How to Watch a Movie (12 page)

You could see that a hundred years ago in Griffith. He moved in two directions at once with cutting. He felt the suppleness and flow with which he could convey an anecdotal incident: the shooting of Lincoln, the attempted rape of Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh), the great battle—all from
The Birth of a Nation;
surely that ease helped audiences in the test of sitting still for a three-and-a-half-hour story (so long as enough arousing things were happening). But in his next film,
Intolerance
, this naïve inventor yielded to the literary and philosophical ambitions he had felt in editing. He discovered lofty comparison and never realized it was dumb repetition and far inferior to the comparisons and allusions that Joyce, Henry James, and Kafka were making at about the same time. Kafka wrote
Metamorphosis
in the year Griffith made
Intolerance
, but the eery simplicity of its opening was so far ahead of what film could do: “One morning as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” Then again, could Kafka have been so swift
and sly in words without the casual transitions he had noticed on screen? The ways in which writers started learning from film are so many and so likely to disprove reports of the death of the novel.

Griffith decided to have four stories in
Intolerance
that demonstrated … human intolerance: incidents in ancient Babylon; the time of Christ; the massacre of the French Huguenots in 1572; and a modern story (set in 1914) in which a young man is wrongfully convicted of murder and will be executed if word cannot reach the prison in that recent creation of movies, “the nick of time,” or what we might call suspense.

Even in 1916, the scheme threatened the vitality of any individual story.
Intolerance
was a failure commercially just as
Birth of a Nation
had founded a new business. The comparison of various intolerances was thought fatuous and long-winded, pretentious and silly, no matter that the Babylon sequence had a spectacular palace set built at great expense at 4500 Sunset Blvd.—but without any real idea of how to use it, so the camera (in a balloon) just drifts across the immense façade like a gaping tourist. Far too much of the historical episodes seemed dull excuses for costume, décor, and the preachiness of Griffith's attitudes. But the modern story is a gripping display of conventional suspense in which the articulated rendering of action (through edited shots) is matched by the hectic or desperate crosscutting of the final race against time. Isolate that modern story (it stars Robert Harron, Mae Marsh, and Miriam Cooper) and it might be the most impressive work of Griffith's career.

Suppose that the audience for
Intolerance
was disconcerted by the yoking together of far-flung periods, but riveted by the intensity of advancing action in modern storytelling. The
lesson for commercial movies (which Griffith had done so much to inaugurate) was don't be aggressively ambitious and let editing act as an accelerating force in story. We still benefit from that decision, in pictures like
All Is Lost
and
Amour
as well as television series like
Homeland
and
Breaking Bad
. In all of those works, we find ourselves wondering what happens next, even if some of the answers are fanciful (or absurd). But that is only part of the potential in editing, and now the adventurous filmgoer needs to understand the dynamic better.

Let me repeat, the cut is also a joining or a suture. Try this experiment: Select two items of a modest size that seem to have nothing in common and put them on the same table. Then invite a newcomer to study the table and suggest a connection between the two things. That person will never fail, because the human mind has a helpless but essential capacity for seeing connections or likenesses. The cut in film may serve as an interruption, a stroke or caesura, if you like; but the watcher will knit up the rift so quickly it is amazing. The filmmaker may break his own flow with a shot chosen at random. In the Surrealist literature, the classic absurd pairing involved a sewing machine and an umbrella—and the agility of the receptive mind finds a clue: they are both used in repairing appearance; in both, you press a knob and they come to life; they are companions in the hall closet…. They are metaphors!

It may seem far-fetched to consider a whole movie based on this kind of dissociation, though
Un Chien Andalou
(1929), by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, was made in such a reckless spirit. It is a sixteen-minute dreamscape on the theme of sexual awakening that obeys no kind of restraint or censorship. Primitive, childlike but intuitive, it digs into the subconscious like people in a desert seeking water. There is a modern
surrealist who functions on the edges of the mainstream, David Lynch, who slips unaccountable actions into the narrative of his films: remember Dean Stockwell's character, Ben, in brocade and heavy make-up, miming Roy Orbison's “In Dreams” in
Blue Velvet;
or Betty's steamy screen test in
Mulholland Dr.
, which manages to be comic, banal, and erotic all at the same time. It's not that
Mulholland Dr
. “works” in the way that can be reduced to a map of itself, a listing of subtexual meanings. Far more, it exposes us to the wildness of association, without the frenzied atmospheric of horror. The magic of
Mulholland Dr
. is in its calm. In the long run that is the only way to disarm the shock in cutting.

Facing most of Lynch's work, some viewers are likely to feel degrees of bewilderment or outrage. Some may stop watching. But for others, the digressions or departures only deepen the emotional power of his films. And if you need reassurance, just use the remote to surf through channels on your television and notice the arbitrary, incidental but sometimes haunting beauty you uncover. It's often more captivating and liberating than any particular channel, and it's a reminder that the Surrealists reveled in automatic or random associations.

If Picasso had looked at
Guernica
after he had finished and yielded to a passing whim by adding a prostrate odalisque to the frame, unaware of the air raid and its damage (she could be playing cards with that young man in Chardin), it would still be all Picasso. It might be a greater picture, or one in which the gravity and anger of April 1937 were pierced by unexpected inappropriateness. But what is trite about
Guernica
now (compared with
Las Meninas
) is that the whole damn thing is against air raids. Aren't we all?

In François Truffaut's
Shoot the Piano Player
, a gangster
swears on his mother's life that a story is true, and Truffaut nonchalantly interrupts his own narrative with a cameo shot of an elderly woman suffering an apparent heart attack. In the mood of the French New Wave of the sixties, there was a lot of blithe subversion. When Jean-Luc Godard assembled
Breathless
, he found the film was too long and so he went through it again introducing the jump cut. That saved time but it also undermined the articulate serenity of every shot and pronounced that film (even film that was the truth twenty-four times per second—a Godard axiom) was whatever the cutting made of it. So the film bumped and jerked along to a new time scheme rather as years later Douglas Gordon would replace the dread and suspense in
Psycho
by distending every frame and second until
24 Hour Psycho
became a contemplation of the film process. Some say that remaking is ridiculous, but Martin Scorsese, for one, has had the habit for years of doing multiple printing of certain frames in order to stress one instant over another. This is stretching time, if you like, but it is a kind of cutting.

Cutting does reveal artistic character eventually, but it offers so many prospects. In
The Magnificent Ambersons
, in the strawberry shortcake scene with Tim Holt and Agnes Moorehead, Orson Welles trusted to do it in one shot. He may have filmed covering close-ups, but in the event he settled for duration, the actors, and even a kind of boredom. Not that he rejected shock cuts in his career—the huge mouth saying “Rosebud” at the start of
Kane
that cuts to the glass ball breaking on the ground; the alarmed cockatoo in Xanadu; and even the moment in the cabin scene in Colorado when the purposeful mother walks across the room, throws up the window, and the film cuts to a sudden close-up of her face looking out at the cold and her son
with a reordering of the spatial rhythms in the scene. For the cabin scene had been shot so far in a way that had no close-ups or their direct confrontation with emotion. It is a scene about actual interior space and the way the mother controls it. It is still debatable whether that sudden cut to the mother is to push her sensibility into the story (we hear faint music and a mournful wind and Agnes Moorehead cries out “Charles!,” calling him and condemning him, as if the word had been torn from her) or to raise the unanswered question—what does her son think of her and of the way he was sold off? That implication is at the heart of the film's elusiveness, for the viewer was asked to understand the complex editing scheme of flashbacks and be able to balance them like the different narrative voices in Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
. (That entirely unfilmable book was written by a man who was about to become a Hollywood screenwriter.)

So many films liked to reassure audiences with the notion that the wild screen was manageable and organized. The prospect of abandon, orgy, madness, and slaughter touched on in
Un Chien Andalou
, in Russian and German film, was palpable and alarming. In Hollywood, even, it affected Stroheim and Sternberg. But the business was always anxious to keep that energy reined in, or unappreciated, if only so that business could stay regular and businesslike. Stroheim's
Greed
had been obstructed because it was excessive (it was cut from ten hours to two), but it was feared because of its direct assault on such a subject.

But in 1915, the editing ambition of
Birth of a Nation
had helped prove movies as a business and led to the building of theaters and the foundation of companies that would be household names. Yet if that picture is screened, for its anniversary,
in 2015, in Memphis, in Atlanta, in Chicago, in Harlem, there will likely be demonstrations against its offensiveness. The phenomenon that established the show cannot be shown, except as a sign of history—and perhaps not even then.

For decades, mainstream filmmaking rejected cuts that might explore the full potential of cutting. That meant the denial of intellectual discomfort, and the elimination of a natural tendency for movies to seek the unknown. Apart from what it does to her in the shower,
Psycho
cuts Marion Crane's ostensible life into another not dreamed of until it happens (has she ever thought of being murdered?). But Hitchcock had always had his superstitious faith in the unexpected: it can range from Henry Fonda's being arrested in
The Wrong Man
to a plane dusting crops where none are growing in
North by Northwest
. In
Vertigo
, one can say that the James Stewart character sees a “cut” from one Kim Novak to another, but is slow in realizing how far the two women are married.

Any consideration of editing as a force that interrupts and fragments apparent order needs to take note of another condition in filmmaking. Very few movies are shot “in order,” or according to the line of the narrative. For reasons of economic expediency, the shooting schedule goes all over the place. So the plot is disassembled for the actors; it is repeated, sometimes with many takes; and it is subject to reshoots, and the careful filming of extensive sequences (even entire locations) that never get into the final picture. So there is a natural and cheerful climate of the haphazard in film production, and a feeling of collage and alteration going on all the time. There is yet another nuance to this: the crazy schedule plays fast and loose with time, so that the things shot seem to be floating in just the way in
Kane
, say, you're never quite sure where or when you are.

At the very moment of
Vertigo
and
North by Northwest
, Alain Resnais made
Hiroshima Mon Amour
, expanding the reach in editing, and the right of film to use it. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) is in Hiroshima to make a film about peace. As she lies in bed with her Japanese lover (Eiji Okada) she tells him that she understands Hiroshima and what happened there. She has been to the museum. No, he says, she saw nothing. This is not a bitter dispute, but a calm assertion that Hiroshima cannot be understood in a museum or by looking at graves and signs. We assume a night of lovemaking between them. In the morning, the woman is up first. She has her coffee on the balcony and then she looks at the man in bed. His arm is rather awkwardly twisted against his body. There is a cut and we see another arm in a similar pose, but it is wearing a uniform. It is the body of the German soldier this French woman loved in a town called Nevers in a perilous act of collaboration for which she was punished when the war was over.

This one knot or synapse will be the motif of the film in which the woman speaks of loving Hiroshima and Nevers. Once that link is established,
Hiroshima Mon Amour
can move back and forth in time without awkwardness or effort. Once upon a time, the flashback was like a found object, a vital cache of letters or information, an answer in the mystery of story, a tidy package of life and action introduced for its explanatory value. But in
Hiroshima Mon Amour
the past is always there, untidy, sprawling, poetic, suggestive, and subject to errors of memory. (The present, the now, in film has to be correct; the past has no more chance of that than the future.)

The past may be the future. In Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining
, Jack Torrance has taken the job of caretaker at the Overlook Hotel to write the novel he has dreamed of for so long. He is alone there but for his wife and his young son. But the
magnificent hotel is not comfortable when empty. It creaks with the possibility of story or ghostliness. Jack's writing is not going well, but he is desperate to be overtaken by fiction. He feels the pangs of his old weakness, alcohol, and prowls the corridors of the Overlook, drawn to the Gold Bar.