Screen Language

People often think of screen language as professional packaging. Used as techno-wrapping, it can easily make a film mechanical and soulless, but whenever we see a sensitively shot and visualized film, we sense a questing human intelligence is at work. This is because the film’s language arises from the maker’s interests and sympathies, and he or she is using it in an emotionally integrated way. Let’s see how this works.

Imagine you go to your high school reunion and afterwards find a little cam-corder that someone has left behind. It has no name on it, so you run some of its footage to see to whom it might belong. You see what another former student filmed. The camera is his eyes and ears, and he recorded whatever he cared to notice. What he shot gives you such a characteristic idea of his personality that you are pretty sure of the owner. You see not only who he looked at and talked to but also how he spent time and how his mind worked. From his actions and reactions, you can see into his mind and heart, even though he says little from behind the camera and never once appears on-screen.

A good documentary’s handling of events and personalities creates the same overarching sense of a heart and mind doing the perceiving. Misused professionalism, on the other hand, replaces this quality with a soulless kind of instructional efficiency. This chapter explores how to shoot with soul.

Ingredients

All documentaries are permutations of remarkably few elements. Their recombinant possibilities seem endless but are naturally limited by the conventions of screen language. Mere conformity won’t, however, make your filmmaking distinguished, so this chapter supplies some analogies and practical guidelines to help raise your shooting above a formulaic approach. First, here are the basic ingredients that everyone must work with.

You can combine these ingredients effectively by modeling your film visualization on everyday patterns of perception, a faculty that unconsciously integrates observation, feeling, and thinking so they turn into action. Ordinarily we know little about how this works, since it functions perfectly and automatically, much as our leg muscles coordinate while we walk. This chapter suggests ways to study your perceptual processes so you can improve your shooting and editing. It takes a high degree of concentration but no equipment, since you can practice anywhere that people congregate.

Let’s work from what is familiar from the screen backward to its much less familiar human origins.

Screen Grammar

Filmmaking, especially for documentaries, resembles the three-stage process we employ to process experience and consolidate its significance:

• Experiencing an event and storing the event’s highlights in memory
• Inwardly reviewing what happened, giving it meaning, and making it into a story
• Telling that story to an audience to gauge its effect and validate our interpretation

Here are the life and cinema processes side by side:

Film equipment is like eyes and ears, and the operator plus director are its guiding intelligence. The storage medium (film, tape, or chip) is the cinema’s memory. The editor dips into that memory and uses a computer, software and the grammar of film to restructure, consolidate, and compress the memory’s essences. The aim is to produce a stylish, compelling narrative. At the screening, the film-makers try their story on an audience to verify its effect and meaning, then further modify it for maximum impact.

The event that becomes a story might be a dispute at work, a shockingly expensive day of shopping, an archeological discovery, or, as happened to me recently while walking our dog, something as mundane as a fall on an icy sidewalk. I was unhurt and enjoyed telling afterwards how it happened:

Tales involve a succession of actions or events, each experienced in a particular way (many of mine were through sound). We structure them by chronology or some other priority, then organize them for brevity and effectiveness. Then we try them on somebody for effect to see how they react.

Let’s look at how cinema language parallels human experience. This table gives a flavor and does not pretend to be comprehensive.

A film shot arises from two sources: what’s physically in front of the camera and what’s in the operator’s mind behind the camera as he or she reacts, adapts, and adjusts. Should any action come too early or late, the shot communicates a lack of integration. Editing can make some adjustments, but most camerawork is unforgiving and allows just one opportunity to get it right. Unfortunately, whatever is imperfect is just as revealing.

Motivation

Every edit and camera movement must feel motivated because in life something always initiates our actions. The camera’s actions (moving aside, coming closer, reframing, backing away, altering focus, craning up) can imply anticipation, curiosity, appreciation, surprise, apprehension, intuition, dread, affection, anger—whatever the situation calls for.

Practice imagining the camera and editing equivalencies for these events:

• A voice behind you in a crowd motivates you to turn around to see who it is.
• While you are writing, footsteps approach. You lift your head to look at the door, anticipating who will enter.
• It’s someone you find boring, so you turn back to your writing.
• In a ski lodge you open a door to the outside and find yourself facing a mountainside. You tilt your head back to see the peak.
• Your eyeline is obstructed by a tree, so you move sideways to see past it.

What the camera pursues, avoids, or finds exciting colors the “corner of nature seen through a temperament.” We feel a focused heart and mind at work, one that sees opportunity, enigma, threat, obstruction, beauty, or horror as each new situation takes shape. Sometimes the camera is tired or drained and reacts passively. More often it is lively and draws us along with its active ideas and agendas. To see all this in action, run the seminal direct cinema work Primary by Robert Drew, Terry Filgate, Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, and D. A. Pennebaker (1960, United States). It’s the classic film about the process by which John Kennedy sought the presidency, and you can clearly see the decision making during the filming.

Finding patterns and explanations—what T. S. Eliot called “imposing order”—is an important part of authorship.

Covering a Conversation: The Actor and the Acted Upon

In a conversation we seldom know we are acting on those around us, but in fact everyone acts upon those around them all the time, even by adopting the strategy of passivity. Everyone has agendas, and you already know how to assess them. Try scrutinizing how your perception moves between two people talking. Sometimes you only look at whoever speaks. Na ï ve camera operators who cover a whole conversation like this produce what I think of as Dog Television. Man’s best friend, lacking powers of interpretation, can only look hopefully at the source of sound.

Maybe the conversation you are watching becomes more intense. You notice that you look first at each speaker as she begins, and then in mid-sentence you switch to watching the listener. To understand what’s going on here, think of watching a tennis game. At any given moment, one player will act (hit the ball), while the other is acted upon (receives the shot). Player A is set to launch an aggressive serve, but your eye jumps ahead of the ball, eager to know how Player B will deal with the onslaught. She runs, jumps, swings her racquet, and intercepts. The moment you know she’s going to succeed, your eye flicks ahead of the ball to check whether Player A can handle her return.

We follow the actions and reactions in human relationships in this way because we know subconsciously that people are always trying to get, do, or accomplish something. A tennis game ritualizes this exchange as a competition for points, but a conversation can be just as structured and competitive. See how fast the “actor” and the “acted upon” switch roles. Your eyeline keeps probing their motivations, and your mind keeps building ideas about who wants what. That’s what is behind film technique.

To get a better sense of control, try instructing your eyeline by talking it through “editing” the conversation. As soon as you see how A has begun acting, tell your gaze to switch in mid-sentence over to B to see how she is taking it. When you see how B is adapting and acting back, tell yourself to switch back to A. In television, a person acting as a switcher does this between multiple cameras covering the same event.

Can you pinpoint the moments of knowledge or realization that trigger—or should trigger—each move? Your perceptions are now hard at work, and dragging their lightning decisions into consciousness is how you study them. Human beings do all this searching because the clues to actions and reactions perennially fascinate us. From such clues we read character, mood, and motives.

Once you recognize this principle forever working in your daily life, the shooting and editing decisions that mimic it are easy. However, your decisions about motives also depend on one more principle. It’s called the subtext.

Subtext

Underlying the visible surface of any human situation is an invisible subtext— that is, the participants’ hidden and usually unconscious agendas that provide most of the situation’s tension. A married couple’s argument isn’t really about whose turn it is to take the car for servicing. You sense that there’s a subtext, something present but unspoken. You don’t know what it can be, so you eavesdrop until you pick up that he’s hurt and jealous because she had lunch with an old boyfriend. Their acrimony isn’t about whose turn it is to take the car in; it’s about him being possessive and her needing to assert her autonomy.

In theater and in fiction films, the director and actors put a lot of work into developing the subtexts, because they fuel the tensions that animate real life. In documentary you don’t need to add subtexts because they already exist; your challenge is to identify what is at work and then to use cinema language to get the audience to look for what’s under the surface.

Perception

Perception by a camcorder is a mechanical process; an imaging chip at the focal plane sends video signals to the recorder while the microphone diaphragm does the same by responding to the air-pressure changes by which sound travels. The result is a scientific fact—sound and picture that you can replay indefinitely. Perception by a human being is far more complex and ephemeral. As information comes to us, we scan it for meaning and decide what action is possible and justified: Doesn’t she trust me? Should I offer help? What did she say that was different before? And so on. Confidence or self-doubt can help or hinder this, but perception usually makes us want to do something. For instance, we might want to:

• Interpret (Is this an insult, and if so, how should I react?)
• Formulate a subtext (I don’t trust that kind of smile. What’s really going on?)
• Test the information (Can this be true? What does it remind me of?)
• Commit what’s significant to memory (That’s interesting; I’ll need it later.)
• Imagine consequences or alternatives (If… supposing… then…)
• Decide what to register (Can I show what I feel or should I hide it?)
• Fight or flight (Should I fight to change this situation? Keep watching? Take evasive action?)

In camerawork, framing and camera movement communicate as thought and feeling. Really sensitive, appropriate camerawork conveys a human heart, intelligence, and soul at work. It takes strong mental and emotional focus while you operate the camera. Sometimes your mind goes ahead of, or away from, the task in hand. You are admiring a composition, guessing the source of a shadow, or thinking associatively about something else. You’re no longer in touch and the audience senses it straight away. Actors call this “losing focus.”

Camera operators must maintain an unbroken interior life on behalf of the camera or it won’t move, react, search, retreat, evade, or go closer as any lively human intelligence should. This motivation and reactivity are very obvious in handheld, spontaneous coverage but still present when the camera is on a tripod and producing more settled, formal coverage. You work from a tripod whenever you use a long lens and whenever you want shots to be steady. An unsteady camera during an interview, for instance, is simply a distraction unless we are in the back of a truck in a war zone, and the improvised nature of the exchange is fully justified.

Denotation and Connotation

A shot’s content, as we said in an earlier chapter, is what it denotes, but what the shot connotes is a different matter. Imagine calm shots of a flower or a hand lighting a candle. The shots denote what their subjects “are”—that is, a flower and a candle. But in the right context each can connote or suggest “natural beauty,” “devotion,” or a host of other associations.

You trigger connotation in your audience’s mind to make them follow you toward the poetic and philosophic, which is the domain of mature authorship. To practice for this exalted role, make a habit of assessing everything you shoot—images, sounds, words—as potentially a metaphor. Iranian cinema is powerful because it comes from a culture immersed in poetic thinking. Even a humble shepherd can recite poetry by heart and is trained through his religion to know that matters of the spirit are conveyed through symbols and metaphysical imagery. This is a way of seeing and of expressing that you can make your own.

Shots in Juxtaposition

When you cut two images together in juxtaposition, you lead us to infer meaning from their relationship. The Kuleshov experiment of 1918 used the same reaction shot three times over. It was of a man looking out of frame rather expres sionlessly. By cutting it against a plate of soup, a girl, and a coffin, audiences inferred he was hungry, feeling desire, or grieving. Clearly, juxtaposing shots not only suggests relationship but also stimulates ideas and interpretations.

The examples in Figure 6-1 illustrate an engaging disagreement between two early Russian editing theorists. Examples 1 to 5 illustrate the categories of juxtaposition posited by Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893 – 1953), which are essential for exposition and building a story narrative. This covers establishing the location’s geography, the characters and what they are doing, and the central character’s “problem”—whatever he or she is trying to get, do, or accomplish.

FIGURE 6-1 Examples of juxtaposed shots or cuts.

Examples 6 to 13 show categories favored by Sergei Eisenstein (1898 – 1948). To him, the essence of narrative art lay in dialectics and in the meanings that emerge from tension between what is dissimilar. His editing confronts the viewer with comparison, contrast, and conflict—all juxtapositions that argue as much as they inform.

Most modern filmmaking contains most types of editing. For the building-site film in the previous chapter you would need expository shots to establish each machine, its purpose, and its driver, and you would also need to show how their activities link together and how they interact. For contrasts, you’d want to contrast the rushing Bobcat with the slowest and largest machine all in the same shot; the jaws of a machine grabbing trash juxtaposed with a foreman pushing a sandwich in his mouth, a truck halting for a bulldozer, and so on.

Lines of Tension, Scene Axis, and Camera Axis

FIGURE 6-2 The Observer watching a conversation.

Let’s return to the idea of two people having an animated discussion. Figure 6-2 represents A and B under observation by O, who is a child. Children are good for my example because they are highly observant, feel strong emotions,and often go unseen by their seniors. Imagine you are O, your eyeline moving back and forth between your parents, A and B, as they talk. Your awareness travels the line of tension between them; that is, the active pathway of words, looks, awareness, and volition. Known as the scene axis, it is really the subject-to-subject axis.

Apart from having one or more subject-to-subject axis, every scene also has an observer-to-subject axis, which my example shows at right angles to the axis between A and B. When the camera replaces the Observer, that axis becomes the camera axis or camera-to-subject axis. This may all sound rather technical, but it’s really quite human. The Observer has a keen sense of relationship to each person (his axis), to the invisible connection between them (their axis), and to what passes between them.

In turning to look from person to person, the Observer can be replaced by a camera panning (i.e., moving horizontally) between the two speakers. In Figure 6-3 you can see what happens when O moves closer to A and B’s axis. To avoid missing any of the action, the Observer must swerve his or her attention quickly between A and B.

Under this circumstance we momentarily blink our eyes to avoid the unpleasant blur between widely separated subjects. The brain reads this as two static images with no period of black in between. Cinema reproduces this familiar experience by cutting between two subjects, each taken from the same camera position. Historically this solution probably emerged when someone tried cutting out a nauseatingly fast pan between two characters. It “worked,” as we’ve said earlier, because its counterpart was already inherent to human psychological experience.

FIGURE 6-3 The Observer moves close to the characters’ axis.

Screen Direction

FIGURE 6-4 A range of screen directions and their descriptions.

FIGURE 6-5 Series of shots all maintaining right to left movement.

A subject’s direction or movement through a composition is called his screen direction, and these have been formalized using left to right, right to left, up screen, and down screen (Figure 6-4). Where a subject’s movement links several shots, as in a march, this becomes rather important. In successive shots all the action should cross the screen in the same screen direction (Figure 6-5). Thismeans you must shoot characters and their movements from only one side of the scene axis.

To explain why, let’s imagine you take shots of a parade going screen left to right (L – R), then you run ahead of the parade so you can shoot it filing past a landmark. To get a better background, you cross the parade’s path to shoot from the other side, something that feels quite unremarkable. However, when you try to intercut the R – L material with the L – R close-ups shot earlier, things go awry. The audience assumes there are two factions marching toward each other.

Cutting to a new camera position across the axis looks awful because we only see the “before” and “after,” not the transition where you crossed the scene axis.

Changing Screen Direction

FIGURE 6-6 By shooting at a corner, a parade or moving object can be made to change screen direction.

You can, in fact, change the screen direction of a parade, chase, or character’s path, but you must show crossing the scene axis on-screen. The two ways to do it are:

• By filming at an angle to a corner as in Figure 6-6: The marchers enter in the background going L – R, turn the corner in the foreground, and exit R – L. In essence, they change screen direction. Subsequent shots must now show their action continuing R – L.
• By running the camera and dollying visibly across the subject’s axis of movement during a gap in the parade (Figure 6-7): The audience sees and understands the change in screen direction. In subsequent shots, the action must maintain the new screen direction.

FIGURE 6-7 Dollying sideways between floats in a parade changes the parade’s effective screen direction, but the dollying movement must be shown.

Duration, Rhythm, and Concentration

You determine the duration of a shot by how much attention its content requires. A simple analogy is an advertisement on the side of a bus. If it’s a simple image with four words of text, the bus can drive past quickly and you’ll get the ad; but if the ad has four lines of text and a complicated diagram, the bus cannot go so fast.

Dissimilar shots edited together may be of different lengths yet seem similar in duration because the editor has timed them so each takes a similar degree of concentration to decode. Because each is present for the time you need to “read” it, their visual rhythm feels about equal.

Film language makes use of many rhythms that originate in the human mind and body. Our breathing and heart rate provide rhythms. We tap our feet to music or jump up to dance when the music takes us. The rhythms, duration, and capacity of our minds and bodies determine everything we do. Anything with a strong rhythmic structure helps audiences maintain concentration, which is why the entertainers of antiquity composed their epic stories as poems. Film makes use of every possible rhythm. Many sounds from everyday life—birdsong, traffic, the sounds from a carpenter’s shop, or the wheels of a train—will contain strong rhythms that help you compose a sequence. Even pictorial compositions contain visual rhythms such as symmetry, balance, repetition, and opposition—all patterns that entertain and intrigue the eye.

When you shoot long dialogue exchanges, you’ll become very aware of speech and movement rhythms. You will want to move your camera and edit within the characters’ rhythmic framework. Pacing and cutting, as we saw in the exercises earlier, reproduce the way an onlooker’s senses shift direction in search of meaning. A long reaction time, for instance, might suggest “she’s uncertain how to answer,” but a quicker reaction will imply “she’s been waiting for him to suggest this.” Different meanings emerging from different pauses! These scenes are exquisitely demanding to get right, either when moving with the camera during handheld coverage or later when you find you can edit complementary angles together. Enhancing subtexts requires you to orchestrate delicate nuances of behavior and coverage, and this is wonderfully challenging work.

Sequence

How do you know what to shoot in a daylong process such as a marathon? In life there is an unending flow of events but only some that are significant. A short biographical film will reduce a whole lifetime to 30 minutes by showing only its significant moments bridged together. The building blocks are segments of time—the hero’s visit to the hospital emergency room after a road accident, the two high points during his residency in Rome, the stages of building his own home while his wife became increasingly exasperated at the time it was taking. Each of these is a sequence.

Think of any time period as a middling waveform with a few high and low points (Figure 6-8). To represent it, you’d skim off the peaks and troughs, and the audience will understand that you have compressed that life by eliminating what was tedious and insignificant.

Transitions and Transitional Devices

The transitions between the building blocks (sequences) of a story are junctures that you can hide or show as the story demands. Most of the transitions we make in life—from place to place or time to time—are imperceptible because we are preoccupied and drive or walk automatically. Stories replicate this by minimizing the seams between sequences. An action match cut between a woman drinking her morning fruit juice and a beer drinker raising his glass in a smoky dive minimizes the scene shift by focusing attention on the act of drinking. A dissolve from one scene to the other indicates (in outdated screen language) “and time passed.” A simple cut from one place to the next invites the audience to fill in the blank.

FIGURE 6-8 A period—a day, maybe a month—during which someone’s happiness fluctuates. By focusing on the extremes, biography condenses the record to what is significant.

If, however, the transition must surprise or shock, we emphasize the junctures. A teenager singing along to the car radio in a long, boring drive, followed by flash images of a truck, screeching tires, and the teenager desperately yanking the steering wheel, is intentionally a series of shock transitions. It replicates the violent changes we go through when taken nastily by surprise.

Sound can also function 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 the birdsong from the campsite is still fading out gives the feeling of having moved to the city while the mind and heart lag behind in the woodland. Both examples imply an emotional point of view.

Going Further

In Part 6: Documentary Aesthetics, Chapters 17 to 20 take film language further and show how to use it in greater detail while you direct and edit. Daniel Arijon’s Grammar of the Film Language (1991, Silman-James Press) is a formal primer.