2
Alternative technique
Jump cuts
You may have seen films or TV programmes where you become very conscious of the camerawork and continuity editing conventions are not followed. Music videos are often full of ambiguous images, rapid changes in location and an apparent complete disregard for the invisible technique tradition. Many commercials tell a 30-second story in a similar way.
Figure 2.1 ‘Breathless’ (1959; dir. Jean-Luc Goddard). A continuous shot with the same foreground framing is edited so that the background occasionally ‘jumps’ to a new locale
Some filmmakers have consciously rejected the central philosophy of the invisible technique tradition and do not wish to disguise how the film was created. They appear to expose the mechanics of film making with obtrusive cutting and camera movement divorced from action.
Breathless’ (1959), directed by Jean-Luc Goddard, has a sequence of an open-topped car driving through Paris. The two main characters in the film (played by Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg) are shot from behind, with Belmondo driving. The shot of Jean Seberg is edited without cutaways causing the view through the windscreen to abruptly change. There is no attempt to disguise these rapid transitions to different locations. The standard continuity editing technique is abandoned.
Composition in this technique has obviously has a different function to the codes developed for invisible technique.
What are the characteristics of this alternative technique?
Unsteady frame produced by the preference for hand-held camerawork;
obtrusive camera movement that is constantly on the move or unrelated to action;
a rejection of standard framing – a deliberate mispronunciation of standard visual conventions (e.g., faces squashed to one side of the frame; see Figure 2.2);
a tendency to draw attention to the methods of production (e.g., camerawork, editing, etc.) rather than the content;
form becomes content;
jump cuts and a rejection of continuity editing;
abrupt, unexplained changes in location or time;
the open frame technique where the audience's attention is drawn to what is unseen and outside the frame;
abrupt changes between monochrome and colour shots;
the mixture of low tech and high tech formats (e.g., use of 8 mm film in flashbacks by Resnais in ‘Muriel’ (1993));
deliberate degradation of the image using sub-standard formats or deliberately degrading the image by overexposure or marking the negative;
lighting that is unconnected with action to produce images that are unlit, obscure or ambiguous;
slow-motion sequences unmotivated by action.
Figure 2.2 An offset framing deliberately squeezing the face to the edge of the screen
Some of these characteristics were summarized by Andre Breton when he was commenting on surrealism:
The depiction of chance and ‘marvellous’ juxtapositions, creating an impression of randomness and irrationality for the viewer and thus rejection of the idea that art must cling to the representation of an everyday reality.
(Hill and Gibson, 1998: 400)
Alternatives
Invisible technique was developed to keep the audience involved with the story, for example in action films and suspense thrillers, and for the viewer to identify with the main characters until the story's resolution. Essentially the camerawork that evolved sought to avoid distracting the audience with detail or shots that did not serve these ends. These production methods encouraged the audience to enter a ‘dream’ state eliminating any annoying interruptions to their ‘sleep’ that would cause them to become aware that they were watching a fabrication, a fiction put together by a group of people.
Many of the audience did wish to ‘lose themselves in the story’ and escape from their own lives, and ignore or suspend judgement on the wider political and social issues that surrounded the story. For some film makers, this technique and this type of story construction that enforced these aims robbed the audience of critical judgement. They sought production methods that provoked the audience to ‘wake up’ and examine what they were being told, how they were being told and why they were being told that particular story.
The major influence on this alternative method of storytelling was Bertolt Brecht, a writer, poet and theatre director working in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. He wanted the audience to think about the wider political context of the story they were witnessing, and not simply identify with the stage characters.
It's magic
If the aim of a magician or illusionist is to convince the observer that the impossible has happened he must not reveal his methods of achieving the ‘magic'. If he does, the illusion will simply be seen as a ‘trick’ and will be without fascination or awe. His skill is his invisible technique, which convinces the audience they are seeing everything whereas their attention is deliberately misdirected so that they miss the most important part of the action. Standard film and TV techniques have the same objective. The technique must be sufficiently skilful to hide the fabrication of reality from the audience.
A British comedy magician, Tommy Cooper, deliberately subverted this magical deceit by failing to perform the trick or by revealing the shallow deception that was being practised. In a sense he was performing in a Brechtian way by making the audience aware of the illusion. He was making them think of the nature of ‘magic'. Another comedy act, Morecam be and Wise, used the same technique of revealing the mechanics of melodrama and by looking at the camera and the viewer, they acknowledged their ‘play’ was a piece of fiction, a make believe. They were inviting the audience to join them in watching themselves perform.
In film, this alternative technique rejects the notion of a set of sleep-inducing ‘invisible’ conventions. The aim of some avant-garde film makers is to constantly remind the viewer that they are watching a fabrication, and therefore any conventions that render technique ‘invisible’ and encourage the audience to suspend criticism are to be avoided. Often they wish the audience to be uncertain of the outcome of events described, and therefore these film makers deliberately avoid narrative conventions that provide structured explanations. It requires an audience response that is at ease with uncertainty.
It challenges the ‘realism’ of Hollywood continuity editing and aims for uncertainty, ambiguity and unresolved narrative. This type of randomness and irrationality may cause an audience conditioned by the language of standard film making conventions to be confused and unresponsive. The film language is simply not one to which they are accustomed. In the words of film academic Jonas Mekas, ‘more than 90 per cent of people do not like films, they like stories'. This leaves the remaining 10 per cent a minority audience who may enjoy a visual challenge and are prepared to watch types of film making other than standard Hollywood conventions.
Extreme alternative technique are those productions that reject storytelling and may consist of unrelated, impressionistic shots or even one static eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building. Andy Warhol, who made this particular film called ‘Empire’ (1965), had a very idiosyncratic way of making films. Paul Morrissey, another independent filmmaker, described him at work.
There were about 30 people on one side of the room and the camera was on the other side in front of them and I said ‘what kind of film are you making?'. He said ‘I don't know. What shall we do?'. Then he said ‘but you know, I don't like to move the camera'. I said ‘really, well then the camera will be on the other side of the loft and there will only be little tiny people on the other end', and he said ‘I know, I don't know what to do'. Also he said ‘and I don't like to stop the camera'. Well when he said ‘I don't like to move it and I don't like to stop it', I realized that he needed somebody to figure out what to do with the film and the camera. He couldn't direct, therefore he said let's not direct. All right, let's see. He was hoping that somehow, without doing anything, something would get made. Basically I was contracted as his manager with the distinction being that when you manage somebody usually they do something.
(Andy Warhol’ documentary, Channel 4, 3 February 2002)
In one sense, a book about picture composition can only deal with standard visual conventions. Alternative styles of production up to the most radical avant-garde films have no requirement for formal visual structures to communicate a story or idea. Composition as a technique for communication assumes that there will only be one reading of the events depicted. A suitable composition will be chosen to most accurately communicate that point. But communication, like perception, does not always provide one infallible reading.
Realism and imagination
Film historians often trace the two traditions of realism and imagination in film technique back to the early French film pioneers, Lumière and Mèliès. Lumière's 1895 single shot of a train entering a station suggests the factual style of film making – a straightforward depiction that will be understood in a similar way by the whole audience. In effect there could have been a number of positions selected for the camera to film this event. The cameraman, however, selected a position that had the engine approaching the lens. The shot allowed the dynamic depiction of movement, relationship with passengers and people on the platform without panning because the fixed position of the camera on its tripod did not allow such a camera movement. The first pan/tilt head was not in use until 1897. The shot had a visual impact on its first audiences, unused to movement of a projected image, and alarmed and frightened some of them. It was factual, but had the power to move and affect the audience more than the event would have done in reality.
The alternative strand of film making is to use the camera to suggest fantasy, imagination and subjective experience. Mèliès, as an ex-stage magician, sought to create images that caused wonder and amazement in his audience. ‘A Trip to the Moon’ (1902) was a science fiction romp that used camera tricks and creative imagination to entertain and enthral his audience.
Figure 2.3 The Lumière brothers, ‘Arrival of a Train at a Station’ (1895), contains one static shot of the train arriving and passengers disembarking
The film moment is always now
A film story often has a predictable future. Characters follow the path created for them in the plot and the audience's curiosity is heightened by plot construction and character identification. What happens next holds the audiences attention.
An audience may feel the enjoyment of a film is exhausted once the mystery of the plot has been resolved. The hook of their attention is fastened on wanting to find out how the story ends. The construction or the aesthetics of the film form has little attraction for the majority of the audience. What happens to their favourite star overrides all other considerations.
In reality, many people's lives are not as predictable as a film story, especially to the individual. With hindsight, an individual may be able to see a pattern of cause and effect but, in the present, the future is neither predictable nor, to the individual, inevitable. A standard film story resolves problems, explains misunderstandings and eliminates any ambiguity of the action. Only action that is pertinent to the main story is included. Any inconsequential events or activities to the main story are usually omitted.
Sidney Lumet's ‘Twelve Angry Men’ (1957), uses the standard technique to cover twelve men attempting to reach a decision in a jury room. At all times the geography of the room is provided by the shot structure. Important plot points are made with an appropriate close-up. The pace and tension of the story is controlled by the performance and shifts in shot size.
Contrast this with a short film located in a bar where a group of people seated around a table are in discussion. The camera frequently circles the table, panning across faces but not consistently on the person who is talking. Sometimes, by accident, a speaker comes into frame but often the speaker would be out of frame. To many viewers, the camerawork would be intrusive and would frustrate their natural curiosity to see who is talking. There is no change of tempo or interpretation of the discussion. The film ends with a speaker in mid-sentence.
There is a distinct difference in the compositional conventions used in the two films because the aims of the film makers were different.
Avant-garde film makers often feel that the ‘Twelve Angry Men’ treatment of reality is misleading and incomplete. They may be motivated by political aims to reveal what they feel is the true structure of society or they may feel conventional story telling ignores a large part of human experience. Individuals do not see their life as a rounded story-line limited to meaningful activity. There is a great deal of ambiguous and confusing activity that at the time fits no apparent pattern. Avant-garde productions therefore seek to reject the standard visual conventions and are often ambiguous and incomplete, like the example of the discussion in the bar. The talk is rambling, unstructured and reaches no conclusion. There are no tidy endings and explanations, no characters to drive the story along, in fact there is no story.
Without a story there is no requirement to structure the images with a continuity understandable to the audience. In this alternative film form there is no simple explanation of events, no one reading of reality bundled up in a 90-minute segment that neatly explains the action depicted. The majority, if not all, of the visual conventions developed by the commercial cinema to attract, hold and entertain an audience can be discarded. This free form artefact can often cause confusion, puzzlement and even annoyance because it does not conform to the standard set of visual conventions audiences have been educated to follow. Audiences often assume that a film can only have one set of conventions. But not only audiences. Many film/TV programme makers assess the competence of a production by how well it employs standard visual conventions.
Why people dislike the rejection of standard conventions
Camerawork that appears to ignore traditional invisible technique may be thought of as either lacking in knowledge or ability or wilfully ignoring such technique out of a perverse desire to be ‘different'. The same criticisms have been levelled in other art and craft forms. A popular response when examining a Picasso painting is that the observer's child could produce the same or a better image. The inference is that Picasso lacks the skill and expertise to create a ‘proper’ illusion of reality. He lacks the knowledge of Renaissance perspective and the mastery of eye/hand coordination that would allow him to compete with better works that provide a complete illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. There is obviously an assumption by such an observer that the aim of all painting is to create a recognizable illusion of their concept of reality. The same unexamined assumptions can operate when people are faced with forms of contemporary dance that do not incorporate the conventions of classical ballet, drama that appears to have no storyline and music without melody.
People hold similar strong assumptions about film They believe it should have recognizable characters in a dramatic situation that is resolved before the end. A series of images that evoke, for example, an ambiguity and uncertainty without character or plot is not only unacceptable, it often annoys or even enrages the viewer. They feel that it is not a ‘proper’ film and the maker of the film is either incompetent or naive, but most often a charlatan for attempting to pass off bad work for the real article – a properly constructed film
Many cameramen believe that visual conventions of storytelling (e.g., linear continuity in shots, camera movement motivated by action, matched shots and eye lines, etc.) are ignored out of ignorance. They feel a practitioner employing an alternative visual language does not understand the conventions. They believe there is only one acceptable set of camerawork conventions because all their experience in production is grounded in storytelling either in fiction, documentary or news. The aim of their craft is to attract and hold the attention of the audience. In the words of Orson Welles, perhaps they should consider ‘God, there is a lot of stuff here I don't know'.
One of the paradoxes of radical or avant-garde technique is the speed with which it is absorbed to serve commercial ends. The French Impressionist painting style was dismissed as ‘mere daubs’ by contemporaries but was later recycled into chocolate box labels to be sold back to their hostile critics. The radical images of German expressionist experimental 1920s films reappeared again in mass market music videos in the 1980s.
Storytelling
A story is a commercial imperative as most people demand what they are used to – a beginning, a middle and an end. Avant-garde practitioners reject this presentation of reality when it is understood as a linear revelation of facts. There may be plot twists and red herrings but a standard film story usually in the end has an explanation of all that has been presented.
Camerawork that is intrusive and erratic (e.g., news coverage of unrehearsed incidents) has a specific authenticating credibility even when it is replicated. For some people, music without a melody is difficult to enjoy, just as a series of images without a story is incomprehensible. What does it mean? How are the images connected?
One of the seminal avant-garde films was Luis Bufmel's ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (1928). It contains a sequence where an eye is sliced by a razor. The image is alarming and frightening. It is a radical assault on the viewer who may require a film that tells a story. It is a visual assault on the eye of the viewer's preconceptions of what a film should be.
Don't wake me up
Most viewers dislike any technique that distracts them from being fully immersed in the story. They require a stream of images that, without distraction, allow them to follow the action and become identified with the participants. The camera style that achieves this is unobtrusive, and only presents images and action that are relevant to the story.
Lumière's ‘Arrival of a Train at a Station’ has a rudimentary story. The train arrives, passengers are moving on the platform. In cultures that are familiar with trains the information in the image can easily be interpreted. They may even surmise the motivation of individual people on the platform. Are they waiting for friends, relatives? Are they going on a journey, etc.? A culture without trains or people not familiar with the dress codes in the image may make completely different deductions. Are these people involved in some kind of religious or ceremonial activity? Is that large black moving shape (the train) benevolent or threatening?
The relevance of an image, like perception, is dependent on what the observer brings to their understanding of the shot as well as its factual content. It is often erroneously believed by film makers that all audiences will understand their chosen visual storytelling methods.
Antonioni's film ‘Chung Kuo Cina’ (1972) contained a shot of a Chinese bridge taken from a low angle with wide-angle distortion to provide a dynamic and imposing image. This was considered insulting by the Chinese because, in their eyes, it inferred that the bridge was unstable and distorted. They considered it should have been shot from a square-on position to provide a symmetrical, imposing, stable image.
Definition of alternative conventions
In general, invisible technique is more consistent than alternative technique that does not form a recognized standard visual grammar. There is not one alternative technique; there are many. Different elements are employed in individual avant-garde or art house films. They can be loosely summarized as the story might not be structured by logical cause and effect. For example, an event is depicted and then another event, which appears to be unconnected, follows. There might never be an explanation of the connection. Yasujiro Ozu's ‘Tokyo Story’ (1953), is the story of an elderly couple gradually becoming estranged from their adult children. The clear linear narrative is occasionally interspersed with shots of washing on a line, empty urban landscapes, a clump of factory chimneys. Each shot is visually attractive and there is the subjective impression that these depictions of an empty, hostile environment are part of the old people's gradual alienation from their family but there is no linear connection as occurs in conventional shot structure. Although these locations are near where the story takes place, they do not directly connect with the story. Unlike standard visual technique, the connection is made obliquely. The existence of these non-essential narrative shots appears to give greater depth to our understanding of the characters and story. In the majority of commercial, mass market productions, this type of shot would be judged to slow the pace, interrupt the action, be irrelevant to the plot and eliminated from the final cut.
Figure 2.4 For an experienced cameraman, it would be no problem to pan from a tenth floor hospital window (a) down to the main entrance (c) timed to meet the arrival of the main characters. Instead, to fabricate the camera ‘surprised by events’ style the camera starts unsteadily on its travel, misses the entrance (b), and hurriedly pans back to hold an unsteady frame of the entrance. This jittery camerawork is there by design
Avant-garde productions, or ‘art house’ films as they are sometimes termed, often suggest conflict or story lines that are left unresolved. This ‘open-endedness’ may be intended to suggest the lack of meaning or form to everyday living. Whereas invisible technique attempts to provide guidelines of the geography of the action – the space/time relationships of the story, alternative technique will often ignore linear continuity and have abrupt changes in place or time without explanation.
Many mass-entertainment films/programmes are built around charismatic artistes – the star system of promoting a new film These celebrities require close attention from the cinematographer/cameraman to ensure they remain attractive (and commercially in demand) in the way they are shot and presented. Alternative productions may feature unattractive, difficult, disturbed people with whom it is difficult to identify.
Some types of alternative productions appear to be seeking a different technique to express those themes that are not normally commercially acceptable. Others attempt to dispense with central ‘charismatic’ characters and rely on montage to provoke feeling, emotion or discussion. A third category is the attempt to subvert standard Hollywood visual conventions and invent visual structures that remind the audience they are watching an illusion – a replication of reality. These avoid any disguise of technique and deliberately expose the mechanics of film making with jump cuts, subjective camerawork and constant reminders to the audience that they are watching an artefact. This can be too successful and a mass audience may reject the production. Many people found the swerving and constantly moving camerawork in the American TV crime series ‘NYPD Blue’ an irritant and, although they may have been interested in the story, the form in which it was presented (see Chapter 12) was, to them, objectionable.
Conventions
I want to make a distinction between ‘commandment’ and ‘convention'. Photographically speaking, I understand a commandment to be a rule, axiom, or principle, an incontrovertible fact of photographic procedure which is unchangeable for physical and chemical reasons. On the other hand, a convention to me, is a usage which has become acceptable through repetition. It is a tradition rather than a rule. With time the convention becomes a commandment, through force of habit. I feel the limiting effect is both obvious and unfortunate.
(How I broke the rules in "Citizen Kane" ‘, by Greg Toland, Popular
Photography, Vol. 8, June 1941)
Greg Toland, an outstanding Hollywood cinematographer, identifies one of the fundamental problems when discussing composition of the moving image. What aspects of standard composition are conventions accepted by repetition – ‘a tradition rather than a rule’ and what aspects of composition are an ‘incontrovertible fact’ indispensable in visual communication?
Like spoken language, the language of standard visual conventions that grew up and was developed in the first decades of film making is always in the process of change. Techniques once universal, such as perfect studio portrait lighting to glamorize the star of the film, have been modified to serve the fashion for a more spontaneous and realistic look, although the concept of what is ‘realistic’ tends to change with every decade – see Chapter 11, ‘News and documentary'.
An alternative camerawork and editing language may create a sense of randomness and a lack of purpose compared with standard invisible technique but it still has to share a common ancestry. The use of lenses, camera movement, shot size and cutting points cannot stray too far from standard practice before the images become so disjointed there is no communication. This objective is sometimes striven for and is similar to the punk movement's attempt to destroy the existent conventional performance of pop music. Non-communication carried to extreme must eventually lose the attention of all but a tiny minority of its audience.
Summary
Some filmmakers reject invisible technique tradition and do not wish to disguise how the film is created. They expose the mechanics of film making with obtrusive cutting and camera movement divorced from action.
This technique and some types of story construction provoke the audience to ‘wake up’ and examine what they are being told, how they are being told and why they are being told that particular story. The aim is to constantly remind the viewer that they are watching a fabrication.