CHAPTER 4

A DIRECTOR'S SCREEN GRAMMAR

 

SCREEN LANGUAGE

As children we learn to communicate because language is a tool to get or accomplish things. My elder daughter's first sentence was, “Meat, I like it.” Effective, if a little shaky in syntax. All languages operate under conventions, and those determining screen language began developing in the 1890s as camera operators and actors competed to rush elementary stories before paying audiences. Soon they were joined by directors and editors as movies became big business and a production line evolved requiring greater division of labor. Though the first movies were very simple, most of today's screen language emerged in the first two decades of silent cinema.

Separately, in the world's various centers of production, filmmakers felt their way toward the same movie grammar through trial and error. During the 1920s, needing an efficient common language to communicate with a vast, multilingual, and mostly illiterate population, filmmakers in the post-revolutionary Russian government made a concerted effort to formulate screen language. Their theoretical writings do not make easy reading and are of limited use. Even today, theory among working filmmakers is mostly conspicuous by its absence—hardly surprising as languages flowered for millennia before anyone needed philology.

FILM AS A REPRODUCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Like any language, film's is evolving to enable the stories we want and the form we want them in. It uses the juxtaposition of images, actions, and sounds, as well as spoken and written language. The visual and behavioral aspects of film are universally accessible because human beings everywhere have common processes of perception and emotion. Proof of this is that those in the industry discuss a film in progress in terms of “what works.” Be it an action, rhythm, shot, line, or character's motivation, the dialogue hinges on what works. Each person calls on his or her bank of life experience to recognize what is authentic and organic to the story and its characters, and what is off kilter. Without this innate ability to recognize authenticity in a stream of events on the screen, neither the cinema nor drama itself could exist.

Isn't film language easy to use if it relies on something common to everyone? To use it superficially is easy, but to use it more profoundly is not easy at all. That's because we lack a detailed knowledge of our own perceptual and emotional processes. Our perceptions work automatically and feed our feelings, but we have no need to know how they work together—not, that is, until we want to make effective film.

THE NEED FOR A HUMANE VOICE

Because film is realized technologically, the beginner sees its obstacles as technological, too. Therefore, this is what most schools and most beginning film students attend to, unless enlightened teaching places their attention on larger issues. But there are endless reasons to keep your eyes lowered: logistical and financial details and the need for persistence, empathy, humility, and self-knowledge to lead other people—all this is needed to construct even the shell of a fiction story.

Most people start directing by modeling themselves on admired filmmakers. This is natural and necessary, but it holds the same dangers as when actors study other actors. Stanislavsky warned that actors must learn from life, not from the tricks used by other actors. If acting and film language are rooted in human perceptions, actions, and reactions, then life itself is the primary resource, and the works of those who simulate it are secondary.

This is liberating because it means whenever you become aware of how your perceptions and emotions interact, you are working at developing film language and film subjects. An active involvement in unraveling consciousness and a willingness to make many short films are the path toward an individual—as opposed to mechanical—writing or screen “voice,” one with the force of simplicity and truth. Then other people's work becomes not a model to emulate but an example of a solution to particular problems you are trying to solve.

Cinema language is really the most evolved model we have developed of human consciousness at work. Human experience and human communicating always involve a point of view, and what is put on the screen should, too. By point of view I mean more than a political outlook or philosophically influenced way of seeing, which can be learned or copied. Your point of view on your family, for instance, cannot be copied because it is too individual and too informed by complex experience. What you have to say about your family is almost certainly interesting, even arresting, and will tell the listener much about your outlook, beliefs, and vulnerabilities. A point of view is simply a full human perception, with all its inbuilt convictions, loyalties, and contradictions. It is not a manifesto or teaching strategy and is not meant to educate or improve others. It is a human soul, something invariably present in work that audiences and critics have always instinctively valued.

Any endeavor that sets out to involve the human heart requires that the members of its authorial team be treading the demanding path of self-realization. How you use narrative to address your audience will only be as engaging as the concerns in the hearts and minds of your team. Many professionals are unaware of this because the film industry uses assembly-line methods that provide their own momentum and meaning. Thus, most filmed fiction is soulless because it lacks an honest heart and an overarching human point of view.

Yet an authorial voice of sorts is often present in students' first works. Sadly, it disappears when their attention moves toward glossier skills. To help you avoid this dehumanization in your work and to focus you always on what is human in the process, here is an unconventional screen grammar that relates every aspect of film language to human behavior and perception. By picking subjects with special meaning to you, and by assimilating and using the analogies for human consciousness in the next section, you will always be evoking the psychological and physical viewpoint of an involved observer, which is how a point of view is constructed.

THE ELEMENTS OF FILM LANGUAGE

Let's look over the elemental units of film language. They correspond to glancing, reacting, studying, walking, looking around, whirling about, stepping back, rising, sinking, scanning, running, gliding, and a host of other expressive bodily and psychological interactions. Film is a reproduction of consciousness, and whatever is within a human being also has its outward, bodily expression. Conversely, a person's outward movement, when it's authentic, always expresses his or her inner state. Film happens in the here and now and expresses human feeling though a texture of seeing, hearing, and moving.

FIXED CAMERA POSITION

A fixed camera position gives the feeling you get when you stand in one spot and look around. Depending on the context, a static shot can variously convey being secure, fixed, trapped, contemplative, wise, or just plain stuck. Yasujiro Ozu's famous Tokyo Story (1953), about an elderly couple discovering that none of their married children can make time for their visit, is shot from a single camera height and contains just one movement, a gentle pan, throughout the movie. See the film to realize how natural such stasis can be. It makes you aware of how routinely camera movement is debased through overuse.

A shot is a framed image, which might be taken by accident, or more often is an image recorded by someone for whom it had meaning. Think of a shot as equivalent to a glance, which can be short or long and lingering. Of course, looking at anything or anybody starts any number of thoughts, questions, and feelings (such as curiosity, fear, boredom, wonder, weary acceptance). Shots evoke more than their subject, for they make us wonder who is doing the seeing, and why.

Brief Shots are like the cursory glance that ends immediately once we know what we were seeking. We do this all the time. Often we do this to orient ourselves in a new situation or to look in many places in search of something. Think about where your eye goes and how long it stays as you search, coupon in hand, for the new, low-sodium Nutty Wheatlets in the supermarket.

Held Shots are like the long looks we indulge in. Maybe we are too weary to look around anymore or something significant or interesting requires sustained attention, such as some mystifying street graffiti. Maybe we watch a store customer we suspect of shoplifting with the hope of catching him. Maybe it's a friend leaving for a long journey whose last smile we want to commit to memory. Long looks therefore break into two classifications: resting looks and studying looks.

Close Shots reproduce the feeling of taking a close and intensive look. Maybe it's something small requiring close attention like a watch face, or something large such as the surface of a great weathered rock. There are also other, more psychologically determined reasons to dwell on something. Imagine a person who waits by a phone in a large room. When it rings, the person waiting will learn the results of a medical test. All that exists for that person is the phone and its terrifying aura of power. In this case the close shot reproduces a kind of emotional focus that makes us blind even to grandiose surroundings.

Wide Shots approximate the way we take in something large, busy, or distant. We look at it until we have located what we need to examine in more detail. Coming out of a dark church into a busy street, for instance, takes adapting to the new circumstances while we work out the direction home. Often we must establish the nature of our new surroundings, hence the common term establishing shot. Think of this shot as the long moment upon arriving at a party when you establish the room, establish who is there, and establish who is talking to whom.

MOVING CAMERA

Camera movements, like their human-movement equivalents, never happen without a motivation. Camera movements divide into three kinds of motivation, which resemble active and passive ways of being present at an event:

• Subject-motivated, in which camera movement responds to stimuli provided by the action. The camera might follow a moving subject or adapt to a changing composition. It is a relatively passive mode of interaction that adapts and is subject-driven.
• Search-motivated, in which the camera's “mind” actively pursues a logic of inquiry or expectation. This is a more active mode that probes, anticipates, hypothesizes, or interrogates the action.
• Boredom-motivated, in which the camera simulates the human tendency to look around when we run out of stimuli.

Camera movements generally have three phases, each with its own set of considerations:

• Starting composition (held for a particular duration before the movement)
• Movement (with its particular direction, speed, and even its subject to follow, such as a moving vehicle)
• Finishing composition (held for a particular duration after the movement)

Camera Movements from a Static Position

These movements convey the feeling of looking from a fixed position and include turning, looking up and down, and looking more closely.

Pan (short for panoramic) shots happen when the camera pivots horizontally, mimicking the way we turn our heads when scanning a horizontal subject such as a landscape or bridge. Direction of travel is indicated as “pan left” or “pan right.”

Tilt shots are like a pan shot except the camera pivots vertically, reproducing the action of looking up or down the length of a vertical subject like a tree or high building. Direction of travel is indicated as “tilt up” or “tilt down.”

Zoom ins or zoom outs are made with a lens of adjustable focal length. Although zooming gives the impression of movement toward or away from the subject, picture perspective actually remains identical because the proportion of foreground compared with background objects stays the same. For perspective to change as it does when we walk, the camera itself must move.

TRAVELING CAMERA MOVEMENTS

These occur when the whole camera moves—up, down, forward, sideways, or backward through space, or in a combination. Traveling camera movements impart a range of kinesthetic feelings associated with walking, running, approaching, climbing, ascending, descending, retreating, and so on.

Craning (up or down) is a movement in which the camera body is raised or lowered in relation to the subject. The movement corresponds with the feeling of sitting down or standing up—sometimes as an act of conclusion, sometimes to “rise above,” sometimes to acquire a better sightline.

Dollying, tracking, or trucking are interchangeable names for any movement by which the camera moves horizontally through space. In life, our thoughts or feelings often motivate us to move closer to or farther away from that which commands our attention. We move sideways to see better or to avoid an obstacle in our sightline. Associations with this sort of camera movement include walking, running, riding a bike, riding in a car, gliding, skating, sliding, sailing, flying, floating, or drifting.

Crab dollying is when the camera travels sideways like a crab. The equivalent is stalking someone or accompanying them and looking at them sideways as you walk.

SHOTS IN JUXTAPOSITION

When any two shots are juxtaposed, we look for a relationship and meaning between them. In this way A + B does not equal AB, but C—a third meaning. In the documentary film about the September 11, 2001 sabotage of the World Trade Center by Jules and Gedeon Naudet, 9/11 (2002), a single shot reveals how a crumpled aircraft engine cowling has landed next to an equally crumpled waste bin whose sign says, “Do Not Litter.” These images juxtaposed within a single shot are a comment not only about the irony of fate, but about the larger irony in which airliners smash into New York life.

Juxtaposing is used extensively in advertising to implant associations: the richly attired couple next to the Mercedes; the bag of fertilizer standing amid a rich green lawn; the bride in her wedding dress running barefoot on the beach outside a hotel. A comic strip juxtaposes a series of key frames to compress a lengthy process and suggest its essence. Each new frame makes us imagine the progression from the previous one.

Film's favorite form of juxtaposing is the cut from one image to another, and the juxtaposing of scene against scene, making the cinema master of time and space. At this juncture we are trained to expect a narrative intention. Figure 4-1 and the remainder of this section show some examples with explanations and illustrate an engaging disagreement between two early Russian editing theorists.

Continuity and expository editing: Examples 1 through 5 (see Figure 4-1) illustrate Pudovkin's categories of juxtaposition in which exposition (building the information of a story line) and continuity are paramount. With the coming of sound and theatrical moviemaking, the illusion of continuity during dialogue scenes with many changes of angle became paramount, and most editing focused on creating continuity.

Dialectical editing: Examples 6 through 12 (see Figure 4-1) show the preferred methods of Eisenstein, for whom the essence of narrative art lay in dialectical conflict. His juxtapositions therefore highlight contrast and contradiction, and as they inform, they argue by creating contrasts and irony.

Action match editing: Editing that is too obvious can easily draw unwelcome attention to authorial manipulation. Early filmmakers discovered that the best way to edit from a tight shot to a wide shot, or vice versa, was to place the cut not in the static part of the action, but right in the most dynamic. Like a pickpocket whose craft is most safely practiced during a flurry of activity, or a conjuror using sleight of hand, the action match cut allows an image change to pass unnoticed under a cover of compelling action. When you want the eye not to notice something, seduce it with movement.

Ear and eye together: The mind has only so much processing power, so you can take our attention away from sound by showing the eye some compelling action (during an unpleasant atmosphere change, for instance), or you can mask a bad picture cut by introducing a new sound element. You will in each case direct our critical faculties away from the fiasco.

Sound juxtaposing: Sound in film realism simply backs up the picture—what you see determines what you hear, so nothing you would expect is missing. But sound effects, music, and language are also frequently juxtaposed against picture to create not an imitation of reality, but a composite set of impressions for the audience to interpret. Director Robert Altman is famous for developing dense picture and sound counterpoint in his films.

POINT OF VIEW

Meaning and signification are a cultural work in progress and thus are always in slow but inexorable evolution. Effective film communication depends on maintaining collusion between audience and communicator by providing a set of

conventions the audience can “read.” Ethnographers noticed, after projecting edited footage to isolated tribespeople, that their subjects understood the “story” until the film cut to a close-up. The tribespeople lost concentration because they failed to understand why the camera eye suddenly “jumped close.” They were unaware that a close-up does not necessarily collapse space; it can act like a telescope that diminishes and intensifies the field of attention and clears away what surrounds and obscures the center of interest.

But whose center of interest? You might reply, “The audience's,” but the answer is more complex and much more useful to film directing because it places the persona of a storyteller ahead of the audience's reception of the story.

Perception by a camera is a mechanical process in which sensitized film at the focal plane is affected by incoming light. Perception by humans is radically different because, unlike a machine, we are able to evolve an intellectual and emotional framework within which to organize what our senses bring us. The conventional narrative or inner internal monologue (also called voice-over) illustrates this because it verbalizes the process.

THE CONCERNED OBSERVER AND THE STORYTELLER

Witnessing: Let's say that human perception is the inner dialogue of ideas, feelings, and intentions we maintain as we navigate the tests posed by an environment. This interior activity is not simply a reaction or a discrete parallel activity, for it forms our resolve and initiates our actions. We are seldom dispassionate observers, but are usually concerned and involved.

The literary or oral storyteller is a little different, for he (or she, of course) seeks to affect the listener by a selective presentation of bygone events. Think of how a comedian might describe a wedding. Through the telling, he aims to sustain and modulate a funny event in the reader's imagination.

Storytelling by a camera is by comparison an anomaly. Film is always now and appears to show us an uninflected, ongoing present. Unless you force the past tense on what the audience sees with a past tense narration, film always lapses into the present tense. How can you retell the present? The most you can do is observe, react, and navigate, which is what the camera does unless it serves to reproduce what a character is experiencing. A camera and editing can do all this without so much as a word, causing any apparent mediation to vaporize, even though a selective intelligence is silently guiding our eyes and ears as much as any literary mediator could.

The Concerned Observer: Let's place this involved, perceptual process in a notional figure we'll call the Concerned Observer. Seeing and hearing, this onlooker forms ideas and anticipations. But a witness only experiences and doesn't necessarily relay anything. How and why the Concerned Observer witnesses will be important, but it won't be any form of communication until witness turns into communicator.

The Storyteller: In this situation our Observer changes from informed witness to an active, opinionated Storyteller, like a comedian who describes a wedding and makes the audience laugh. A Storyteller is someone through whose active, creative intelligence we perceive the film's events.

WHY DIRECTING MUST BE STORYTELLING

Creating the narrative wit, intelligence, and emotional involvement of a Storyteller is central to conscious, integrated film directing. This is where the events cease to be mechanically reflected through technique and appear through the prism of a human heart and intelligence. I want to make perception as personal and non-abstract as possible in a film because in everyday life, perception is so routine that we seldom notice how or why we observe. Even the word “observe” has misleadingly passive, scientific association, when in reality it is a highly active process and freighted with an intricate interplay of feelings, associations, and ideas—all leading constantly to actions.

Something you have to deal with in filmmaking is the existence of not just one axis in cinema, but many. This is where we'll employ the Concerned Observer.

SCENE AXIS ESSENTIALS

LINES OF TENSION AND THE SCENE AXIS

Notice, when two people have an animated conversation near you, how your attention shifts back and forth between them. Figure 4-2 represents Person A and Person B being watched by observer O, who might be yourself but whom it may be helpful to think of as a child because children are highly observant, have strong emotions, and are often invisible to their seniors. As O your sight line plays back and forth from A to B and back again as they talk. Your eye is following an invisible line of tension between them, the active pathway of their words, looks, awareness, and volition. In film parlance this is called the scene or subject-to-subject axis.

Every observed two-person scene has additionally an observer-to-subject axis, which in my example (see Figure 4-2) is at right angles to the scene axis between A and B. This is called the camera or camera-to-subject axis. The term axis depersonalizes the situation and makes it sound technical when all along it is intensely human. The observer (you involved in watching two people in conversation, for instance) has a strong sense of relationship to each person, to the invisible connection between them, and to what passes between them. When you are watching this way, you become the Concerned Observer, to whom all these connections are significant.

In turning to look from person to person, the Observer can be replaced by a camera panning (that is, moving horizontally) between the two speakers. Now let's see in Figure 4-3 what happens when O moves closer to A and B's axis.

Not to miss any of the action, the Observer must switch quickly between A and B. When they do this, human beings blink their eyes to avoid the unpleasant blur as the eye is swished between widely separated subjects. To the brain, momentarily shutting your eyes produces two static images with virtually no period of transition between them. And so you have—the cut! Cutting between two camera angles taken from the same camera position reproduces this familiar experience. The cinematic equivalent probably emerged when someone tried

cutting out a nauseatingly fast pan between two characters. It “worked” because its counterpart was already embedded in human experience.

CROSSING THE LINE OR SCENE AXIS

In life, we are used to occupying an observing position in relation to events, as O does to A and B. The camera generally mimics this treatment of space by staying on one side only of a scene axis. So long as O stays on one side, A will always be looking left to right (L-R) in the frame and B always right to left (R-L). In Chapter 30, Figures 30-3A and 30-3B, you will find a ground plan and storyboard that show what happens if you cross the line, shoot a shot from the other side of the scene axis, and then intercut it. If there is an observational logic, it need not be a disaster, and in any case there is an established device that allows you to cross the axis, or line, if you need to. See the following sections on Screen Direction and Changing Screen Direction. In the meantime, let's continue with the figures at either end of the scene axis, or line.

THE ACTOR AND THE ACTED-UPON

Consider the different ways you follow a conversation. Sometimes you merely look toward whomever speaks next. Other times, when the talk becomes heated, you find yourself looking at the listener, not the speaker. What's going on here?

A human interaction can be likened to a tennis game. At any given moment, one player acts (serves the ball), and the other is acted upon (receives it). When we see a player prepare to make an aggressive serve, our eye runs ahead of the ball to see how the recipient will deal with the onslaught. We see her run, jump, swing her racquet, and intercept the ball. When it becomes certain she's going to succeed, our eye flicks back to see how the first player is placed and how she will handle the return. The cycle of actor and acted-upon has been reversed because our eye jumps back to the original player before the ball returns.

Unconsciously, we monitor every human interaction the same way because we know everybody is constantly trying to get or do something, no matter where, what, or who is involved. A game ritualizes this interchange as a competition, but to the film specialist (which you are now becoming) every conversation has potential to be equally complex and structured.

Of course, we nice, middle-class people hate to think of ourselves making demands. We picture ourselves as patient, tolerant victims being worked on by a greedy and selfish world. Seldom do we see how we act on others, except during our occasional triumphs. But the fact is—and you must take this to heart if you intend to work in drama—that everyone acts upon those around him, even when he uses the strategy of passivity.

To the analytic, any time one person acts on another, there is always an actor and an acted-upon. Usually, but not always, the situation alternates rapidly, but it is through actions and reactions that we measure another person's character, mood, and motives.

Now see how you watch two people conversing. Your sightline switches according to your notion of who is acting upon whom. As in watching tennis, you'll find that as soon as you've decided how A has begun acting on B, your eye switches in mid-sentence to see how B is taking it. Depending on how B adapts and acts back, you soon find yourself returning to A. Once you can identify this in action, most shooting and editing decisions become obvious.

TEXT AND AUTHORSHIP ESSENTIALS

SUBTEXT

While observing a conversation, you are really searching for behavioral clues to unlock the hidden motives and inner lives of the characters. Beneath the visible and audible surface lies the situation's subtext, or hidden meaning—something we are always seeking. Most of the work a director does is not with the text but in response to the subtext.

The text is what the characters do or what action they take verbally. But why do they say what they say and do what they do? This is the purview of subtext. This hidden life—the character's hidden agenda, whatever it is they are trying to get or do—is something developed by the director and the actors, and something that continues developing during rehearsal, shooting, and even in editing. It is the editor's job, in addition to putting the pieces together, to liberate the subtextual possibilities that eluded everyone else. Lengthening a reaction before a character speaks and allowing for a more complex subtext may implant a quite different idea of her interior action and motivation.

Shot Point of View is the how and why of the way we look at something. It is the intention behind the combination of a shot's content and form. At a photo exhibition you are guessing what the photographers were thinking and feeling as they decided to take each shot. You assess this from what each shot includes and from what it excludes or implies. For instance, a shot of a man staring offscreen focuses our attention on how rather than what he sees. Shot point of view is also used more prosaically to imply where the shot was taken from, such as from a high building down into a plaza.

Shot Denotation and Shot Connotation describe different ways to register an image. If we see a bus, a pair of worn-out shoes, and a man in a wheelchair, we may only see what those images denote. If their context encourages us to ascribe special meanings to them, such as vacation, poverty, and power brought low, then we are reacting to associations those images connote. Denotation is what a thing is, connotation is what it seems to mean, a cultural set of associations the image-maker uses to channel the spectator into a particular path of speculation.

When we see carefully framed shots of a flower or of a hand lighting a candle, they denote a flower and a hand lighting a candle. But a flower on a battlefield might connote a single, fragile life, natural beauty, devotion, or a host of other ideas. The hand lighting a candle in the trenches of that battlefield might connote, depending on context, hope being kept alive, remembering the dead or more prosaically the risk of getting shot. Responding to connotation means going beyond what is literally there and calling on the larger framework of implied meanings.

AUTHORIAL POINT OF VIEW

Connotations of an image that imply a symbol or metaphor prompt us to wonder about the heart and mind that chose to take note of the flower or the hand lighting the candle, each in its particular context. This is the authorial point of view, the Storyteller's sense of what is finally significant.

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC METAPHORS

The flower and lighting candle images mentioned previously are acceptable because they are organic to the battlefield situation. If instead you interpolated a naked baby into the battlefield to symbolize, say, how vulnerable humanity is, it would look like a heavy-handed editorial comment because babies, naked or dressed for dinner, do not belong with and are not organic to, trench warfare. In any case, because these images I have chosen are clichés, they use worn-out language and are not acceptable. From a sophisticated modern audience they might even draw a groan.

UNACCEPTABLE POINT OF VIEW

The more remote material is in terms of time and place, the more easily you can see how a film imposes meanings, and how pervasive were the received truths of the day. Any footage taken in colonial days is likely to disclose the unreflecting racial supremacy of the day, in which natives were treated at best like children. Nobody at the time questioned the favoritism of the filmmaking, for it was “true” in the eyes of the white beholders.

The parallel should give us due warning: What we view of present-day footage of familiar scenes may seem objective and value-free. But representations, whether of actuality or of life enacted or re-enacted, are always constructs. This means they are always subjective and imply a triangular relationship among content, Storyteller, and viewer. You must be able to identify what an implied point of view is, decide what biases it incorporates, and assess its overall credibility. In Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle, the narrator, is so crazed that he is plainly what literature calls an “unreliable narrator.” Usually a point of view, especially one established through camerawork alone, is much more subtle and difficult to pin down.

Imagine you are hunting through archival World War II shots in a film library, as I once did at the Imperial War Museum in London. After you recover from the atmosphere of a place so packed with sad ghosts, you notice that by today's standards, the cameras and film stock from this era were less developed. Even so, each shot testifies, in addition to its subject, to different kinds of involvement from its makers, that is, different emotions, emphases, and agendas.

You run a shot that some librarian has neatly labeled “Russian soldiers, vicinity of Warsaw, running into sniper fire.” From the first frame you notice how emotionally loaded everything seems: It's shot in high-contrast black-and-white that accentuates the mood, and the air is smoky because lighting comes from behind the subjects. Here as elsewhere, filming is undeniably a mechanical process of reproduction, but everything has been polarized by the interrelationship among human choice, technology, subject, and environment. All these things contribute to the powerful feelings you are getting. The camera enters the soldiers' world because it runs jerkily with them instead of shooting from a sheltered tripod. You catch your breath when a soldier falls because the cameraman almost trips over his fallen comrade. The camera recovers and continues onward, leaving the wounded soldier to his fate. Then suddenly it plunges to the ground. Framing some out-of-focus mud, the camera motor runs out. With slow horror you realize you have just accompanied a cameraman in his last seconds of work. Desolated, you replay his shot several times. As you stop on particular frames, it seems as though time and destiny can be replayed, re-entered, and relived. Even when you replay something and know full well what's going to happen, film is always and forever in the present tense. Film permits destiny to be played and replayed.

Now someone brings you a photo of a dead cameraman lying face down on the battlefield, his camera fallen from his hands. You recognize the knob of mud from his last seconds of film. It's him, your poor cameraman. Left alone with him, you ponder what made him willing to gamble his life to do his work. You wonder whom he left behind and whether they ever learned how he died. Now you are his witness because you died with him. Somewhere inside you his work, his good intentions, his gamble that ended in death will always be with you. You are aching with sadness, but he has given you something and you have grown. Now you carry him in the recesses of yourself. You have become him. There can be a world of meaning in a single shot. Here authorship and the author's fate converge.

SCREEN DIRECTION AND ANGLES

Screen direction is a term describing a subject's direction or movement, especially when a subject's movement links several shots, as in a chase (Figure 4-4). An important screen convention is that characters and their movements are generally observed from only one side of the scene axis. Let's imagine you ignored this and intercut one part of a parade moving across the screen L-R (left to right) with another going R-L. The audience would expect the two factions to collide, as when police move into a position where they can block a demonstration.

Now suppose you run ahead of the parade to watch it file past a landmark. In the new position you would see marchers entering an empty street from the same screen direction. But in life, you might cross the parade's path to watch it from the other side. This would be unremarkable because you initiated the relocation. But in film, cutting to a camera position across the axis must be specially set up or it reverses some screen directions and causes disorientation for the spectator.

CHANGING SCREEN DIRECTION

You can make a parade change screen direction by filming at an angle to a corner (Figure 4-5). The marchers enter in the background going screen right to screen left (R-L), turn the corner in the foreground, and exit L-R. In essence they have changed screen direction. If subsequent shots are to match, their action will also have to be L-R.

Another solution to changing screen direction is to dolly during a gap in the parade so the camera visibly crosses the subject's axis of movement (Figure 4-6). Remember that any change of observing camera orientation to the action must

be shown onscreen. Screen direction can be changed without trouble if we see the change onscreen.

DIFFERENT ANGLES ON THE SAME ACTION

So far we have found everyday human correlations for every aspect of film language. But can there be one to justify using very different angles to cover the same action? We said earlier that cutting together long and closer shots taken from a single axis or direction suggests, by excluding the irrelevant, an observer's changed degree of concentration. But now imagine the scene of a tense family meal that is covered from several very different angles. Though it's a familiar screen convention, surely it has no corollary in life? Ah, but wait. This narrative device—switching viewpoints during a single scene—was a prose convention long before film was invented; so probably it has rather deep roots.

In literature it is clear that multiple points of view imply not physical changes of vantage point but shifts in psychological and emotional points of view. The same is true when this strategy is used onscreen. But film is misleading because, unlike literature, it seems to give us “real” events and a “real” vantage point, so we must constantly remind ourselves that film gives us a perception of events, a “seeming” that is not, despite appearances, the events themselves.

Here's an example from your own life. When you are a bystander during a major disagreement between friends, you get so absorbed that you forget all

about yourself. Instead, you go through a series of internal agreements and disagreements, seeing first one person's point, then another's. You get so involved that you virtually experience each of the protagonists' realities. Screen language evokes this heightened subjectivity by employing a series of physically privileged views. These correspond, we have learned, with the way an observer can identify with different people as time progresses. Under such close examination, our sympathy and fascination migrates from person to person. What's important is that an empathic shift must be rooted in an identifiable point of view—usually one of the characters—if it is to pass as natural and integrated. This state of heightened and all-encompassing concentration is not one that anyone normally maintains for long.

ABSTRACTION

The alternative pole to this state of probing emotional inquiry is that of withdrawal into mental stocktaking or abstraction. We alter our examination from the whole to a part, or a part to the whole—whatever suffices to occupy our reverie. Watch your own shifts of attention; you will find that you often do this to escape into a private realm where you can speculate, contemplate, remember, or imagine. Often a detail catching your eye at this time turns out to have symbolic meaning, or is a part made to stand for a whole. Thus a car door immersed up to the door handle in swirling water can stand for a whole flood. This oft-used principle in film is called synecdoche (pronounced sin-ECK-doh-kee). It arises when our eye alights on something symbolic, that is, something conventionally representative, much as a scale represents justice or a flower growing on an empty lot might represent renewal.

Abstraction can arise for different reasons. Going into reverie may represent withdrawal or refuge by the Observer, but also taking refuge inward as one makes an intense search for the significance of a recent event. Selective focus is a device used to suggest this state. When an object is isolated on the screen, with its foreground and background thrown out of focus, it strongly suggests abstracted vision. Abnormal motion—either slow or fast—has rather the same effect. These are ways to represent how we routinely dismantle reality and distance ourselves from the moment. We may be searching for meaning, hiding from pain, or simply regenerating ourselves through imaginative play.

SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY

Our world is full of dualities, oppositions, and ironic contrasts. You drive your car very fast at night, and then, stopping to look at the stars you become aware of your own insignificance under their light, which has taken millions of years to reach your eye. Human attention shifts from subjectivity to objectivity, from past to present and back again, from looking at a crowd as a phenomenon to looking at the profile of a woman as she turns away. There is screen language to replicate every phase of the Observer's attention. If as a filmmaker you make the shifts in the image-stream consistent with human consciousness, your audience will experience an integrated being's presence—that of our invisible, thinking, all-seeing Concerned Observer.

DURATION, RHYTHM, AND CONCENTRATION

Human beings are directed by rhythms that begin in the brain and control heartbeat and breathing. We tap our feet to music or jump up to dance when the music takes us. Everything we do is measured by the beat, duration, and capacity of our minds and bodies.

Screen language is governed by other human capacities. The duration of a shot, for instance, is determined by how much attention it demands, just as the decision of when to cross the road is governed by how long we take to scope out the traffic. The speed of a movement on the screen is judged by its context, where it is going, and why.

Speech has inherently powerful rhythms. The Czech composer Leoš Janáček was so fascinated by language rhythms that his late compositions draw on the pacing and tonal patterns of people talking. Films—particularly those with long dialogue scenes—are composed similarly around the speech and movement rhythms of the characters. Screen language mimics the way an observer's senses shift direction and follows the way we maintain concentration by refreshing our minds through search. Complex dialogue scenes are always the most difficult to get right in editing because subtextual consistency depends on delicate nuances.

Rhythm plays an important role in helping us assimilate film, but this comes from an old, established principle. Archaic narratives like Homer's Odyssey, the Arthurian legends, and the Norse sagas were composed in strict rhythmic patterns. This not only made memorization easier for the troubadours who recited them from court to court, but language with a strong rhythmic structure helped audiences concentrate longer.

Film language makes use of every possible rhythm, not only speech. Many sounds from everyday life—bird song, traffic, the sounds from a building site, or the wheels of a train—contain strong rhythms to help in composing a sequence. Even static pictorial compositions contain visual rhythms derived from the sensations of symmetry, balance, repetition, opposition, and patterns that intrigue the eye.

SEQUENCE AND MEMORY

In life there is an everlasting flow of events, and only some of them are memorable. A biography takes only the significant parts of a life and jumps them together. The building blocks are segments of time (the hero's visit to the hospital emergency room after a road accident), the events at a location (the high points of his residency in Rome), or of a developing idea (as he builds their home, his wife loses patience with the slowness of the process). Because time and space are now indicated, there are junctures between the narrative building blocks that must either be indicated or hidden as the story demands. These junctures are transitions, to be emphasized or elided (glided over).

Actually this process of elision is also faithful to human experience because our memory casts off whatever is insignificant. If you think back on the sensations you had during an accident, you'll find your recall keeps only the significant parts, almost like a shot list for a film sequence. The memory is a fine editor. Once, advising two students who were feeling defeated in front of their 70 hours of documentary dailies, I surprised them by telling them not to use their logs at all, but to write down what they remembered. What they wrote down was, of course, that minority of the footage that “had something,” and this became the core of a successful film.

When we have a dream or tell an experience, we relay only the tips of what we recall, never the troughs.

TRANSITIONS AND TRANSITIONAL DEVICES

The transitions we make in life—from place to place, or from time to time—are either imperceptible because we are preoccupied or come as a surprise or shock. Stories replicate this by hiding the seams between sequences or by indicating and even emphasizing them. An action match between a woman drinking her morning fruit juice and a beer drinker raising his glass in a smoky dive minimizes the scene shift by drawing attention to the act of drinking. A dissolve from one scene to another would signal, in rather creaky language, “and time passed.” A simple cut from one place to the next leaves the audience to fill in the blank. However, imagine the scene of a teenager singing along to the car radio on a long, boring drive, followed by flash images of a truck, screeching tires, and the youngster yanking desperately at the steering wheel. The transition from comfort to panic is intentionally a shock transition and reproduces the violent change we undergo when taken nastily by surprise.

Sound can be used as a transitional device. Hearing a conversation over an empty landscape can draw us forward into the next scene (of two campers in their tent). Cutting to a shot of a cityscape while we still hear the campsite bird song gives the feeling of being confronted with a change of location while the mind and heart lag behind in the woodland. Both these transitional devices imply an emotional point of view.

Each transition, like the literary phrase, and then, is a narrative device with its own way of handling the progression between two discontinuous story segments. Each transition's style also implies an attitude or point of view emanating from the characters or Storyteller.

SCREEN LANGUAGE IN SUMMARY

Screen language is routinely confused with professional packaging and can easily lack soul when used offhandedly to present events to an audience. But whenever we sense the sympathy and integrity of a questing human intelligence at work, life onscreen becomes human and compelling instead of mechanical and banal.

Imagine that you go to your high school reunion and afterward see what another participant filmed with his little video camera. It was his eyes and ears, recording whatever he cared to notice. Afterward you find that his version of the events gives a strong idea of his personality. You see not only whom he looked at and talked to, but based on how he spent time with each person and event, you see his mind and heart at work and even into the inner workings of his character.

Likewise, the handling of events and personalities in intelligent fiction always implies an overarching heart and mind behind the perceiving. Under the auteur theory of filmmaking, this is the director's vision. But controlling how a whole film crew and actors create the perceptual stream is simply beyond any one person's control, so I prefer to personify the intelligence behind the film's point of view as that of the Storyteller. This is not the simple “I” of the director, but a fictional entity as complex and dependent on the director's invention as any of the film's characters.

Less obviously this is also true for documentary and other nonfiction forms. All are constructs, even though they may take their materials directly from life. At its most compelling, screen language implies the course of a particular intelligence at work as it grapples with the events in which it participates. People who work successfully in the medium seem to understand this instinctively, but I have never heard or read what I have just written. If you happen to lack such instinct, simply pattern your work around the natural, observable processes of human perception, human action, and human reaction. You can't go far wrong if you are true to life. As you do this, your film will somehow take on a narrative persona all its own, and as this emerges you should augment it.

RESEARCHING TO BE A STORYTELLER

You could prepare yourself for the responsibility of storytelling by reading all of Proust and Henry James. If you don't have the time, simply form the habit of monitoring your own processes of physical and emotional observation, especially under duress. You'll constantly forget to do this homework because we are prisoners of our own subjectivity. In ordinary living we see, think, and react automatically, storing our conclusions but remaining oblivious to how we arrived there. Now compare this with what you usually see on the screen. The camera's verisimilitude makes events unfold with seeming objectivity. Well used, it gives events the force of inevitability, like music that is perfectly judged.

Students often assume that the cinema process and its instruments are an alchemy that will aggrandize and ennoble whatever they put before the camera. But cameras and projectors simply frame and magnify. Truth looks more true and artifice more artificial. Small is big, and big is enormous. Every step by a film's makers relentlessly exposes their fallibilities along with their true insights. To use the medium successfully you will need to understand a lot about the human psyche. You must develop an instinct for what your audience will make of anything you give them. This is rooted not in audience studies or theory, but in your instinct for human truth and human judgments.

Let's say it again: A film delivers not only a filtered version of events but also, by mimicking human consciousness, it implies a human heart and mind doing the observing. Screen some of the world's first films and you'll comprehend this. Louis and Auguste Lumiere are palpably present behind their wooden box camera, winding away at the handle until their handmade filmstock runs out. It is through their minds as much as their cameras that we see workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon or the train disgorging passengers so casually unaware of the history they are making.

Film conventions are modeled on the dialectical flow of our consciousness whenever we are following something of importance to us. Our emotional responses play a huge part in this by literally directing our sight and hearing. You can test this. Try noting what you remember from a striking event you experienced. What most people write down about an accident, for instance, is highly visual, abbreviated, selective, and emotionally loaded. Just like a film!

WHY DOCUMENTARY TRAINING IS USEFUL

Unfortunately there is a perception on the part of would-be fiction filmmakers that documentary is a lesser form. Actually, some direct cinema experience, if you can get it, is very useful. Direct cinema is also called observational filming, and it demands that the camera is subservient to the action and does not intrude into or alter any of the processes it films. John Cassavetes' earliest films, such as Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), and Husbands (1970), were made in this way and remain powerful and disturbing to this day. He believed that the stock Freudian, psychological keys to character are bogus, and instead character is formed or even found in the interstices of human interaction. Ray Carney in The Films of John Cassavetes (Cambridge University Press, 1994) has written with rare insight about how Cassavetes' characters plunge into experiences in order to learn about them:

But the openness of Cassavetes' characters is much more radical than their merely being open to change or defying prediction, and that leads to the second difference between Cassavetes' characters and those in virtually all other American feature films. The Cassavetean self is open in the sense of pulling down the walls that normally separate one character from another. Like onstage performers, characters like Lelia, Mabel, and Gloria make themselves up and revise themselves in a continuous process of dramatic improvisation in response to the different audiences before which they appear. Their identities are relational; they are, at least in part, negotiated with others. Cassavetes' leading characters figure an extreme degree of awareness of, sensitivity to, and responsiveness to others; yet that is not to put it strongly enough. Cassavetes' characters are so open to external influences and so willing to make adjustments in their positions that it would be better to say that it is as if their identities are not theirs alone, but shared with others. They are not in complete control of their selves, but turn over part of the control to others. Their selves are not solid and bounded, but soft and permeable; others reach into them, affect them, change them, and at times even inhabit them… Their identities are supremely vulnerable—continuously susceptible to violation or deformation.

(Introduction, pp 21–22)

Perhaps only an extremely experienced and passionately committed actor could possibly create characters with such a truthful degree of human volatility and at the same time understand the futility of stock forms of illustrative characterization.

Your ability to see actors at work and challenge them to create between themselves will be enhanced if you use improvisation techniques and a documentary technique that captures what actually happens. For you, documentary can:

• Offer a rapid and voluminous training in finding stories and telling them on the screen.
• Develop confidence in your abilities and show the rewards of spontaneity and adapting to the actual.
• Demand that its makers use intuitive judgments.
• Develop your eye for a focused and truthful human presence.
• Offer a workout in the language of film and demand that you find a means of narrative compression.
• Offer the opportunity for fast shooting but slow editing and time to contemplate the results. Fiction, conversely, is slow to shoot but fast to edit.
• Require much inventiveness and adaptability in the area of sound shooting. Sound design can be quite intensive in documentary, and location sound inequities teach the preeminent importance of good microphone choice and positioning.
• Show you real characters in real action. Character is allied with will or volition, and each is best revealed when the subject has to struggle with some obstacle. You'll also see Carney's observation in action: that individual identity is somehow developed between people and is not a fixed and formed commodity that functions the same way in all circumstances.
• Face you with the need to capture evidence of character-making decisions. Gripping observational documentary usually deals with the behavior of people trying to accomplish things. Documentaries expose the elements of good dramatic writing by revealing these principles at work in life.
• Allow you to see how, in active characters, issues flow from decisions, and decisions create new issues.
• Demonstrate how character-driven documentaries are no different from character-driven fiction. Well-conceived documentary is thus a laboratory of character-driven drama.
• Show how editing must impose brevity, compression, and rhythm. In fiction, this has to be injected at the writing stage. Thus documentary teaches why the elements of good writing involve brevity, compression, and action.
• License a director and camera crew to improvise and spontaneously create.
• Give directors advance experience of participants simply being, a crucial benchmark for knowing when actors have reached that state during the search for spontaneity.
• Teach the director to catalyze truth from participants, so a fiction director can learn to do the same with actors.
• Pose the same narrative problems as fiction, thus giving what is really writing experience.
• Help the whole crew to see all human action as dramatic evidence.
• Be shot in real time, when drama must be plucked from life. This accustoms directors to thinking on their feet.
• Establish that the risk/confrontation/chemistry of the moment are the stock in trade of both documentary and improvisational fiction.

Documentary coverage of fiction film rehearsals is useful for:

• Discovering the best camera positions.
• Practicing camera framing and movements as something subservient to actors.
• Revealing performance inequities on the screen.
• Demystifying the relationship between live performance and its results on the screen.
• Seeing need for rewrites based on the screen results.
• Giving experience in working with non-actors or actors who are marginally experienced.
• Helping to spot clichés, bad acting habits, and areas that are forced or false.
• Helping prepare actors for the presence of camera—thus lowering the regression that follows the introduction of a camera when shooting begins.
• Posing problems of adaptation to a here-and-now actuality.

In later chapters I strongly advocate shooting continuous-take documentary coverage of rehearsals, from which (if you follow my advice) you will see the value of your work in the points above. Should documentary catch your interest, the companion volume to this book will expand the points above (Michael Rabiger, Directing the Documentary 3^rd edition, Burlington, MA Focal Press, 1998). Incorporating a documentary attitude to human truth could change how you think about fiction and put you with the modern masters of the cinema who are moving cinema away from its theatrical beginnings.