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This chapter continues the exploration begun in the last chapter, which looked at the tension between style and content and how that tension generates first a distinct voice for the narrative. This voice is first articulated in the compositional choices and consequently in the organization and orchestration of those images. Style may refer to genre or it may reconsider the organization of shots into a different narrative frame, such as the non-linear frame Quentin Tarantino uses in Pulp Fiction (1994). In this chapter we examine 4 stylistic interventions that on one level appear to be a return to former forms, in a sense a creative reaction to the radical experience of the nonlinear story. On another level, however, these interventions represent a deepening of long evolving tendencies in film narrative. In this sense they work with the limitations of those tendencies, not so much imitating them as trying to stretch the boundaries those tendencies may have. We begin with the most conservative of these tendencies, the elevation of cinema verité.
THE ELEVATION OF CINEMA VERITÉ
Cinema verité, beginning with its ideological underpinnings in the work of Dziga Vertov (see Chapter 1), has been principally viewed as affiliated with the documentary. Indeed, together with the personal documentary and the educational-political documentary, cinema verité is one of the 3 principal ideologies of the documentary. Its affiliation with the dramatic film dates from the 1960s: the British kitchen sink dramas, the New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard, and the docudramas of Peter Watkins and Ken Loach.1 More recently there has been a resurgence of interest and activity in the use of the cinema verité style. The results of that interest have led to the most profitable film of all time (in terms of percentage of revenue to cost), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and to the most talked-about school of filmmaking of the 1990s, Dogma 95. Cinema verité has also had a pronounced impact on the lively Belgian school, the films of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (Rosetta, 1999) and Frederick Fonteyne (An Affair of Love, 2000), and the move to hyperrealism in the work of Erick Zonca (The Dreamlife of Angels, 1998) in France. The earlier work of Remy Belvaux (Man Bites Dog, 1992) is formative in the Belgian embrace of cinema verité. Turning to the Dogma films, a background note will contextualize the movement.
The Dogma filmmakers are led by the Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier. Their “dogma” echoes the ethos of the New Wave declaration that their films would be a creative reaction to the dominant studio films of the day and that the style of their films would be free of those conventions. In the case of Dogma 95 that means a return to cinema verité. Von Trier together with Thomas Vinterberg, SØand Frederick Fonteyneren Kragh-Jacobsen, and Kristian Levring have committed themselves to making films without artifice. That means no tripods, artificial light, or music. As much as possible naturalism must prevail. There is a script and there are actors, but all else looks and feels like cinema verité. The style is critical to the experience. Making it feel real, albeit a stylistic posture, is the central tenet of Dogma 95. The subject matter of the films, the fact that they are scripted, and the fact that actors are portraying the characters makes the content classic melodrama. The style, however, is the style of cinema verité. Since the declaration and the release of a number of Dogma films at least one major filmmaker has embraced the Dogma style. Mike Figgis has produced Time Code (2000), and there are certainly independent filmmakers such as Kevin Smith (Clerks, 1994) who echo the principles of Dogma.
To understand the conflict of style and content we turn to Thomas Vinterberg's film The Celebration (released in Europe as Festen, 1998). The film covers a crucial 24 hours in the life of one Danish family. The patriarch, a successful businessman named Helge, is turning 60 and the celebration of the title brings together all the extended intergenerational members of his family. Such an event is a mark of success, but the title is essentially used ironically. For Helge's 3 surviving children (there was a recent suicide by the only adult child still living at home), Christian, Helene, and Michael, the issue is whether to celebrate silently and continue living depressed and disparate lives, or whether tonight is the time to expose the family's ugly secret. The suicide was Christian's twin sister, and Christian decides to challenge the status quo. At the party, as he toasts his father, he congratulates him for being the man who continually raped him and his sister when they were children. This statement initiates a chain reaction that results in all the children turning against their father. At the very end the mother joins them, banishing Helge from the celebratory breakfast. It has been the night that changed the power structure in this family. The children at last can assume a different position, hopefully a more successful position in their emotional lives.
The Celebration is about secrets, it is about anxiety, it is about guilt within a family. How does the cinema verité style contribute to the veracity of the emotional states? How do the camera placements, the shot selections, and the organization of the shots create the feeling states that underline the narrative?
The cinema verité approach creates a general sense of veracity. It seems to capture the edgy personalities of character unmasked—the insecurity and rage of Michael, the depression and special position in the family of Christian, the power and confidence of Helge, the provocative rebelliousness of Helene, the superficiality and extroversion of the mother. But the style goes further; it also seems to catch the sense of minor characters, such as the manager of the hotel who knows his place and is the voice of the owner and no more. The chef is outspoken and ironic; he doesn't accept his place. The waitress, with her openness and charming sexuality, is in contrast to the closed Christian, whom she has always adored. The cinema verité style captures character and makes each of them seem more credible than they might if the style didn't promote a sense of actuality.
Perhaps even more striking is that the camera becomes an active participant in creating the sense of the emotional core of the characters. When Helge is photographed, it's in mid-shot. He's always in the center of the frame, and there is a stillness to the shot. Vinterberg also holds the shot longer than he does with other characters. The result is that we feel Helge's power, his control over others. In the case of Michael, the images are quite the opposite. Michael is more than insecure; he is filled with rage, and his anger, although inappropriate to the moment, is explosive. Here Vinterberg uses a camera in close to Michael, looking down and at him—almost glaring at him. The camera also moves in jerking movements toward the object of his rage, usually his wife and often other women. The camera motion is kinetic, just as are his emotions. Vinterberg also uses quick cuts, whether they are jump cuts or cutaways, to simulate Michael's emotional state.
Although Christian and the children are ultimately victorious, Vinterberg never exploits the emotional power shift via image or editing. There are no quick emotional fixes here. Toward the end the camera placement and cutting vis-à-vis Michael slows down and becomes more calm, just as Michael calms down and actually assumes a leadership role in his new position in relation to his father. The result is that we experience the new Michael as more solid, more stable, and more a man with a sense of dignity than the man who was controlled by fear and anger earlier in the narrative. This transition is particularly critical because Michael seemed the most damaged of the 3 surviving children. Different camera placement and a pace that lacks the staccato cutting surrounding Michael in Act I, indicate how far the grown children have come in these 24 hours.
One more observation about the editing style of The Celebration is important. The Celebration is not an action film nor is it a plot-driven film. Consequently, it would be expected that the editing style would be relatively slow. It's not. Because The Celebration is about the emotional turmoil that surrounds a key family event, and because it focuses on a 24-hour period, Vinterberg cuts the film as if it's a thriller. In Act I all that happens prior to Christian's inflammatory toast to his father, is that we are introduced to the situation and to the characters. To make these 30 minutes dynamic, Vinterberg rapidly cuts between the arrival of the 3 children, then the guests and the preparations of each of the adult children for the party. By rapidly cutting between them, Vinterberg adds pace to the narrative purpose. He individuates the 3 children, giving each their own pace that is driven by their character. Christian is depressed, so the pace is slow, the camera distant, and the deep focus of the shots makes him seem very far away. Michael, as mentioned, is nervous, almost undone by having to prepare for the party. He berates his wife for leaving his black shoes behind, but minutes later needs to have sex with her (to lie down for five minutes) to calm down. He trips in the shower, and he trips while running to meet his father. He is a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Helene, on the other hand, is in a room, the room where her sister recently committed suicide. The manager of the hotel is with her. She begins to search for her sister and eventually finds the suicide note left by her. This sequence is one of distance and observation in Helene's search for her sister. The shots are longer and the movement subjectively echoes Helene's point of view. The pace is faster than the Christian sequence but not as hectic as the shots relating to Michael. Overall, the pace here creates a sense of dynamism but also emotional tension. The restlessness of the camera echoes the emotional out-of-breath quality of Helge's children. We don't yet know the why, but by the end of Act I we are emotionally exhausted and the party is just about to really begin. This is the power of the editing style Vinterberg employs. He uses cinema verité to add a layer of veracity to the narrative.
This impulse is magnified fivefold in Erick Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels (1998). Isa and Marie are twentysomething young women. The narrative takes place in Lille, France, today. Isa is from the South. Both are marginal in the sense that they are uneducated, unskilled young women. Although Isa is more the drifter, she has a more optimistic personality. Marie is negative and angry. In The Dreamlife of Angels, Zonca frames the narrative with the friendship of these two women, and like any relationship, this one has the arc of meeting, growing closer, growing apart, and ending the relationship. Within this metastructure, Zonca explores two relationships, Isa's relationship with a young girl in a coma, and Marie's with a rich young man. The apartment in which the women live is owned by the young girl's mother, who died as a consequence of the car accident that left the young girl in a coma. The relationship between Isa and the girl in a coma would appear to be an impossible one but it isn't. In the case of Marie, Zonca follows her relationship with a rich young man who is clearly a womanizer. He is a poor choice for Marie, and when he abandons her leaving Isa to give Marie the news, Marie at first blames Isa, pushes Isa away, and then finally commits suicide.
The style Zonca has chosen reflects in a general way cinema verité—a handheld camera, tight two-shots (in cramped spaces), lots of close-ups of functional activity such as writing in a journal. The footage has a captured quality as opposed to one that is staged, and this too is symptomatic of cinema verité. But Zonca has more in mind than to observe two marginalized young women. He wants the level of observation to promote a love for his characters rather than an assessment of them. To promote this level of involvement with his two main characters, Zonca needs to adopt what I call hyper-realism, a much more intense experience than the veracity yielded from cinema verité. As a consequence, Zonca first truncates scenes. He doesn't move from an establishing shot into mid-shots of interactions between characters to a cutaway for a new idea to a close-up for dramatic emphasis to mid-shot to long-shot as he concludes the scene. Rather he is very selective. Scenes are constructed of fewer shots, and the shots that are employed are used to emotionally heat up the experience of the scene. This means that scenes are mostly presented in mid-shots and close-ups. It also means that the camera placement crowds the action. There is very little space between us and the characters.
In one scene, for example, Isa is offering breakfast coffee to Marie. They are recent acquaintances. Marie, at Isa's request, has allowed Isa to sleep in the apartment. Call this a breakthrough-in-the-relationship scene—the two will be friends. There is no detail of the bedroom's geography in the scene, only the two young women. It's as if Zonca wants to push us toward them, the last two human beings on earth. In this scene Zonca creates a sense of togetherness as well as isolation from geography, the apartment, and other people. Most of his scenes proceed with this level of intimacy vis-à-vis the young women and this level of isolation from society at large. When we do see the young women with others, Marie with an early corpulent lover or Isa with the young girl in a coma, Zonca approaches the scenes with the same sense of inclusion and exclusion. The result is intense, emotional, and involving—the hyper-realism that goes beyond cinema verité.
THE RETURN OF MISE-EN-SCÈNE
As a style, mise-en-scène is associated with Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958), with Max Ophüls in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and Lola Montès (1955). These filmmakers, building upon the work of F. W. Murnau in the 1920s (The Last Laugh, 1924), essentially moved the camera to avoid editing. The elegance of their camera movement recorded performance and added a more subtle editorial direction. In Welles’ case, a sense of aesthetic virtuosity was created; in the case of Ophüls, a sense of romantic longing and energy. The former impulse, that of technical virtuosity and the filmic aesthetic, infuse the early camera movement in the career of Stanley Kubrick (Paths of Glory, 1957). Only later would Kubrick use the camera movement to slow down the pace of the film in order to recreate the seventeenth-century sense of time and place in Barry Lyndon (1975) or the accelerated sense of the future in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The latter impulse, the moody romanticism of Ophüls, resonates in the mise-en-scène work of Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti. But none of these filmmakers was as effective at using the moving camera to conjure the inner emotional state of the main character as was F. W. Murnau. Hitchcock tried to capture the feeling but was more effective when he resorted to a cutaway or subjective sound.
What about mise-en-scène today, in the era of rapid pace and authorial intervention? Today the work of Luc Besson, Oliver Stone, and John Frankenheimer reflects the influence of Eisenstein rather than Murnau. But in spite of the preference for the fast cut, there is a renewed interest in mise-en-scène, particularly in the work of Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, and it is to this work that we now turn.
Stanley Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide Shut (1999) differs substantially from his previous work. Kubrick has principally gravitated to genre work, which gave him an opportunity to explore aesthetic challenge and moral failure. This dialectic operates in his war films, Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket (1987); his satires, Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1963); his horror film, The Shining (1979); his science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey; his gangster film, The Killing (1969); and his epics, Spartacus (1960) and Barry Lyndon. As mentioned earlier, Kubrick enjoyed the challenge of mise-en-scène and he employs it with a panache rare among filmmakers. For the most part, however, the movement of the camera seemed to be a creative challenge Kubrick warmed to. How else does one understand the lengthy tracking shot that follows the Master Sergeant about the barracks, introducing his ethos to the young recruits, in Full Metal Jacket? Movement does energize the scene, but it is the aesthetic virtuosity of the lengthy shot that stays with the viewer. Here the style of the scene seems to be far more important than its content. This approach to mise-en-scène is echoed in the long tracking shots in The Shining and in the trenches and in the chateaux in Paths of Glory. As I mentioned earlier, there is a deeper purposefulness to the deployment of mise-en-scène in 2001: A Space Odyssey and in Barry Lyndon.
Turning to Eyes Wide Shut, we first note that it is neither a classic genre film nor a classic satire. Instead Kubrick has turned to a moral fable for adults. The Harfords are a materially successful New York professional couple. Bill Harford is a caring physician; she is a caring mother. But each is more in love with their own self-image than they are with one another. Consequently, to feed the personal excitement of her narcissism, Alice, the wife, plants a seed of doubt in her husband's mind: there was and may be another man in her life. The notion excites her but fills him with doubt and jealousy, and he begins a search, a desperate search, for excitement and illicit thrills. But his journey becomes a nightmare. Outrageous behavior, even murder, are the results of the narcissism he encounters in others, and in the end he is rather undone while his wife is reconciled to a relationship without ecstasy, the desired goal of self-love.
The New York the Harfords inhabit is as much a spiritual wasteland as are the chateaux of France in Paths of Glory. Material abundance implies that spirituality is flesh-bound, but this is not what Kubrick implies in Eyes Wide Shut. On the contrary, what the Harfords encounter is emptiness and here lies the moral of Kubrick's tale. The culture of narcissism leads away from spiritual fulfillment, not towards it. The question for us is how Kubrick uses a particular style that may or may not conflict with the content, to create the sense of narcissism, ennui, and the illusion that sexual adventure can satisfy the longings of self-love. These are complex and interior feelings. How does this plot-oriented director create these interior states of mind?
The options here are performance, art direction, and/or camera movement. Kubrick, of course, uses all of the above. Our interest, however, is on his use of camera movement. Here he doesn't disappoint. Kubrick's camera moves in a restless, probing, searching movement.
Two examples will illustrate how Kubrick has gone further with miseen-scène than did the work of F. W. Murnau. To contextualize these two examples from Eyes Wide Shut, it's useful to look at Murnau's use of miseen-scène in The Last Laugh. In 1924 Murnau made this film about an older gentleman who gained great status from his position as the doorman at a major urban hotel. But in the first Act, we see his pride, the sense of power he derives from his position. A turn of events sees him removed from his position; he lies to his neighbors and to his daughter—he is still a doorman. To be convincing he needs a uniform, and so he steals it and begins his pretense—the precursor to his tragic downfall. When he enters the hotel the camera is with him, but as he proceeds to steal the coat, the camera moves ahead of him, stopping at the coat, the object of his desire. Murnau has used mise-en-scène to pictorialize both the psychology of the old man, desperation, and his desire to do anything to regain his status. The camera movement, which is subjective and labored, then filled with a desire that outsteps the old man, provides a full sense of his inner life. This is what Kubrick achieves in the following early sequence in Eyes Wide Shut.
The scene is a party given by a wealthy client-friend of Bill. The first camera movement is the arrival of the Harfords. The movement, directly in front of the Harfords, is a glide fairly close to them. Both sides of the frame capture the mirrors that line the entry, and beautiful people are seen close to the periphery. The track captures the Harfords in mid-shot. They are looking at the guests and the mirrors to the sides. They are looking at themselves in the mirrors and beautiful people are looking at them. Are they comparing themselves to the other guests? It doesn't appear so. What they note is that others are looking at them, rather than each of them taking an interest in others. The effect of the tracking shot is excessive but very much directed at the subjects mid-frame, the Harfords. What we are left with is a powerful sense of their self-absorption, their unbridled, unfiltered narcissism that feeds on the image of themselves watching themselves and being watched. It's as if the main characters are becoming, in this single shot, their own objects of desire.
Our second example is also found in the same party scene. Bill has been called upstairs. The host's mistress has overdosed upstairs while his wife ministers to the guests downstairs. He calls upon Bill, his medical friend, to save the situation by saving the girl's life. Bill obliges and does so. Alice, meanwhile, is gently accosted by an older man with a distinctly elegant, illicit aura. He is not only trying to meet her, he is also trying to talk her into having an affair with him. Here the mis-en-scène is a tracking shot that follows Alice dancing with the Lothario. What is critical is that this movement also proceeds in mid-shot and the camera is placed even closer to Alice and her would-be lover. This crowding accomplishes two things. First, it gives the shot a sense of intimacy, the movement of seduction. Second, the camera, by staying close, excludes all the others. She is the only woman in this world, and he is the only man. The consequence in this case is to withdraw context. It's no longer a party in a very wealthy man's home; it's an erotic encounter. The exclusion of context heightens the intensity and narcissism of both characters. In the first tracking shot, discussed above, the narcissism was a barrier; here it is shared. In the first track there was no erotic quality, only self-absorption; in the second track, it's all erotic, directed at stimulating Alice in a way she wasn't with her “familiar” husband. In essence, Kubrick has created a sexualized dream state by using camera movement with the same intense purposefulness used by F. W. Murnau. But the focus in Eyes Wide Shut is the self as the subject and object of desire.
Martin Scorsese sets himself quite a different task in Kundun (1997). In essence, Scorsese uses mis-en-scène to create a spiritual dream state appropriate to a biography of the Dalai Lama. Scorsese has used camera movement to energize the bar scene in Mean Streets (1973) and to establish a sense of power (albeit posturing) for the main character's entry and movement about a restaurant in Goodfellas (1990). But in Kundun the goal of the movement is far more interior and complex.
Kundun follows the life of the current Dalai Lama from his discovery as the next Dalai Lama at age 3 to his leaving Tibet, now invaded and occupied by China, 30 years later. The historical conflicts among his advisors, the Chinese invasion, his meeting with Mao, the decision to accept exile in India, all this is covered in the narrative. But that is plot and not of central interest to Scorsese. These events are events of the secular world, the political world. Scorsese is more interested in the spiritual world, the inner life of the Dalai Lama. The challenge is to concretize this spiritual sensibility.
Robert Bresson and Carl Dreyer both took up this challenge in their work, and both used a mise-en-scène approach to create the conflict between the outer world conflict and the inner strength and belief of their characters. Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1945) and Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929) exemplify their methodology.
The first notable quality of the camera movement is that it simulates the eye line and point of view of the Dalai Lama. When we first encounter the boy he is lying down, and we see the adult world upside down. As he rises the camera rights itself and begins to move at the pace of the young boy's movement. Since he is always running, the camera moves at a fast pace. The young boy is curious, and the camera movement is not only subjective but also takes in objects and people. In every sense, the camera movement identifies the point of view with the attitudes and interests of the 3-year-old boy.
It is important that Scorsese moves the camera along this subjective arc. When he uses cutaways, they are clearly from the boy's point of view. By doing so excessively in the first scenes, Scorsese is establishing ownership by the character of Dalai Lama but also subjectivity in the most inclusive sense. The shot selection in these scenes represents the sense memory of the little boy, which creates the context for what will follow. The progression of shots doesn't follow logic but rather the feelings and interior “monologue” of a young boy with himself. What sense does he make of adults, parents, the tests the priests put to him to prove or disprove he is the chosen one, or Kundun? This is the aesthetic and psychological rationale for the shots chosen. It is also the driving notion for how and when camera movement is used to avoid editing.
To complement this subjective camera movement Scorsese uses a variety of images of the natural world. Usually he incorporates them into a sequence of travel, as when the young boy is transported to Lhasa or when his father dies and his body is disassembled for burial, which consists of feeding him to the scavengers of nature, the vultures. In these cutaways, in effect, Scorsese is always concerned with the scale of man in nature. And so the image may be the boy's caravan as a speck in the frame, with the rest of the image filled with the sun and the desert. Or the image will be of snowcapped mountains that reach to the sky. Or birds in flight from valley to mountain. Or a river that is endless until it reaches the sky at the horizon. The images are always contextual: human beings are not the masters of nature, only one of many who inhabit nature. These natural cutaways are the practical context for the actions and deliberations of men. Kundun or the Chosen One is one of many ongoing elements of natural life. The contrast of these images clashing with the subjective camera movements of a young boy provide a dialectic of the inner and the outer worlds that carries us into the notion that both exist in an ongoing and harmonious balance.
Beyond the subjective camera movement juxtaposed with the cutaways of nature, Scorsese must create a sense of a dream state, in this case a spiritual one. Here it is pattern that is important. Acknowledging the repetition of various aural patterns in the score by Phillip Glass, Scorsese harmonizes the camera movements with the score. They too tend to follow a pattern, a rhythmic repetition. The crowning of the young Dalai Lama provides a good example. A young boy arrives in Lhasa. Crowds are present, in awe of their new spiritual leader. The boy's parents are present. His advisors are present. The movement first enters the frame, then cuts away to side-to-side movements of his family, for example, and then cuts to the camera moving again into frame with the seated boy stationery. These rhythmic movements set up and follow a pattern, and they instill a formal discovery, that this young boy is making the transition from being a citizen to being Kundun, from the human to the spiritual. It is this pattern, this rhythm of the movements, that creates a special sense, a spiritual sense of the occasion of the crowning of the country's spiritual leader. What is critical here is that real time and naturalism are subverted and replaced with a feeling that is not practical or easy to articulate. It is spiritual.
Before we leave this section on mise-en-scène it is worth mentioning other notable work that tries to use the moving camera in a manner not associated with a Hitchcock, a Polanski, or a Spielberg—the thriller or action directors, in other words—nor for identification or the tension inherent in the use of the moving camera in an action sequence. (See Chapter 17.) Two of the most interesting directors are Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, 1969, and The Sacrifice, 1986) and Miklós Janscó (The Round-Up, 1965, and The Red and the White, 1967). In both cases the filmmaker moves the camera to avoid editing. The lengthy takes in The Red and the White and The Sacrifice become as much an aesthetic challenge as a source of insight into the narrative. The voice of the filmmaker is as important here as the narrative elements. An example will illustrate the point, The Red and the White, a story of the civil war that followed the 1918 Bolshevik revolution in Russia as it spills over into middle-Europe. Jansco's camera moves from one side of the battlefield to the other and back. Geography doesn't mean a lot, nor does rank. Nothing protects the combatants from the inevitability of mutual extinction. This is the voice of Jansco: neither side is better than the other. This idea is achieved through his use of the moving camera.
Working at about the same time, Mike Nichols explores ideas about manmade machines, airplanes, killing machines, and the environment. Are they natural or unnatural? They look like birds in the sky, but they kill not for food but for more human reasons. These are the ironic notions Mike Nichols is working with as he uses zooms and camera movement to follow these manmade “birds” in Catch 22 (1970). Nichols takes a similar ironic approach to relationships in Carnal Knowledge (1971). Again, the camera movement both follows the action and distances us from the characters so that we consider the nature of those male-female and male-male relationships.
More recently, Quentin Tarantino has taken up camera movement in Pulp Fiction (1994). In keeping with the genre subversion he is seeking, the moving camera maintains an even flow of energy as opposed to the upward arc of action and violence so central to the gangster film. Tarantino's first subversion is to replace action with dialogue. His second is to move the camera rather than to build up a sequence through pace and closeups. In this sense, his use of camera movement is supportive of his voice (as in the case of Jansco) rather than in support of the dramatic arc of the narrative.
THE CLOSE-UP AND THE LONG SHOT
D. W. Griffith created a pattern of fragmentation of shots that differentiated long shots, or shots that established location and context, and close-shots, or shots that were emphatic, emotional, and intense. Eisenstein built on Griffith's innovations by using the juxtaposition of images to create conflict. In effect this meant a polarization of the kind of shots used, with Eisenstein using more close-ups than had been the practice. Those directors who sidestepped mise-en-scène and chose to be more directive about audience emotions gravitated to a disproportionate use of close-ups. Sam Peckinpah, Oliver Stone, and feature directors coming from the world of TV commercials such as Michael Bay (Armageddon, 1997) favored the close-up. In fact, all of the above-mentioned directors also embraced extreme close-up shots in which there is no context, shots that only make sense in juxtaposition to the other shots in the scene. Needless to say, these directors also embraced pace with vigor. Which brings us to the issue of this section: What are filmmakers today doing with the juxtaposition of the long shot and the closeup? Since I will focus on the work of Shekhar Kapur, particularly Elizabeth (1998) and Bandit Queen (1994), we need first to look at other epic filmmakers to understand how they dealt with the issue of juxtaposition.
All filmmakers have a logic for their shot selection. Otto Preminger in Exodus (1960), for example, uses wide-angle shots with his main character in the foreground and the ship, the Exodus, or the attack on Acre prison ongoing in the background. He doesn't use close-ups as much as the deepfocus cinemascope frame as a whole to advance his narrative. He is not all that interested in the juxtaposition of the long shot and the close-up. In this sense his is a mise-en-scène approach to the issue.
Anthony Mann, on the other hand, is interested in juxtaposition. Whether it's El Cid (1961) or The Heroes of Telmark (1965), he will very often move from an intense close-up to an extreme long shot. Indeed, the angles he chooses for the long shot give them scale, a heroic proportion. In a sense, the shots aren't so much dramatic (although they are) as they are scaled to create an epic or heroic sense about character or action or both.
Turning to David Lean, whether it is the burial scene in Doctor Zhivago (1965) or the attack on the train in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) or, for that matter, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), one notices how sparingly Lean uses close-ups. But when he does we are emotionally overwhelmed by them. Think of the trees swaying at the funeral in Doctor Zhivago or the hands pushing the detonator in Lawrence of Arabia or the cross driven into the ground in Bridge on the River Kwai. The shots are dramatically very important to the evolution of the scene that is to follow. If there is an observation to be made about Lean's close-ups it's that he uses them to plunge us into a scene, as opposed to the punctuation for the middle of a scene. In terms of his long shots, very few filmmakers have used the long shot as effectively, whether it is the winter wonderland of Doctor Zhivago or the scale of man as he crosses the magnificent fierce desert in Lawrence of Arabia. Unlike Anthony Mann, whose images grip us, impress us, and give us a sense of the hero, Lean uses the long shot as he does the close shot—for dramatic impact.
Another way to look at this issue is to contrast this work to that of Carl Dreyer, whose The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929) proceeds almost entirely in close shots. What we experience is first the disorientation of a loss of context, then the intensity of the close shots. Placed next to Carl Dreyer, John Ford's The Searchers (1956) is principally composed of long shots and mid-shots. We are left with the epic sense of the search for young family members who survived an Indian massacre. The long shots give the film a poetic, formal quality, quite different from the Dreyer experience. Perhaps the best balance of long shot and close shot is George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951). This intensely romantic tragedy modulates feeling through the use of the long shot and the close shot. Here the close shots provide point of view and dramatic emphasis. In the close shots we see Angela, the object of George Eastman's desire; in the long shots we have the perspective of class and social position and see where George fits in. Initially he is at the bottom of the social ladder. Stevens uses the shots, both close and long, to articulate the layers of the narrative. He subsumes his voice deeply in the narrative (the antithesis of Anthony Mann).
The recent filmmaker who uses long shots and close shots in a manner closest to Stevens is Steven Spielberg. Throughout Saving Private Ryan (1998) we are led to narrative clarity and emotional pitch through shot selection and balance. The recent filmmaker who uses long shots and close shots akin to the Anthony Mann style is Ridley Scott. Ironically, Scott's Gladiator (2000) is a retelling of Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), with a shift in emphasis from plot to character. These, then, are the models facing Shekhar Kapur: to stick with the narrative, as do Stevens and Spielberg, or, at the other extreme, to create a heroic epic with a distinct authorial voice that pushes the narrative to an aesthetic that may look intriguing, but that may be out of scale with the content of the narrative or at the very least push a less apparent interpretation of the narrative.
Kapur lies somewhere in between, but at times he expresses one or the other of the extremes. Just as Mann will occasionally use an extremely stylized long shot, so too Kapur. Elizabeth is rife with extreme long shots from a point of view high above the characters. Does this represent Kapur's artistic perspective or an authorial comment? Whichever it is, the extreme long shots draw considerable attention to themselves. To coax out the meaning of this and other options, we must first turn to his film The Bandit Queen (1994).
The film, which is based on a real character, begins with Phoolan, at the age of 11, being promised by her father to an adult in a marriage of low caste. The family needs the money it will gain from the marriage. Phoolan, a spirited young girl, accompanies her husband. Even at this age she smarts at the injustice of boys and men who verbally and otherwise abuse her because of her low social status. When the husband insists on sexual relations (she has not yet entered puberty) she rebels and runs backs to her parents. There shame follows her through adolescence. As a young woman, now living with her parents, the head villager's son tries to rape her in a field. She fights him off, but he accuses her of seducing him. The consequence, in a hearing of the village elders, is that Phoolan is banished from the village. Again men have been unjust and only she has paid the consequences.
Phoolan joins a band of low-caste bandits and becomes the lover of its leader. In this relationship she experiences for the first time a relationship of equals. It doesn't last because he is killed and she is raped by one of his criminal patrons. The experience is so humiliating that she is consumed with a need for revenge. Her criminal career grows as does her notoriety when she returns to the village where she was raped and kills ten of its men. The perpetrator, however, eludes her revenge. Eventually she is hunted down and imprisoned, but her fame is such that she is pardoned by the government and freed at last. Phoolan's story is the biography of a low-caste woman.
In fact, Kapur makes the film much more. It's an incitement to change women and the caste system. All must change. There is too much injustice. This is the theme of Kapur's film.
How does the deployment of long shots and close-ups, their use in a pattern of juxtaposition, help articulate the narrative? And how does Kapur present a layered view of Phoolan rather than a simplistic hero-villain approach?
The first challenge for Kapur is to lead the viewer to identify with Phoolan. Initially, he uses close-ups to show us her emotive quality. All the other characters are relatively impassive or guarded, but Phoolan is open and expressive, particularly in her reaction to personal injustice. Here the close-up is deployed to differentiate Phoolan from the other characters. Kapur does not make of her a romanticized heroine or a pathetic victim; he focuses on her spirit, and he treats her character in a realistic manner.
Nor does Kapur make a case that Phoolan shares a bond with other women, that her story is their story. He is far more specific. This is Phoolan's story. She is rebellious and she is unusual. The other women seem more resigned to their status in the family and in their communities. Her mother-in-law, for example, is assertive, cold, and cruel to this 11-year-old bride. She is the privileged one in Phoolan's new home; even her son, the husband, conforms to her view of Phoolan as lazy and uncooperative. In this sense, Kapur's portrait is very specific. Phoolan is the exception rather than a symbol. He creates a believable, understandable, admirable character. She doesn't want to be anyone's victim.
To give the narrative an epic feeling, Kapur resorts to extreme long shots—Phoolan crossing a bridge with her new husband, or Phoolan in the hilly badlands that house the bandits. These images add a formal sense of the context for Phoolan's life; that context is the southern Indian subcontinent, a vast space where people can lose themselves. This aspect of Kapur's approach is very different from the cinema verité approach where the characters’ environment is less the focus than the characters’ relationships. By alternating between the emotional close shots of Phoolan with the formal impassivity of the long shots, one gets the sense that there will be no help for Phoolan. There is no romantic Fordian vision of the land to be had here.
The next dimension of the use of close shots and long shots is the variety of viewpoints of Phoolan that Kapur seek. I would suggest that Kapur wants to give us as diverse a portrait of Phoolan as he can. By doing so he begins to make the more general case that, on one level, Phoolan's story is every woman's story. This means that he needs to establish the powerful Phoolan as well as the powerless Phoolan. He needs to show her as woman, daughter, lover, and leader. He needs to show every aspect of Phoolan in order that the general case of women be made. He thus has to be both specific for the Phoolan's identification and layered for Phoolan to become everywoman.
I have already illustrated Phoolan as the defiant daughter and the naive young Phoolan who believes that if you tell the truth, justice should prevail. In spite of being truthful about the assault by the village elder's son, she is still banished from her home. When Kapur shows us Phoolan the lover, with her lover the bandit leader, the shots he chooses emphasize the equivalence of man and woman. They are first related to each other in the same frame (foreground and background), and as they grow intimate they are presented on the same plane. Kapur uses close shots to punctuate the passion in the relationship. Phoolan the lover is presented emotionally in the use of the close shot. The camera placement is also intimate.
Later, when Phoolan is raped by the local crime boss, the camera placement is more distant. And when she is humiliated, walking naked through the village, the placement is high and the camera is far from her. The long shot records her humiliation. Here Phoolan is the victim of unbridled, cruel male power.
When Phoolan does exact revenge on the men of her village and she has 10 of them executed by her own men, the camera is in close to Phoolan. It's as if we have to feel her power as a woman seeking revenge on the men who contributed to her past humiliation.
By moving to different visual perspectives on Phoolan using close shots and extreme long shots, and by varying the placement of the camera from looking down on her after the rape (victim) to looking close at her as an executioner, Kapur gives us multiple perspectives on Phoolan. By doing so he individuates her as a strong personality. He also creates a portrait of the various roles of women in a man's world: victim, lover, daughter, mother, powerless castaway, powerful leader.
Kapur takes up another story of a woman in Elizabeth, but in this case she is the sixteenth-century Queen of England rather than a woman from the lowest caste in India. But there are similarities between the two films, both dramatically and in terms of shot selection. First, a summary of the narrative.
Elizabeth begins with Elizabeth's half-sister, Mary, on the throne. Mary is a Catholic and Elizabeth is a Protestant. Religious differences and alliances pit sister against sister, and in the first Act of the film Elizabeth's life is under threat. At the end of Act I, Mary dies and the Protestant Elizabeth assumes the throne. But as a woman and as a Protestant, she is surrounded by enemies. The highest nobleman, Norfolk, is Catholic, and he wants to be king. Elizabeth's advisors suggest an alliance—marry the King of Spain or a Prince of France, both Catholic monarchies. Even Elizabeth's lover counsels an alliance. In the end she trusts one Protestant advisor, Walsingham who, as a Protestant cleric and nobleman, is interested in her survival as a Protestant Queen. The thread through the narrative is that all men (but Walsingham) treat her as a woman rather than as a monarch. In the end she realizes she must choose to be a woman or a monarch. She can't be both. She renounces her feminine (read weak) side and assumes the role of an asexual but successful monarch.
The prologue sets the directorial pattern as it applies to the conflict of Catholic versus Protestant. In an intense close-up, a woman's head is being shaved. In a close-up of her accuser, a Catholic bishop condemns her as a heretic to be burned at the stake. Quickly the scene moves to 3 heretics tied to a stake and observed by a crowd. Wood is heaped and a fire is set. The heretics complain that they burn too slowly. More wood is thrown on the fire and they perish. The scene is presented principally in intense close-up, with close-shot cutaways to the crowd and to the Catholic officials. Interspersed are a few establishing shots. Kapur cuts away to a point of view shot from above—is this his point of view, or God's point of view? Whatever it represents, it interjects a “watching” perspective. The conflict between Catholic and Protestant is being observed. The scene is very intense and unforgettably establishes the stakes in this conflict. It also sets the directorial pattern: a preponderance of close-shots with a few long shots for context, and the introduction of a third person perspective from above the action.
When we meet Elizabeth in the next scene, it is in a close-up. She is dancing with her ladies-in-waiting—in a field, awaiting the return of her lover, Sir Robert. The image of Elizabeth is soft and feminine, in sharp contrast to the presentation of Elizabeth at the end of the film, where the shots are three-quarter shots to long shots, and the distant camera placement is hard-edged and powerful but not sexual, as is the presentation when we first see her. In these opening shots Kapur uses a telephoto lens to blur the context, giving Elizabeth not only a softness, but also an openness of expression that seems so opposite to the cruelty of the preceding scene. In this scene, Elizabeth is arrested and taken to the Tower of London. For the most part we see Elizabeth in close, either via camera placement or as she approaches the camera, or the shot is a close-up. The images of the court, particularly in the Queen's chambers, are distant and more long shots prevail. When Norfolk moves through the Queen's castle toward her chamber, the point-of-view is again from high above. He and his retinue look very small indeed. The extreme long shots from a third person or from a distant on-high perspective creates an epic perspective: the struggle is not just men struggling for power; there is something bigger at stake. The implication is that an epic struggle is being observed by the gods. This alternation of very intense close-ups for emotion (the death of the Protestant heretics) or identification (Elizabeth) is alternated with extreme long shots to give the sense of a struggle that is epic.
In the scene that follows, Elizabeth is called to the Queen's chamber from her jail cell. There in the chamber, Mary weighs Elizabeth's fate. They are half-sisters, but of different religions. Mary acknowledges that Elizabeth will be Queen when she dies (she is now ill), but only if Mary doesn't sign Elizabeth's death warrant. Here both power and emotion are played out. There are long shots of the chamber that remind us that Mary as Queen has absolute power. And there are close-ups of Elizabeth and Mary where Elizabeth appeals to her as a sister not to condemn her to death. The shift from long shot to close-up, from power to emotion, captures the layers of this narrative extremely well. It is both the emotional story of a woman concerned about love, about relationships, about dignity, and it is a story about power, its scale and its absolutism. Relationships, love, and dignity have no place beside power, and in the narrative Elizabeth will eventually have to choose.
Kapur uses close-ups for the emotion, for the femininity, for the sexuality of Elizabeth (and others), and he uses the long shot to articulate power issues, whether they are about Protestant versus Catholic, or monarchy versus Church, or England versus France or Spain. He also uses the extreme long shot from a third person or on-high point of view to lend an epic scale to all the struggles listed.
CAMERA PLACEMENT AND PACE: THE INTERVENTION OF SUBJECTIVE STATES
Numerous filmmakers have used a subjective camera placement and/or shifts in pace to alert us that the narrative has shifted into a subjective or dream or unreal state as opposed to the in-the-world, real state that has preceded it. Beginning with Georges Méliès, best known for his film A Trip to the Moon (1902), subjective states have been a narrative concern and creative challenge. Luis Buñuel simply ignored the distinction between the objective and subjective from his first film, Un Chien Anadalou (1929), in which he simply cut directly into an altered state. Other filmmakers were more aesthetically elegant. Rouben Mamoulian used the subjective camera to establish point of view in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932). Alfred Hitchcock used sound and the close-up in Blackmail (1929). Federico Fellini used sound, or its absence, and the subjective point of view, together with shifts in art direction and, of course, a narrative absurdity to assure that we would understand the difference between the objective and the subjective. Filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, on the other hand, blurred the line between them in their work. Others used black and white and color to differentiate one from the other. To examine this issue we begin with Elem Klimov's Come and See (1985) and then look at Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2000).
Elem Klimov's Come and See is a war film set in German-occupied Byelorussia. The time is 1943. The main character, Florya, is a young adolescent who volunteers to fight for the partisans. The narrative is experienced and envisioned through his eyes. The story begins with Florya finding a gun, the prerequisite for joining the partisans (to provide your own weapon). He leaves home and joins. The story ends, perhaps days or weeks later, after his initial experiences of war; he is shooting his gun for the first time and moving off into the woods with the partisans. In between he experiences the horrors of war and wartime occupation. He is left on guard duty in the woods with a young woman only a few years older than himself. The partisans move off to fight the Germans, then he and the young woman experience a German aerial bombardment resulting in his temporary deafness. The two flee to his home, but his mother and sisters have disappeared. He doesn't know it, but they have been killed by the Germans in an exercise in ethnic cleansing. He and the young woman go to an island where he is certain he will find his mother and sisters; there are many survivors but none of his family. He then goes off with a soldier to find food for the people on the island. They steal a cow, but both the soldier and the cow are killed by artillery fire. A peasant farmer hides him, but soon the Germans take him. They round up everyone in the village, including Florya, and herd them into a barn. He is allowed to leave the barn and then the Germans burn the barn with its hundreds of occupants. He is threatened with death but, it is only for the photograph a German is taking—as a souvenir. The Germans leave, and he has survived. Soon the same Germans who burnt the barn are captured. We learn that half of them are in fact fellow Russians. Sentiment among the partisans is to burn them, but they are all shot instead. Florya now fires his rifle at a portrait of Hitler. This is intercut with historical footage of the rise of Hitler. As we move through this sequence, and as the shooting proceeds, we realize that chronologically the historical footage is moving backwards in time and backwards in presentation, as if it is being eliminated. The narrative ends with a statement that more than 600 villages were burned by the Nazis as they moved through Byelorussia.
This narrative summary is a chronology of the events of the film. What is more important, however, is how Klimov creates the subjective state of Florya, the young main character. How does he feel about war, about this war, about himself, about what is happening to him and his family? Klimov is more interested in giving us the feelings of the boy. Camera placement, shot selection, and sound combine to create the internal state of Florya. The consequence is a film experience that is constantly on the verge of the unbearable, and of the unbelievable. The question for us is how does Klimov create the subjective state of the main character? Whether it is real or imagined, an expression of his fear or of his hopes, is beside the point. Klimov's task is to transport us into the inner life of an adolescent as it is shaped by external events—the losses, the possibility of imminent death, the manner of observed violence. How does he process all of these events, and how does Klimov take us into the feeling state that the boy experiences?
First Klimov begins from afar, observing Florya. He is guided by another boy in his search for a gun. This search seems almost absurd, a war game played by boys. It only becomes real when Florya digs up a gun. All we see is that the gun is attached to a hand and rigor mortis has made pulling the gun from its dead possessor a very difficult task. This absurd narrative piece sets up the paradox—a real task, getting a gun, is born out of absurd, surreal circumstance. The fun is buried, together with its previous owner, on a beach that seems an ideal setting for two kids to be playing out a war game. It's play, it's real, and it's surreal.
Shortly a glider floats by. This cutaway, also surreal, will be repeated throughout the film as a prologue to the intrusion of the real war, a German attack, which will follow. At this point the glider seems a tranquil, childlike part of the war game. We will learn its true meaning after a few more repetitions of the shot.
The narrative proceeds with the induction of the boy into the partisans. His mother pleads with him that he doesn't need to and shouldn't go. A partisan officer says that they need men with guns; he has fulfilled the recruitment requirement, and he must go. Cutaways of food being prepared and the boy's twin sister flesh out a realistic sequence. He is excited. Like all all young people, the act of going to war makes him feel older, and proud of it. He leaves. In the forest, Klimov's subjective strategy begins. The bombardment catches Florya and the young girl in a playful mood, but the mood changes quickly. Klimov uses the sound of the descending bombs to set the tone. The pitch is high and loud, and the images are in themselves descriptive of a bombing. But as the bombing proceeds he cuts to very long takes of the main character. As his eardrums are damaged, the close-up of his face focuses on his pain. The sound of the bombs then becomes louder and more distorted. The focus on Florya, on his pain, on the intensity and distortion of the sound, and on the growing distortion of constant noise, suddenly gives us the subjective aural experience of the character. Later the girl will explain that he has become crazy because he can't hear. In a sense this is what we begin to experience—his inner sense of pain and isolation from the world.
Klimov now alternates scenes of the real and the subjective. The next scene is Florya taking the young woman to his home for protection, but no one is home. There is still warm soup on the table. Florya eats and tells the girl that his mother makes good soup. This very naturalistic scene ends with Florya's notion that his mother and sisters have escaped to the island not far away. They run off, but as they do the young woman looks over her shoulder and sees naked bodies piled up behind a barn. This glimpse reveals to us that the mother and sisters have been killed. This scene proceeds naturalistically, but it is followed by the almost surreal journey to the island. The water surrounding the island is thick with oil tar that retards the progress of the characters’ flight. They wade through water. The tar coats their bodies and faces. The pace slows way down, and it seems the oil tar will sink them. When they finally emerge they look inhuman.
They soon find other villagers who tell Florya that his mother is dead. They are covered with oil and tar, and a close-up registers his attempt to scream. Does he scream? Is it inner or outer reality? Florya seems demented, and the girl says he is crazy from the damage to his ears. This scene seems entirely subjective and non-naturalistic. This pattern will be repeated with each scene: the search for food, his capture by the Germans, the barn burning, the execution of the Germans. By moving back and forth Klimov creates a tension between the outer reality and the inner feeling state of the boy.
The concluding sequence continues to heighten the tension between outer and inner reality. When the boy fires his gun at the portrait of Hitler, he is trying to exorcise his anger and the source of his pain—Adolph Hitler. By cutting between the boy firing and the history of the Third Reich, Klimov is giving him a target. By running the footage of the Third Reich in reverse, he is implying that the boy's firing is turning back and erasing history. Whether this is a catharsis or a wish, the sequence is very much a subjective adolescent notion—that the boy can, by firing his gun, turn back the destruction done to his family and to his country. This subjective idea and state is then offset by the return to reality. The boy moves off to join the partisans and we are told with a title how many villages in Byelorussia were destroyed by fire by the advancing German army.
Sound, camera placement, and shot selection—particularly close-up shots where the camera is very close to the subject—create the subjective state of this young person in war. Pace plays a secondary role in particular sequences such as crossing to the island and the artillery attack that kills the soldier and the cow intended to feed the people on the island.
Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2000) is also concerned with subjective states—states that are induced by drugs. The narrative focuses on 4 characters: Harry, his mother Sara Goldfarb, his girlfriend Marion, and his friend and business partner, Tyrone. Harry and Tyrone are, as Harry calls it, in the distribution business, the distribution of drugs. Marion becomes addicted to heroin and Harry's mother, Sara Goldfarb, becomes addicted to diet pills. Initially, every character has some degree of control over their lives, but by the end, each loses control and each does what they have to to survive. Aronofsky gives each character a well-defined character arc. For Harry, it's being a guilty caretaker, torn between self-interest and responsibility to others. For Sara Goldfarb, it's loneliness or a search for acknowledgment by others (her friends, her son, the community at large, as represented by her quest for public recognition through a television appearance). For Marion, it's rebellion, first against her parents and later by blaming whomever she depends upon for money to buy drugs. For Tyrone, it's being a man torn by the need for praise and yet impulsive to a degree that undermines any achievement. In the course of their drug dependency the characters will lose everything physically and mentally, and they will be left with very little dignity.
The creative issue for Aronofsky is how to portray the shift from living in a community to living in your head. To manage the transition, Aronofsky uses a full range of devices—sound, pace, camera placement, the distortion of a fisheye, wide-angle images, pixilation, and lots of camera movement. The issue for us is first to see an outer/inner visual dialectic, and then to differentiate how Aronofsky illustrates the transition for each of the characters so that he creates a subjective state that is distinct for each.
First we'll look at the outer/inner dynamic that contextualizes and prepares us for the shift to a subjective state. Aronofsky uses two devices: the alternation between extreme close-up and extreme distance from the action, and the narrative device of intercutting reality with a fantasy.
When we first meet Harry and his mother, he is taking her television with the help of Tyrone. He pawns it to buy drugs—as he calls it “a stake”—to get his business going again. When we see Harry and Sara Goldfarb, both are in intense close-up. Aronofsky uses a split screen so they are together within the big frame but separated by the split. When Harry and Tyrone are moving the TV through the streets, the camera moves with them but is located at a distance. The use of a fisheye lens makes them seem even farther away. Aronofsky often cuts between these two extremes so that we feel very close and then very distant from the characters. He repeats this pattern when Harry and Tyrone take drugs. The drugs are shot in 3 quick close-up shots: of heroin dissolving under a flame, of the pump of heroin moving through an injection device, and then of a breakdown of the drug, whether it's in a vein in the body or externally we are uncertain. Aronofsky then cuts to Harry and Tyrone in a wide-angle shot that is initially in slow motion, then in accelerating motion. The use of an extremely wide-angle lens gives some distortion to the shot. Aronofsky repeats this sequence of shots when Harry, Tyrone, and Marion get high. Here the additional use of pixilation makes the sense of drug-induced motion powerful and unnaturally fast.
Aronofsky also uses the narrative device of a fantasy insert to create a sense of the dissonance between the outer and inner world. Sara Goldfarb will often see herself as a character in the TV game show she watches religiously. Harry dreams of stealing a policeman's gun. Tyrone dreams of his childhood, of its perfection and his idealized relationship with his mother. When Marion is having dinner with her therapist (he is clearly interested in her sexually), she dreams of driving a fork through his hand as it reaches out to her. These inserts clarify the thoughts of the characters, but principally they articulate the desire to be or to do what they cannot be or do in real life.
To create distinctive subjective states for each of these characters, Aronofsky initially uses pace to illustrate their individual goals. They all energetically want something: Sara Goldfarb wants to be thin; Harry wants to be helpful; Tyrone wants to be successful; and Marion, principally, wants thrills, including the thrill of being high. Having established their goals, Aronofsky will explore what thwarts their goals. This involves close-ups. For Sara, it's a close-up of chocolates. Following the shot of the chocolates, Sara gets a phone call that she has been chosen to be on television. It is clearly a sales come-on for something, but to her it's the beginning of a new opportunity. Immediately she gets her hair colored so she will look younger and tries to get into her red dress, but she can't. This introduces the issue of diet. When she visits a doctor he puts her on medication—amphetamines to lose weight, and sleeping pills to sleep—and her journey into a distorted world begins. Now Aronofsky uses a visual shorthand: the mailbox close-up registers her anticipation of the TV invitation or the application to appear. The fridge far away represents the objects of desire, food. The pills in closeup represent the means to the end—her appearance in the red dress. But her hallucinations become more frequent; she sees and hears fragments. When she visits the doctor late in her experience, her pills are working less well. She sees him far away, his movements are pixilated, and his voice is distant and distorted. We now have a representation of an extremely dissociative state. The establishment of this state precedes her final act of desperation: her appearance at the TV station, disheveled and demanding to appear on TV. This act develops along the path of disconnectedness, and Sara is taken off to Bellevue for involuntary confinement and shock treatment. She has lost touch with reality; she is totally within her own subjective state.
Aronofsky parallel cuts between the descent of Harry, Tyrone, and Marion together with Sara. Their arcs proceed downward into loss and humiliation. By using the alternation of very close and extremely long shots (with a fisheye lens to make us seem even further), and by using sound and image and changes in pace, Aronofsky brings us into the inner world and the descent into the self that characterizes the effect of drugs on these 4 characters. The style is critical in creating our feeling for each of these characters from the most internal subjective perspective.
A final comment: there is a great deal of energy in this film. Pace and movement energize these characters even though they are caught in an inertia brought on by drugs. Each of them acts, but the inappropriateness of their actions harms rather than helps them. These are characters who can't save themselves or each other in spite of their desire to help the others.