Conflict, Friction, Tension in Cinema: What is it a film needs in order to work?

(Screenshot: North by Northwest. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Cinematography: Robert Burks. Rock face: Robert Boyle. Shoe, sock, glove: Harry Kress. Hands: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint.)

‘Drama’, commented Alexander Mackendrick, ‘is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.’ How often, here in the US, have we been told that drama in the movies is about conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict was all I heard over the years of my film school teaching. Not from the students but from the faculty. If a short wasn’t pumped up with conflict, with wall to wall conflict, woe betide the filmmakers! Then came a fellow European. (Despite the iniquitous, malicious Brexit, I regard my English and Brit self as European—as my ancestry, from Spain to the Ukraine, attests). Equipped with the intellect my colleagues so vehemently opposed, this new teacher maintained that the drama of a film is a question not of simply of conflict but of friction. At last! I thought, I have the word, the language, the concept, and so—freed from the tyranny of conflict—I breathed a sigh of relief…

If conflict necessitates two opposing forces, friction suggests instead some manner of mismatch. Of goal or aim perhaps, of emotion, of desire, cognition, approach, need, character. Not the simple punch-up, literal or figurative that seems the imperative of conflict but a universe of possibilities. Got it! I thought, Home and dry…

Yet the journey was far from over—as, indeed, it never will be—for a couple of years later, a student at the school, Chinese, brilliant, further explained to me what the captivating, irresistible, addictive quality of drama in cinema is about. Tension! they said, as I eagerly seized on this fresh draft of enlightenment. Tension! Now I have it. I’d known of the Mackendrick comment since I’d read Paul Cronin’s compilation of his teachings at CalArts: On Film-making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director but this one word encapsulated his insight.

Anticipation + Uncertainty = Tension. The math of drama. (Wait… I’m no reductionist. There’s more to come…)

What I had suspected all along was at last becoming clear. The conflict that so many American filmmaking educators see as requisite, is the consequence of our nation’s cultural foundations. Where adversarial individualism is the creed on which all else is constructed, the mantra without which there can be no ‘freedom’, you will, sooner or later, end up with conflict. No escaping it. Fistfights, firefights more so—the gun as quintessential American fetish and instrument of individualist agency, catalyst and culmination of ‘action’, of story, of denouement. This Cinema of Conflict can be understood as a front for cultural nativism. The Cinema of Tension, on the other hand, is universal…

How is tension manifested? Firstly, in the realm ‘beyond the screen.’ The fictional story, world, characters, situations, events we come to believe in as we watch a movie. In the suspense of the dramatic narrative, in wondering what will happen next. Looking at the frame here from North by Northwest—will Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill grab Eva Marie Saint’s Eve Kendall’s gloved hand and prevent her falling to her death? Or not? This cliffhanger—is it about conflict? Sure, it happens in the context of conflict—Martin Landau’s Leonard and the goons serving James Mason’s villainous Philip Vandamm are pursuing our fleeing couple. But this moment, so consummately captured within the frame, is tense indeed, is Mackendrick’s anticipation mingled with uncertainty. (The artist creates. The critic defines. Mackendrick—an American who grew up in Scotland who saw far beyond ‘conflict’—was, it seems, both.)

That last point, ‘within the frame’, reveals another manifestation of tension—the nature of the frame and how what I call its practical aesthetics convey information, emotion, and physical sensation of one form or another. This prompts another word and concept vital to our consideration, one I heard stressed by Iranian master filmmaker and teacher Asghar Farhadi, that again takes us past the simplistic conflict—and that is: Contrast.

Look at the frame in question closely. There’s up, there’s down. There’s fear, there’s hope. A gloved hand, an ungloved hand, one female, one male. The foot, the hands. There’s light, there’s dark. Human presence, mineral indifference. A close rock face, a sliver of distant sky. The augury of contact, the omen of severance. The potential for salvation, the threat of mortality. Continuity or finality… The defiance of, or the succumbing to… gravity. Will there be a rising, an anabasis, or a falling, a katabasis?

Let’s add another word, related of course to contrast: Dissonance. The glove and the loafer, hardly suitable for rock-climbing! Human-made items against a natural background. Comfortable social life juxtaposed with primal struggle. Sophistication with autochthony. The ephemeral with the permanent…

In the shot’s construction meanwhile, in its composition, the diagonal formed by the reaching fingers renders the vectors of visual tension both lateral and vertical, tautening the rectangular frame as it holds us—incapable of looking away—helpless in its timeless instant...

With the shot’s tactile, primordial promise of touch comes also the sensual and the sexual, and the anticipation, the tension this brings. Thus, Hitchcock heats up his suspense. Visionary of cinema Michael Haneke has commented that all storytelling, whatever its genre, its emotional terrain, its stakes, must incorporate suspense. Cut to the chase! Say the filmmaking educators. No! Cut to the suspense. Hold it! Prolong it! ­Render it unbearable! (Tarantino has this down, and excruciatingly so…)

So, what do we have?…conflict, friction, tension, contrast, dissonance, their visual articulation, suspense… Anything else fundamental to the workings of a movie?

A couple of my alumni, again Chinese, observed that, as they see it, cinema is not so much about conflict as it is about a vibe. Imagine any American filmmaking educator saying such a thing! A vibe? They’d be out on their ear! Asian cinema might work in such a nebulous manner, the cultural nativist might suggest, but its American counterpart?  Well…yes. It might indeed. Think of Aristotle’s eudaimonia, his word for which there appears to be no direct translation but seems to approximate to the ineffable engagement (pleasure?) we take in following a story, a journey incorporating emotions often far removed from delight: anxiety, fear, terror even, sadness, pity, grief, anger, as well as joy—in short the spectrum of human feeling. Then there comes the distinct gratification afforded by the visual language of the screen—composition and its elements of space, shape, proportion, line, tone (light to dark), and color palette (what I call ikones), and mise-en-scène, the placing of specific elements, characters, objects, segments of an environment within the frame. Even while watching harrowing events, one’s visual sensibility revels in the filmmaker’s articulation of their canvas and how it relates to the narrative…

Let’s add awe, wonder, spectacle to our criteria. The flow of energy within the shot, across the cut and the transition. The mesmerism we experience before vista, vignette, the play of light, the meshing of sound, music, and image. The frissons prompted by misdirection across the vectors of the frame, over the axes of the drama, changing from moment to moment.

So…the eudaimonia offered by the narrative and its visual representation—might we not see this as the vibe my alumni described?

Finally (almost), let’s not forget The 3 Ms. Mischief. Magic. Mystery. So much more compelling than the simple, ongoing fracas demanded by the dogmatic conflict-ist. The properties of myth, the imagination, the subconscious. The quintessentials of the soul—without which there can be no cinema…

Let’s end though, with the words of Yazujiro Ozu, taking us from the metaphysical to the vibe of the grounded everyday:

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.’ ”

That simplicity, the modest register of daily interaction, is maybe the most difficult drama of all to achieve. The cliffhanger of our quotidian exchanges perhaps? And the uncertain anticipation that informs our experience of being alive—one instant to the next…

Peter Markham August 2022