The Appropriation of Style I: Imitation and Innovation

In this chapter, we explore a new phenomenon, the movie whose style is created from the context of movie life rather than real life. The consequence is twofold—the presumption of deep knowledge on the part of the audience of those forms such as the gangster films or Westerns, horror films or adventure films. And that the parody or alteration of that film creates a new form, a different experience for the audience. This imitative and innovative style is a style associated with the brief but influential directing career of Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, 1992; Pulp Fiction, 1994). In order to suggest the limits of imitation and a more startling kind of innovation, we look at Milcho Manchevski's film, Before the Rain (1994). Like Pulp Fiction, it is three stories in a single film.

In order to contextualize the theme of style, imitation, and innovation, we turn to earlier examples of filmmakers whose style was pronounced.

   NARRATIVE AND STYLE

Style in and of itself can contribute to the narrative or it can undermine the narrative if it is not clearly dramatically purposeful. The elements of style most obvious to the viewer, are compositional elements—camera placement, movement, the juxtaposition of foreground and background people or things, the light, the sound, and, of course, the editing. Whether the filmmaker relies on the editing, the pace, to explain the narrative, or she avoids editing, moving the camera, using the planes within the frame to explain the narrative. More often style is associated with composition—naturalistic or stylized; however, editing, as I hope we've illustrated in this book, has its own style—ranging from directly expository to elliptical and metaphorical.

Two filmmakers who use a distinct style that serves the narrative well are Max Ophuls and George Stevens. In Caught (1949), Ophuls uses camera composition to create a style that beautifully fleshes out the narrative. A young woman, Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes), wants to marry rich and she does. She marries Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan). He proves to be sadistic and cruel. She runs off and works for a Dr. Quinada (James Mason), in a poor, urban district of New York. They fall in love and the triangle is set. Will she find happiness or be destroyed for her original goal, material wealth? Ophuls uses the composition of Leonora and Smith at the outset to show his power over her. Whenever they are together the composition suggest control rather than love. Early in the film, Ophuls uses a similar composition where Smith is seeing his psychoanalyst. But here the power position in the composition belongs to the analyst. In the scene, Smith is so upset by an allegation that he wouldn't marry the girl, that he in fact calls and arranges the marriage. He will leave analysis and enter marriage to show the analyst that he himself is in control, not the analyst. The composition affirms the contrary.

Later in the film when Leonora leaves her husband, she works for Dr. Quinada. One evening, he takes her out for dinner. They dance and he proposes marriage. She tells him she loves him but that she has to clarify issues in her life (Ohlrig and the pregnancy she has just discovered). The commitment to and a visual rendering of the quality of the relationship is recorded in a single shot. Ophuls moves the camera as the lovers, in close-up, dance on the crowded dance floor. This gentle, elegant shot communicates everything about the future of this relationship.

The following shot uses three planes. In the foreground, Leonora's desk, as we pan to the left from the desk we see one partner, the obstetrician in the office, panning to the other side, Dr. Quinada. The two men talk about Leonora's disappearance and about Quinada's proposal. The obstetrician, knowing she is pregnant, suggests Quinada forget about her. The camera pans one direction or the other at least twice, but all the while Leonora's desk is in the close-up or middle-ground of the frame. Consequently, whatever the dialogue, we never forget what is being spoken about—Leonora. These two shots use movement, placement, and composition to create a sense of an entire relationship. This is style in brilliant service of the narrative purpose.

In George Stevens's A Place in the Sun (1951), the agenda is more complex. George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) comes east to take a job with his rich uncle. His own parents were religious and poor. He comes from a different class in spite of sharing the name Eastman. Early in the film, George is invited to the Eastman home. Having just arrived in town, he buys a suit. He then goes to see his mentor-to-be and his family. The wife and the two grown children are totally snobbish about their poor cousin. In order to create the sense of status or lack thereof, Stevens has George Eastman enter what seems to be a cavernous room. In the foreground, the wealthy Eastmans are seated. The patriarch is the only one to offer him a hand. In a series of carefully staged images, Stevens portrays the separateness of George Eastman from his relations. Stevens uses camera placement and a deep focus image. George Eastman is at the back of the frame. They also occupy the center while George is often placed to the side. When another guest arrives, she, Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor) sweeps into the room not even seeing George Eastman. By the staging, and using the planes of the composition, Stevens suggests George Eastman is the forgotten man. He simply does not have the status to be a “real” Eastman. Again, the compositonal style underscores the theme of the narrative.

   STYLE FOR ITS OWN SAKE

It is not always the case that style supports the narrative. Often style is presented as a substitute for a weak narrative or is, in the view of the director, a necessary overmodulation simulating the thematic extremes of the narrative. To be specific about style, we need only look to films such as Fellini Satyricon (1970) or Cornel Wilde's Beach Red (1967) to see style overwhelming the content. On the other hand, in each case, the style spoke to the director's view of ancient Rome or about war. In both cases, excess was too mild a term to describe the director's view. There are times when this can work, as in Fellini Satyricon, but there are other instances, such as Richard Lester's Petulia (1968), when the style totally overwhelms the content of the film.

A good example of a film with a feeble narrative, but a remarkable style, is Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), one of Welles's great works. The story of a murder and its investigation in a Texas border town is simply too trite for description. But beginning the film with a three-minute tracking shot of a bomb being planted in a car on the Mexican side of the border and ending with its explosion on the American side, the shot is simply a tour de force. In the course of the shot, Welles also introduces the main character, the Mexican investigator, Vargas (Charlton Heston). The murder of a Mexican drug lord (Akim Tamiroff) by the sheriff (Welles), the assault on Vargas's wife, the final recording of the guilty sheriff and his death, each of these sequences is a remarkable exercises in style. Using excessively the wideangle lens, low camera placements, and a crowding of the foreground of the frame, Welles has created a style more appropriate to film noir than to a police story. It is a style that is garish, even corrupt. In its power it conveys something the narrative lacks—conviction.

An example of eclectic but extreme style is Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). The story of a futuristic England beset by violent youth and a mind-controling government, Kubrick's version of the Anthony Burgess novel is to use style as a counterpoint to the action. The camera pans gradually over an ongoing rape. Extreme close-ups of the assault on the man character's eyes forces sympathy as the victimizer becomes the victim. Kubrick tracks and zooms with an equanimity totally absent in the narrative. Eventually we are worn out by the violence and by the ironic style, left to consider our own world and its future.

A third example of style overwhelming the subject is the apocalyptic tale, Twelve Monkeys (1995). Terry Gilliam, better known for Brazil (1985), another highly stylized tale of the future, portrays the future and the present with a fish-eye lens view. Distortion is everywhere and a key to Gilliam's treatment of Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962). Can one prevent the future from happening? Are we all destined to be the future's victims? These are the central issues of Twelve Monkeys. Biological research, wealth, psychiatry, all form the nexus of man-made madness that pre-ordains the fate of the world—destruction. Few, if any, filmmakers, with the exception of John Frankenheimer in Seconds (1966), have relied so heavily on a distorting lens to filter their narrative. The result of using a lens that makes the world less natural, more distorted, is to distance us form the narrative and to position us for a strongly visual, highly unnaturalistic experience. The result is that we become less involved and possibly lose the apocalyptic message of Twelve Monkeys. This is the upshot of a surplus of style.

   BREAKING EXPECTATIONS

Perhaps no filmmakers represent as great a break from expectations as a trio of filmmakers with the independent filmmaking spirit—Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Oliver Stone.

In his work in Raging Bull (1980), Martin Scorsese uses a metaphor to create a style. This tale is of a man whose aggression was so great that prizefighting was simply an extension of his life. The metaphor Scorsese borrows is from opera. Many nineteenth-century operas included a ballet within the opera. Using the music from Verdi's La Forza del destino, Scorsese opens the film with LaMotta (Robert De Niro) prepping for a fight. There in slow motion the beauty of the physical movements of arms, legs, and body become ballet-like. The emphasis in this section of the “ballet” is on beauty. Later, as LaMotta actually fights, the shift is to physical clash and brutality, but the way in which the action in the ring is filmed, makes it another phase of the ballet—the combat phase.

Scorsese's metaphor set to Verdi's music creates a layer of meaning to LaMotta's life that pushes the story beyond the biography of Jake LaMotta, champion middleweight, to the battle of the titans, the gods, the kings so often invoked as the central subject of opera. Here Scorsese's stylistic choices break the expectations that Raging Bull will be a boxing film about a famous boxer, albeit flawed as a human being. By breaking our expectations, Scorsese creates a modern opera, the equivalent of Verdi's La Forza del destino.

Spike Lee also challenges expectations in much of his work. In Jungle Fever (1991), a film with a distinct style, Lee portrays the world of two families—an African-American family and an Italian-American family. The catalytic event is an interracial love affair between an African-American man and an Italian-American woman. The style of the film is far from documentary. When two men speak to one another, Lee photographs them from a heroic camera placement, midshot. Only the background moves. This stylized shot forces us to think about what they are saying rather than engaging us by what we see. Later, the main character's visit to a crack house in search of his brother is akin to a series of Hieronymus Bosch paintings. Again unreality, but the power comes from the sense of how far from reality the house's occupants want to be. What we expect from Spike Lee in Jungle Fever is a sexual exploration of stereotypes of black men and white women; instead what we get is a meditation on racism, on family, on love, and on responsibility. By using a highly stylized approach, Lee undermines our expectations and provides us with a much greater experience.

Oliver Stone has always relied on a powerful style. Using pace, a roving camera, and an excess of close-ups, he has clearly used style to press his editorial view—war, politics, and controversial issues in American history. He is not a director who layers the case, as does Fred Wiseman in his documentaries. Instead, Stone uses style to promote his view of the case. His style is so effective that the only question the viewer can ask is why every advertiser in the country doesn't line up to hire Stone to direct their commercials!

We expect Oliver Stone to carry on this tradition of staking out an editorial position of force. In Natural Born Killers (1994), however, he so broadens the definition of stylistic choices that we no longer know what to expect from Oliver Stone. How can a filmmaker known for excessive style find a style even more excessive? Given the subject matter—young killers on a killing spree, followed and exploited by the media and, in turn exploiting the media—Stone anticipates the tough question of identification by using an MT style, cartoons, sitcom format, as well as mixing a black and white newsreel look with an overly decorous color. Natural Born Killers is awash in style. And yet we are both offended and moved by this post-modern visitation to medialand's today in the USA. Using the story thread of the rise and fall of two young lover-killers, Stone uses style to create a satire on the American relationship with guns and violence. Few films have more effectively used a surplus of style to create a new interpretation on the American dream and the American nightmare. By moving beyond our expectations of excessive style, Stone outdoes himself. He finds a style suited to his view of the subject.

   IMITATION VERSUS INNOVATION

There is a definite demarcation point between imitation and innovation. Imitation is simply referential; we have seen it before, and the implication is we've seen it too often. It's become somewhat of a cliché. The gunfight in George Stevens’ Shane (1953) is a good example. The gunfight between Shane (Alan Ladd) and his antagonist (Jack Palance) is staged in a careful manner. It is referential to many other gunfights we have seen. The result is predictable, imitative. That is not to say that Shane, as a film, is an uncreative film. On the contrary: Stevens has respected the Western myth and affirmed in this tale that primitivism will have no place next to civilization. But the gunfight itself is imitative of other gunfights in other Western films.

More novel is the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) or the gunfight at the end of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959). Some Westerns prefer to reference earlier films—the killing of a miner in town in Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985) references the murder of a homesteader in Stevens's Shane. Others choose to parody earlier films. The train sequence at the beginning of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984) references the opening of Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952). The point here is that in order to create a new insight to a point of view, straight imitation does not do the trick; it's necessary to alter the narrative or visual style of the scene to make it seem new. The very length of the train sequence in the Leone film creates a tension about the anticipated arrival as powerful as the arrival of the train in High Noon. The length and the exaggerated interplay of extreme close-ups and extreme long shots in Leone's film make the train sequence and the shoot-out that follows it a fitting prologue to the epic that will follow. Leone makes something new by imitating a famous sequence from the earlier Western film.

My point here is that there is a relationship between imitation and innovation. But the filmmaker has to recognize that our engagement with the imitation will depend upon his making it seem novel and innovative.

   IMITATION AND INNOVATION

The heart of this chapter lies in the great and novel success of a film like Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. In terms of classical story forms, Pulp Fiction is a classic gangster film in its generic origin, but this is where the comparison ends. Tarantino also feels free to relate Pulp Fiction to the ebb and flow of movies and television on that popular culture. A character refers to himself as “I'm The Guns of Navarone.” Another character portraying a Vietnam veteran recently released from a prisoner-of-war camp, who is portrayed by Christopher Walken, tells a powerful story about preserving a gold watch while a prisoner-of-war. The reference here is to the film that made Walken's career, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978), where he portrayed an American fighting in Vietnam, imprisoned by the Vietnamese.

Elsewhere in the film, a restaurant is hosted by an Ed Sullivan imitator. A waiter is Buddy Holly, a waitress is Marilyn Monroe, a performer imitates Ricky Nelson. Just as the gangster film is one point of reference for Pulp Fiction, popular culture since 1950 is the other key referent point.

If these were its only narrative virtues, there would be little to write about. Pulp Fiction is also organized around three stories, a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue is continued in terms of time in the epilogue. The time frame then for Pulp Fiction resembles the circle rather than the straight line. Tarantino uses this frame to break our expectations of a linear treatment of the gangster genre. If the film were linear, the story would follow a rise and fall story line. Given the circularity of the story line, Tarantino can meditate on the pursuit of work and pleasure in the world of the gangster. Both are fraught with a fatalism that underscores the fragility of life and, in the case of one of the characters, Jules (Samuel Jackson), causes him to give up the life for a pursuit that will be more spiritual.

The actual story line is, in reality, three story lines—Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's wife, The Gold Watch, and The Bonnie Situation. Characters from each story line appear in the other stories. The first story is the story of Vincent Vega (John Travolta), who, with his partner, Jules, proceeds to kill some young dealers who have betrayed their employer, Marsellus. The second part of this story is the “date” Vincent has with Mia (Uma Thurman), Marsellus's wife. This drug-induced date sees Mia overdose and Vincent rescue her with the help of his drug dealer (Eric Stoltz). The overall tone of this first story is a drug-like trance. The killers, Vincent and Jules, approach their work like ministers meditating on life values and loyalty. The second phase is a cocaine-hazed seduction without sex. But playing with fire, whether it's sex or drugs, has consequences. Vincent is always aware of doing the right thing, not crossing over the line. Self-preservation is his philosophy in a profession where the long view is the short run.

The second story is the story of Butch (Bruce Willis). His gold watch has been passed down for generations of heroic but dead soldiers in Butch's family. For him the watch represents the father, and grandfather, he never knew. Butch is a boxer who has agreed to throw a fight for Marsellus, the local L.A. crime boss. Instead, he wins the fight and the money he bet on it. But now Marsellus wants to kill him. His escape is well-planned except that his girlfriend left his gold watch in his apartment. Fate pulls him back in the direction of Marsellus. Back at the apartment to retrieve the watch, he finds Vincent in the washroom, his gun in the kitchen. Butch kills Vincent, but as he escapes, he literally runs into Marsellus on the street. They try to kill one another. Absurdly they are taken into captivity by a pawn shop owner who proceeds, with the help of a friend, to rape Marsellus. Rescued by Butch, Marsellus forgives him but Butch must leave town.

The third story returns to the killing of the first story. It seems there was a hidden gunman in the backroom. He is killed by Vincent and Jules but not before he has fired five shots, all missing their target. Jules is certain divine intervention has saved his life. He will give up the life of crime. With a young black man taken from the apartment, they leave. En route, Vincent accidentally kills the young man, splaying blood and matter all over the car and themselves. Now endangered, they proceed to the home of a friend (Quentin Tarantino). The friend tells them they must leave quickly before his wife returns. They call on Marsellus for help. He dispatches Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel) to help set up the situation. He does so, cleaning them and the car for re-entry into the world.

Hungry, they go out for breakfast where the robbery that has begun in the prologue is now played out as an epilogue. Jules has said that he will no longer kill and he advises the robbers how to leave with their booty and their lives. The film ends at this point, although, in terms of chronology, the gold watch story is to take place at a future point.

To understand the imitative dimensions of Pulp Fiction, we look at the references to the popular culture, particularly television. It is not only the references to particular characters, it is also the attitudes expressed. Butch is a product of a “Leave it to Beaver” family and he becomes a boxer, the result of “Beaver” being orphaned. He is the analogue to the persona who grows up without a father; Jimmie (Quentin Tarantino) is a house-husband, a “Mr. Brady” without the Bunch, Marsellus is Othello to Mia's Desdemona, and Vincent is Iago's younger brother—all three are contemporary visions of a 50s Playhouse 90 re-visited in the 90s. Wolf is a George C. Scott character out of The Hustler (1961) and Jules is a character who has walked right out of a Sinclair Lewis novel made for television. The imitative dimensions of Pulp Fiction, although presented with great wit, would not be enough to suggest innovation.

The innovative storytelling dimension of Pulp Fiction has more to do with genre violation. Not only does Tarantino use black humor as the tone for Pulp Fiction, he actually satirizes the form's violence and its fastidious devotion to testosterone. Both Vincent and Jules, although killers, are sensitive to one another and, in Vincent's case, remarkably sensitive to Mia, Marsellus's wife. Their devotion to language, its nuances and its elegance, makes them the most unusual of hitmen. In a story form known for action and a devotion to quick solutions, this obsession with language can only be interpreted as a satire on the male propensity for action. By substituting language for action, Tarantino is also substituting one for the other, thereby undermining a key motif of the genre. Consequently, the shape of the dramatic action becomes less cause and effect and more meditation, even a search for goals.

The result, given the circularity of the narrative and the substitution of dialogue for action, is to shift the narrative heart of Pulp Fiction from material goals to spiritual goals for each of the main characters. First, Vincent simply wants to eschew sexuality for survival; Butch wants a piece of his family, perhaps all of his family, as represented by his father's gold watch, instead of money; and finally, Jules wants to leave the life he leads for a better one; the Lord has shown him the way to save himself—divine intervention, he calls it. Whether any of these characters will indeed find happiness we will never know (although we do witness Vincent's fate: he has a right to be cautious). The key result of the innovations Tarantino introduces is to shift us from a focus on cause and effect, or linear narrative, to a different kind of narrative, a circular narrative. The focus, consequently, shifts to character over action, and to spiritual values over material values. All of this is presented in a tone that allows Tarantino to find humor in a form not known for humor and to step outside the dramatic limitations of the form into a new kind of experience, where a self-reflexive meditation on the medium occurs as well as the narrative.

The layered experience of Pulp Fiction consequently allows us to be inside the film, and outside the film. The result is that Tarantino has moved far beyond imitation to a work that is remarkable for its innovation.

To give some sense of perspective on how creative Pulp Fiction is, we turn to another tri-partite story, Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain. Set in Macedonia in 1993, Before the Rain is essentially three love stories, two set in rural Macedonia and one in London. Each focuses on a love that is forbidden by the surrounding society and each ends tragically as religious bigotry leads to murder. The combatants in each case are Macedonian and Albanian, Christian and Muslin.

The first story, Words, focuses on a priest, Father Kiril, who has taken a vow of silence. He finds a young Albanian woman in his room. Her hair has been shorn. She looks young, not more than eighteen. She is being pursued by Macedonians who accuse her of murder. The priest hides her, against the wishes of his superiors. The Macedonians search the grounds but do not find her. When she's found out, the priest is thrown out with her. They cannot communicate because each speaks a different language. But a bond has formed. They are discovered by the girl's grandfather and his men. The priest is sent away while the girl is beaten and accused of being a slut. She professes love and runs after him. The girl is killed by her own brother.

The second story, Faces, takes place in London. A British woman, Anne, an executive in a photography agency, has a lover, a Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer. Alexander, the photographer, is Macedonian. He wants her to return to Macedonia with him, but she refuses. She is pregnant by the husband she has left for the photographer. He leaves, and she meets her husband at a restaurant. She tells him she's pregnant by him but stills wants a divorce. In the background, an argument grows in intensity. It is between an ethnic waiter and an ethnic customer. The argument mushrooms. The implication is a re-play of the Macedonian-Albanian enmity in London. Both are thrown out. The angry customer returns and shoots indiscriminately, killing the waiter as well as Anne's husband.

Pictures, the third story, is Alexander's story. He returns after sixteen years to his home in Macedonia. He is greeted by his relatives. Only when they recognize him do they drop their enmity. Everyone seems to carry guns.

Alexander visits Hana, a school friend, a woman he clearly loves. She is Albanian. He is greeted with great hostility but clearly she was the love of his life and he has returned to see if his love is returned by her. Her father is respectful but her son threatens to kill him. He leaves.

Alexander's cousin is killed and Hana's daughter is accused. She asks if he can find her daughter. He finds and releases her, but in doing so, he is killed by his own cousin. The young woman runs off to a monastery, the very monastery of the first story.

The three stories of Before the Rain form a circle of time, another circle of religious hatred, and a circle of love. Each story has the same theme, and in each, the hatred destroys the love. Only time continues, but in Manchevski's world, it comes full circle, in order to repeat itself with another circle of opportunity, love, and religious hatred.

In each story, the characters of the other appear. And in each story the meditation of the main character fails to puncture the circles.

Like Tarantino in Pulp Fiction, Manchevski has chosen a nonlinear frame in order to layer his story. Where Tarantino used the structure to comment on the form—the gangster film—Manchevski uses the nonlinear frame to create a fable about issues larger than Macedonia or the former Yugoslavia. His goal is to say something about the struggle between the life instinct and the death instinct and to warn us that, in Macedonia, this archetypal struggle is moving towards a victory for death. Manchevski doesn't portray religion or social structures as the enemy. He shows both sides victimized and caught in a circle of self-destruction. In this film, the nonlinear structure and style help Manchevski distance himself from the particular and to suggest the general. He uses the structure to create a modern parable. Manchevski's film is innovative in every way. There is little imitation of story form. He strikes a fresh chord. Although this struggle has been told before, specifically in Elia Kazan's America, America (1963), it has never been told in such a novel fashion. Manchevski's style in Before the Rain presents an ideal example of how a style can be so innovative as to seem uniquely original.

Both these films—Pulp Fiction and Before the Rain—rely on a nonlinear structure to move them beyond imitation and to suggest a new innovative style for film narrative. It is not the case that every story is well-served by this approach. However, as these two films illustrate, the options for film narrative have been expanded by Tarantino and Manchevski.