subtext Van Diem layers the narrative with details about the social structure of the society. Important characters include a Communist, a fraudulent businessman, a strong police presence in everyday life, and an upper class that lives in a different world. But Jacob’s world view continues to be shaped by his mother and father. For Jacob the world he lives in is withholding and cruel, a world in which only wealth matters. Character is a film whose narrative spans 35 years in the life of its main character. The immediate editing problem is that the film will be exposition heavy and emotionally too slow for a modern audience. Van Diem has adopted a variety of editing strategies that will throw us into the story and keep us there. The first strategy is to bookend the narrative with a dynamic prologue and epilogue. The film begins and ends in the present. In the prologue Jacob

138

Editing

Katadreuffe, on the day of his graduation celebration goes to visit the bailiff Dreverhaven to announce his freedom from ‘bondage’ to his father. They argue and they fight. The visit is presented in subjective camera placement, lots of camera movement, and when the fight does begin it’s presented in a slow motion subjective image of Jacob diving at Dreverhaven. The shots shift to a battered Jacob, bloodied, returning home, where in short order his apartment is broken into by police who arrest him. The scene cuts to police headquarters where Jacob is questioned by police as to motive for killing Dreverhaven. How did he know the victim? In narration Jacob tells the story of Joba, the servant, raped by her master, Dreverhaven. The rape and his birth are quickly shown after Joba tells her master she is pregnant and will leave him. The epilogue returns to the fight between Jacob and Dreverhaven but this time includes Dreverhaven’s suicide. The second strategy Van Diem uses is to focus on the sightings of Dreverhaven by the young Jacob. He clearly longs for a father. That sense of longing will be ongoing into Jacob’s adulthood. Van Diem also focuses on Jacob’s relationship with his mother, her provision of basic needs but withholding the affection Jacob needs. Jacob as narrator tells us how different he and the mother are and consequently they have always had a troubled relationship. A third strategy Van Diem uses is to provide alternatives for Jacob. The lawyer De Gaankelaar (Victor Low) who employs him in Act II is the opposite of Dreverhaven, warm, communicative, and always supportive of Jacob. Also in Act II, at the law firm, Jacob falls in love with Lorna (Tamar van den Dop). In each case Jacob is unable to go as far as is offered in these relationships and uses them to offset what was not offered from his mother and his father. The failure traps Jacob in the orbit of his parents and their natures. The consequence is that Jacob does survive his parents, but he is so damaged by the family that he can never overcome that damage.

Game of Thrones It is not an overstatement to say that Game of Thrones is one of the most successful TV series of all time. It does have Kings and dragons and white walkers and wildlings and much spectacle. It also has a primary theme of surviving one’s family. But under all that enmity within numerous families in Game of Thrones it is about the importance of scapegoats within families and the subtext of many of the scapegoats is how to overcome and even become victorious in spite of being a scapegoat. Game of Thrones is a catchy title, but the series could equally be called Game of Scapegoats. Not as sexy as a title but its claim to the heart of these family stories could be made. As mentioned earlier in the book Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) is the primary scapegoat in the Stark family, although Sansa (Sophie Hunter), as the eldest female child of Eddard Stark, is also treated to the scapegoat role by the Lannisters. In the Baratheon household, Renly Baratheon as the homosexual

The creative possibilities

139

brother is scapegoat and victim of his brother Stannis’ ambitions. In the house of Lannister Tyrion, the dwarf (Peter Dinklage), is victimized by his sister Cersei (Lena Headley) as well as by his father, Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance). Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) is scapegoat and tool for her brother’s ambitions. But these characters are not the only scapegoats within their families. Key secondary characters are positioned as scapegoats within their families. Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen) is so positioned by his father and later in the series by his uncle. Samwell Tarly (John Bradley-West) is exiled to the Black by his father who cannot bear that his son is an intellectual rather than a warrior. And Loras Tyrell (Fin Jones) has to be protected from the wrath of his family who are in denial that he is a homosexual. The plights of all these characters are placed within the larger plot of the rivalries about which family will rule the Seven Kingdoms. The scapegoat position for each of these characters will be used to emotionalize the struggle each of these characters faces. Not all will prevail. Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell will be killed, but the others will struggle to become less of a scapegoat. Sansa Stark will mature but not until she has survived two relationships that have gone bad; the first her engagement to Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleason) and the other a marriage to Ramsay Snow (Iwan Rheon), bastard son of Roose Bolton (Michael Mcelhatton), force her to lose her naivety and her dignity. Tyrion Lannister will be charged with the killing of his nephew, King Joffrey, by his sister and his father. He will kill his father and escape across the Narrow Sea where he will re-emerge as the Chief Advisor to Queen Daenerys Targaryen. Jon Snow’s journey is also challenging. After the death of his father, Eddard (Sean Bean), and his brother Rob (Richard Madden) he emerges as the Commander of the Night’s Watch. He will die and be brought back to life by a witch, only to find that he has to return to his ancestral home, Winterfell, to fight Roose Bolton’s son, Ramsay, the betrayers of his family in the North. As new King of Winterfell he goes south to seek help from Daenerys Targaryen. He finds that and falls in love. Sam Tarwell also rises to become an important healer, a master, and a major help to his friend, Jon Snow. Theon Greyjoy, after being tortured and emasculated at the hands of Ramsay Snow, will help Sansa escape from Ramsay. Consequently, he will try to help his sister to reclaim their lands, now in the hands of their uncle. Plot is the salvation or destruction of these scapegoats of their families. Generally the editing of Game of Thrones takes a secondary position to the performances, the art direction, and the spectacular cinematography of the series. However there are exceptions such as The Battle of the Bastards in Season 7. This battle with its leaders Jon Snow and Ramsay Snow is carefully articulated and uses every tool in the editing tool kit. Beginning with the positioning of the two armies and their leaders against one another. Followed by the execution of the youngest Stark son, a prisoner of Ramsay Snow,

140

Editing

sent running toward the enemy lines. Jon Snow, horsed, watches as Ramsay Snow fires arrow after arrow toward the boy but misses. When the boy almost reaches Jon Snow Ramsay unleashes the arrow that kills the boy. Jon Snow, against previous judgment, rushes toward the enemy horde and as he rides into their ranks they close on him. His men follow. The armies collide and a torrent of intense close-ups of the battle ensue. The whole battle intensifies. Killing grows in brutality. Just as Jon Snow and his army are about to be defeated, the army of House Aryen arrives and saves the day for the army of Jon Snow. He personally beats Ramsay Snow to within an inch of his life. The presentation of this battle represents the power of face and camera point of view. It’s one of the remarkable sequences in the series and represents the victory of Jon Snow in reclaiming Winterfell for his family. At this moment Jon Snow has survived being a scapegoat and the assault on his family by the Lannisters and their allies. That assault is the core theme of this exceptional television series.

13 Three case studies of excellence

Excellence in editing presumes narrative clarity and appropriate dramatic emphasis. The edit must also layer in an engaging subtext. And the edit should add a level of surprise that makes the audience gasp for more. The three films I’ve chosen for this chapter tell complex stories. Each has found its own pathway to emotionalize its story. And each is an experience that’s difficult to forget. Each stays with its audience, and examining how this is achieved is the goal of this chapter. For Robert Altman in Nashville (1975), it’s the soundtrack that is his primary creative vehicle in the edit. For Alan Resnais in La Guerre est Finie (1966), he is telling a present story and a past story. Time and history are both critical dimensions of the narrative, and it’s the edit that has to bring to life the role of time in this story. Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) is a multi-generational story of the opposing forces of crime and the police. Scorsese uses rapid movement and particular moments in relationships to capture these forces. Opposition or similarity? Stasis or transformation? These are the editing strategies in The Departed.

Nashville Robert Altman who made Nashville is something of a contrarian. His genre films such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) is an anti-Western film just as Mash (1969) as an anti-War film. Altman has also made three Satires, Nashville (1975), The Player (1992), and Short Cuts (1993). All are attacks on American values. The values that are under attack in Nashville are celebrity, material success, and the gender and racial divisions that distinguish the population into predators and victims. Nashville takes place in a single weekend. It begins with the return from a medical clinic of the female star Barbara Jean (Ronnee Blakely) and ends 141

142

Editing

with her assassination at a concert by a deranged soldier-fan. The population is a mix of performers, Connie White (Karen Black), Tom Frank (Keith Carradine), Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson); fans and wannabes, L.A. Joan (Shelley Duvall), Albuquerque (Barbara Harris), Suelee Gay (Gwen Welles); and eccentrics, Tricycle Man (Jeff Goldblum); parasitic characters such as the political operative John Triplette (Michael Murphy), Barbara Jean’s managerhusband (Alan Garfield), and go-between Delbert Reese (Ned Beatty). Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) and Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn) seem to be normal, their presence a baseline for how way out the others are. To look at the creative entry into this Satire we begin with the credit sequence. The idea behind the credit sequence is to present it as a commercial. The narrator announces the credits reading a narration that sounds like an advertisement. On screen drawings of the performers picture framed in the center of the frame accompany the narration. Another soundtrack presents the music that will be an integral part of the film. The combination of diverse songs and an upbeat narration imply excitement about the story we are about to see in Nashville. Together the build is a trumpet call to participate in a pageant. The film itself opens with a speaker broadcasting a message via a megaphone mounted on a moving van. The voice is Hal Phillip Walker of the Replacement Party. He is critiquing the modern political economy. It is useful to remember that in 1975 the country was roiling from rising oil prices and inflation. President Nixon had just resigned in disgrace and the Vietnam War had ended, a war lost. The Walker voice is a voice of blame, a voice that offers populist solutions to complex national problems. The van moves about town. The voice spouts on. There is an ominous quality to this opening scene. Faceless grievance. In a sense this opening sets a different tone than the upbeat credit sequence. The dissonance between the credit sequence and this opening is unsettling. Where is the story going? The reliance on sound continues into the next sequence. The location is a recording studio where an impish singer with an accompaniment of three singers belts out a patriotic ballad. Haven Hamilton, an Opry star, records his song, ‘We Must Be Doing Something Right to Last Two Hundred Years’. The recording session is going well until the splenetic star is set off by the entry of a journalist into the session. For Haven Hamilton, she should be paying for the privilege! The next two efforts to get the song right, are off. Haven has lost patience as well as judgment and takes it out on a long haired crew member. This session is intercut with a gospel song being recorded with an AfricanAmerican ensemble with a single white singer (Lily Tomlin). This recording seems joyous and affecting. So far Altman has introduced two key characters, Haven and Linnea Reese, as well as their families. But the most important achievement is to establish the tone for Nashville. Both scenes create a sense of unease. What dissent is this faceless van conveying? Why is Haven so easily shaken out of the performance he is creating?

Three case studies of excellence

143

This unsettledness is what Altman will build upon. The third scene is the arrival at the airport of singer-star Barbara Jean. A crowd has gathered. Haven arrives and is the host of the greeting party. A band of majorettes performs, a little girl bears the gift of flowers. There is excitement about the celebrity in their midst. Inside the terminal the crowd impatiently waits for a glimpse of Barbara Jean. She decides to greet them, but as she begins her approach toward the terminal, she trips, falls, and faints. Her relapse unsettles her fans. When cars, trucks, and the political van leave the airport for the city, a sudden car crash leads to multiple smash ups. Traffic as a whole stops moving. People mill waiting. A pattern of growing discontent and anger sets in and continues to grow. So far Altman has created a tone that all is not well. His next tasks are to reveal insights into the behavior of characters who will lead us to an even worse set of expectations. What becomes clear is that the men are predatory towards women. Tom Frank, part of a trio, prefers sleeping with as many fans as he can rather than attend to his professional affiliation, the trio. It is clear that Delbert Reese has little interest or involvement with his wife and two deaf sons. He’s rather keep his employers happy. John Triplette is interested in capturing celebrities for his political client, Hal Phillip Walker, no matter who is demeaned or humiliated in the process. But men are not the only practitioners of misbehavior. Connie White, at the Grand Ole Opry night, is consumed with her envy of Barbara Jean, just as Barbara Jean in her hospital bed is consumed with envy of her replacement, Connie White. Opal, the BBC journalist, will sleep with any celebrity, actions that belie her interest in America or journalism. L.A. Joan is indifferent to her aunt, dying in a hospital, and never does visit her, the ostensible reason she is in Nashville. She too is consumed with sleeping with celebrities. Altman relies on two songs to capture this attitude toward others in Nashville. The first is performed by Sueleen Gay played by Gwen Welles. She sings the song and the audience calls for her to do more and she ends up stripping at this men’s night sponsored by Delbert Reese and John Triplette. The title of her song is ‘I Never Get Enough’. For Sueleen the response is humiliating and cruel. And what is demanded demeans her. The other song is performed by Tom Frank (Keith Carradine), called ‘I’m Easy’, which perfectly describes Frank’s attitude toward women. We turn now to the final scene of Nashville to illustrate how sound totally alters the narrative of the film. The scene is the political rally for Hal Phillip Walker. Barbara Jean is to lead off the event with a song. In the last third of the scene Barbara Jean is assassinated by a lone gunman in the crowd. Haven Hamilton’s response is to shout, ‘This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville. We sing’. Haven, in shock, hands off the microphone to a wannabe, Albuquerque (Barbara Harris) to sing to the crowd. That’s what they’ve come to Nashville for, to be entertained by song. By the end of the sequence, she’s singing the gospel, singers accompanying her, and the audience is becoming engaged.

144

Editing

This final sequence begins with an on camera commentary by Harry Reasoner on the primary success of Hal Phillip Walker who wants to abolish everything that marks the role of government in American life. Altman uses a documentary camera style in this sequence. Included are shots of multiple police cars coming to the site. A large sign for the candidate overshadows the stage. Full shots of the American flag are intercut with shots of the audience. On the stage awaiting the performance of Barbara Jean, a traveling shot picks up all the characters, singers, wannabees who stand on the stage. Following are shots of the crowd including characters such as the BBC reporter, a soldier, and the assassin. Before the shooting, Altman cuts to the assassin unlocking his guitar case to retrieve his gun. Cutaways continue in close-ups under the music performance. Once the firing starts, reaction shots, particularly of the wounded Haven, and Barbara Jean’s husband and state troopers proceed to carry Barbara Jean off stage. As the song of the wannabee grows in confidence, the mood changes. At this stage the political organizer of the event leaves; the performance continues. As it grows more confident Altman returns to cutaways of the audience, now no longer of characters who have appeared earlier in the film. Now in close-ups he cuts to the children there because their parents brought them to the rally concert. The emphasis here is on their innocence. The irony of this end poses questions. Is American life only framed in terms of entertainment? What future will these children face? This is followed by a long shot tilt from the scene of the stage and entertainment as well as the murder of Barbara Jean, toward the heavens. Nashville ends in a state of reflective sadness.

La Guerre est Finie Since he made Night and Fog (1956) about Auschwitz during World War 11 and Auschwitz in 1955, Alan Resnais has turned to the past and the present as the basis for many of his most famous films. In Night and Fog he uses black and white archival footage with color for the present footage. This is an unsubtle way to distinguish past from present. In Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) he uses visual association, in France, a German lover’s hand from the past cuts to Japan in the present and the Japanese lover’s hand. The pattern of the past in the present continues in La Guerre est Finie (1966). La Guerre est Finie is about a middle aged Spanish revolutionary, Diego (Yves Montand), at a crisis point in his work to bring about change in fascist Spain, his home country. The Spanish police are after his network and although he gets out of Spain using a borrowed passport, he wonders if he should continue or simply live a more stable life in Paris with his mistress, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin). A challenge to embracing the present is his meeting a young enthusiastic Parisian, the daughter of the man who lent him his

Three case studies of excellence

145

passport. The daughter, Nadine (Genevieve Bujold), is involved in a student activist group which feels the need to take radical action on behalf of a return to the Spanish Republic. Their strategy is to use bombs. Nadine gives us a sense of the sensual, energetic passion of being young and committed. Diego is very taken with Nadine. Here in Paris he sees the two options embedded in his emotional life, the new Nadine or the older Marianne who wants Diego to be with her. One represents the past and the other the present. In his life the past has always had a strong hold on him. But now he is arguing with his superiors in the revolutionary organization. They only turn to Diego once again when their colleague Ramon (Jean Bouise), who was to take his place and go back to Spain, suddenly dies. And so one last time Diego goes back to Spain with a different passport. They learn that the network is being rolled up by the Spanish police. Diego faces great danger. They send Marianne to try to stop him. At this point the film ends. Although La Guerre est Finie has a strong plot from start to end, Resnais has given the edit an even stronger sense of an interior rather than simply an externalized narrative. The first sounds, a liturgy-style music track, invites the audience to reflect upon the character of Diego and in the depth of belief within the film just beginning. The second strategy Resnais uses is to move his camera subjectively close to Diego, either behind him or directly in front of him. And the camera is close enough to make the shot waist high rather than far enough behind Diego that he is fully visible in the frame. In this way we are emotionally closer to Diego than we are accustomed to be in the use of this kind of traveling shot. Resnais uses a similar kind of shot when Diego is seeing fellow revolutionaries, or his mistress, Marianne. The result is to give the audience the sense of rushing toward these characters. Resnais also uses jump cuts to accentuate Diego’s impatience to reach out to people such as Marianne. He also uses the jump cut when he is making love to Marianne or imagining what Nadine looks like as she offers herself to him. In each case the editing style with both women suggests holding and withholding from them. It’s rare to see a visual analogue for attraction and its opposite. When Diego is moving around Paris he is always looking about to see if he is being followed. None of the other characters harbor such a suspicion. Consequently their stillness sets Diego apart from them. He is always in danger of being taken, at least in his own mind. This idea is reinforced by being stopped by a policeman while he is driving Marianne’s car. This idea of being taken is set up in the scene where he is first crossing from Spain into France. He is asked into an office where he is interrogated. Only his borrowed passport allows him to return to Paris. Resnais continually uses the passport throughout the rest of the film. It becomes in a sense the vehicle for freedom or its opposite. Resnais uses close-ups around the photograph in the passport, the removal of his picture and the return of the photograph of its real owner, Nadine’s father. It’s important to convey that these small photographs are the difference between life and death for the revolutionary.

146

Editing

Resnais is also very particular about his dialogue track. When fellow revolutionaries speak to Diego, the camera remains on Diego; when Diego speaks the camera cuts away for the reaction shot to what he is saying. The result is to give a sense of separation of Diego from his colleagues. Resnais uses the same strategy to create a sense of distance of Diego from the guests who are working with Marianne in her apartment. The scenes are edited to convey Diego’s distance from life in Paris. He is interested in Marianne, but he’s not interested in her life beyond him. In La Guerre est Finie Alan Resnais has created a narrative whose character lives in the past and is uncomfortable in the present. The consequence is that Diego lives more in his memories than in his life. His is an unsettled, difficult interior space, where he seems more at war than at peace with himself and the life choices he has made.

The Departed Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) examines two careers, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) and Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio). Ostensibly both are trained as Massachusetts State troopers and both have family histories steeped in the crime world. Sullivan has been sponsored and works for Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). He will be Costello’s informer within the State Police. Billy Costigan, after graduation, is inducted into a police special unit responsible to Captain Queen (Martin Sheen) and Sergeant Digham (Mark Wahlberg). He will be jailed and paroled as if he’s been thrown out of the State Police. His job is to infiltrate the Costello organization and be the eyes and ears of the special unit inside the crime organization. He too will be an informer, as is Sullivan. Each has a goal. For Sullivan, it’s to protect the mob. For Costigan, it is to bring down the mob. Each side finds out there is a mole, and each side will track that mole and destroy him. Both Costello and Queen are surrogate fathers to Sullivan and Costigan. Each, Sullivan and Costigan are trying to overcome a deprived past in the present. As Costello philosophizes there’s not much difference between crime and policing. Each lives by the gun and dies by the gun. And whether cop or criminal, in life you have to take what you want. In the end all will die in service of living for what you want. The Departed as a film experience pulses with life. Camera movement, fast pace, jump cutting all energize The Departed with the goal of capturing life. It’s disjointed filled with reminders that life is temporary and death when it comes, is sudden. The title itself, The Departed, suggests loss. Both Sullivan and Costigan are introduced as children in the background of a shot where Costello, the father, is introduced. The foreground represents power while the background represents powerlessness, and eventually death. Costigan occupies the background of a shot when he is killed. Sullivan occupies

Three case studies of excellence

147

the background of a shot when he is killed. Costello is primarily in the foreground of shots, at least until he is killed by Sullivan. In the kill-shot it’s Sullivan in the foreground and Costello in the background of the shot. In the almost exclusively male world of The Departed, it’s all about who has the power. Scorsese uses the frame and positioning in the frame to visualize the shifting power relationships in The Departed. To understand more deeply the narrative of The Departed, one need look no further than the Gangster Film as a genre. The plot of the Gangster Film is the rise and fall of the gangster. The character layer of classic Gangster Films is the desire to get ahead and secondly the conflict between family values and the material values of the prevailing society. We see these elements working in this way for one of the two main characters, Colin Sullivan. But they do not work the same way for the other main character, Bill Costigan. Costigan is always agitated. As he puts it to Captain Queen in their last encounter, ‘All I want is my identity back’. He turns to Queen and later to Madolyn in search of that stability that will allow him to live in a state of grace. Although he never achieves that state, the search marks him as a Scorsese character. Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980) reaches for a state of grace as does Costigan. Only the future Dalai Lama in Kundun (1990) achieves that state of grace. Another way of seeing Billy Costigan’s inner journey is to think of him at the outset as a child of outsiders seeking by returning to the identity of a state trooper, he is trying to shed his origins and to be transformed into someone without his past, someone who belongs in the society made up of State Police. Although he never achieves his goal, he has tried to move toward that goal. The performances of all the actors are very strong but guided by the subtext that Boston, police, and criminals, are Bostonian, regional, and very Irish Catholic. Competing organizations, whether police or gangster, are a society unto themselves, a religious society. Costello and Queen are Cardinals; Dinham and Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) are the Jesuit activists; and the others, the mobsters and the police, are their minions, obeying, guided by their superiors. Both Costigan and Sullivan seem positioned to enter the church if they follow in service to the Order. The other organizations which get short shrift in The Departed are science represented by Madolyn. Whether its gender or writer-director choice, science doesn’t have much traction in the world of The Departed. The subtext of the church guides the performances in the film and goes far in explaining the tribal behaviors in all the performances. Ray Winstone as French and Alec Baldwin as Ellerby and Jack Nicholson as Costello stand above the rest, although the others are quite good. Finally Scorsese’s use of sound is surprising and exceptional. A literate philosophical narration by Costello opens the film. After 10 minutes of backstory for Sullivan and Costigan, Scorsese turns up the volume on an Irish protest song that beats the drum for what is to follow. He will return to this

148

Editing

powerful musical choice later in the film when he wants to raise the conflict potential during the sale of microprocessors by Costello to customers who are Chinese gangsters. The music powers up the stakes in the exchange accompanied by the police action to close down this exchange. This scene will be Costello’s last success and point a more aggressive finger toward the moles in both the criminal and police organizations. Although the search for the moles will be filled with crosscutting and close-ups and close calls, it can’t match the power Scorsese demonstrates in Act I and Act II. Nevertheless The Departed remains a remarkable experience. The Scorsese-Schoonmaker combination together with William Monahan’s screenplay illustrate the power of brilliance in each area of storytelling execution.

IV The storytelling experience from beginning to end

14 Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass

The title Splendor in the Grass (1960) is a quote from Wordsworth. The screenwriter, William Inge, uses it to capture the youthful idealism which is lost as its characters grow up in pre-Depression Kansas. William Inge is essentially a playwright of the late 1940s and 1950s best known for his plays, Picnic, Bus Stop, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. He is also a novelist and screenwriter whose first screenplay, Splendor in the Grass, won Inge the Oscar for best original screenplay in 1961. Inge is known for storytelling about growing up in the Midwest and for his focus on sexual identity – gender, desire, homosexuality, repression, and attendant alcoholism all have a role in his narratives. Inge’s work in Splendor in the Grass is joined by a director, Elia Kazan, who is famous for his theatrical productions of the works of Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. He is also the film director of Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Other playwrights Kazan has worked with include Paul Barnes (East of Eden) and as an actor with Clifford Odets (Awake and Sing). Kazan has also worked with esteemed novelists John Steinbeck (Viva Zapata) and Bud Schulberg (On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd). Kazan, as a screenwriter, wrote the screenplays for his novels, America America (1963) and The Arrangement (1969).

The narrative The two main characters of Splendor in the Grass are Deanie (Natalie Wood) and Bud (Warren Beatty). They each struggle with following their heart, the choice of loving each other, or listening to their strong-willed parent, in Deanie’s case her mother (Audrey Christie) and in Bud’s case his father, Ace (Pat Hingle). For Deanie’s mother, sex is not enjoyable but rather a 151

152

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

submission to her husband after marriage. For Bud’s father there are girls you go with for sex and then there is the girl you marry, usually for position rather than for love. Both of these parents put as the higher goal, money. Deanie’s mother doesn’t have and wants money; Bud’s father, an oilman, has struck it rich. Neither can ever have enough money. What comes for the mother with money is higher status. What comes for Bud’s father is a level of achievement that he and his son deserve. In the Midwestern small town high school Bud and Deanie attend, the two have everything, beauty, money, status. Bud is the captain of the football team. Every other student aspires to what they have, the status but also the love they have for each other. They sit at the pinnacle of their adolescent society. But there is a problem. Neither can manage the sexual desire they feel for each other. Bud’s solution is that they marry. Deanie’s solution is to remain true to her mother’s warnings about giving herself up to Bud – as her mother puts it, spoiling herself. Deanie must save herself for marriage. Sexual pleasure is the fiction that Deanie’s mother promotes. In both Deanie’s and Bud’s families the other parent is the opposite of the strong parent. The other parents love their son or daughter but they have little or no influence within the family. Deanie’s father is quiet but compassionate to his daughter’s pain just as he is compassionate to his wife’s goal, to get rich. He has invested their small savings in oil stock and he will only sell the stock to send Deanie for special psychiatric care after her breakdown. He is pained to see Deanie’s suffering around Bud but does not intervene as his wife does. In the case of Bud’s mother, she loves her children but is powerless in the face of her husband’s will. She is also very accepting about her daughter’s rebellious behavior. Bud’s sister, Ginny (Barbara Loden), acts out sexually and wants to leave home to attend art school in California. The mother accepts her daughter’s affairs with men in spite of the father’s consequent rejection of his daughter. His harsh judgment of their daughter pains the mother. Each of the main characters has their own arc, but each is defined by the state of the relationship with the other. Deanie’s arc in Act I is taken up with presenting her vision of being obsessed with her love for Bud. In this act her sexuality is a presence, but she remains closer to her feeling state, the state of her own sexuality, although this is not the dominant element as it is for Bud. At school Deanie is aware that other female students envy her and want what she has and would be more than willing to give Bud what he needs. This makes Deanie insecure and aware of her competition. In Act II, the struggle around giving Bud what he wants comes more to the fore. Deanie is confused, should I or shouldn’t I have sex with Bud? She can’t handle his needs as well as her own desire. To manage, Bud promises his father he will go to Yale and be engaged to Deanie while a student. In the second half of Act II, the couple act as if they were married but it doesn’t work. Deanie has a mini-breakdown and the couple part ways. Toots (Gary Lockwood), a friend of Bud, invites Deanie to the year-end dance and she accepts. At the dance she sees Bud. Her confusion and pain

Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass

153

become manifest. Toots takes Deanie out of town to the river and tries to press her to have sex with him. Deanie refuses but is so upset she tries to drown herself. The act ends with Deanie’s total emotional collapse. Act III covers her two and a half years at a Menninger-like clinic in Kansas. As a residential treatment center, Deanie is away from her mother. She has daily therapy. She meets a fellow patient, John, from Cincinnati. Her psychiatrist insists that she will have to deal with Bud eventually. Her relationship with John progresses. Finally well enough to leave she decides she will marry John. In the last scene of the act Deanie goes to visit Bud at the ranch he inherited from his father. She meets Bud’s wife, Angelina (Zohra Lampert), and his infant son. They talk about the past and how each has had to move on. It’s not the same as it was when they were in high school. Deanie tells Bud she too is in a relationship but it’s not the same. Deanie leaves the ranch. Has she gotten over her first love? Will life continue with John of Cincinnati? That is her hope. Bud’s arc follows a similar pattern to Deanie’s arc. Act I is dominated by his sexual frustration. He is obsessed with his love for Deanie, but he is stymied by his father’s plans for his future. Although Bud excels at sports he is not a good student. His father wants him to go to Yale and presumably to marry well. The father’s advice is not to get Deanie pregnant or he will have to marry her. He should pay for sex as his father has, on an as-needed basis. In Act I Bud’s sexual frustration works him into physical collapse. In Act II, Bud comes up with a plan to get engaged to Deanie. Reluctantly his father agrees. In return the father asks that Bud intervene with his sister Ginny. The message is make sure she doesn’t get into any more trouble with men. At the family New Year’s party Bud gets into a fight with the group of men trying to sleep with Ginny in her car. Bud is beaten up. He is so disturbed by his sister’s promiscuity he takes it out on Deanie and suggests they not see each other for a while. Bud does see Deanie at the final school dance with Toots. She seeks Bud out. He tells Deanie he can think of nothing else but her. Deanie offers herself sexually to Bud, but he is overwhelmed with shame and rejects her. Deanie goes off with Toots. At the end of the act, Bud goes off to attend Yale. Act III is set in New Haven. Bud is actively trying to fail out. Depressed, he meets Angelina at a pizza hangout and seeks solace from her. Bud and his father meet with the Dean. The Dean tells them Yale isn’t for everybody although the father wants to force Bud to stay. The Dean recognizes Bud has different aspirations. Bud’s father will convince him otherwise. He takes Bud to New York. He hires Bud a chorus girl for the night. She looks like Deanie. Bud doesn’t want a replacement. The stock market crash pushes Bud’s father to suicide. The family, including Bud, crumbles. Two years later Deanie visits Bud at the ranch. Bud seems resigned and grateful to Angelina for stabilizing his life. He tells Deanie he’ll see her around. She knows this is goodbye. He may too. He has a different life now.

154

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

This is Bud’s real growing up, his real education, his real life. Nothing is the same as it was. There is a bittersweet feeling about their parting. He kisses Angelina. Bud can feel at last. He is less happy, but happiness has had to be set aside for Bud. He and Deanie have lost their innocence. Both Deanie and Bud’s arcs are steeped in themes of love and sexuality, family and self, all organized along this loss of innocence arc. The context, the Midwest in the 1920s, is steeped in a plot of American optimism and darkness surrounding the Stock Market Crash of 1929. In a sense the plot also contains this loss of innocence arc.

The directing Elia Kazan is masterful in understanding that storytelling is not only rife with conflict, but if it’s to be believable and compelling, it must encompass a layered view of conflict. For Kazan, the humanity of his characters has to be on display but so too their drives, their ambitions, and their fears. If they are, you and I will understand them and care about their fate. Kazan is one of a group of directors whose route through acting and stage directing has made them attuned to the importance and opportunities in a particular style of acting. Whether we call it Stanislavski or the Actors Studio, the focus is on a lived sense of the moment in the construction of a performance. Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, and Sidney Pollack share this goal in their direction. In terms of screen interpretation we need to see Kazan as an immigrant to the United States who sees the United States as an outsider looking in. As the son of a small businessman, Kazan sees the United States as a land where the rich elite and the working poor coexist but are often at odds in their goals. As a man of the theater he sees films and plays as instruments of change, political and social. As a son he sees a world dominated by fathers, and as a father he hopes the pathway for his sons will be easier than his own. All these life layers inform how Kazan chooses to interpret his stories. Perhaps that is why his theater and film work is so difficult to contain and explain. Poetry and realism coexist in his creative work. Kazan in his ambitions for storytelling was quite influenced by Alexander Dovshenko, a poetic Russian revolutionary filmmaker. Kazan was quite taken with Dovshenko’s early films. To be poetic and to be respectful of the exploited classes in Mexico is the subtext of Kazan’s film Viva Zapata (1951), and the search for respect on the New Jersey docks is the subtext of On the Waterfront (1954), and to be respectful of Kazan’s family narrative, his origin story, is the subtext of America America (1961). Turning to Splendor in the Grass, it is clear that the conflict in Deanie’s family over sexuality, not as a source of pleasure but rather as a duty to be endured, becomes a mother–daughter conflict with tragic consequences for Deanie. Given Kazan’s own embrace of sexuality as a life force that can’t

Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass

155

be denied results in the interpretation of the mother’s role as antagonistic to the daughter she professes to love. In the case of Bud’s family, it’s his father’s embrace of materialism that leads to his own destruction as well as the destruction of the family. This interpretation is very much in line with Kazan’s progressive view of capitalism unleashed as a destructive force in individual families and in society. Kazan sees the same issues  – sexuality and capitalism  – as mutually exclusive and destructive forces in the Midwest community that is the setting of Splendor in the Grass. The embrace of psychoanalytic ideas around behavior, parent–child relationships as well as mindful rather than self-destructive behaviors, particularly in adolescent life, position Kazan again as a progressive around the forces that bear in on emotional life. All of these views shape his screen interpretation of the screenplay of Splendor in the Grass. In terms of actors, Kazan is famous in his cultivation of great performances of actors and his views that stars are not necessarily the kind of actors with whom he can achieve great performances. Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd, John Garfield in Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947), Anthony Quinn in Viva Zapata, Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass are all remarkable for their feeling and their complexity. In Splendor in the Grass, the casting of Natalie Wood as Deanie and Warren Beatty as Bud illustrates that beauty and physicality together with deep desire are front and center for Kazan. In the casting of Pat Hingle as Ace, Bud’s father, the physicality and emotional violence of the actor are fused to become this character. His never take no for an answer attitude is right there each time we see Hingle’s face. He is so aggressive the sense that he hears nothing and listens to no one is powerful in the performance. Also notable is Audrey Christie as Deanie’s mother. She is domineering and materialistic, the powerhouse in her family. Hers is a very lived-in performance. Also noteworthy, Zohra Lampert as Angelina and Barbara Loden as Ginny. Although secondary in the narrative, each of these women offers a physicalized sense of their characters. All speak to Kazan’s recognition that in casting for a particular look and a capacity for range in their performances, he proves masterful. Kazan is particularly strong in capturing the arc of the two main characters. In Act I Deanie is brimming with sexual feeling and sensitivity to Bud and to her mother. In Act II Deanie is confused and envious of Juanita, the loose girl in class, with whom Bud will find sexual relief. In Act III, Deanie is in a state of insecurity and anger about her collapse. In the case of Bud’s arc, Kazan keys the performance to the specific phases of his relationship with Deanie. In Act I Bud is sexually frustrated by Deanie and unable to deal with his father ignoring his state of mind. Consequently Bud is angry all the time. In Act II Bud naively becomes the tool of his father, agreeing to give up his own dreams, and enters the space of his father’s dreams for him. Bud becomes a false self. In Act III, Bud is numb to carrying out his

156

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

father’s agenda and he is rescued by Angelina. He marries Angelina to escape from the horror of his father’s death and the family’s financial collapse. He doesn’t really understand why what’s happened has happened. In his case Angelina has become what his father was in his life, the decisionmaker. Kazan directs the camera to follow the arc of his two main characters. Beyond the physicality he presents in the Deanie–Bud relationship, the Deanie–mother relationship, the Bud–father relationship, Kazan tries to position the camera to capture who has the power in each of these relationships. First Kazan establishes the physical connection to the strong parent in their lives. Deanie holds on to her mother in their first scene together. She has just come home from a date with Bud. Deanie is hugging her mother close as she asks about her parent’s sexual relationship. Her mother tells her there was no sex before marriage and in any case she simply gave in to her husband after marriage. She never enjoyed the sex. Kazan has Deanie hold tight to her mother at this moment to establish her mother’s power over her. Here Deanie is the child to her mother’s adult. Kazan could have staged the scene without physical contact but for him sex and physical contact are connected and so he opts to physicalize the visual piece of this dialogue exchange. The intimacy of the filming of the scene concretizes the connection between physical holding and sexuality. Later in the film in Act III when Deanie is stronger and it’s the mother who is insecure about the relationship after Deanie has returned from her hospitalization, the mother is seated and Deanie stands in the background. Deanie approaches to reassure her mother that she loves her. Here the camera looks down in mid-shot at the mother. In this scene the power relationship between daughter and mother has been reversed and now it’s Deanie who is portrayed as powerful and her mother as less powerful. This is the opposite of how the Act I scene mentioned earlier was filmed. Kazan follows a similar pattern with Bud. The same physicality is established between Bud and his father, Ace. Given the football status of Bud, the father kneels down and punches Bud’s shoulder and invites the same from Bud. Verbally he warns Bud not to impregnate Deanie and conveys he has big plans for Bud and assures him that as his father he is depending on his son to fulfill his dreams for Bud. It’s as if Bud carries his father’s fate on his shoulders. The physicality here is different than Deanie and her mother. It seems more akin to rivalry with his son. Ace limps from a work injury incurred at Bud’s age. Ace needs Bud to fulfill his own aspirations. Unlike Deanie’s embrace of her mother, Bud is taunted into silence and for Ace into obedience. Kazan shows father and son in a two person mid-shot but it is clear in the shot that Ace holds the power in the relationship. When the mother walks into the room Bud embraces her. She has just returned from Chicago with his older sister. Ace seems to be utterly disconnected from his wife, implying that the only familial interest he has is in his son. In later scenes Kazan uses the same two shot of father and son in a New York nightclub. Ace remains in control of his son. The camera crowds him, a hint of his desperation.

Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass

157

Later when Ace has suicided Kazan relies on four shots, a close-up of Bud asleep being awakened by police, a cutaway to the two policemen and a long shot of the alleyway between two buildings, followed by a long shot of Bud standing over his father’s body. Unlike Deanie’s emotionality, Bud displays no emotion about the dead, saying only he will take his father home. Bud still seems defeated by his father, even in death. The same attention to physicality is important in the presentation of the Deanie–Bud relationship. In the very first shot in the film, Bud and Deanie in mid-shot dominate the frame, the waterfall in the background. Deanie is lying down, her feet toward the camera. Bud is seated. They embrace. The shot is awkward. Kazan cuts away to the water cascading down the Falls. Bud has to leave the car out of sexual frustration. It is clear he has the power in the scene, but he doesn’t act as if he has the power. The next day a school scene follows. Again Kazan opts for a mid-shot. The camera moves as Bud and Deanie walk. It is clear they are mesmerized. They are adored by the other students, but it is clear they see only each other. Nothing else matters. After school inside Deanie’s house, Bud pushes Deanie to her knees as if she is his slave. It’s an aggressive gesture that humiliates Deanie. She falls to the ground and taken with guilt Bud goes down to her level. The close image is intimate rather than sexual. It pictorializes where the two of them are in the relationship, dominated by desires they are forbidden to actualize. Bud berates himself and confesses Deanie is in his thoughts all the time. It’s clear he fluctuates between desire and self-abnegation continually. In later scenes outside school and in his car the two are fracturing because each is overwhelmed by the feelings they have for each other. These shots are long shots. Visually Kazan is emphasizing they are no longer together. At the very end of the film, Deanie and Bud are together in close-up, trying to say goodbye. In this scene it seems more difficult for Bud than for Deanie. He tells her it was really good to see her. His face conveys that he is going over their history and there is a sense of resignation, possibly regret. And they part. The extreme long shot of the car that carries Deanie away grows smaller in the background and the film ends to Amram’s romantic music. It seems to usher out the world Bud and Deanie inhabited.

The editing The edit strategy is to focus the narrative on the love story of Deanie and Bud, two high-school seniors. For the most part the presentation of Deanie and Bud is in mid-shot. The opening scene is almost entirely in mid-shot and close-ups. Only when Bud leaves the car is there a long shot. Kazan opts not to provide a location shot but rather to jump into the core of the film. Only in the second scene do we see a long shot of Deanie’s house. A title locates the film in southeast Kansas in 1928. Unlike the opening of

158

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

Kazan’s East of Eden where the town of Salinas is on display, the town where Deanie and Bud live is never shown. Beside the focus on Deanie and Bud, the other focus is on interiors, Deanie’s house, Bud’s house, the school hallway, a classroom, a doctor’s office, and the Falls, the location for adolescent love trysts. The consequence is that the sense of place is a result of the art direction of the interiors rather than a contextual landscape. This is not untypical of studio-produced films in 1960. A by-product is of an interior narrative told in an interior pattern. All the more important that the edit be driven by performance realism rather than by any other dimension. Because Kazan has shaped these performances with strong actors, we are less aware of the austerity of the visual style of the film. Cinematographer Boris Kauffman (On the Waterfront) uses light and color so that the visual style of the shots is strengthened. The other characteristic of the edit is to use an abundance of reaction shots. There are two classroom scenes, the first in Act I and the second in Act II. The first is introductory, the second is very difficult for Deanie as she and Bud have just ‘broken up’. In both scenes the loose girl, Juanita, is prominent. She sits in front of Deanie. Kazan uses reaction shots of the teacher and of a number of the female students. In the first scene, it is to introduce the idea that the students, not only Deanie, have other things on their mind. In the second scene essentially focused on the Wordsworth poem that provides the title of the film, the goal is to capture the pain and the self-consciousness Deanie feels because of the breakup. The scene ends with Deanie running out of the classroom. In the first scene the reaction shots are mid-shots, whereas in the second they are close-ups. The choice of shots sets the tone of each scene, with the second being quite intense and focused on Deanie’s inability to handle the overflow of her emotions. The other notable editing choice is to use rushing water and the Falls location as a natural analogue for sexual feeling. The rush of the water, the shot of Bud and Juanita under the waterfall support the idea of the power of the water as well as its natural character. Kazan suggests that the power of the Falls and the power of sexual feelings are similar. They rush, they crash, and they have beauty. For the most part Kazan uses sound and music softly to support the fragility of the adolescent love. Only in the kitchen scene where Ace entertains his workers for bringing in a new well and the New Year scene where family feeling and desire get out of hand via Ginny and her volatile relationship with her father, Ace, does the music and sound effects rise in decibels. In these moments we come closer to the tragic consequences of the emotional volatility in Bud’s family. It’s like a gusher of an oil well, boisterous and dangerous. At these points music and sound effects and dialogue hit a very different note from the rest of the film.

15 Sidney Lumet’s Daniel

Sidney Lumet’s Daniel (1985) is based on E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, a fictionalized vision of the fate of the children of the Rosenbergs, executed in the 1950s for treason, the sharing of atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. Doctorow wrote the screenplay for the film. Sidney Lumet, a child actor, came to prominence with his film, 12 Angry Men (1957). He solidified his reputation with a film version of Eugene O’ Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) and The Pawnbroker (1964). Although he is best known for Network (1976) he has been a very flexible filmmaker working in a wide variety of genres. Very much an actor’s director he has made memorable films with Al Pacino, Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), River Phoenix, Running on Empty (1988), and Paul Newman, The Verdict (1982). He has created memorable film versions of great American playwrights, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1962) and Tennessee Williams’ The Fugitive Kind (1960) and a remarkable version of the Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler novel Fail Safe (1964). As a director Lumet is bold and confident. He doesn’t mind changing styles. His Pawnbroker differs from Fail Safe which differs from Bye Bye Braverman (1969). Pawnbroker is a hallucinatory modern Horror story while Fail Safe, also a modern Horror is filmed in Docudrama style while Bye Bye Braverman is a literary dark Situation Comedy. Lumet can adopt a very dark tone as in The Verdict or he can go comic-tragic as in Dog Day Afternoon. In this sense he is harder to fit into a niche as can be the case with many directors.

The narrative Doctorow in his screenplay for Daniel adopts a complex strategy. He uses a narrator, Daniel, to comment upon various modes of execution through the ages, beginning with exposition on the electric chair. These narrative pauses punctuate the entire film.

159

160

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

The second layer is the present story of the Isaacson children, Daniel (Timothy Hutton) and Susan (Amanda Plummer). This layer begins with a Thanksgiving dinner argument between Daniel and Susan about what to do with their trust fund. They are at home with their foster parents, the Lewins (John Rubenstein and Maria Tucci). This present story is shaped by the emotional collapse of Susan leading to her death at the end of the film. Her illness propels Daniel to try to find out if his parents were guilty or not. He visits the widow of the lawyer who represented his parents, Mrs. Ascher (Carmen Matthews), and Linda, daughter of Selig Mindisch (Tovah Feldshuh). Mindisch was the accuser who implicated his parents. The visits do not uncover an answer that will help save Susan. The past story is the story of the parents, Paul and Rochelle, how they met and married and their political journey. The major part of the past narrative is their arrest, trial, and execution. Doctorow focuses on the impact of these events on Daniel and Susan. Although Daniel is an adolescent, Susan is a child when they are shuttled through foster care and a number of homes. At one point because of Susan’s level of distress they run away from city foster care back to their original home. In court the Isaacsons are found guilty and sentenced to death. Ascher takes the children for the last visit to see their parents. Rochelle puts on a good face, but it is clear that Paul Isaacson is falling apart. The past story ends with the execution of Paul and Rochelle followed by their burial. Jacob Ascher (Edward Asner) plays the lawyer for the Isaacsons. He tries to shepherd the children, first to Paul’s sister (Julie Bovasso) and later to the Lewins. He and Rochelle Isaacson are the characters who try to care for the children. Paul Isaacson is more taken up with political rhetoric and support for Communist ideology. There is also a black superintendent in the building where the Isaacsons live. He too has a role in looking out for the children. Rochelle’s mother is the link to the past, Jewish, speaking Yiddish, she is the pragmatic person concerned for the family’s economic survival. Rochelle exhibits her social conscience by contributing part of her pay for the Scottsboro boys’ defense. There is a feeling in the screenplay that Jews are supporters of left-wing causes and that the face of the establishment is the police and the FBI and that these forces of law enforcement are antagonistic to left-wing groups and their ideas. There is also a strong sense of betrayal and fear that America’s ally in World War II, the Soviet Union, had become in the aftermath of the war, the primary rival of the United States, particularly in the atomic arms race. The subtext of the past story is the process of abandonment and its impact on the two Isaacson children. This overrides the political, racial, and historical origins of the narrative. Doctorow, by focusing on the fate of the children as the arrests and trial and execution proceed, makes Daniel emotionally more available to its audience. The subtext of the present story is the consequence of that abandonment on Daniel and Susan Isaacson. Their adult lives have been stamped by that

Sidney Lumet’s Daniel

161

abandonment. Because of the ripping apart of their family by the political climate of the 1930s to the 1950s by American society and its law enforcement institutions, the Isaacson children have been forever damaged, particularly Susan. As the younger, more vulnerable child, Susan, although she tries to overcome her state by political action, is simply internally destroyed. Not only has she lost the capacity for a normal life, she has never developed a defense against her profound sense of personal responsibility for the fate of her parents. Self-destruction is her response to the abandonment. The lingering question in the screenplay is the issue of the antagonist. In the Melodrama the antagonist tends to be someone from the power structure – the judge, the defending attorney, the Prince of Darkness, in The Verdict. Certainly the FBI can play that role in Daniel, but it seems too remote. There is even the possibility here that the Isaacsons themselves are the antagonists for their children. But theirs is too sympathetic a portrayal to fulfill the role of antagonists. That leaves the possibility of Dr. Mindisch who betrays the Isaacsons. This is a presence in the screenplay but in a sense Mindisch too is a victim of the Red Scare. If we view the Isaacson children as the main characters, the parents are closest to fulfilling the role of antagonist. However, given their fate, they don’t fully capture the role of antagonist. The result is that unless we view the government as the de facto ‘antagonist’, we are left with possibilities for the role but no firm stand-in to fulfill this important narrative role.

The directing In terms of the screenplay interpretation, Lumet has decided to give each layer of Daniel a distinctive look that implies his view of each. The present story is presented through a blue green hue. The result is a clinical cold look. The past, on the other hand, is presented through a sun-drenched softer look. The result at least initially is hopeful, optimistic. With the exception of the children’s last visit to see their parents in prison and their execution, he sustains the over-lit soft look. The last visit and the execution shift over to the blue green clinical look. The time line, past to present is cast in a hopeful to hope lost visual presentation. The second level of interpretation has to do with the issue of oppression and protest in America. The presentation of mounted police pushing up against protesters, the callous search methods of the FBI in the Isaacson apartment and the importance of a black man looking after the building where the Isaacson apartment is located all support this theme. But nothing presents the theme more than the choice of Paul Robeson songs that make up much of the music track of Daniel. A third issue of script interpretation is to look at the story from the children’s point of view. This puts enormous demands on the performances of the children at various life stages. It also means that the actual political lives

162

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

of the parents is implied rather than enacted. Participation in marches, proCommunist lectures, and the family presence at a Robeson concert is the extent of what we know about the Isaacsons’ political life. In all these situations it is Paul Isaacson who is the ideologue while Rochelle is far more involved with her children and their lives. The consequence of these choices is that it is the arrest and imprisonment and trial of the parents that has far more bearing on the children. In terms of the narrative the politics of the parents remains deep background and more mysterious to the children as is appropriate if the story is from the children’s point of view. A fourth layer of the script interpretation is the myth of the personal dimension of the story. The myth is certainly the symbol the Isaacsons represented for the Left and the progressive political movement. On this level of the narrative, the Isaacsons and their children are important pawns for the movement. Nothing captures this better than the presentation of the rally on behalf of the defense fund for the Isaacsons. The children are brought to the rally by Jacob Ascher and then passed up to the dais as living examples of what the Isaacsons represent to the people. The fact that the two children are passed forward as if they were meat being passed up to a starving collective suggests the myth in operation. The facts on the ground for the children are a story of abandonment, anger, and confusion. Their reality is pronounced and despairing and traumatic particularly for the younger child, Susan. The myth and the reality, both are powerfully portrayed in Lumet’s script interpretation. Lumet requires a great deal from all his actors, particularly the children. By keeping the young Susan within a narrow angry, confused sense as well as focusing on her perception that her parents will die, Lumet achieves an acceptable performance. In the case of Daniel, his is an angry teenager who says he will kill those who are taking away his parents. Alternately Daniel says he will become a lawyer in order to save his parents. Here too a narrow band approach allows for a credible performance. With regard to the adult versions of Daniel (Timothy Hutton) and Susan (Amanda Plummer), Lumet achieves complexity in the performances that emotionalizes Daniel’s complicated reaction to his sister’s failure to thrive as well as her suicide attempt and consequent downward spiral. Hutton is both angry and quick to blame his wife (Ellen Barkin) with hostility that is palpable. On the other hand, we can see him struggling to hold on to empathy and caring he calls on to try to save Susan. As Hutton illustrated in the earlier Ordinary People (1981) he has an emotional range unusual in such a young performer. In the case of Amanda Plummer as Susan, her lived-in performance is memorable as the tragic child of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson. She has emotional range and a capacity to create a bottomless well of pain. The performances of Amanda Plummer, Mandy Patinkin as Paul and Ed Asner as Ascher are the crown jewels of performance in Daniel. The Isaacson parents have very different roles in Daniel as Rochelle (Lindsay Crouse) is passionate and more practical than Paul. Her pragmatism offsets

Sidney Lumet’s Daniel

163

his political obsession. Her only political scene occurs with her mother. Her mother, all nerves, is Yiddish speaking. She is harsh and judgmental about her daughter ranging beyond the ghetto. She is a woman trying to make ends meet. They rely on Rochelle’s income and she is critical when the income falls $3 short because of her contribution to the Scottsboro Boys Defense Fund. Beyond this political decision, Rochelle is very much the parent concerned for her children’s well-being. Even in her last visit in prison, Rochelle seeks to comfort her children, trying to reassure Susan that there will be appeals so that their execution is far off and not necessarily likely. Crouse’s performance is strong but not as emotionally resonant as is Mandy Patinkin’s Paul. Patinkin moves lightly, dancing out his passion for Russia, speechifies and captures in movement and words a man swept up by the poetry of passion but crushed by reality. He is father by virtue of his sloganeering and slinging clichés about his love for his children. In his final scene with his children he is a man overcome by his children’s presence and he throws around platitudes believing they will satisfy his children. We share their humiliation in that moment. It’s painful to watch but a brilliant capture of a man of contradictions – all belief but as hurt by life as a man can be. His is a truly magnificent performance. Ed Asner as Jacob Ascher is a believer in the law and in justice. Nevertheless he does what a defense attorney does, everything to defend his clients. He’s a man weighed down by his own humanity. His is a subtle but powerful performance that illustrates how great a director like Sidney Lumet can be in his work with actors. Lumet is no less inventive in his use of the camera. I’ve already mentioned the visual look of the past and present stories. I also noted the powerful visual treatment of the treatment of the Isaacson children at a rally on behalf of their parents. Lumet is also very deliberate about his use of extreme close-ups, closeups, and long shots. Lumet opens the film with an extreme close-up of Daniel (Timothy Hutton). The shot opens on his eyes and moves back as he speaks about the history of the electric chair. Lumet returns to this close-up three more times, each devoted to exposition about government’s mode of execution in the Middle Ages, England, drawing and quartering, in Czarist Russia, gnouting and burning at the stake in France. In each case he tells the viewer, these were the modes of execution for the rowdy lower classes. Execution of the nobility in England was beheading. These interventions in the narrative remind the audience that execution is the primary backstory of Daniel and that such execution modalities are all about controlling and suppressing opposition from the restive marginalized segment of each of these societies. In each case the intense image counters the objectified means of crowd control by the power structure in each of these countries. Information given is a provocation in intention. At the other extreme Lumet uses a shot in between an extreme long shot and a long shot in the scene where Daniel and Susan see each parent in

164

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

prison. It’s the last time they will see their parents alive. Particularly in the shot where they wait for their mother and she enters, the camera is placed at the end of the room looking in. Rochelle enters from the rear of the frame. The children stand near a desk, flanking the desk toward the background of the shot. Jacob Ascher stands back to the camera, in the foreground of the shot. Lumet films most of the scene in this extreme long shot. Lumet moves in for closer shots as Rochelle gifts each child and tries to reassure them she will not die. The effect of this extreme long shot is to visualize how alienating the prison is and how alienated the children feel from the idea that they are to lose their parents forever. Lumet stages the visit with their father, which follows on the visit with their mother, from the same point of view. He begins in a similar extreme long shot. But then he begins to move the camera in closer to Paul Isaacson. The movement captures how Paul is frightening to the children and how dissembled a state he is in. He smokes, he babbles, he tries to connect with Daniel and Susan. But unlike Rochelle he is in a bad way and his behavior is frightening and difficult to watch. He is trying to connect but can’t, and the children have a negative response to the meeting. Paul looks to Jacob Ascher for confirmation of the meaning of his words and Ascher knowingly agrees. But for Daniel and Susan the moment is awkward and unsettling. And suddenly it is over. Another directorial choice Lumet makes is how he chooses to film interactive scenes. When he is filming Daniel and Susan with the Lewins, the camera is close to the actors and the placement of the camera around a Thanksgiving dinner table fills the center of the frame. The consequence is to make the ensuing exchange intense. The difference between Daniel and Susan’s positions about the trust fund is consequently far more dramatic than would be the case if the camera placement was further from the characters. On the other hand, when Daniel is interviewing the Ascher widow and Linda Mindisch about her father, Lumet positions them distant from one another within the same frame. No furniture takes up the space between them. This visual organization positions Daniel quite distant from the widow and from Linda Mindisch. The visual setup of the characters in each case tells us how far apart each is from Daniel. Neither will help him achieve his goal to understand the past in order to save his sister. Finally in the integration of the past and the present in the visualization of the funeral for the Isaacsons and the funeral for Susan, Lumet uses crosscutting and the music, a lament sung by Paul Robeson. By doing so the three Isaacson tragedies are made one, linked familial tragedy. Lumet moves us back and forth between the two funerals and unquestionably implies cause and effect between Susan’s death and that of her parents. It’s a brilliant idea that is as moving as it intends to be.

Sidney Lumet’s Daniel

165

The editing In conceptualizing and contextualizing the story of the Isaacson children Lumet resorts to two documentary protest marches in the second scene of Daniel and in the film’s closing sequence. The first documentary sequence is of a protest march in Washington. The protest is against the Vietnam War and includes luminaries such as Benjamin Spock. The scale of the protest as well as the police presence pits the forces of government against the young, the women, and war objectors from the establishment. The footage is primarily archival and includes numerous Washington monuments in the background. The second documentary sequence takes place in New York and presents Daniel as a character, and his family as an integral part of the scene. Here the demonstration includes archival footage as well as staged footage and ends in a peaceful demonstration in Central Park with a panoramic shot that emphasizes the scale of the demonstration. From a narrative point of view the scene shows that the character, Daniel, has now joined the protest movement. Until this point in the narrative only Susan had participated in protests. By using documentary archival footage integrated with the actors, Lumet is placing the story of Daniel in a very particular time in American history. The Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the Women’s Rights Movement all signaled the beginning of the culture wars that are part of national life today. Although the protest factor plays a role in the past story, it does not play a role in the present story with the exception of Susan’s off-screen participation. Consequently the two documentary style sequences have at best an indirect effect on the narrative. The other indirect or contextual piece of the film is Daniel as narrator on the subject of historical modes of execution particularly those used toward the lower classes. These interdictions into the narrative are provocative reminders that class conflict and control have been ongoing tools of the exercise of power of ruling groups over those being ruled. These sequences break out of the highly emotional abandonment story of the two Isaacson children. A question of their usefulness makes narrative sense. They are most reminiscent of the early work of Sergei Eisenstein where juxtaposition and clash of ideas was an important editing strategy. Since this kind of intervention is rare except in more experimental narratives, these scenes are powerful but puzzling in purpose in the film. Another editing strategy is to move toward longer takes rather than more reliance pace, that is, a shot-reaction shot-cutaway shot approach to scene structure. The result is that many scenes present with a smaller number of shots than the usual number of shots in a scene. This is particularly the case in the edit of the past story. Another editing strategy Lumet uses is a scenic montage notion to cover a great deal of the past story. He presents the entire Paul–Rochelle relationship

166

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

in a series of small scenes. First there is a protest scene where Paul and Rochelle meet. They learn each is a part-time student at City College of New York. In the next scene they are political action colleagues with Paul taking the ideological assertive position. We learn in this scene both are Jews. In the next scene we see the relationship progress. He offers to see her home. At home she tells her mother they should invite Paul to dinner. In the next scene, a political lecture at a camp, the Sol Mindisch character is introduced and his friendship with the Isaacsons is established. At the country dance that night Mindisch dances with Rochelle and grabs her breast. She moves his hand and in doing so, Mindisch’s inappropriate behavior is established. In the next scene Paul is in an Army uniform. He takes center stage saying how well he gets on with soldiers from the South. He dominates the crowded scene. In one shot he puts on a record, dances to the Russian marching song, and moves toward the back of the frame. There he picks up his baby son from Rochelle’s mother. A reaction mid-shot of Rochelle suggests they are now married and have a child. The montage ends with this scene. In very short order in five scenes five years in the lives of the Isaacsons has past. Much has happened for Paul and Rochelle as well as for the country. The economy of this sequence emanates from the montage approach Lumet uses. Finally the music track Lumet uses in Daniel is special. Not only does he rely heavily on Paul Robeson, but he presents a range of songs from the energetic and hopeful to the lament he uses for the funeral sequence. Paul Robeson was a controversial performer who was political, using his voice for change in American society. The choice of his music fuses the Isaacson story to a charismatic activist throughout the telling of the past story. Robeson was also controversial for his political alignment with the Soviet Union and the burgeoning black rights movement. The depth and power of his voice also adds scale to the experience of this film. Lumet is all too aware of the melding of American black history and American political history. His use of the music of Robeson is inspired and is significant just as Doctorow’s screenplay is significant, just as the performances achieved in the film are significant. All contribute collectively to the power of Daniel.

16 Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul

Laszlo Nemes has a very short film biography. Son of Saul (2015) is his first feature film as a director. He co-wrote the screenplay with Clara Royer. Although he is Hungarian, he studied filmmaking in Paris and New York. What Son of Saul demonstrates is a plot-driven approach to the narrative and a visual audacity reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick. Nemes was 38 when Son of Saul was released.

The narrative Son of Saul takes place in Auschwitz in October, 1944. The main character, Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), is Hungarian. His story takes place over two days. Saul is a Sonderkommando who is part of a group of Jews tasked to usher Jews into a large space where they will be gassed. The Sonderkommandos collect their clothes and move the naked dead into the crematorium where they will be turned into smoke and grey ashes. Background to this story is that unlike the Jews of Poland, the Ukraine, the Baltic States and Western Europe whose destruction began soon after war was declared and accelerated after the German invasion of the USSR in June, 1941, the Jews of Hungary were protected until the spring of 1944 when Germany lost patience and invaded Hungary. In the next three months 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed, many in Auschwitz. When Son of Saul takes place, in October, 1944, the deportation of Hungarian Jews had stopped, Eichmann was trying to sell them to the Allies for trucks but settled for cash. Eight hundred Jews were saved in this way, leaving over 400,000 more under threat. In Act I, we see Saul perform his responsibilities as a Sonderkommando herding Jews into a large room where they disrobe and prepare to be showered. The soundtrack presents the German subterfuge – don’t drink the water, you will have hot tea after showering. Jobs and work await. Life will improve. Naked, they enter the shower rooms where the increasing noise speaks to their terror – they are in the enclosed room to be killed. Saul immediately 167

168

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

begins clearing and checking their clothes for valuables. He is told to look for shiny artifacts only – gold or silver or currency. The important event that occurs is that one of the gassed Jews, a boy, is still breathing. He is promptly carried to a table where an SS doctor examines and then asphyxiates him. The doctor orders the Jewish doctor, also Hungarian, to perform an autopsy to find out why he survived. Saul steps in and takes a proprietary interest in the body. He asks that it not be autopsied. The doctor, also a prisoner, at best will delay the inevitable. Saul asks a rabbi, also a Sonderkommando, to perform a Jewish ritual. He agrees to say a prayer for the dead on behalf of the boy. He can do no more. Saul is not satisfied. He wants a prayer and a Jewish burial. The second plot layer is introduced at this point in Act I. The time limit for the Sonderkommandos is two months and it is about to be reached. They have seen too much and so they are killed and replaced. A plan to detonate their crematorium is alluded to. Saul has heard that there is a Greek rabbi in another Sonderkommando unit led by a Pole, Mieteke. He has to go out of the compound to find this rabbi. Mieteke’s unit is disposing of human ash into the river. The Greek rabbi is not agreeable and acts as if he has lost his mind. This leads to an altercation with the German officer in command. Only the gentile leader saves Saul. In return Mieteke asks for a payment. Saul gives him a bracelet hidden in his boot. Saul returns to his own unit inside the camp. In Act II, we see that the Sonderkommandos have privileges, separate facilities to wash and better food. They are aggressive toward one another. Saul sees that the boy’s body has been moved. He is very concerned but learns from the Jewish doctor that he has moved the body to a less conspicuous place. Saul moves the body again so he can have more control over it. The important plot events in Act II are Saul’s participation in hiding a camera that is used to record events ongoing in the camp. He also participates in preparations for the ‘revolt’ planned by his unit. They are also aided by Russian soldiers, prisoners of war imprisoned in Auschwitz, and someone in Kanada, a woman’s barrack where the belongings of those killed and cremated are collected and catalogued. Saul is sent there to pick up gunpowder to be used to blow up the crematorium, the prelude to saving the Biederman Sonderkommandos from certain death. The Germans announce to the Sonderkommando Uber commander that all in his command will have to work that night. Three transports are expected and they must be finished by daylight. The German commander also tells the Uber commander to make a list of the 70 most expendable Sonderkommandos by tomorrow. The killing plan is moving forward, and they will have to act sooner to save themselves. Saul is sent to Kanada. Ella, who he knows, has the gunpowder for him. A bribe is given to the German guard who allows Saul to enter. The guard assumes it’s for sex. Saul asks for Ella Fried. The Kapo tells him no touching. She retrieves Ella. Ella recognizes Saul. She expects a physical experience, but

Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul

169

Saul puts her off. She gives him the bag which he hides in his clothing. The German guard is surprised Saul is leaving so quickly. Saul goes off to help bring the transport’s occupants to their fate. It’s chaos. Saul’s agenda remains, however, to find a rabbi. He finds a Frenchman he thinks looks like a rabbi. In the rush to kill the Frenchman, the prisoner is taken from Saul and pushed toward a pit where killing is taking place. Pit killing only takes place when the crematoria are full. Saul himself is almost killed. Biederman himself protests that Saul is a Sonderkommando. As a result Biederman himself is pushed into the pit and shot. Saul finds another Frenchman who looks like a rabbi and dresses the man in his own shirt which bears the Sonderkommando red X designating he is Sonderkommando. But the Germans are aggressive and again Saul is pushed toward the pit. This time he is saved by the same gentile Kapo who saved him at the river. This time he wants two bracelets. But he is called away to help with the French Jews. This part of the film is loud and chaotic and seems frenzied in its appetite for killing. Saul tells the rabbi he will help Saul bury his son. In Act III, two plots unfold. The first is the search for a proper burial by Saul for the adolescent he calls his son. The second plot is the breakout from Auschwitz to save the lives of the Sonderkommandos in the Biederman unit. In the first, Saul washes the boy’s body as well as cuts the French rabbi’s beard. Unfortunately in trying to secure the rabbi Saul has lost the gunpowder secured in Kanada. His coconspirators are very unhappy with Saul as they can no longer destroy the crematorium. All recommend he abandon the body, an idea restated strongly by the Jewish doctor at roll call. Saul is more determined to achieve a burial for the boy. The second plot accelerates when the Biederman Sonderkommando is ordered to the undressing room. In their restive state the revolt begins with an attack on their armed German guards. The prisoners armed with pistols and grenades begin to kill their German guards and to retrieve their automatic weapons. Saul carries the boy’s body over his shoulder. The prisoners push forward and throw grenades at the electrified fence. They rush through the holes into the woods beyond. Saul follows carrying the body. He also pushes the French rabbi to keep him close. They reach the riverbank. At the riverbank Saul begins to dig and orders the rabbi to say Kaddosh. The rabbi begins, but frightened by the sound of the approaching dogs, he can do no more. Twice Saul has claimed the boy to be his son and twice his claim has been challenged. Now as the threat to his plan nears the site of burial, Saul digs more furiously, as if this rather than escape, is most important. The last of the escapees approaches the riverbank, among them the rabbi in the unit. He urges they must cross the river before this last chance ends. The Germans dogs are closer. Saul picks up the body. He enters the river, floating the body ahead of him. He needs to catch up with the French rabbi to complete the burial. In the current Saul loses the boy’s body; he begins to

170

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

drown. The Biederman rabbi grabs Saul by the neck, helps get him across the river and pushes him onto the shore. Losing the body, Saul, dazed, has lost the will to go on. The rabbi helps him. They reach a farm barn and rest. Two of the escapees voice opposite goals. Go on to Cracow, the Russians are there and all should join the Russian forces. The alternative voice urges they push on in the forest and find the Partisans. They should join them to fight the Germans. A young blond farm boy sees them. Saul sees the boy and smiles to him. The boy runs off; he is stopped by the German troops. They move on the barn while the boy runs deeper into the forest. The gunfire that follows implies the Germans have found Saul and the other escapees and killed them. The boy continues to run deeper into the forest. The film ends. Nemes captures these two days in October in the extermination camp, Auschwitz. Beyond the cheapness of life thematic threads emerge. The Sonderkommandos want to live. But for Saul the subtext is different. His goal is a Jewish funeral for the adolescent boy who miraculously survives the German lethal showers. This motivates Saul, as if he is moving beyond the will to survive. The task Saul sets for himself is madness in this place of killing. But if he can achieve a Jewish funeral for the boy, a key piece of the human experience will survive. This impossible irrational drive is the subtext of Son of Saul. Other Holocaust narratives have focused on the will to live (Run Boy Run); others have focused on ancillary narrative goals. Agnieska Holland’s The Angry Harvest focuses on the capacity to exploit opportunity during this war of wars; others such as The Notebook have focused on the loss of humanity during this war. Son of Saul joins these films in capturing the humanity needed and the sacrifice needed in order to face oneself with actions taken in order to live on in this hardest of times.

The directing In terms of script interpretation, Nemes, in his direction of Son of Saul, has very particular ideas. Auschwitz was the single largest killing machine in history. Killing took place in other camps, in vans, in the woods, or in a pit or in a major city, but none surpassed Auschwitz. The film takes place three months before Auschwitz was liberated by the Russian army. In its third year of operation this camp seems busier than ever in murdering European Jews. To create this sense of mission, Nemes’ character, Saul, is always on the move, working in a crematorium or scheming to find a way to have a Jewish funeral. Others scheme to get out, escape. No character is reflective. There is no small talk among Sonderkommandos. If a German approaches or stops in front of them, they instantly remove their hats and lower their eyes. If a

Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul

171

Sonderkommando speaks to another, he closes on the face of the other and says what he says in a suppressed whisper. No one speaks normally. Level of voice is in step with the power of the speaker. An Uber Sonderkommando barks orders. There is no space for disobedience. Disobedience means death. Bodies are dragged, doors are shut tight, and Jews are killed; all narrative events are presented in action. Only when Ella approaches Saul in Kanada is there stillness and an emotion different than the anger that prevails in all discourse. A female Kapo stands between them and orders no touching. Ella’s face brings feeling into the scene, but Saul’s face remains non-responsive. He is not available emotionally to Ella. This scene is the strongest positive emotion in Son of Saul. It’s a moment of reflection in a place where there is no place for this luxury. Only movement, avoidance, and fear exist here. As a result a subtextual element that emerges is the debasement of human feeling. The other notable contributor to the narrative in Son of Saul is the pervasive violence, not only German to prisoner but also inmate to other inmate. In the Biederman Sonderkommando there seems to be constant aggression from the Uber Sonderkommando and from Biederman towards the men under them. Prisoners are pushed from one task into another unpredictably. All comes down from the leadership and instant action to the order is the demand from leadership. Aggression and physical abuse are quick to follow the slightest hesitation. Self-preservation is the only rule of behavior in Auschwitz. Personal agendas abound and drive each character. Conflict and punishment partner these agendas. If you are not a help, you are a hindrance. This message is ongoing, and there is only rare respite from aggression. The Jewish doctor and the rabbi in the Biederman unit seem different but this is momentary, given the obstinate Saul. Their sense of aggression seems fed by the ominous tonal shift during the night transport and the hunger for killing quickly at the pit. Intensions accelerate at this moment as does the pressure on individuals to be in accord with their German masters. What is clear in Nemes’ script interpretation is that only movement and aggression are proof of life, a condition that is at best temporary in Auschwitz. The acting in Son of Saul is principally a casting issue. The range of behavior required in the performances is narrow. Physicality is very important to contribute to the sense of intention and survival in Auschwitz. There are two exceptions to this. The first is Saul, Geza Rohrig. Saul’s look is flat and ordinary. And yet he is the character who comes up with an idea whose intention is to lift him and give his life in Auschwitz greater meaning that his dead ‘son’ deserves what is impossible in Auschwitz, a Jewish burial. This becomes the goal that will drive Saul in the two days before he is killed. What this requires in the performance is that this ordinary person become alive and not accept the inevitable, in short, to become extraordinary. This is precisely what Saul becomes. Given the forces he’s up against this is remarkable and can only be attributed to the actor and to his director, Laszlo Nemes.

172

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

The second exception is the two men Saul fixes upon as rabbis  – first the Greek rabbi and later the French rabbi. Both men have a presence that suggests they are different from the other prisoners. Both have a physical presence that is more charismatic than the other prisoners. Both look more like movie stars than they look like rabbis. It is unclear whether Nemes has done this to parallel Saul’s delusion that the boy is his son, or whether Nemes wants to illustrate that all who survive in Auschwitz are more than they appear to be. Whatever his reason, these two actors do not convince that they are or ever were rabbis. In terms of how director Nemes uses his camera, on the other hand, he is very clear about his intentions. And it is here that the experience of Son of Saul becomes an experience of an entirely different other level than it might otherwise have been. The first strategy Nemes uses is the long tracking shot. His adaptation of this shot is specific and different. First he keeps the focus on Saul, essentially using the movement of the shot to position as close to Saul as possible. He uses a subjective placement, in front of or behind Saul as well as an objective placement, beside Saul. However Nemes does not use the usual lens for this type of shot, the wide angle lens which allows the background of the character to remain in focus, thereby providing visual context within the shot. Nemes instead uses a normal lens which means the character is in focus in the foreground of the shot, but the visual context, the background, is out of focus. The audience is denied visual context for the character. At times disorienting this type of shot withdraws context in the name of masking what’s really going on, which should be left to the audience’s imagination. We can interpret this choice as being even more disturbing than seeing the background. In the shots both inside and outside the shower area, this means that the growing number of naked people rushing into the showers will become naked dead bodies, their number indeterminate because of the blur to the growing pile of naked bodies. The second consequence of this strategy is that the audience is given only Saul’s point of view and no other. Whatever Saul is doing the presentation of this point of view is singular and gives the audience no choice but to see what he sees. The only choice here is to identify with Saul. He doesn’t have to be charismatic or charm the audience. They see only his perception. This extreme strategy works because what is going on in Auschwitz is so extreme. Saul’s struggle to remain human and take on a strategy that will sustain his humanity becomes the struggle for the audience to sustain their humanity. Saul and the audience align in a shared goal. Nemes has chosen a risky, bold strategy which positions him in rare company. He shares a creative goal with Orson Welles in the opening shot of Touch of Evil (1958), Stanley Kubrick in the trenches with Colonel Dax in Paths of Glory (1957), Max Ophuls in The Earrings of Madame De (1953), and Miklos Jansco in The Red and the White (1967). The primary difference is that all the above directors provided the visual context so that the entire

Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul

173

frame was in focus. Nemes alone opts to emphasize on the main character and to obscure the background of the shot. The length of most of the shots being 2–3 minutes means that the complexity of following action for as long as he does implies a technical challenge for the director of photography as well as for the editor. The fact that Son of Saul is a first feature film makes the achievement all the more remarkable. To help his audience with this visual strategy Nemes opens and closes the film placing context into a central position in his direction of Son of Saul. The opening shot begins totally out of focus. As a group of people approaches, the visual begins to tell us they are moving toward the camera. Once they reach the camera we can see that the person out front is Saul. Once Saul passes the camera, the camera begins to follow him and the foreground, a close-up on Saul remains in focus. All else is out of focus. In this shot Saul’s work in helping move the emptying transported prisoners from the train to the barrack where the undressing area is adjacent to the shower room. Once they are in the undressing area a soothing German voice tells them lies about what awaits them. Throughout the second shot which begins as all including Saul are in the undressing area, the visual focus is on Saul. In the last shot of the film a small blond Polish boy has encountered German soldiers. He continues to run away and the camera moves with him. He is in the center of the frame and remains in focus. The camera slows when he enters a heavily wooded area. The camera stops. The boy disappears. Throughout this shot, the sound of Germans firing their weapons into the shed where they find Saul and the other escaped prisoners. The shooting slows and the still camera allows us to see only the wooded area where the Polish boy has entered. The final seconds are quiet and tranquil and in focus. Another directorial strategy Nemes uses is the way he presents killing and its instrument, the Germans. The first observation is that the Germans are a pervasive presence but they always seem to live in a world far from Saul. When he does see Germans, Saul is always respectful, immediately doffing his hat and lowering his eyes from the German. It’s an animal-like respect toward his captors. The first time we see a murder it is of the boy Saul claims to be his son. The German doctor in uniform checks the boy’s heart and confirming he is alive he quietly chokes the boy to death. We see the killing in a deep background from Saul’s distant point of view. It’s a quiet killing, totally the opposite of the killings at the pit. There again from Saul’s point of view, the officer kills Biederman who has tried to save Saul. This time the killing happens very quickly as there is no time to waste at the pit. Although we don’t see Saul killed by the Germans, there are at least two other scenes where he encounters Germans. The first is when he is in the clinical room where he last saw the boy’s body. Saul is fretful; the body may be lost to him. German officers enter and question his presence. Whatever he blurts out, a young officer humiliates Saul, pretending to act out his protestation. The scene is filmed in close-up and the laughter of the Germans displays utter contempt toward Saul. He is not worth killing. It’s a moment of great

174

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

threat towards Saul. It also captures the low-subhuman regard these military men have for their Jewish prisoners. The second incident, outside the Kanada warehouse, the prisoner with Saul bribes the German guard. Even Jews need occasional sex and ostensibly this is the bribe’s purpose. Saul collects the package he came for and rushes to leave. The guard comments on his speed. Again the comment is humiliating but not threatening. The incident confirms that Saul and probably other Jews are objectified by their German captors. Anything can be said or done because these prisoners don’t merit human behavior.

The editing There are more shots in the 20-minute D-day set piece in Saving Private Ryan than there is in the entirety of Son of Saul, principally because Nemes has opted for the strategy of long takes, many of which are 2–3 minutes long. This poses issues for continuity within the film. Nemes gives a sense of continuity by the use of a door shutting closing the first shot. He opens on activity in the undressing room in the second shot. The cut from shot one to shot two achieves the same as a fade-out and fade-in between shots. In other shots inside the barrack Nemes fades to black implying he is moving into a separate scene within the same location. The implication of a new scene focusing on a new piece of narrative information is implied either by a cutaway or by a piece of sound – for example when the inmates hear a noise from one of the just killed Jews. A piece of dialogue from the Sonderkommandos tells us this is only the second time anyone survived the gassing in the showers. A cutaway to the boy breathing but not conscious provides the visual context for the comment. The boy is then carried to a table in the Jewish doctor’s room. This kind of progression assures the audience is clear about the focus shifting to the boy who has survived. The next scene will show the boy being killed by the German doctor. Saul is in the foreground of this shot, establishing the link between Saul and the now dead boy. Another strategy Nemes uses is to jump cut during the night scene at the pit. The jump cutting establishes the panic and chaos that is key in this scene. A similar strategy is used in the breakout scene. What is important is that Saul has the boy’s body, that explosive devices are used to create a hole in the fence, that there is forward motion behind a wagon, that German guards are being shot or killed, that returning fire is killing prisoners, that the group has gotten past the gate into the woods, that Saul and the French rabbi are moving through the woods, and that the immediate danger to them is diminished. Much of this is conveyed in cutaways and jump cuts. Directionally, Nemes makes sure that the shots progress in the same direction.

Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul

175

In most other sections Nemes stays with a focus on Saul. In the two roll call sequences there is no establishing shot; Nemes stays with the Biederman Sonderkommandos, Saul, a guard, an officer, to imply the principle of the roll call. He does the same with eating, cleaning up, and collecting victim clothing. More complex scenes involve Saul and the Jewish doctor and Saul and Ella and the female Kapo in Kanada. Here there is more regular match cutting so that the narrative point of the scene as well as the individuation of characters is achieved. For the most part, however, Nemes uses the mise-en-scene approach to avoid editing. He moves the camera in order to render the narrative both in point of view and narrative revelations. In this choice he follows in the footsteps of Fred Murnau in Sunrise (1927) and Max Ophuls in Lola Montes (1955).

17 Conclusion

The idea that writing, directing, and editing are different roles in the production of film and television has for too long been the prevailing wisdom in the industry and in the schools that prepare students for careers in the industry. In fact writing, directing, and editing are each dedicated to the effective telling of the story. But each deploys a different set of tools to do so. In this book, I am proposing that these distinct creative phases have a shared goal to tell the story effectively and that the shared goal makes these three stages more linked than not. This is why certain directors have favored particular writers and particular editors. It’s why Ernst Lubitsch worked disproportionally with the writer Sam Raphaelson. It’s why Martin Scorsese’s early career is linked to Paul Schrader. It’s why the early career of Volker Schlondorff is linked to Margarethe Von Trotta. And it’s why the late career of Luis Bunuel is linked to Jean-Claude Carriere. In terms of editors, Mike Nichols preferred Sam O’Steen, just as Martin Scorsese has chosen to work throughout his career with Thelma Schoonmaker. And Orson Welles preferred to work with Robert Wise. Compatibility is one reason. A second is the capacity to add value to the film. Whatever the reason, when directors find writers or editors they see as valuable they work with them as much as they can. Shared vision and complementary strengths matter. The fabric that weaves narrative to directing to editing can be illustrated by looking at five story strategies that tie each stage to the other. They are: 1 2 3 4 5

Polarities in use Surprise An emotional through line Tonal strategy The subtext used

Whether producing a series, a limited series for television, or a theatrical film, basic necessities require a main character in crisis, an antagonist, a set of conflicting goals, and a resolution. In Scott Frank’s Godless (2017), a bandit, Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell), son to the leader of a gang of bandits, Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels), wants to change the direction of his life. To make his point he decides to rob the gains of robberies conducted, from the gang and its 176

Conclusion

177

leader. Frank Griffin wants his money back, and he wants to kill Roy Goode. He pursues Roy, and Roy shoots Frank Griffin in the arm. Roy is wounded in the exchange. In escaping from Frank, Roy Goode ends up at an isolated ranch where he is again shot, this time by its owner, Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery). Her Indian mother-in-law takes care of Roy’s wounds, and later Roy will be helpful to Alice in tending to the needs of her farm. Various sheriffs are on the hunt for mass killer Frank Griffin and his gang. All these people come together conflictually in the cruel western climate of the town of La Belle, Colorado. Applying our five criteria, we will look at Godless and see how Scott Frank moves from the writing to the directing and to the editing.

Polarities The issue of polarities or opposites can operate within a character or between characters. For Scott Frank, the writer-director of Godless, the most interesting use of polarities is within a character. Frank organizes his characters within four families. The outlaws group around their leader Frank Griffin. He is the de facto father. Roy Goode is the favored son in this family. The second family is Roy Goode’s family of origin, initially two young brothers who have survived the killing of their parents. The older brother leaves Roy, the younger brother, with Lucy, a would-be nun who runs an orphanage. The third family surrounds Alice Fletcher. She has a ranch from her first husband, who drowned taking her to the ranch. She has a son by her second husband, a Paiute Indian, and an Indian mother-in-law. Her Indian husband was killed by a citizen of La Belle. Roy Goode joins Alice’s family becoming a surrogate father to her son, Truckee. The fourth family is that of the widower sheriff of La Belle, Bill McNue. He has two children and he looks to his sister, widow Mary Agnus McNue, to be their mother. In terms of the polarities operating within the major characters of Godless, Roy Goode is a bandit, a killer next only to the chief killer, Frank Griffin. But as his namesake implies and Alice Fletcher’s last words to Roy affirm, Roy is also a good man. Killing and kindness are both present in the same man. Frank Griffin is the antagonist of Godless. He is fatherly within his band of outlaws, and he is a killer without mercy. He is a pastor who knows his Bible; nevertheless he rides his horse into a church and threatens those praying inside, with God’s wrath and Frank Griffin’s wrath on the Lord’s Day in the Lord’s house. Griffin is a man of constant contradiction evincing love and hate from moment to moment. This contradiction makes him all the more dangerous. Alice Fletcher, in spite of coming west from Boston, seems almost malelike in her adaptation to the West. Although she is very capable with weapons, there is Alice the mother and the woman.

178

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

The polarity is the female Alice vs. what she has had to become to survive two marriages and the hardship of life in Colorado. She has embraced a stoic anti-female persona. The other major female character, Mary Agnus McNue, has also adopted an aggressive male quality. She dresses like a man and is very capable with a pistol and a rifle. But in her case, she has taken the teacher and former prostitute, Callie Dunne (Tess Frazier), as her lover. As her husband was the former Mayor and her brother is the current sheriff, Mary Agnus is very much a managerial character in her male adaptation. She is also caretaker to her brother’s children in her female side. Both women, Alice and Mary Agnus, exhibit male and female behavioral qualities. Gender provides the polarities inside these two characters. The last major character, Sheriff Bill McNue, in his professional role is a man who has lost the respect of the town. They feel he’s no longer up to the job. He’s a man who has suffered losses, principally his wife, and has lost his confidence as a father. He is also suffering from losing a degree of his eyesight. The polarity here is between the man Bill McNue was and the man he is now. The director of Godless is also its screenwriter, Scott Frank. How does he direct the actors and the camera to bring out the polarities he has used to capture the characters of Roy Goode, Frank Griffin, Alice Fletcher, Mary Agnus McNue, and Sheriff Bill McNue? Perhaps the richest character in Godless is Jeff Daniels as Frank Griffin. He is the unquestioned leader of his 30 plus gang of outlaws. As such his leadership or decision-making is never challenged except by Roy Goode. He illustrates his paternal interest in Goode and in the twins incorporating all, into his family, the band of outlaws. To those outside the band he acts as a preacher whose wrath is God’s punishment particularly if they betray him. Jeff Daniels captures the courtesy and the criminality in Griffin. And he is mercurial and without mercy as he illustrates in the massacres in Creede and in Blackton, and later in La Belle. This capacity to capture old world courtliness and cruelty makes Griffin a compelling antagonist in a role that is an actor’s dream. As often as possible Scott Frank has Griffin on his horse, a power position he rarely strays from. He also uses the camera, both moving and still, to pictorialize Griffin at the head of what at times seems an army of outlaws. In this fashion Frank scales up the power of the antagonist and the forces towns, railroads, and sheriffs are up against. Roy Goode, on the other hand, is often alone even when he steals the money from Frank Griffin outside Creede. Jack O’Connell brings a quietness to his performance as Roy Goode. A man of few words, he is straightforward, kind to Truckee, and respectful to Alice Fletcher. Although he is an outlaw, he’s not threatening in the way Frank Griffin so often is. More often his performance is filled with the modesty of the younger brother who has found nurture in the orphanage and in the outlaw gang. Roy is straightforward with Sheriff Bill McNue, offering himself up for arrest. He warns the sheriff that Frank Griffin will come for him if he learns that Goode is in a La Belle jail.

Conclusion

179

O’Connell’s performance has none of the bluster of the Daniels performance as Frank Griffin. He is very much in the mold of Clint Eastwood as Josey Wales. Scott Frank captures the solitary quality of Roy Goode, often placing him in the background of the frame. He also uses less close-ups for Goode than he does for Frank Griffin. The consequence is that the Frank Griffin–Roy Goode relationship and its fracture beginning with the robbery from Frank Griffin in episode 1 to the shootout between them in episode 7 is the outer rim of the unfolding of the plot, thereby leaving much narrative space and energy for the story of La Belle, and the female characters in Godless. The other compelling story in Godless is the gender story, particularly as embedded in the characters of Alice Fletcher and Mary Agnus McNue. Michelle Dockery plays Alice Fletcher, a character as far as can be imagined from the patrician Crawley daughter she portrayed in Downton Abbey. Alice, a single mother in a subsistence life on an isolated ranch in nineteenthcentury Colorado, is a stoic character whose femininity has no room in her frontier life in Godless. She is far too busy digging a well, putting food on her table, and keeping her small family safe. The first time we see her it is on a dark night when a stranger shows up at her ranch. She shoots him because he hasn’t responded to her call to identify himself. We find out that the closest town, La Belle, was the place her husband was killed years before. The inhabitants view her as an evil spirit that in revenge for that death caused all the husbands in the population, 83 in all, to die in a fire in the local gold mine. She is seen as powerful and evil. We discover she’s not evil but rather a mother who has to be both parents and teacher to her teenage Indian son. There has been no time to be a woman, although she will become a woman in her relationship with Roy Goode. Dockery is powerful in her capacity to portray a woman who has had no time in her life to be indulgent. The West and her life in it has hardened her. Scott Frank does not beautify or idealize her character. The result is a performance stripped of the romanticism so often on display in women in the Western genre. Realism has replaced romanticism in this performance. It’s impressive. In the case of Merritt Wever as Mary Agnus McNue, the performance is more complex. She has not only to convince in the adoption of her husband’s clothes but also his sexual identity. Mary Agnus is the only character who has a level of self-awareness and self-reflection. She is also the character who uses irony to defend who she has become after the death of her husband. For the most part Scott Frank positions Mary Agnus in tight mid-shots and close-ups prominent in her dialogue exchanges with Whitey, Callie, and the mining security people. Her views are emotionally insightful as well as positioning her as a realist and a leader in the battle against Frank Griffin and his gang in La Belle. In short Scott Frank values her opinions over those of the women of La Belle as well as of many of the men. In terms of the edit Scott Frank gives each of these characters their back stories. These back stories are stripped of color, or allow the color of Alice

180

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

Fletcher’s yellow dress or the blood on the twins’ clothing when they are taken into the gang by Griffin, even as Griffin knows they just killed their own family. The backstory scenes speak to how each of the four characters came to be who they are, with an emphasis on the good and evil issue for Frank Griffin and Roy Goode and the gender issue for Alice and Mary Agnus. Scott Frank also uses a contrary behavior in each case to emphasize that each of these people has an all too human side. In the case of Frank Griffin, Scott Frank uses Griffin’s behavior when he encounters a farm overrun by smallpox. He ministers to the ill and helps feed the weak. For Roy Goode it’s about his handiness with horses and his fatherliness toward Truckee, who is afraid of horses. For Mary Agnus it’s her jealousy toward her female lover, Carrie. For Alice Fletcher, it’s her capacity to carry on after she has experienced so much tragedy.

Surprise Surprise in narrative is most often found in plot twists and turns. In good scripts characters in their behavior can also surprise. For purposes of placing surprises in the context of the entire series, let’s look first at surprise in the opening and closing battles in Godless. The opening and the closing battles take place in Creede and La Belle, small towns in Colorado. What is surprising in each of these events is that they revolve around the betrayal of Roy Goode against Frank Griffin, his outlaw ‘father’. Both illustrate how far Frank Griffin is willing to go when he is betrayed. In Creede he kills every man, woman, and child. In La Belle he tries to do the same but is defeated by the women of La Belle, aided by Sheriff Bill McNue, almost blind, and Roy Goode. The first massacre is presented almost in abstract, an act of man in the godless West where death is ever close and living is a struggle. The battle in La Belle is violent, persistent, and points out that will and luck can determine a different outcome. Scott Frank has a straightforward emphasis on the main characters, but he doesn’t overlook the importance of surprise in his secondary characters. Whitey, the deputy sheriff, who has to the point of the final battle, transcended his youthful looks by showing how adept he is with his guns, coming to the aid of the sheriff one rowdy night in La Belle, early in the series. He shoots one of the rowdy cowboys twice and ends their threats to the townspeople and to the sheriff. In the last battle he responds by pulling out his two pistols, exits his office to emerge into the sunlight ready to deal with the Griffin gang. He is killed at that instant by a knife thrown into his heart. For Whitey it’s all over before his fight has begun. This surprise by Scott Frank implies that the battle just beginning is going to be far worse for the women than hoped for. Beyond these opening and closing struggles there is the question of the money. Frank Griffin robs miners and trains for the money. Roy Goode steals

Conclusion

181

the proceeds of those thefts from Frank Griffin. Clearly the money is important to Griffin but it’s not important to Roy Goode, except as it harms Frank. Roy gives the proceeds of his first robbery to Lucy Cole whose orphanage was home to Roy after his brother left him. In the second instance he gives the Creede train money to Alice Fletcher. Both gifts are surprising and they say a good deal about Roy Goode. They designate Roy as a character who values the nurturing he’s received from these two women. Roy was also nurtured by Frank Griffin but in Frank’s case Roy bears him no gratitude. He states that Creede changed his attitude toward Frank Griffin. Griffin as a father saved him and the twins, but Roy has found this father is more devoted to killing than to saving. Roy Goode has acted on his conscience and moved against Griffin as a result. The final surprise I’ll point out is how Scott Frank treats the land. It’s beautiful, but it’s also unforgiving. Weather, mines, mountains, and forests hold both beauty and danger. From the land a rattlesnake crawls into a house where a sick baby sits on the floor. In an instant clouds turn a wall of water into death for Alice Fletcher’s first husband. A mine disaster kills almost a hundred men in 5 minutes. In a forest an Indian boy’s horse is crippled and he must kill the horse to stop the resulting agony. Horses and guns kill but also save lives in Scott Frank’s West. I can’t recall a Western where horses, their training, and their maintenance were so integral a part of the narrative. Frank presents the West, the horses, the guns in extreme long shots (the beauty) and in extreme close-ups (the danger). And he spends considerable screen time on both. All the principal characters articulate their relationships to horses and guns at different stages of the narrative.

An emotional through line When I speak of an emotional through line I refer to a particular emotional through line for each of the main characters. There also has to be an overarching emotional through line about life in the West, specifically in Colorado in the 1880s when Godless takes place. To be clear this latter through line represents the vast group of characters in Godless. As well as the main white characters there is a Paiute community, a black community, an immigrant community principally from Northern Europe, a newspaperman, the outlaws, and the townspeople. For most of these characters, with the exception of the newspaperman, life is challenging. Disease, natural disasters, and the clash of civilizations makes for lives menaced, less adventurous than as propagated in earlier Westerns. In fact for most of the population in Godless, survival is the ongoing principal challenge. In terms of our principal characters, each has a distinct emotional through line which winds its way through a single relationship. For Frank Griffin that relationship is with his ‘son’, Roy Goode. When Goode abandons Frank

182

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

Griffin at the outset of Godless, Frank Griffin spends the rest of the story looking for Roy with the goal of destroying him. Having been abandoned by his family of origin (killed by Mormons dressed up to appear to be Indians) he has spent the rest of his life trying to create a replacement family. Roy Goode also looks to restore the family he has lost as a boy. Although he yearns for the brother who abandoned him to go to California (to make a better life for both of them), he has settled for surrogates, first Lucy Cole, then Frank Griffin, and finally Alice Fletcher. He is always respectful of Alice. In their first encounter, she shoots him in the throat. In their last encounter, she kisses Roy and tells him he is a good man. Although Alice is the initiator in their developing relationship, he always seems young in her presence. Scott Frank often films them together, initially distant, mindful of the other as if they are considering the state of their relationship. In the second phase, when Alice teaches Roy to read, they are filmed in mid-shot on the same plane, in a fashion, at last, together. Trust at least from Alice turns to love as she comes to admire Roy for being a teacher to her son, Truckee. Theirs is so delicate a relationship. Roy is so different than most of the men in Godless. The man Roy most resembles in his behavior toward Alice is Whitey in his behavior toward Louise Hobbs (Jessica Sula). Both Jack O’Connell and Michelle Dockery offer restrained quiet performances that project intense inner feeling. This feeling carries and elevates Roy Goode’s emotional arc, as it does for Alice Fletcher. For Alice, the additional feeling Sheriff Bill McNue has for her suggests an appeal that transcends her history with men. In the case of the sheriff who has lost his wife and is left with two small children, it is unclear if he seeks out companionship in a lonely life rather than another kind of solace. Alice responds to him guardedly until the very end of Godless. At that moment she seems emotionally available to him. The most independent of the characters is Mary Agnus McNue. Consequently her emotional arc with regard to her lesbian lover, Callie Dunne, is more tentative, as if Mary Agnus is still transitioning from the dress-wearing widow to the male-attired leader of the women of La Belle. Is this a case of not wanting to lose her lover as she so recently did in the case of her husband? Or does her jealousy about Callie’s flirtation with another woman suggest Mary Agnus is more vulnerable than she appears to be? The result is that Mary Agnus’ emotional arc is turbulent rather than straightforward, a reflection of her inner life as she works through her gender preference. Scott Frank gives Merritt Wever lots of space in her performance. He often films her off to the side of the frame as she seems to be processing what is going on in the rest of the frame.

Tonal strategy In Westerns the key struggle is between pastoral values (a past representing good) vs. civilized or modern values (a present that is solely

Conclusion

183

materialistic). The values of the past have nobility, but the present progress has a diminished set of values. The consequence is a Western hero who fights against modernity generally represented by an antagonist, a sheriff or an acquisitive rancher or a capitalist from the East. In Godless a mining company promises to resurrect prosperity to La Belle. But security for the mine seems more important than bringing prosperity. The security personnel are more interested in pillaging the town than they are in helping the town. Helping themselves is the by-product of their definition of progress. Their theft of the recently acquired horses for the town exemplifies the harmful behaviors of these exemplars of modernity. The primal struggle in Godless is not so much a clash of values as it is a struggle to stay alive in a naturally beautiful environment that is ironically lethal. Nature and man conspire against man. Here the title Godless implies no protection for the inhabitants of the land. This is Scott Frank reconfiguring the central struggle of the Western to less good vs. evil than a place where the power of the gun and the possession of horses empower those who can override the laws of man. In terms of the main character–antagonist relationship, the forces against the main character include the owner and security forces of the Eastern company that buys the mine in La Belle, the organized government institutions such as the Army that do nothing to rescue citizens from the wrath of Frank Griffin and his gang of 30. Standing against them are Roy Goode, Sheriff Bill McNue, Mary Agnus McNue, and Alice Fletcher. Collectively these four characters, particularly Roy Goode, stand in the way of chaos and killing represented by Frank Griffin. Scott Frank has given each of the men a disability. Frank Griffin has lost his left arm; Sheriff Bill McNue is losing his eyesight; and Roy Goode simply seems lost, sad, and rebellious against the evil forces in his life, as represented by Frank Griffin. The other aspect of Roy Goode is that he seems grateful to Lucy Cole and Alice Fletcher for taking him in. By doing so they rescue him from those forces that act against him. The two women are strong survivors of trauma, and each is forceful in protecting their physical fragility and their inner gender struggle. This is not the typical collection of characters in the Western. Here the men are damaged, but it is the women who seem to have the capacity to prevail. The character closest to God is the most evil character, Frank Griffin. Here too Scott Frank is challenging Western tropes around character. Frank Griffin’s closest analogue is Judge Roy Bean in William Wyler’s The Westerner (1940), although Bean is not as religious as Frank Griffin. Scott Frank has made Godless as a Western rife with Western elements but with a post-9/11 sensibility. Angry African Americans, feminist positions about gender and LGBT, an irrational chaos that tries to kill all in its path, and the idea that human life is a perilous journey dominate Godless. Gone is the poetic view of America in John Ford’s Westerns and gone is the neurotic Western hero of Anthony Mann’s Westerns.

184

Storytelling experience, beginning to end

The subtext used The latitude for subtext in Godless is considerable beginning with its title. Using the building of the church in La Belle as one of the narrative through lines, Scott Frank establishes the importance of God for many of the characters in Godless. Indeed the pastor for the church being built in La Belle arrives after the battle when Whitey is being buried. Does his arrival suggest at last God will have a representative in La Belle with the promise of a better future? The fact that until this point the primary arbiter of prayer has been Frank Griffin, a satanic figure for the populations of New Mexico and Colorado and that he is now dead, leaves space for the new figure of the pastor. What this will mean for the Indians and the African Americans in the region, who until now have believed in spirits and other deities, is not addressed. What is clear is that until now the white man’s God has not saved them from the venality of progress and the burgeoning dispute over property rights in the American West. What I propose as the subtext of Godless is that Scott Frank has written and directed a Western in which the very existence of the lead characters is in question. If God is absent from this land if the challenges the characters face are both the natural and the man-made destruction each faces. Their very existence is under threat just as the very existence of the United States was threatened by the events of September 11, 2001. If we look at each of the four characters who are victimized by the threat Frank Griffin poses to them, each has an externalized person or place or both who represent hope, or a future. For Roy Goode the hope is represented by his brother Jim who has written and asked Roy to join him in California, near the Pacific Ocean. To get to his brother Roy must overcome an external threat and an internal threat, his illiteracy. For Sheriff Bill McNue hope resides in a relationship with Alice Fletcher. The barriers the sheriff faces is the internal threat, his loss of eyesight, and the external threat, Frank Griffin and his destructive plans for La Belle. For Alice Fletcher hope resides in her son, Truckee. The external threat is the whites and how they view Indians. They’ve already killed Truckee’s father. To protect against the internal threat, that she cannot be mother and father to Truckee, Alice is helped by Roy Goode who acts as a father to Truckee throughout his stay on the Fletcher ranch. For Mary Agnus the hope lies in Callie Dunne, a woman who is far more secure in her sexuality than is Mary Agnus. The external threat is Frank Griffin. The internal threat is her own insecurity in her gender transition. For these characters life is precarious, death is likely, and hope is distant and elusive. But in the end each in his or her way embraces hope. Scott Frank gives each a directorial nudge toward that future, best visualized in the last shot of Godless, a mid-shot of Roy Goode on his horse, staring at the beautiful vast Pacific Ocean. For Roy, it’s the new frontier.

Glossary Screenwriting Act I break Sometimes referred to as the first major plot point, the Act I break is a surprise that opens up the story. Act II break Sometimes referred to as the second major plot point, the Act II break is a surprise that closes down the story. Antagonist The character in the screenplay who poses the greatest opposition to the goal of the main character. In certain genres, this character is far more powerful than the main character and consequently is more menacing to the main character. Catalytic event A narrative surprise early in Act I. It can be the introduction of the plot of the film. Often referred to as the point of attack or as the inciting incident. Character arc Character arc refers to the change a character goes through from the first appearance in the film to the last. Although the change is primarily associated with the main character, changes occur through the effect of relationships and plot upon the character. The change in the main character is often thought of as the spine of the narrative. Character layer The emotional layer of the screenplay. The character layer of the structure is two opposing relationships for the main character. These two opposing characters represent the main expression of the premise in the screenplay. Character population The main and secondary characters in the screenplay. The secondary characters can be viewed as two opposing groups, one representing the first option in the premise, the other group representing the second option. The character population interacts with the main character to move that character to the choice they make in Act III. Charisma A character quality, a mixture of intense belief and energetic assertiveness that makes a character easily relatable or appealing. Conflict A dramatic property that energizes a story. In more specific terms the goal of the main character clashes with the goals of one group of secondary characters, the harmers, particularly the goal of the antagonist, the most powerful character standing against the main character. The plot itself also operates against the goal of the main character. All these forces generate the energy or conflict in the narrative. Critical moment We meet the main character in the screenplay at a moment of crisis, at least of change. This critical moment should propel

185

186

Glossary

us into the screenplay. Another way to imagine the critical moment is via the character arc. The critical moment is the beginning of the character arc. Docudrama A dramatic film that employs a documentary look in order to convey a sense of realism and serious purpose to the story. The structure most closely follows building a case advocating for a particular purpose, as opposed to a three act structure. The Docudrama is a voiceoriented genre. Editorial position In every story, visual detailing of character and plot points us to interpret the story in the fashion the writer intends. Light, realistic, passionate, dark each represents a specific pathway to interpretation. Experimental Narrative A voice-oriented genre that emphasizes mood over narrative progression. Character in this genre does not change and consequently there is no character arc. Energy comes from an intense style rather than conflicting goals of characters. Fable A Fable is a voice-oriented genre whose goal is to promote hopefulness. The Fable is plot intensive and has a tone that veers away from realism. Tone can shift as the narrative progresses. Although considered a genre principally for children, the Fable can cross over into more adult narratives as well. Genre Every film is one genre or another. Distinguishing between genres are the following characteristics – the goal of the main character, the role of the antagonist, the nature of the plot, the nature of the resolution, and the tone. Genres tend to fall into one of four categories, wish fulfillment, realism, nightmare, and voice oriented. The origins of genre in literature and theater are romantic vs. tragic and tonally, comedic vs. serious. Genre choice determines the importance of plot and character layers and the fate of the main character. Genres can be pushed or pulled tonally to present a fresh perception of the genre but remain recognizable because of their recurring tropes. Goal A character without a goal, a passive character, is a character we watch rather than get involved with. Goals are needed to create active characters who are consequently more engaging for the audience. Harmers The secondary characters whose goals bring them into conflict with the main character and his or her goal. The most important harmer is the antagonist. Harmers represent one option of the premise. Helpers The secondary characters who in their goals are aligned with the main character and his or her goal. They represent the other, opposite option of the premise. Main character The narrative is experienced through the main character whose struggle is to make a choice between two opposing options, the premise of the narrative.

Glossary

187

Non-linear story A narrative with multiple main characters. The plot is not linear and not necessarily chronological. Each character feeds into a shaping idea, an event, place, or time. Unifying the loose story is the voice/intention of the writer. Tone can vary within different stories or characters. Plot layer An external, in the world event that puts pressure on the main character. Plot is not an internal struggle for the main character. Plot is used in many but not necessarily all narratives. Plot-driven genres include Action-Adventure, Police, Gangster, War, Thriller. Plot point The surprise embedded in each scene is revealed as a plot point. It is not unusual for a feature film to have 60 plot points. Premise The premise, sometimes referred to as the spine, is the deepest layer of the screenplay. The premise is the key struggle for the main character. The premise is the two opposing options with which the main character struggles. The premise is present in every scene of the screenplay and is represented by the two groups of secondary characters who put pressure on the main character. Protagonist In plays and novels the main character is often referred to as the protagonist. Resolution The point in Act III where the main character achieves his or her goal. The resolution also marks the end point in the character arc. Satire A voice-oriented genre that in its characteristics closely mirrors the Fable. It differs, however, in its negative resolution. If the Fable is hopeful, the Satire is the opposite. Its dark ending is intended to provoke the audience to consider the consequences for the main character as a warning. Satire is creative, funny, and challenging for the writer and for its audience. Scene, sequence A scene contains a plot point as well as a transitional narrative device into the next scene. Generally scenes are short. A sequence can contain four to six scenes. Acts I and III each have two sequences, Act II has four to six sequences. A scene averages 2 minutes while a sequence averages 15 minutes. Both scenes and sequences are used by writers and producers to break down the script for management of the writing and the producing of the screenplay. Secondary character Important characters who interact and influence the actions of the main character. Helpers and harmers are the categories used to group the secondary characters according to their purposes in the screenplay. Story form A term often used interchangeably with genre.

188

Glossary

Structure Structure of the screenplay is four distinct layers, the organization of the three acts, a plot layer, a character layer, and an overlay of genre which organizes the proportion of plot to character layers. This will differ depending upon the genre. Subtext Below the surface of the three act structure, the plot, the character layer, and the genre, there can be deeper meaning/intention of the screenplay. This is the subtext. Subtext is often used by writers and directors to deepen their narrative and enrich the audience experience. Theme A general description of the narrative is theme. It does not necessarily summarize the contents of the narrative. Decisions about characters, plot, and genre follow on the decision about theme and direct the writer in the necessary choices about what will become the screenplay. Three act structure Ninety percent of feature films are organized in three acts. Act I is the act of setting up, Act II is the act of confrontation, Act III is the act of resolution. Act II is twice the length of the other two acts. Another way to think of the three acts is to use Aristotle’s idea that stories are organized as a beginning, a middle, and an end. Tone Visual detailing of character and plot that will point the audience toward interpreting the narrative in the direction intended by the writer. The editorial decision-making about story is enabled by tonal decisions. Voice-oriented genres Ten percent of screenplays do not conform to three act structure. Style, tonal decisions, and story intentions are central in voice-oriented genres. Non-linear stories, Docudramas, Experimental Narratives, Fables, and Satires are voice-oriented genres. These genres invite more active participation from the audience than does three act storytelling.

Directing Directing the actor There are numerous styles of performance the director can use. The strongest modern school of thinking on performance is to make the performance above all seem natural, thereby shrinking the distance between performer and audience. Strategies that are geared to this goal include in the moment emotions relying on recalled memories. This approach is represented by method acting; Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, and Elia Kazan are practitioner-teachers espousing the approach. Other strategies call for greater theatricality in the performance. Scaling up a performance means essentially a theater-oriented performance, acting to reach the last row in the theater. A third approach is to direct the performance toward a concrete subtext rather than to use the dialogue in a more literal

Glossary

189

fashion. Two important names associated with acting styles are Konstantin Stanislavski and Jerzy Grotowski. Stanislavski’s approach is the theoretical basis for method acting. His emphasis was to find behavioral and physical authenticity in the performance. Grotowski seeks a spiritual dimension within the performance. Directing the camera The first choice a director makes is where to put the camera in relation to the actors. Each placement promotes a different relationship with the words and actions of the actor. The second choice is whether to move the camera or not. The third choice is the length of the shot. Each choice has a different result. The lens to be used will affect the depth of field or visual context for the action within the shot. Here too there is a range of choices to be made. Each depends on the goal of the shot. The director also has to decide about all matters within the frame of the shot. There is a foreground, mid-ground, and background to the shot. Actions in one part of the shot have a bearing on all others. Again the goal of the shot determines what happens in all planes of the frame of the shot. Finally the goal of the scene affects the decisions about the camera. A set piece will be far more complex and demanding about the specificity of the shots than will be a simpler scene. Script interpretation Writers, directors, and producers are singular people. What they write and read filters through who they are. A good script is subject to interpretation. Its writer and reader will read and depending on their character, beliefs, and biases, will interpret the script differently. In creative fields such as film and television, this is a strength. Every decision the director makes from casting to the crew she chooses to work with, to the sets, to the camera positioning, all filter through their script interpretation.

Editing ADR Automated dialog replacement. The process of rerecording replacement dialogue where the original recording of dialogue had too much ambient noise in the recording. Assembly A rough cut, the organization of shots in rough order according to the script. Asynchronous Sound that is not synchronized to the visuals being shown. Back lighting Light directed from behind the subject toward the camera. The effect is to soften the image of the subject. Bridging shot A shot used to cover a jump in time or another break in continuity.

190

Glossary

Camera angle The angle of view created by the position of the camera vis-a vis the subject. The positioning results in a composition that has particular characteristics as a result of the angle chosen. Cheat shot A shot in which part of the subject is excluded from view to make the part that is recorded appear to be more than what it actually is. Cheat shots are often used in action sequences to create the illusion of danger or disaster. Close-up A tight shot of a character’s head and shoulders. An extreme close-up is a more specific facial view, that is, the eyes or the mouth. Crosscut Sometimes referred to as intercutting or parallel editing. The intermingling of shots from two or more scenes. An alternating of scenes implies an eventual relationship between them. Cutaway Also known as an insert shot. A noncritical shot used to break or link principal action in scenes. The cutaway is often used to introduce a new idea into a scene. Dailies Also referred to as rushes. Dailies are used to check content and quality in the shots recorded. Depth of field The distance between the nearest and farthest points from the camera at which the subject is acceptably sharp. Digital An electronic signal system composed of voltages that are turned on or off. Data, whether audio or visual, in digital form may be copied many times without loss of quality because digital data is not subject to the kind of degradation that occurs with analogue originated data. Dissolve A gradual merging of the end of one shot into the beginning of the next shot, produced by the superimposition of a fade-out onto a fade-in of equal length. A dissolve implies the passing of time. Dolly A moveable platform on which a camera may be mounted so that action in front of the camera may be followed. See also tracking shot. Establishing shot Usually an extreme long shot or long shot, used near the beginning of a scene to establish the location of a scene. It also establishes the interrelationship of details to be shown subsequently in closer shots. Fade-in The beginning of a shot that begins in no light and gradually brightens to full light. Implication that time has passed since the last scene. Fade-out The beginning of a shot that begins in full brightness and gradually darkens to black.

Glossary

191

Fine cut Also referred to as final cut. An editor’s last cut of the edited work after all the changes have been made. Flashback A scene that takes place at an earlier time than the scene it follows. Focus pull The shift of the subject in focus from the foreground to the background or vice versa. Frame A single image of film is the still visual composition. Freeze frame At a chosen point in a scene, the effect of freezing the action. This can be accomplished digitally. Full shot A shot in which an entire person is visible within the frame. Insert shot See cutaway. Intercut See crosscut and parallel action. Jump cut A cut that breaks the continuity of time by jumping forward from one part of an action to another that is obviously separated from the first by an interval of time. The jump cut is used to energize a scene, imply chaos, alert the audience that something is wrong. Key lighting (high or low) A high-key image has a characteristic over-lit quality achieved by soft, full illumination on a light-toned subject with lighter than usual shadows and background. Library shot A shot using archival footage rather than footage recorded specifically for the film. Often used to enhance veracity of the narrative. Location shot A shot whose purpose is to locate action. Often used to open the narrative. Long shot A full body shot often used to follow action. Master shot A single shot of an entire piece of dramatic action designed to facilitate the editing of the closer, detailed shots from which the final edit of the scene will be created. Match cut A cut in which the end of one shot leads logically and visually to the beginning of the second shot. An example is the cut from a character exiting frame right to the character entering the next shot frame left. Medium close shot A shot with a looser framing than a close shot. A medium close shot of an actor, for example, includes the actor from the waist up. A close shot includes only the actor’s face.

192

Glossary

Medium shot For the human figure a shot from the waist up. Montage A compilation of images on a particular event, idea, or person. Narration Most often found in documentary, narration can also be used in dramatic films. Collapses need for expository scenes and/or provides the viewer with a specific point of view. Can be referred to as voice over or commentary. Outtake A shot or scene discarded in the process of editing. Panning shot A shot in which the camera moves along a horizontal axis. A panning shot is often used to establish location or to follow action. Parallel action A device of narrative construction in which the development of two pieces of action are represented by alternately showing a fragment of one and then a fragment of another. See crosscut. Pre-production The writing, financing, and preparation of the film for production. Production The production with cast, crew under the direction of the producer and the director. Post-production The editing of sound and image as well as the production of special effects and audio dubbing. Slate A device used in front of the film or television camera to display production information such as scene number, take number, date, and other pertinent information. The clapboard, which also provides a simultaneous sound cue for editing, is one type of slate. Synchronous sound Sound that has been recorded synchronized to the picture simultaneously. Take A single recording or a shot. Telephoto shot An image where the depth of field is collapsed, providing no context for the in-focus subject. Tilt Moving the camera along a vertical axis, from up to down or from down to up. Tracking shot Also known as a trucking shot. A shot taken when the camera is in motion on a truck, dolly, or trolley. Trolley A wheeled device on which the camera can be moved while recording a shot. Two shot A shot framing two people usually from the waist up.

Glossary

193

Wide angle shot The use of a wide angle lens, a lens of short focal length, provides the shot with great depth of field. Character and background or context are in focus. Wild shooting Shooting visuals while simultaneously recording sound. Zoom To magnify a chosen area of the image by means of a zoom lens (a lens with a variable focal length). The camera appears to move closer to the subject.

Index 400 Blows, The (Truffaut), surviving the family 124–125 abandonment: Kid with the Bike, The (Dardennes & Dardennes) 48–49; as subtext 160–161 Aldrich, Robert: Attack 131–133; Too Late the Hero 133–134 Allen, Woody 59–60 Altman, Robert: McCabe and Mrs. Miller 38; Nashville 141–144 Americans, The 6–8, 45–46; as redemption story 58 Anderson, Lindsay 58 antagonist 9, 13–14, 23–25, 30, 61, 63–64, 85, 97, 118, 120, 176, 183; in Daniel 161; Homeland 13–17; in melodrama 161; in Westerns 35, 37–38 Antonia’s Line (Gorris), surviving the family 125–126 Arcand, Deny: Barbarian Invasions, The 25; Jesus of Montreal 42 Attack (Aldrich) 131–133; point of view 131 audience, engagement of 8–9, 12, 27–28, 106, 143 Barbarian Invasions The, Arcand, Deny 25 Becker, Wolfgang, Good Bye Lenin! 119–120 Beresford, Bruce, Breaker Moran 85 Bigelow, Kathryn 68–73; Detroit 69; Hurt Locker, The 69; individuals’ struggle 72; pace 117; set pieces 70; Zero Dark Thirty 69 Black Hawk Down (Scott) 59 Boardwalk Empire 5, 6 Boorman, John, Point Blank 30 Bourne Conspiracy, The (Greengrass): pace in 117 Brave One, The (Jordan) 31 Breaker Moran (Beresford), war film 85 Breaking Bad (Gilligan) 8; love–hate theme 93–94; Walter White (character) 5 Brute Force (Dassin) 88–89 Burmese Harp, The (Ichikawa), redemption theme 34 camera, use of in narrative 62 catharsis 8, 74 Caught (Ophuls) 81–83 Chabrol, Claude, Le Boucher 25 chaos 59, 116, 169, 183 Chaos (Serreau), surviving the family 126–217

194

character, in narrative 11 Character (Van Diem), surviving the family 137–138 character arc 17–18, 135 character layer 20; melodramatic 43 character population 11, 16–17, 111 characters 16–18; change and emotional connection to 23–25; pliability of 6; transformative secondary character 24–25 cinema verité, influence of 116 Circle of Deceit (Schlondorff) 67–68 Cleopatra (Mankiewicz), objective camera placement in 113–114 Come and See (Klimov), use of cutaway in 109–110 conflict 9–10, 27, 29, 38, 97, 110, 176; in Daniel (Lumet) 165; Kazan, Elia 154; Lang, Fritz 76; and premise 15–16; and visual techniques 64 context 111–112, 180; in Daniel (Lumet) 165; Frankenheimer, John 64; and visual techniques 105–108, 172–174 Costa Gavras, Music Box 86–88 Counterfeit Traitor, The (Seaton) 33 Count of Monte Cristo, The (novel), revenge theme in 30 Crazy Heart (Cooper) 61 Crazy Stupid Love (Ficarra & Requa) 16 creative phases, shared goals of 176 Daniel (Lumet) 161–166 Dardenne, Jean-Pierre, Kid with the Bike, The 47–49 Dardenne, Luc, Kid with the Bike, The 47–49 Dassin, Jules, Brute Force 88–89 Deadwood 5, 17 Demme, Jonathan: Rachel Getting Married 97–99; Silence of the Lambs, The 52–54 Departed, The: as gangster film 147; use of sound in 147–148 Detective Story, Wyler, William 80–81 Detroit (Bigelow) 69; docudrama style 72–73 devices, narrative 23 Dieterle, William, Life of Emile Zola, The 74–76 directing: and believability 12; and consistency with narrative 12 directing tools see context; script interpretation; subtext; visual techniques directors: Aldrich, Robert 131–134; Allen, Woody 59–60; Altman, Robert 38, 141–144; Anderson, Lindsay 58; Ang, Lee

Index

195

movement 114–115; narrative clarity as goal 105; pace 115–117; point of view 112; shot 106; see also context; sound; visual techniques Eisenstein, Sergei, Potemkin 108 Elizabeth (Khapur) 43 End of the Affair, The (Jordan), sacrifice 121–122 epic 32–33 experimental narrative, emphasis on style 22–23

39; Arcand, Deny 25; Becker, Wolfgang 120; Beresford, Bruce 85; Bigelow, Kathryn 68–73, 117; Boorman, John 30; Chabrol, Claude 25; Cooper, Scott 60–62; Costa Gavras 86–88; Dardenne, Jean-Pierre 47–49; Dardenne, Luc 47–49; Dassin, Jules 88–89; Demme, Jonathan 52–54, 97–99; Dieterle, William 74–76; Donner, Richard 24–25; Dryer, Carl 76, 111; Eastwood, Clint 32–33; Eisenstein, Sergei 108; Ficarra, Glenn 16, 33; Ford, John 134–135; Frank, Scott 176–178; Frankenheimer, John 35–36, 63–65; Gilligan, Vince 5, 8, 93–94; Gilroy, Dan 49–52; Godard, Jean Luc 113; Gorris, Marlene 125–26; Goulding, Edmond 33–34; Greengrass, Paul 117; Grey, James 60; Hitchcock 112–113; Ichikawa, Kon 34; Inarritu, Alejandro 41; Jenkins, Patty 60; Jordan, Neil 31, 121; Kazan, Elia 151–158; Khapur, Shekhar 43; Klimov, Elem 109–110; Lang, Fritz 76–77; Leigh, Mike 90–91; Levring, Kristian 40–41; Lubitsch, Ernst 109; Lumet, Sidney 77, 159–166; Mankiewicz, Joseph 113–14; Mann, Anthony 73, 85, 112; McQueen, Steve 99–101; Mehta, Deepa 91–92; Nemes, Laszlo 167–175; Nichols, Mike 95–97; Ophuls, Max 81; Peckinpah, Sam 44–45; Polanski, Roman 113; Renais, Alain 142; Requa, John 16; Schlondorff, Volker 65–68; Scorsese, Martin 147–148; Scott, Ridley 58; Seaton, George 33; Serreau, Celine 126–127; Sheridan, Taylor 60; Stahl, John 79–80; Stevens, George 43–44; Sturges, Preston 33, 42–43; Tamahori, Lee 136; Truffaut, Francois 124–125; Van Diem, Mike 137–138; Warnier, Regis 120–121; Wyler, William 80–81 docudrama 22, 47, 63, 108, 117; Bigelow, Kathryn 68–73; Kid with the Bike, The (Dardenne & Dardenne) 47–49; style 70–73, 159 documentary: in Daniel (Lumet) 165; style 72–73 Donner, Richard, Inside Moves 24–25 dramatic properties, clash of goals 27 Dryer, Carl, Passion of Joan of Arc, The 76, 108, 111

Game of Thrones 5; surviving the family 138–140 genre 6, 10–14, 29, 58, 116, 136–40; Altman, Robert 141; and editing 118; expectations 18–22; fable 21; gangster film 6, 147; horror 114; Lumet, Sidney 159; organizing structure 25–26; satire 21; thriller 63; unique American 38; Westerns 31, 37–38, 179; see also melodrama; voice-oriented genres Gilligan, Vince, Breaking Bad 5, 8, 93–94 Gilroy, Dan, Nightcrawler 49–52 Godard, Jean Luc, Weekend 113 Good By Lenin! (Becker) 119–20 Good Wife, The 127–129 Gorris, Marlene, Antonia’s Line 125–126 Goulding, Edmond, Razor’s Edge, The 33–34 Great McGinty, The, Sturges, Preston 33 Greengrass, Paul, Bourne Conspiracy, The 117 Griffith, D. W.: match cut 111 Guerre Est Finie, La (Resnais) 145–146

East/West, Warnier, Regis 120–121 Eastwood, Clint, Outlaw Josey Wales, The 32–33 editing strategies: continuity vs. discontinuity 111; image 106; jump cut vs. match cut 105; juxtaposition 109–110;

Hail the Conquering Hero (Sturges) 42–43 Hamlet, revenge theme in 30 Handmaid’s Tale, The, June Osborne/ Offred (character) 6 Hitchcock, Alfred, subjective point of view 112–113

fables: four acts 3–4; Tin Drum, The (Schlondorff) 66–67; as voice-oriented genre 21–22 Ficarra, Glenn, Crazy Stupid Love 16 Field, Syd, Screenplay, the Foundation of Screenwriting (book) 18 Fire (Mehta) 91–92; casting 92; close-up in 108 Ford, John: Searchers, The 39–40; They Were Expendable 134–135 four act structure 26 Frank, Scott, Godless 176–184 Frankenheimer, John: Manchurian Candidate, The 35–36; visual techniques 63–65

196

Index

Homeland 5–6, 13–17, 45–46; love–hate theme 79 Hostiles (Cooper) 61–62 House of Cards 5 Hugo, Victor, Les Miserables (novel) 34 Hunger (McQueen) 99–101 Hurt Locker, The (Bigelow) 69; docudrama style 70–71 Ichikawa, Kon, Burmese Harp, The 34 importance of context, in Winchester 73 (Mann) 112 Inarritu, Alejandro, Revenant, The 41 Inge, William (screenwriter), Splendor in the Grass (Kazan) 151 Inside Moves (Donner) 24–25 Jesus of Montreal (Arcand) 42; as redemption story 42 Jordan, Neil: Brave One, The 31; End of the Affair, The 121 jump cut 105, 110 justice–injustice theme 74–78, 81–83, 133–136; in Music Box (Costa Gavras) 86–88; in war films 84 juxtaposition: Eisenstein, Sergei 110; use of editing to express 110 Kazan, Elia: and acting style 154; Spendor in the Grass 151–158; Splendor in the Grass 151 Khapur, Shekhar, Elizabeth 43 Kid with the Bike, The (Dardenne & Dardenne) 47–49 Klimov, Elem, Come and See 109–110 Lang, Fritz 76–77 Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl) 79–80 Le Boucher, Chabrol, Claude 25 Lee, Ang, Ride with the Devil 39 Leigh, Mike, Secrets and Lies 90–91 Les Miserables (novel), as model redemption story 34–35 Levring, Kristian, Salvation, The 39–41 Life of Emile Zola, The (Dieterle), biographies 74–76 Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Schlondorff) 65–66 love–hate theme 74, 78–83, 89–94; Homeland 79 Lubitsch, Ernst, Ninotchka 109 Lumet, Sidney: Daniel 159–166; Verdict, The 77 M (Lang) 76–77 Mad Men 5

Manchurian Candidate, The (Frankenheimer), as redemption story 35–36 Mankiewicz, Joseph, Cleopatra 113–114 Mann, Anthony, Winchester 73 38, 85, 112 McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman) 38 McQueen, Steve, Hunger 99–101 Mehta, Deepa, Fire 91–92 melodrama 18, 118, 161; Caught (Ophuls) 81; Chaos (Serreau) 126; Elizabeth (Khapur) 43; family 135; Nightcrawler (Gilroy) 49, 51; Place in the Sun, A (Stevens) 43; Razor’s Edge, The (Goulding) 33–34 Metropolis (Lang) 76–77 motifs, Westerns 37–38 Music Box (Costa Gavras) 86–88 narrative: devices 23, 24; and plot 23; and premise 15; reconfiguration of genre 41; script 57; technical requirements for 10–11; and three act structure 26; use of subtext 37–38 Nashville (Altman) 141–144; genre 20–22; as satire 142 Nemes, Laszlo: Son of Saul 167–175 Nichols, Mike, Regarding Harry 95–97 Nightcrawler (Gilroy) 49–52; importance of surprise 51 Ninotchka (Lubitsch), use of cutaway in 109 non-linear film 21 Notebook, The (Szász) 24–25 objective camera placement, in Weekend (Godard) 113 Once Were Warriors (Tamahori), surviving the family 136–140 Ophuls, Max, Caught 81–83 Outlaw Josey Wales, The (Eastwood), and revenge theme 32–33 Out of the Furnace (Cooper) 61 pace 115–117 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (Dryer) 108, 111; use of close-ups in 76 Peckinpah, Sam, Ride the High Country 44–45 Place in the Sun, A (Stevens) 43–44; and redemption theme 43–44 plot 9, 14, 27, 54; critical moment of 24; and genre 25–26, 85, 117–118; layers 19–20; and narrative 23; need for emotional credibility 24; in revenge theme 33; and sensation 20, 23 Point Blank (Boorman), revenge theme 30

Index

point of view 12, 58, 74; Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 126; Attack (Aldrich) 131; Bigelow, Kathryn 70; Daniel (Lumet) 161–162, 164–165; Frankheimer, John 64–65; Game of Thrones 140; Godard, Jean Luc 113; Hitchcock, Alfred 112–113; McQueen, Steve 100; Polanski, Roman 113; Son of Saul (Nemes) 172–173; and subjectivity 112 Polanski, Roman, subjective point of view 113 Potemkin (Eisenstein): close-up 108; juxtaposition in 110 premise 15–17, 20, 107; in 3–act structure 19; long shot 107; moral choice 17 Prison Break (television show) 122–124 production: phases of 3; process 15, 94 Rachel Getting Married (Demme) 97–99 Razor’s Edge, The (Goulding), and redemption theme 33–34 redemption theme 33–37, 42–46; 110; Americans, The 45–46; Burmese Harp, The (Ichikawa) 34; and character 30–33; Crazy Heart (Cooper) 61; Elizabeth (Khapur) 43; Hail the Conquering Hero (Sturges) 42–43; Hostiles (Cooper) 61–62; Jesus of Montreal (Arcand) 42; Out of the Furnace (Cooper) 62; Place in the Sun, A (Stevens) 43–44; Ride the High Country (Peckinpah) 44–45 Regarding Harry (Nichols) 95–97 Requa, John, Crazy Stupid Love 16 Resnais, Alan, Guerre Est Finie, La 142 Revenant, The (Inarritu) 41; Westerns 41 revenge theme 30–33, 37–42; Count of Monte Cristo, The (novel) 30; creative possibilities of 37–46; Hamlet 30; Point Blank (Boorman) 30; role of antagonist in 30; and three act structure 30–33; Western motifs 37–46 Ride the High Country (Peckinpah) 44–45; Westerns 44–45 Ride with the Devil (Lee) 39; Westerns 39 Robeson, Paul, use in Daniel (Lumet) 161–162 Salvation, The (Levring) 39–41; Westerns 39–40 satire 21; Nashville (Altman) 141–142 Schlondorff, Volker: Circle of Deceit 67–68; Lost Honor of Katharina Blum 65–66; Tin Drum, The 66–67; use of camera in narrative 65–68 Scorsese, Martin, Departed, The 147–148 Scott, Ridley, Black Hawk Down 58 screenplay 13, 15–20; Daniel (Lumet) 165; see also screenwriter; script interpretation

197

Screenplay, the Foundation of Screenwriting (Field) 18 screenwriter: Doctorow, E. L. 159–160, 166; Inge, William 151 screen story 24, 25, 27 script interpretation: by director 57–63, 119, 161, 165; see also screenplay Searchers, The (Ford) 39–40; Westerns 39–40 Seaton, George, Counterfeit Traitor, The 33 Secrets and Lies (Leigh) 90–91 Serreau, Celine, Chaos 126–127 set pieces: camera movement in 114–115; Hurt Locker, The (Bigelow) 70 Shakespeare, William 4 Silence of the Lambs, The (Demme) 52–54; fusion of plot and character 54; screenplay 52; Talley, Ted (screenwriter) 52–54 Son of Saul (Nemes): directing strategies 172; editing strategies 174–175; narrative 167; point of view 175 Sopranos, The 5 sound: in Daniel (Lumet) 161–162; use of 105, 111, 117, 136, 141–143, 145, 147, 158; see also soundtrack soundtrack 141–142, 167 Splendor in the Grass (Kazan) 151–158; editing 154; and interior narrative 158; use of reaction shots in 158 Stahl, John, Leave Her to Heaven 79–80 Stevens, George, Place in the Sun, A 43–44 stories: see screen story story forms, and editing style 117–118 story strategies 176; emotional through line 181–182; polarities 176–180; subtext 184; surprise 180–181; tone 182–184 structure 18, 139; four act see four act structure; character layer 20, 43; as key to screenwriting success 18; layers of 19, 25, 147, 168; in narrative 11; as organized by genre 25–26; plot layer 19–20; purposes of 3; three acts see three act structure Sturges, Preston: Great McGinty, The 33; Hail the Conquering Hero 42–43 subtext 7, 37, 57, 66, 84, 90–91, 95; Americans, The (television show) 42–44; Attack (Aldrich) 132; Character (Van Dieme) 137; Departed, The (Scorsese) 141; Detective Story (Wyler) 81; Game of Thrones 138; Good Wife, The 129; Hunger (McQueen) 100; and mid-shot 107; Music Box (Costa Garvas) 87; Rachel Getting Married (Demme) 98; and reaction shot 109; and redemption theme 42–44; Revenant, The (Innaritu) 41–42; Schlondorff, Volker 67, 68; and Westerns 38–40 surviving the family 124–129, 136–140; as family melodrama 135

198

Index

Talley, Ted (screenwriter), Silence of the Lambs, The (Demme) 52–54 Tamahori, Lee, Once Were Warriors 136 technical dimension, importance of 10–12 television, four act structure 23 television shows: Boardwalk Empire 5–6; Breaking Bad 5; Deadwood 5; Game of Thrones 5, 138–410; Good Wife, The 127–219; Homeland 81; House of Cards 5; Mad Men 5; Prison Break 122–124; Sopranos, The 5 theme: vs. genre 29; justice–injustice see justice–injustice theme; love–hate see love–hate theme; oppression 161; vs. premise 15; redemption see redemption theme; revenge see revenge theme; sacrifice 119, 127–129; surviving the family see surviving the family; see also abandonment theme They Were Expendable (Ford) 134–135 three act structure 19–26; and narrative 26 Tin Drum, The (Schlondorff) fable 66–67 tone, in narrative 11 Too Late the Hero (Aldrich) 133–134 Truffaut, Francois, 400 Blows, The 124–125 unique American genre, Westerns as 38 use of camera in narrative, Schlondorff, Volker 65–68

Van Diem, Mike, Character 137–138 Verdict, The (Lumet), justice–injustice theme 77–78 visual techniques: close-up 108; cutaway 109–110; extreme close-up 108–109; extreme long shot 106–107; Frankenheimer, John 63–65; jump cut 105; long shot 107; mid-shot 107–108; reaction shot 109; see also editing strategies voice-oriented genres 20–22 war films 84; Breaker Moran (Beresford) 85; They Were Expendable (Ford) 134; Too Late the Hero (Aldrich) 134 Warnier, Regis, East/West 120–121 Weekend (Godard), objective camera placement in 113 Westerns: McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman) 38; motifs 37–38; Revenant, The [Inarritu] 41; revenge theme 37–42; Ride the High Country (Peckinpah) 44–45; Ride with the Devil (Lee) 39; Salvation, The (Levring) 39–40; Searchers, The (Ford) 39–40; as unique American genre 38; Winchester 73 (Mann) 38 Winchester 73 (Mann) 38; importance of context in 112 Wyler, William, Detective Story 80–81 Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow) 69, 71–72