Let’s Think of Cinema’s Screen as a Language
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