A character rendered the conduit into story

From Three Colors Blue. 1993. Director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Screenwriters Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Krzysztof Kieślowski. Cinematography Sławomir Idziak.

On the page, the writer may adopt a first person narrative POV, a subjective I, who as narrator takes us through the story in their perception. We are ‘with’ them whether we care for them or not. Perhaps we empathize, perhaps we don’t. Love or loathe them, since there is only one I we are, for better or worse, stuck with them.

Characters, on the other hand, might be written as an objective he, she, or they. If so, as everyone knows, the author is writing in the third person.

When we follow several such characters but are kept at a distance, unaware of too much of what they are perceiving, feeling, or thinking—as if we were merely witnessing or observing them—it can be said that the writer is utilizing a third person objective point of view. Less intense, usually, than the subjective mode (depending on the stakes of the story, perhaps).

If, on the other hand, we do know what these characters are perceiving, thinking, and feeling—while at the same time they lack such godlike insight into the minds and hearts of each other—then the writer has chosen a third person omniscient point of view. 

When we see through the eyes of a single character, hear their thoughts, know what they know and no more, when they in effect constitute our conduit into the story, its events, and its world, yet they are not an I but a he, she, or they, the writer has adopted a third person limited or intimate point of view.

I prefer intimate to limited because it seems to me that the boundaries set by this approach do not so much impose limitation as intensify the reader’s engagement with the specific character and their journey. It is as though an I is being disguised as a he, she, or they.

How might we compare Narrative POV on the screen to its articulation on the page? Can the screen do what the page can? Can it utilize this variety of approaches. Or does the audience simply sit back and watch events play out—somewhere in the third person objective/omniscient spectrum?

Most of us with a working knowledge of film are aware of the term POV Shot. The camera lens, placed where a character’s eyes are, offers the subjective view of that character. When they turn, the camera pans. When they look up or down, the camera tilts. When they rise or fall, the camera booms up or down. When they walk forward or move laterally, the camera dollies accordingly. For most of us, this amounts to the sum of our understanding of POV in film. It certainly used to for me.

But Narrative POV in film (as with fiction on the page) is a concept and practice, not a particular type of shot—although this device might well constitute an element of the onscreen modulation of POV.

Hitchcock, with his customary perspicacity, said:

Subjective treatment, putting the audience in the mind of the character, is, to me, the purest form of the cinema. I suppose Rear Window is the best example of it. Close-up of a man; what he sees; his reaction to it. And that can’t be done in any other medium—can’t be done in the theater, can’t be done in a novel. You put the audience in the mind of a particular character.

I think it can be done in a novel. At least, it can be described. What my fellow Londoner/Angeleno Hitchcock is pointing to though is the experiential nature of our engagement with with some characters in movies.

With the master’s method, the screen offers, through the experience of a character,  a mimesis of our universal perception, questioning, and grasp of the world before us and what lies in it.

Here is what we might see on the screen:

1.     A character changes from not noticing to noticing and looking at something.

2.     Cut to the something they see.

3.     Cut back to their change of expression as they react. (We must see this change. No good simply seeing a smile or grimace already in place. Then, if only for an instant, we’d have been severed from the journey of the character’s thoughts and emotions.)

4.     A further moment as they question or reflect. (A look down, or to the side.)

5.     A change of their expression as they take a decision. (A blink, a look up.)

6.     (Possibly) They move, about to act…

7.     Cut! Perhaps to a wider shot or to the next scene…

During this sequence, shots showing the something the character sees may be repeated one or more times, intercut with repeated shots of the character, the sizes of both tightening as the beholder’s interest grows.

The contrast of proximity to distance comes into play too. We might find ourselves closer to the character and further away from what they are looking at.

Here’s the paradox: we see not only what the character sees but we see the character seeing it—so how can we be in the character’s ‘point of view’?

We are. We are in their Narrative Point of View, and that NPOV is the screen’s equivalent of the page’s third person intimate. They are not an I (the single POV shot) but a he, she, or they. Even so, we experience a substantially subjective sense of their story of perception.

This third person intimate mode renders a character the viewer’s conduit into the story, and this character also prompts the means of it telling in terms of camera and editing… (On the page, meanwhile a character might prompt idiom, rhythm, sentence construction, tone.)

Such a character’s looks and actions might motivate angles, shot sizes, and cuts. They can also motivate camera placement. Say our fictional being points to something or calls out to someone, there might be a cut to their subjective view, yes, but there might equally be a cut to a shot in which the camera is placed opposite them so that we see them past the object of their attention—which is situated in mid- or foreground while they are placed in the background.

So instead of a POV shot, we see both beholder and what they behold in the same frame. We grasp their inner process and their understanding of their outer world. An example of third person intimate within a single frame.

The articulation of NPOV can also work in a simple scene of dialogue between two characters, whether static or mobile. Each might be shot on matching sizes and angles. When it comes to the edit though, one character will be given prominence over the other. They’ll be given more screentime, especially in relation to listening and reaction shots, plus tighter sizes and longer lenses with narrower focal planes—in contrast to the presentation of their interlocutor, with whom the viewer is not so connected.

There’s another factor. The character in whose NPOV we find ourselves may motivate both the sizes of shot used for the other person in the scene as well as the timing of the cuts from one character to the other.

In this way we experience the scene as our character experiences it. We are ‘with’ them in mind and heart. Their subjective perception is our perception. Our thoughts and emotions are taken from theirs.

In a scene where characters are mobile, one character might motivate not only shot size and cut (perhaps to keep them in the frame as they move) but camera movement too. A dolly, a counter-dolly, a boom up or down might take its energy and direction from those of the character in question (but not from those of other characters).

(At the end of Fellini’s I Vitelloni, a protagonist’s gaze from a moving train even motivates a camera to dolly over vignettes that occur in his imagination—or if they’re ‘real’, they have to be happening in rooms far from anything he’s able to witness.)

With this technique, the looks, movements, and actions of other characters will not motivate anything apart from reaction shots of our central character that keep us in their perception of, and with their reactions to what is going on. This contrast serves to emphasize the filmmaker’s chosen Narrative Point of View.

Sound and score can be integral also. A sound of significance to a character in one way or another might be emphasized in the mix, a reflection of their subjective auditory perception. It might even prompt an image in their mind that we share on the interior ‘screen’ of ours.

A melody, musical motif, a sting, notes from a particular instrument meanwhile, might serve to draw us into a character’s experience, might bring us into the memory of some moment when we last heard it.  

While I’m on the seminal topic of soundscape, a voice-over can take us directly into the mind of a character, their emotions, denials, disturbances, world view, secret thoughts. It may contradict what we see of them, what we’ve understood of them, or may reveal how they imagine themselves to be.  

How does it feel though when, after rigorously following the NPOV of a character for any length of time, we find a sudden switch to those of others? How might this come across if the director has deliberately designed the shift?

I’m indebted to Martin Scorsese and a conversation I was lucky enough to have with him when I was putting together a class on Narrative POV in film. The great director suggested I watch Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man…

Early in the movie, protagonist Manny Balestrero visits an insurance office to make a claim on a policy. The point of view moves to the teller when she begins to think she recognizes Manny as the robber who recently held up the office at gunpoint.

As the POV spreads from her to one colleague after another—none of whom we yet know—we ourselves experience the contagious paranoia in an unsettling manner that seeds our own misgivings that Hitchcock’s unsuspecting protagonist could indeed have been the culprit. (Even if the title of the movie is The Wrong Man!)

These are no rules however. Although third person intimate is to me an intrinsically cinematic approach, great films can lack any subjective POV, be largely objective, or (rarely) may to the contrary be shot entirely on a POV shot or shots.

Narrative POV might be opportunistic, changing from moment to moment, perhaps to communicate suspense, or a gag in a comedy.

Hyper POV is a term I use to describe a violent event, for example in an action movie, covered from many angles, each offering the most dynamic impact, second by second, frame by frame. Third person objective barely measures up to such visceral presentation of mayhem.

The complications of dramatic irony, of unreliable narrators might also be brought to bear. We shouldn’t forget, meanwhile, that we may feel closer to a character and want to go along with them simply because we like them! Or identify with them. Or wish we could be them. Or the star playing them has a compelling charisma. Or a performance draws us in.

Let’s end with a look at that screenshot from the top of this article:

The moment occurs in Kieślowski’s Three Colors Blue, in the seconds before Juliette Binoche’s Julie—in whose eye we see the reflection of a physician—asks him about the condition of her daughter after the family’s car crash. No moment could be more dramatic; the only character we’ve seem thus far is the child…

As Julie asks that question, and receives its answer,  the film gives us our first view of her—and it’s in a close-up.

Here, the narrative point of view of the character is introduced in the very same moments as the character herself—a devastating display of the director’s mastery of this powerful concept.

Peter Markham

In no particular order…

Photo by Joe Roberts, Unsplash

1. Learn not what to know, learn how to think.

2. Don’t conform, dissent.

3. Magic. Mystery. Mischief.

4. Feel. Consider. Challenge.

5. American dramatic narrative = adversarial individualism.

6. Reject the club, seek loneliness.

7. Ambition is is the death of thought. (Wittgenstein)

8. Film is not theatre on camera.

9. Watch films to make films.

10. Make a movie to save your soul.

11. Know it never will.

12. No need to save your soul? No need to make the movie.

13. Read! Read! Read! (Werner Herzog)

14. Story. Screen. Audience.

15. Image. Sound. Film.

16. Dance to the pain.

17. When I’m making a film, I’m the audience. (Martin Scorsese)

18. Emotion.

19. Tone.

20. Language of film.

21. Style comes from the soul.

22. Your vulnerability forms your strength.

23. Not preparation but formulation.

24. Screenplay. Casting. Editing. (From Kieslowski)

25. Connective tissue, the path to simplicity.

26. Image. Shot. Camera.

27. Think passage of time.

28. Montage. (Eisenstein). Time. (Tarkovsky).

29. The agency of emptiness.

30. The potency of silence.

31. Contrast.

32. Dissonance.

33. Interfunctionality of filmmaking crafts.

34. Never “unpack” unless it’s a delivery.

35. Suspect current idiom.

36. Forget careers guidance.

37. Filmmaking an artistic process. Production an industrial.

38. Flow of images, not coverage.

39. Flow of energy.

40. Territory—the primal human currency.

41. Dialogue as multifunctional resource.

42. Looks as wordless dialogue.

43. Image as subtext.

44. Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. (Nabokov).

45. Elegance as eloquence, not embellishment.

46. Rhythm not pace.

47. Let characters not rise above circumstance.

48. Listen to yourself.

49. Listen to the film.

50. Conflict. Friction. Tension. Vibe.

Peter Markham

Disclaimer, I’ve done one.

Photo by wuz on Unsplash

In following a number of BluRay commentaries recently, I’ve realized why, for quite a while, I hadn’t bothered to pay them much attention. The experience of revisiting these “extras” prompted me to ask what we might expect from them, what we might reasonably hope for, and what, in general, we get.

I’ll start with that last thought by applauding the erudition of the best contributors. Film history, background of the movie in question, other movies by the same filmmaker, facts about the director — there are some highly informed scholars and commentators out there whose enlightening discourse might serve to carry us along as the movie plays. (I’m coming to the problem this invariably leads to.) There are other folk of more moderate resources. Over this inconsistent spectrum, some can be engaging, some indifferent, some downright boring.

But most — of whatever calibre — rarely seem to mention is what is actually happening on the screen.

If they do, this will be largely a reference to actors, not so much in terms of performance, for example in relation to camera, but more a matter of which stars might have been considered for the part or any previously attached. There are notable occasions however when an actor’s preparation is discussed, especially when this has been of a singular nature, and this can be intriguing.

Often what we find are details of a film’s industry background — not so much the behind the scenes production circumstances that can be of interest but more the meetings, hesitations, maneuvering and machinations of the corporate high-ups. The perfect way to ruin one’s engagement with the screen.

Contributors seem to want to display familiarity with the business, their vicarious way of saying “I belong”. They seem to want to cleave to orthodoxy, to groupthink as though that reveals their authority. They are insiders, they imply, never outsiders.

The screen might be portraying traumatic mayhem or sublime wonder while the commentary drones on about which bigwig had lunch with which bigwig, as though the speaker is paying no attention to the events we are witnessing or the emotions they are conveying — perhaps because they’re not looking at the film or perhaps because, if they are, they don’t experience cinema in the manner most of us experience it.

But even if the commentary is related more to the movie itself, shouldn’t the commentator refer — at lease from time to time — to what we are seeing? Fundamentally, mightn’t they offer insights into the filmmaker’s cinematic language? Shots, camera, framing, angle, movement, editing, imagery, soundscape, score? Wouldn’t it be an idea to talk about emotion, information, story and storytelling? Then there are those moments that can’t be explained or reduced in any meaningful way yet come across to the viewer with profound effect. Let’s hear them noted, celebrated, marveled at.

There’s complex, inventive narrative and visual connective tissue in a good film. The revisiting of shots, compositions, angles, stagings — let’s have the architectural glue of these memes revealed.

And passage of time — how does the filmmaker modulate this? Through editing. Through transitions. Through ellipses. Even within a single shot — what changes out of frame before a moving camera returns to show the same space (see the end of The Taste of Things).

And how is sound used? For subliminal effect, for tonal dissonance, to heighten emotion, to orchestrate eye trace, as an element in the articulation of narrative point of view, to heighten suspense, to narrow or broaden the “focus”of a scene. A commentary might reveal specific examples of these aspects .

Commentaries that fail to relate to the progression of images on the screen are surely more easily digested, and indeed enjoyed as audio essays elsewhere in the “extras” rather than as a talk that arbitrarily accompanies a movie Watching image, action, drama while listening to largely unrelated narration tends to result in cognitive overload — at least if a film means anything to the viewer.

The image and text correlation I find so helpful and so natural is, it has to be admitted, rare in book form also. Indeed, production of my latest book was agony as I struggled to get the production company to mesh screenshots with sentences and paragraphs in the precise configuration set out in the copyedited manuscript. (One or two instances excepted, we finally got there).

I’m by no means arguing for dry, dispassionate analysis. Commentaries can be dry and dispassionate even without the analysis. I’m asking for the excitement of informed appreciation, nothing too technical or esoteric but an articulate, tonally welcoming, clearly communicative exploration of the filmmaker’s navigation of their medium throughout a movie that might appeal to fellow filmmakers, to film scholars, and to film lovers also — most of whom probably never having set foot anywhere near a film set.

A film is not a novel, not a play, not a poem (although it might be the latter visually), it’s a film — and just as novels and plays and poems can most usefully be appreciated as novels and plays and poems, so films can surely best be appreciated as films.

Those who offer commentaries (and critics too) — please don’t take the film as a film for granted, as if it’s no different from any other narrative form.

Why not discuss it as a film?

Peter Markham

August 2024

A screen of power or a screen of the soul?

From The Teacher’s Lounge. Writer-Director Ilker Çatak. Cinematography Judith Kaufmann. (Image Sony Pictures Classics)

The cinema of vulnerability? What do I mean? Don’t there have to be stakes in any dramatic narrative? Threats, peril, casualties — whether physical or emotional, mortal or psychological? Isn’t all of cinema an arena for vulnerability in one way or another?

I think it was Ari Aster who I heard in an interview say that if he’s to engage fully with a movie, he needs a sense of the filmmaker’s vulnerability. This was a revelation. Not because it was unfamiliar—I realized it’s the case for me too. I’d just never accepted I had the same requirement. Why? Because it made me feel vulnerable? Unable to tough out the action movies, the cold noirs, the macho thrillers?

Or perhaps it’s more that I’m not so interested in watching a movie when I might as well be staring at insects fighting it out in a jar. Being a voyeur gazing at conflict for adrenalin kicks, for ‘the ride’ is not only something that to me seems vacuous, it tends to leave me somewhat nauseous. I can’t help but feel the pain inflicted on characters, whatever their position in any spectrum of good to bad.

Instead, I generally need the filmmaker to bring me into the emotions, visceral and neural sensations, and the cognitive activity of at least one character. If that character isn’t vulnerable in some way, what’s more, I’m unlikely to be able to empathize, not merely sympathize, and certainly not identify with them. (Note: empathy = in the feeling; sympathy = with the feeling; identification = being the character.)

Even Tom Ripley, at least in his novel and movie manifestations — Purple Noon, Ripley’s Game, Talented Mr Ripley has his moments of paranoia verging on panic. Even a Joker, in Joaquin Phoenix’s versatile hands at least, has his complex PTSD, poor murderous guy, and so I go with him.

So that’s one way a filmmaker’s vulnerability might come across — not only in the nature of their characters but in the ways they have the viewer connect with them. (With Whiplash the audience around me in the movie theater were howling with laughter at the suffering of the victims of bullying — something the filmmaker himself, apparently incapable of modulating his film’s tone, seemed to me to be encouraging. No vulnerability there.)

How else might vulnerability in a filmmaker be manifested?

In a sense of fragility perhaps. In the characters, as discussed, but also in their world, their customs and culture. In Ilker Çatak’s 2023 The Teacher’s Lounge the faculty world of protagonist Carla Nowak is stricken with conflicting obligations, loyalties, and resentments. At the same time the teacher-pupil relationship at the center of the story reverberates with an ambiguity of power dynamic familiar to those of us who have worked in such an environment. The authority of the educator vs. the tyranny of the student. The delinquent student as victim, the teacher as bully — although who might be the true bully?

Guilt meanwhile, is transferred so seismically from one to the other that even Hitchcock at his best might feel left behind. The Wrong Man, I Confess, and North By Northwest by the master of vulnerability barely match the interchangeable culpability of perpetrator and perpetrated upon in Teacher’s Lounge. In such a morally shifting cosmos, the tissue of meaning appears fragile. There’s no center that holds and Carla’s world, and our sense of it, falls apart — triumph, defeat, hurt, defiance are rendered the contradictory vibes of the movie’s scintillating, perplexing, paradoxical ending.

Which brings me to uncertainty, as companion of fragility a similarly fertile domain for vulnerability. Moral uncertainty. Cognitive uncertainty. Narrative uncertainty. Uncertain uncertainty.

When we don’t know where we are with a movie, where we’re going with it, whether a character might choose the right path or the wrong, the safe or the perilous, when we are unsure of what our protagonist knows and what they don’t, when a story seems to be going in one direction but we find it going in the opposite or suspect it might, or when we sense traces of a hidden story that might rise up to eclipse the ostensible one, we become uncertain of the film we are watching and how of how we are to relate to it — and with that uncertainty comes a sense of vulnerability, both in the film and in ourselves.

Another approach to understanding this cinema of vulnerability might be to look at its opposite: the cinema of power.

There’s precious little vulnerability in what might be thought of as cinemachismo. In this category we might include the predilection for torture in the movies of Villeneuve from Incendie to Prisoners and on, or the beloved festive screen mayhem of Miller, or a Bond industrial slaughter, or Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty in which the filmmaker invites the viewer to smile with the torturer — or in the filmically consummate soullessness of a Fincher.

This is far from suggesting though that violent movies and thrillers necessarily fit into the cinema of power. If Wenders’ Perfect Days, Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves, the new Cottontail by writer-director Patrick Dickinson, eschewing screen ‘action’ as they do, are quintessential exemplars of vulnerability, then so are Haneke’s brutal films — Funny Gamesamong them — critiques as they are of our love of festive cruelty, of what the filmmaker refers to as America’s ‘barrel-down cinema’ — an alternative term for the cinema of power perhaps? Scorsese’s canon overflows with vulnerability, from the final lonely damnation of Goodfellas’ Henry Hill to the epochal precarity of Kundun’s Dalai Lama. Kubrick’s characters are forever at the mercy of the contradictions and confusions of the human and the mechanical. The criminally underrated master Agnieszka Holland’s most recent film Green Border is awash with brutality melted out to migrants but like much of her body of work aches with vulnerability. The shocking Titanefrom Julie Ducornau descends into terrifying visceral violence yet at its end to sings from the heart in what is surely one of the strangest, most unlikely yet fiercely emotional denouements the screen has ever offered.

These movies, however savage, don’t desensitize us. We aren’t invited to embrace their violence. To the contrary — they tear us apart. Indeed, it isn’t violence or its absence that gets in the way of or gives us a film of vulnerability. It’s where the filmmaker places us in relation to the characters and their story. Yes, violence, cruelty, combat are the stuff of myth, of drama, of story, of spectacle — all potent elements in great cinema. How we engage with all of this is however what determines how this fiction comes to life in us. Does it hurt or does it titillate? Reveal human truth or divert us from it? Do we feel the pain of others or enjoy witnessing it?

Of course, I’m dismissing some highly accomplished directors here while I can so often get things badly wrong. For example, I used to think Steve McQueen couldn’t convey empathy. A brilliant filmmaker but Hunger I found icy, while in Twelve Years a Slave his racking of focus at one point from emotional to physical pain struck me as revealing an instinct for sadism rather than empathy. But when I saw his Small Axe series of films, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. These movies could be compared with Kieslowski’s Decalogue for their luminous humanity. Then there came this versatile filmmaker’s documentary Occupied City! Four-and-a-half-hours of emotion obliquely but painfully conveyed, the soul that seemed almost comprehensively extinguished somehow surviving the hell it has been put through…

It’s the concept though, a cinema of vulnerability that to me resonates. If I’ve left it nebulous at times, I’d argue that the screen of the soul and the movie-audience connection it prompts could never be reduced to easy conclusions…

Peter Markham
June 2024

Movie events vs. non-movie events

From Perfect Days directed by Wim Wenders, Screenplay Takuma Takasaki, Cinematography Franz Lustig (Picture from Free Stone Productions Co.)

A lot of people now equate drama with sensational incident, such as someone getting killed. But that’s not drama; it’s a freak occurrence… Instead I think drama is something without sensational incident, something you can’t easily put into words, with the characters saying everyday things like ‘Is that right?’ ‘Yes, it is,’ ‘So that’s what happened.’

Yasujirō Ozu.

I was recently taking part in a dinner conversation, perfectly congenial, agreeable, indeed enjoyable, in which someone around the table said they’d just seen the worst movie ever. They couldn’t believe how bad it was. Terrible! A disaster!

Somehow, some sixth sense alerted me. Uh-oh! I thought. This is sure to a film I love!

What was it? I asked, fearing the worst.

Then it came. As I feared: the worst.

Perfect Days, they said.

What? I thought. Why? I said.

Nothing happens! they replied.

But everything happens, I replied, finding the conversation had moved on while I was gathering my thoughts — as is invariably the case. But I need time to think, I reflected, wondering, as ever, why others don’t.

When, in life, something out of the ordinary occurs, something extreme, sudden, traumatic — a dangerous accident say, an act of violence, a crime in broad daylight, when moments we witness seem go go into a cinematic slo-mo — people often comment that it was like something out of a movie! In other words, things that happen in films aren’t generally things that happen in daily life. The former have to be ‘action-packed’, involve injury, death, or worse.

And things that happen in daily life don’t happen in movies because that would supposedly make for a boring film.

And this, I think, is what my friend meant… there’s nothing in that film, were it to happen in our everyday existence, that might prompt the like something out of a movie comment. The cleaning of public toilets as a daily routine, protagonist Hirayama’s job, is hardly likely to feature in the next Fast and Furious (even if Dan Casey, screenwriter of the last F&F is, as I can attest, as acutely aware of the nuances of humdrum human drama, of quiet subtext as anyone… or he was with his peers in our classroom).

Is this all a matter of genre, perhaps? In genre, in the sense of the term that suggests heightened drama in which the narrative observes particular conventions and tropes — whether merely regurgitating, or preferably subverting, reinventing them, or perhaps commenting on them obliquely or ironically — in genre we expect to find those somethings that happen in movies. (Okay — maybe not in all such genre, romcoms, for example.) 

Such events become matters of life and death, literally. The stakes couldn’t be higher, the action — usually a euphemism for violence — more physically dynamic, more explosive. But this is the stuff of dreams and nightmares too, of our primal instincts, fears and desires, of myth throughout history the world over. So it doesn’t mean that such fare denotes vacuous sensationalism. (In my eyes, I admit, it too often does.) Of course, to our shame, we often enjoy seeing others suffer pain, as the culture of badass reveals. There can be no festival without cruelty, Nietzsche reminds us. Indeed, we don’t have public executions in the US (yet) but we don’t need them while we have movies and TV to feast on.

But back to the dramatic register of a film, like my friend’s disliked Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, like Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, like the cinema of Ozu, or much of that of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh.

The register of the drama may be less pronounced but the emotions can be as intense, more intense even than those of the escapist mayhem of the action movie. The life and death stakes may be figurative rather than literal. There may crisis of a character’s sense of meaning rather than a threat to their mortality — but what is life without meaning?

And there may of course be cruelty — psychological, emotional, unthinking, deliberate. There may be extreme events too, although these more usually occur offscreen, be reported, at the most out of shot and only heard. Even if they are profoundly painful, life-changing, there is little melodrama about them. They are what they are. They feel the way they feel. Grief, longing, rejection, betrayal, love — no need for bombast to convey the deepest aspects of being alive.

In Perfect Days there’s a theft (of a cassette tape), nightly dreams, an unexpected guest, a father (unseen) with developing dementia, a coming death, and daily public toilet cleaning. There’s getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night.

All of this amounts to perfect cinema. Yet there’s nothing here like something in a movie.

And it’s a film I love.

Peter Markham
June 2024

What critics, what many of us ignore.

From Vertigo (1958). Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay: Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor. Cinematography: Robert Burks.

I’m sure that the painter is not a bit interested in the apples for themselves alone, but in the technique of his work which stimulates the emotion of the viewer of his picture. After all, all art is experience. People look at an abstract and say, ‘I hate it!’ but the mere fact that they use the word ‘hate’ means that they are going through an experience… therefore if you apply these principles to film, as I see it, it is not the pure manner of the content, in other words it is not just the story but what you do with it.

Alfred Hitchcock, 1964, interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

So much of what critics write about films might just as well be written about novels, short stories, plays, or simply a story they’ve heard. Critics invariably offer a synopsis, thoughts on story and characters, and on what works and what doesn’t in the narrative. There might be comparisons with other current movies, references to the filmmaker’s past works and, rarely, some sense of cultural context.

But in general it’s the synoptic take that dominates.

What seems rare is any measure of analysis — at least in all but the most cursory detail — of a film’s cinematic language and how that might be understood as an integral part of what the movie is and of the effect it has on us, emotionally, cognitively, neurally, viscerally. How, indeed, the film could not exist without it. (Or if it does, how such visual indifference diminishes the movie.)

If Marshal McLuhan once said The medium is the message, many critics seem to be saying the medium is irrelevant or the medium as a tool for communication is interchangeable with any other medium for communication, be it the stage, the page, even human speech.

Surely this is to deny the distinctive nature of the screen and its multifunctional richness — just as it ignores the specific resources of those other forms of communication.

Another aspect of how film is discussed — often by filmmakers themselves — is the conflation of the elements of the screen with those of the page. For example, I recently came across Francis Ford Coppola postulating that the screen’s equivalent of the sentence is the shot. (For the moment accepting his observation, how about turning on its head? Why not say that the prose equivalent of the shot is the sentence? Why give the page primacy over the screen? Why should the screen be seen as subservient, the junior to the adult.)

But allow me to question his insight. How do the individual clauses of a sentence correlate with what comprises a shot? With its static frames, its moving frames, with its shifting angles, one after the other? With what does the punctuation within a sentence correlate on the screen? What do its words correlate with? Or the letters of those words? The sentence’s tense? Its idiom?

And how about what happens when two shots are cut together? Is this the same as when one sentence follows another? Martin Scorsese, Coppola contemporary and fellow luminary in the pantheon of American masters, says that when two shots come together, a “phantom image” is created. Not one up there on the screen, but some fleeting, indefinable picture on what I like to call the screen of the mind.

Does that happen with two sentences on the page? Maybe sometimes:

A man crossed the road through the speeding traffic. The ambulance wasn’t long in arriving.

But here we have an ellipsis. The conjoined shots don’t necessarily need an ellipsis. They may elide time and space but also may extend them.

So I’m not seeing too many convincing parallels. Rhythm yes. Length, yes. Simple to complex, ok. Function, maybe. But this brings me to my next point.

What both shot and sentence do have in common is that they are each what I choose to refer to as a narrative unit. (Perhaps, broadly speaking, I’m agreeing with Coppola after all?) A paragraph is also such a unit, as is a chapter, a “book” or “part” within a book. A scene, sequence, an act in a film or as I prefer to say a movement, a vignette, also a sequence of parallel action — all of these might be regarded as narrative units.

Forgive me for questioning the words of a filmmaker whose The Godfathertops so many lists of the greatest masterpieces, whose Apocalypse Nowreaches such dazzling, visionary heights and plumbs such terrifying, epic depths, and whose The Conversation conjures maybe the most chilling paranoia in the history of the movies. I’ve experienced some of the most powerful cinema I know at the hands of this master. But his sentence-shot equivalence doesn’t actually seem to tell us too much, which is perhaps why he doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t follow up with any implications.

Another prose-screen claimed equivalence is the notion of film grammar. But just as writing a novel is not a question of writing decorous grammar, so making a film is not about good “grammatical” behavior. In both cases, it is language not grammar that matters. It is through language that a story is told, language that may be indecorous, innovative, individual and an element of a movie’s distinctive subculture.

Above all, the language of a story may be heretical… A million miles from “grammar” with its intimations of prescribed form, correctness, and good behavior.

For much of my time working in production, as a first AD, then initially as a director, I’d be thinking of establishing shots, matching sizes, matching angles such as profile to follow profile for example — a template of “coverage” into which to force the shooting, the results of which could be assembled in the cutting room, establishing shot first, going tighter through the scene perhaps with a new wide at some point to give breath and punctuation, and a new angle on the action.

No.

The filmmaker’s task is not to behave grammatically but to capture fictional events by the most effective means, means by which they may be conveyed to the viewer, prompting engagement, emotion, realization,. Ari Aster — once my student, as I ever remain his — one day mentioned to me Nabokov’s term ecstatic prose. Okay, here I’m doing is exactly what I was criticizing Francis Ford Coppola for: I’m correlating prose with film’s discourse. But forgive me for arguing that the notion of a corresponding ecstatic screenseems bolder, less dry, more illuminating as a comparison.

It gives a sense of style and language, of ebullient energy. The heady opening sequence of Romain Gavras’ Athena achieves exactly that ecstasy. Terrifying, yes, but exhilarating instant upon hyper dynamic instant.

The screen can by contrast also be uninflected, unassuming, of course. It can be tightly controlled, deliberate. It can proclaim its design (Terence Davies, Paul Schrader), celebrate it (Martin Scorsese), conceal it (Andrea Arnold), exemplify it (Charlotte Wells).

No, it’s not grammar that matters, that makes for the language of the screen, it’s aesthetics — and not as a veneer of either elegance or grittiness but as a practical resource of the visual utterances that form its discourse. Composition, framing, angle, line, space, proportion, light and tone, color, depth, movement, mise-en-scène, flow of energy or visual rhythm — the screen elements I like to call ikones, from the Greek word for an image, ikona (εικόνα).

No correlation to the sentence here.

Look at the ikones in that screenshot from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The left to right, up to down, broad to pointed, oppressive, even threatening diagonal of the Golden Gate Bridge. The dark slash it forms, its vector, its energy,. The sensuous deep red of the stanchions. The silhouetted female figure to lower and less stable screen right, helpless at the mercy of that menacing dark diagonal. The slim, horizontal, tenebrous sliver of the quayside in foreground on which she stands. The broad, horizontal space afforded by the stretch of open water. The distant hills that together with the sweep of the bridge form a thrusting shape traveling behind the figure and across to the far right of the frame. The low horizon and the space it creates for bridge and cloud-laden, blue sky, its contrasting patches of brightness and shadow perhaps threatening some imminent storm.

How different the sentence or sentences describing this frame would be. How differently the reader would process the words of the writer from the way they process the filmmaker’s image. And how different the effect. Seeing the frame, the impact is almost immediate, reading the lines, more cumulative, the prose would have to be more considered, while the picture works on the viewer more primally.

That’s one aspect of a movie’s address of course. There’s sound too. There’s music. There are the connections between one shot and another, one image and another, not necessarily following on but later in a film too, the echoes, the contrasts. There’s dramatic context (as there might equally be on the page.) There’s camera and its stasis or movement, its placement, angle, its lensing. There’s what is shown and what isn’t, what’s in the frame or out.

Vertigo is my favorite film. When I think of it, I think not only of its story, its myth of obsession with some delusional, fixed, cold, lifeless ideal. I feel not only its foreboding melancholy, a resonance of the human psyche (for me at least) but I recall its hallucinatory images and the visual texture or Robert Burks’ elegant, effulgent cinematography. I see it playing out up on the screen. And on the screen of my mind, which is where we remember movies. I see its language, its life, its cinema.

I don’t see it as a novel or a play. I see it as a movie, as a film.

I cannot see its story without its storytelling.

Peter Markham

June 2024

How our terminology restricts our understanding.

(From AFTERSUN, 2022, Writer-Director Charlotte Wells, Cinematographer Gregory Oke.)

What do we mean by the term ‘negative space on a movie screen? An expanse of emptiness, of lack of action, an area beside or outside the place in the frame to which our eyes are drawn, a section of the screen devoid of image, of people or objects, a blankness, that (seemingly) lacks tension — aren’t these some aspects of what we might understand by the term negative space?

It sounds so pejorative. After all, it’s a negative, a minus, a less than anything. You’d think there’d be an opposite term, a positive space. There isn’t, or if there is I’ve missed it, but it’s there by implication. It’s as though no space in the frame matters if something isn’t filling it — and that something needs to be a person or an object, an event, or some presence or other at the very least.

How might we usefully reconceive this phenomenon?

Firstly, how might ‘negative’ space prove to be functional space? How might it interact with other areas of the frame? Have an effect on them?

Asw ith the frame-within-the-frame, an area of “negative”, apparently inactive space can give rise to a new aspect ratio. The newly proportioned segment on the remainder of the screen that contains something — the “positive” space, as it were — is afforded additional emphasis. Such an approach is effective in 2.35:1 especially although can work in other formats of course, the greater the blank area the greater the effect on the constricted remaining section.

This goes for an image too. In Charlotte Regan’s 2022 Scrapper, there’s a shot in which a blank, off-white (as I recall) monochrome wall takes up the entire 2.35:1 frame. Gradually, to the bottom right of the screen and not in close-up but decidedly tiny in the picture, the hands of the young female protagonist rise into shot — all that can be seen in front of the blank wall. The effect? It’s mesmerizing. The moment, the simple, unremarkable action is rendered somehow significant. We watch intently what we might otherwise barely notice.

Think also of where the filmmaker might situate blankness. To the left of the frame, to the right, centered or around the third so as to divide the screen into three sections, three frames. These variations serve to surprise, stimulate, and refresh the visual interest of the viewer, whose shifting gaze travels now around one area, now another. Emptiness and presence dance around the screen, occupying alternating domains. The frame becomes dynamic, a universe for the viewer’s visual journey in its simplest aspect.

There’s a related insight we need to consider. In what part of the frame do we find the space? Top, bottom, left, right — don’t these sections have inherent qualities? Stable/Less stable. Home/Away. Past/Future. Heaven/Hell. Death/Life. Safety/Danger. Setting out/Returning. Where there’s space, where there’s action, what the screen direction of any movement, and what (usually subliminal) meaning is afforded by the relative positioning.

And how might this agility, spatial, lateral, vertical, relate to depth? After all, empty space may be found in a mid- or background of a shot, but also in foreground — perhaps a surface devoid of detail, perhaps one out of focus so that any detail is indiscernible. Again, the viewer’s visual engagement is enhanced, focal planes of something and nothing interacting.

When it comes to the technique of short-siding, blank (“negative”) space can be notably effective. Two characters converse. In one shot, one, in profile, looks to camera right, the other, in the intercut shot to camera left. In a widescreen format, the first might be seen on frame left, the second frame right. Say in both shots there’s corresponding “negative” space across the rest of the screen. That space in each shot, will hold a tension. Each is weighted. The dialogue, the characters’ looks give each space a charge. They may be ‘negative’ but they are active.

Such an approach might indicate a physical distance between the characters also. But when they are not in the same place, on the phone to each other, the effect can emphasize their geographical separation too.

Say, to the contrary, that each character is placed close to the side of the frame to which they are looking, the device known as short-siding. In this case, the space behind each will be devoid of charge — unless we anticipate the appearance of another character or element, so that the shot becomes suspenseful. (When will x appear? we wonder.) When there’s no such expectation, the charge of each shot will rest in that narrow sliver of the screen between the characters and the frames’ edges.

If we are not expecting some new entity and one suddenly appears, then we are surprised, startled. The empty space, abruptly active, thus prompts a jump scare. The emptiness was a misdirection.

Such dynamics of charge or no charge might apply to any lateral composition, not only one utilized in cutting between profile singles. (And to a vertical axis, particularly with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio.) If we expect a “negative” space to be filled we may be either held in suspense — in which case it is rendered potent space — or if we know the new element to be merely innocuous we may become bored because such anticipatory framing goes on for too long.

We might also consider how a shot introducing a scene might consist almost entirely of absence. Perhaps there are elements bordering the frame to one side of the other. This can be seen in the screen capture above from Charlotte Wells’ remarkable debut feature Aftersun, in which we begin, as the camera slowly pans right, to a see Calum’s arms in the mirror to frame right as he practices his tai chi movements. As the camera movement continues, his arms come into the foreground of the shot — and then we understand what we are seeing.

In other words, the initial emptiness over which the camera passes is instrumental in the process of revealing the meaning of the shot.
A second consideration might be the value of emptiness per se in the frame.I’ve written about this before in Cinema’s Mesmerism of Absence but it’s worth repeating — and in relation to the points above — that absence, that space itself, room in the frame, passive space we might call it, can lay claim to the screen. Like the passive character, this might be heresy to the practitioner or teacher of aesthetic and dramatic plenitude but given that by orders of almost infinite magnitude emptiness would seem to be the larger component of the cosmos, why shouldn’t it be granted territory within the frame of a movie now and then? And why, what’s more, shouldn’t we savor the presence of absence?

Like stillness, like silence, like nothing happening, and the resonance such a hiatus can foster, “negative” space is a fundamental, essential cinematic resource. Without seeing what is not there, we cannot truly see what is.

Besides… without emptiness there can be no wonder.

Peter Markham

May 2024

The discourse of the screen. A philosophy of being.

From L’Argent by Robert Bresson. 1983. Cinematography Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel

Monter un film, c’est lier les personnes les unes aux autres et aux objets par les regards.

To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks.

Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph.

There are, it seems to me, not just the obvious one but three profound insights in this sentence from one of cinema’s greatest artists and thinkers.

The first, it goes without saying, can be found in the word looks. Obviously expressed perhaps, but with his brevity, the master’s simplicity encapsulates a wealth of cinematic understanding.

One of the most common faults in editing by new directors and editors, at least in my experience, is a tendency to cut on dialogue. A first character speaks. CUT. A second replies. CUT. The first responds. CUT. The second speaks CUT. Etc., etc….

As though when it comes to editing, it’s all about dialogue — a cinema that, as Hitchcock put it, consists of pictures of people talking.

Dialogue is one aspect only of human interlocution (even if its rich multifunctionality — and indeed disfunctionalities — rewards more plentiful consideration than is often given).

Silence is another. Perhaps more loaded than speech, deeper too. The eloquence in an absence.

So what is the vehicle of the silence?

The look.

Bresson continues thus:

The ejaculatory force of the eye.

The look as agency.

Looks connect (bind, he says) one character to another, to others, to things, places, to events, to thoughts even, to emotion.

What other properties of looks might there be?

Looks prompt fresh camera placement.

Looks prompt new angles.

A look up can motivate a high angle down, one down a low angle up.

Looks prompt changes in shot size.

Looks motivate camera movement.

Looks determine the direction of camera movement.

Looks inform the speed of camera movement.

Looks direct the eye path of the viewer over the screen — across the frame, up, down, left right, and across the cut.

Looks afford charge to one part of the screen over another.

Looks may prompt POV shots.

Looks may prompt cuts to wider shots of the looker, what they look at placed in foreground.

Looks can take the viewer into a character’s narrative POV…

Looks reveal thought, understanding, emotion.

Looks subvert/contradict words.

Looks reveal subtext.

Looks shift to tell a “micro-story”.

Looks downward suggest interior reflection.

Looks sideways suggest anxiety or thought/knowledge a character is hiding.

Looks reveal reaction.

Looks may determine the duration of the shot — between blinks. (See Walter Murch’s book.)

Looks motivate the cut.

Looks spark the transition from one scene to another.

Looks prompt score.

Looks emphasize a sound,

Looks engage the viewer.

Looks command the screen.

Looks seduce.

Looks accuse.

Looks defy.

Looks invite.

Looks acknowledge.

Looks define.

Looks celebrate.

Looks weep.

The look is the heart of the face.

Looks reveal the soul.

Looks form our primal language.

With Bresson, looks (as well as hands) render the performance of the actor — an art drawn from theatre — superfluous, even alien to cinema. Quite a heresy, given the embrace of Method and Meisner by actors and directors in much of American moviemaking. Quite a minimalism too…

And quite an austerity for those of us captivated and moved by the mysterious, magical, mischievous métier of the screen actor, their nuances of expression, stratagems of speech, intuition of the psyche, their exacting, precarious craft…

What else though, do the words of Bresson’s maxim say about the art of film? This leads to the second profound insight.

He uses the verb lier — to bind.

When a character looks to another, they are, in his mind, bound to them. The two are together and it is cinema that discovers this togetherness. This is a very different dynamic from that of a movie that reflects our (America’s) culture of adversarial individualism. In that context, a look may serve to separate. It can confront, oppose, and when weaponized kill — emotionally, viscerally, even, on occasions perhaps, literally. (Or else, it submits.)

Not a binding in our common humanity but a dividing in combat for power.

Drama is conflict, you might insist. But it can also be friction, tension — or as especially bright Chinese directing students of mine put it: a vibe.

What it is not, is harmony, or only for moments perhaps and often uncertain ones at that, maybe at a movie’s end (maybe not!). Bresson is not arguing for harmony though. In his vision, so it seems, we are bound to each other in this common humanity of ours — and what could be more dramatic than that with all of its contradictions, unresolved questions, failings, iniquities, puzzles, chasms, peaks, shadows, lights, despair and joy?

The third insight apparent in Bresson’s celebrated note relates to the look that binds characters to objects.

Not only are we bound together person to person but we are, each of us, bound inescapably to all forms in the world, the universe. Yes, even the individual, seen as a distinct, sovereign, solipsistic being in our western competitive culture, is in the understanding of Robert Bresson, inextricably bound to the simplest inanimate object.

For him, character and object exist together in a shared universe and it is cinema — transcendental as any art — that reveals that universe of mysterious togetherness.

Thus… Looks in Bresson’s and perhaps all cinema, we might reflect, reveal the nature of existence — of presence and the commonality of being.

Peter Markham

April 2024

On liberation from the hubris, agenda obsession, and hype of the present.

Bessie Love taking direction from Alice Guy-Blaché, 1918. (Picture from The Irish Times.)

There I was, eighteen and troubled, at grammar school in Brockenhurst in the south of England’s New Forest. I’d been chosen to play Shakespeare’s troubled prince in a symposium on Hamlet with a visiting troupe of professional actors. Not because I could act, then, now, or ever but because, like Denmark’s eponymous protagonist, if not quite to such existential extremes, I was troubled, sort of…

The day had been stimulating intellectually and practically — the actors proving generous, natural teachers — when after, we sixth-formers had the chance to mingle and chat with our visitors.

Among the group was former American silent movie star Bessie Love, who was born in 1898. Ms. Love is the young woman sitting on the horse in the photo above.

Coming from a working class background and having been told that my hopes of getting into film and TV would get nowhere because “you don’t know the right people”, I somehow summoned the temerity to ask Ms. Love if I was being completely stupid to imagine such a path remotely possible. It was her response — to the effect that there was no good reason why I shouldn’t follow my aspirations — that provided me with the permission I needed in order to pursue a career in film.

Years later I found the photo above, a moment from 1918. The woman giving direction is Alice Guy-Blaché, the first known female director.

So there I was at the end of that afternoon at school, a couple of handshakes away from a pioneering filmmaker, one of the first narrative movie writers and directors, born in 1873.

Taking into consideration the new filmmakers who are or have been under my tutelage, I can count myself among four generations of cineastes.

Add to this some people I’ve worked with — such as master filmmaker John Schlesinger, born somewhere between the dates of Ms. Love and myself — I might claim to be in a community of five generations. When the children of my alumni become filmmakers as — global circumstance allowing — they surely will, that will make for six generations over, maybe, as much as two hundred years.

Martin Scorsese, master filmmaker, historian, teacher gave a speech recently at the PGA Awards in which he described how, when he’d been awarded an honor there at age 22 for his student short It’s Not Just You, Murray! Cary Grant let him know how to approach his moment onstage (by kissing award-giver Elke Summer). So right here you have Scorsese’s connection to Grant and everyone Grant worked with — Hitchcock, Capra, Hawkes, Ingrid Bergman, Kathryn Hepburn, Eva Marie Sainte and many more.

Then look at the legions of filmmakers Scorsese has inspired and informed both by his own mastery and by his championing of past practitioners.

A long, long way — all of this — from the ephemerality of much to be found day upon day on social media. The current hype, the tribalism, the awards season fixation, the cultural lockstep conformism, the lack of original subject matter, the unthinking regurgitation of popular idioms, and the peremptoriness of critical thinking present a sliver of the rich terrain offered by the possible decades of discourse on cinema and its timelessness.

To be fair, there are posts recognizing and bringing attention to movies and filmmakers of recent and less recent decades, and often from the adherents of contemporary trends too, the all-round cinephiles I mention with respect. Amnesia has not (yet?) eradicated film history, which at its best lives and breathes still.

There’s a general point to be made here also. An aspect around long before social media and information overload. (So many movies are currently released, it’s tough even keeping up with the present.) I’m talking of the perennial tendency to look down on those who came before us, as though we know better, do stuff better, are more aware, more understanding, and just comprehensively superior. Hardly a new habit.

For some cinephiles it’s no different — even among talented but new practitioners. One now notable writer-director-producer, after I had taken the class through hours of shot-by-shot, cut-by-cut analysis of the cinematic mind behind Hitchcock’s 1946 Notorious, asked me why I’d taken up so much time on this since “we don’t make films this way anymore”. No, but filmmakers still face the same storytelling challenges, still utilize the same resources even if the technology has changed radically, still work with the image and with sound — and let’s hope with actors rather than AI generated non-beings.

It’s insight gained into how Hitchcock recognized these elements and how he so consummately handled his articulation of them that renders my session more than a class in film theory or archeology. Far from that, it’s an exploration of filmmaking practice — at any time.

(With their subsequent experience and brilliant successes, the class member in question has since retracted his question — an important lesson for me in that some of the most effective education happens not in the instant of its dissemination but over the course of the years that follow.)

Some of us tend to restrict our viewing to contemporary fare. Someone, I seem to recall, once wisely observed that there is no such as an “old” movie, only one we haven’t seen. Indeed!

I’m not saying everyone has to meet the likes of Bessie Love, although that’s surely going to be an inspiring pleasure for anyone so fortunate.

I’m not arguing for the merits of some golden age or for nostalgia for the greats of the past. This has nothing to do with sentimentality or any lack of respect for the young. And I’m aware of the limitations of the past: few female filmmakers, few people of color, few working class cineastes (Martin Scorsese, Terence Davies — you showed the way.)

I’m saying we should take our place proudly and with humility, in the community of cinema’s generations… to be joined, let’s hope, by those who follow us…

In fact, let’s have it all — past, present, future. A screen that knows no generational exclusivity.

Peter Markham

February 2024

When turmoil in life informs turmoil on the screen…

From Black Narcissus 1947, Written, Directed, Produced by Powell/Pressburger, Cinematographer: Jack Cardiff, Eyes: Kathleen Byron

What are some of the ways filmmakers bring their material to life? What are the resources of their process?

Telling a strong story well. ✓

Utilizing the skills of visual and auditory storytelling. ✓

Conscious art and craft of all elements of screen language. ✓

Facilitation and direction of performance. ✓

Conjuring images on the viewer’s “screen of the mind” ✓

A take on, perhaps a vision of the human condition, often sub-conscious, involuntary. ✓

Instinct, intuition. ✓

Stamina, determination, focus. ✓

Belief. ✓

Drawing on personal experience. (Whether harnessed unconsciously or deliberately.) ???

I might not have thought of including this last category were it not for my recent viewing, one of many over the years, of Black Narcissus, the Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger masterpiece of erotic intrigue among a community of Anglican nuns who find themselves situated in a village community high up in the Himalayas.

The film, adapted from the novel by Rumer Godden, traces how Sister Superior, the young Sister Clodagh and the troubled Sister Ruth both experience forbidden desire for Mr Dean, agent for “The General”, who presides over the village. The intrigue this prompts results in uncontrollable jealousy on the part of Sister Ruth — which leads to shocking consequences.

I hadn’t been aware or the personal relationships of some of those on set until — after this viewing — I read about them.

Deborah Kerr, who plays Sister Clodagh, and Kathleen Byron, who plays Sister Ruth were both romantically involved with director Michael Powell, Kerr before, Byron during production.

So the love triangle on the screen mirrors the one on the set, the director corresponding to the fictional Dean.

(Here the triangle is comprised of two females and one male while in the Powell/Pressburger The Red Shoes, it is the other way around — two males and one female. In both cases though, it is the emotional dimension and depth of the women that is central to the drama.)

Was this parallel in the lives of the filmmakers the catalyst for the film’s erotic electricity or with such a screenplay and such a cast would that have come about regardless of the personal chemistry? Did personal emotion intensify the onscreen drama? Did Powell ensure it did? And did the cast have any choice in the matter? Were they enabled as actors or were they exploited?

Were Kerr and Byron so ‘professional’ they could block out their feelings or were they, as sensitive artists, at the mercy of their antagonism? Did they use this, either consciously or subconsciously? If so, did it help or hinder their work?

The two protagonists of Trần Anh Hùng’s 2023 The Taste of Things, Dodin Bouffant and Eugénie, played by Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche, were formerly romantic partners who had a child together. The director has commented he was uncertain as to how their connection might affect their performances as fictional lovers. In the event, he said, the ex-couple’s congenial relationship proved helpful in their approach to their characters, and perhaps to their understanding and realization of their quiet but enduring romance.

Krzysztof Kieślowski, in an interview from the early nineties, commented that, while he was giving a class in which he was using a scene from Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, he first tried two married actors, then two unmarried, finding no advantage in working with the married couple — nor, he said, did he find it detrimental.

The irony here is that in Bergman’s original TV series, the director — who based the work on his own experience — had been married to Liv Ulman, the fictional Marianne in the onscreen episodes. As in Black Narcissus, Bergman’s drama was in part, and perhaps a considerable part, auto-fictional, director and actor(s) playing out a fictional parallel to their personal emotional dynamics.

Surely, the affairs of director Michael Powell with two of his cast, and the tension on set that reportedly resulted, informed the film’s palpable sexual tension to a considerable degree. And surely, an actor must draw on emotions and experiences they know, of whatever nature, in order to bring out those of their character. A director might well enable them to do this — surely an aspect of good filmmaking.

Hitchcock said that the filmmaker should put their fears up on the screen.Taking into account these two masterpieces from Powell and Bergman, perhaps they might put on the screen the tribulations, the pain and drama of their romantic lives too. Does that entail the manipulation of the actors? Or is it a resource for them, prompting some of their best performances?

Would Black Narcissus be the dark classic it is without its tempestuous nourishment? Of that we can never be completely certain — but let’s treasure the movie we have.

Peter Markham February 2024