B0041VYHGW EBOK (162 page)

Each of the four major sections of this chapter emphasizes different aspects of various films. We begin by discussing three classical narrative films:
His Girl Friday, North by Northwest,
and
Do The Right Thing.
Since classically constructed films are familiar to most viewers, it is important to study closely how they work.

We move to three films that represent alternatives to classical norms.
Breathless
relies on ambiguity of character motivation and on stretches of rambling action, all presented through loose, casual techniques. In contrast,
Tokyo Story
uses selective deviations from classical norms to create a highly rigorous style. In
Chungking Express,
the viewer’s expectation that two groups of characters will converge is rechanneled to focus interest on narrative parallels.

Documentary films can go beyond direct recording and suggest a wide range of meanings. This section considers two examples of how formal and stylistic processes can expand a documentary’s implications. The first,
Man with a Movie Camera,
documents a day in the life of the Soviet Union, but it also celebrates the power of cinema to transform reality.
The Thin Blue Line
tells the story of a miscarriage of justice; at the same time, it invites us to reflect on the difficulties of responsibly investigating any crime.

Finally, we move to analyses that emphasize social ideology. Our first example,
Meet Me in St. Louis,
is a film that accepts a dominant ideology and reinforces the audience’s belief in that ideology. In contrast,
Raging Bull
shows how a film can display ambiguity in its ideological implications.

We could have emphasized different aspects of any of these films.
Meet Me in St. Louis,
for example, is a classical narrative film and could be considered from that perspective. Similarly,
Man with a Movie Camera
could be seen as offering an alternative to classical continuity editing. And any of the films represents an ideological position that could be analyzed. Our choices suggest only certain angles of approach; your own critical activities will discover many more.

Those activities are the focus of the Appendix to this chapter. There we suggest some ways in which you can prepare, organize, and write a critical analysis of a film. We draw on the following sample analyses for examples of various strategies that you can apply in your own writing.

1940. Columbia. Directed by Howard Hawks. Script by Charles Lederer from the play
The Front Page
by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Photographed by Joseph Walker. Edited by Gene Harlick. Music by Morris W. Stoloff. With Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, Porter Hall.

The dominant impression left by
His Girl Friday
is that of speed: it is often said to be the fastest sound comedy ever made. So let’s slow it down analytically. By breaking the film into parts and seeing how the parts relate to one another causally, temporally, and spatially, we can suggest how classical narrative form and specific film techniques are used to create this whirlwind experience.

His Girl Friday
can be segmented into 13 scenes, set in the following locales: (1) the
Morning Post
offices, (2) the restaurant, (3) the Criminal Courts pressroom, (4) Walter’s office, (5) Earl Williams’s cell, (6) the pressroom, (7) a precinct jail, (8) the pressroom, (9) the sheriff’s office, (10) the street outside the prison, (11) the pressroom, (12) the sheriff’s office, and (13) the pressroom. All of these scenes are marked off by dissolves except for the transition between 8 and 9, which is simply a cut.

Within these scenes, smaller units of action occur. Scene 1, occupying almost 14 minutes of screen time, introduces almost all of the major characters and sets two plotlines in motion. Or consider scene 13: almost every major character appears in it, and it runs for about 33 minutes.

We could break the longer scenes into smaller parts on the basis of changing character interactions. Thus scene 1 comprises (a) our introduction to the newspaper office, (b) the first conversation between Hildy and Bruce, (c) Walter’s discussion of the past with Hildy, (d) Walter’s conference with Duffy about the Earl Williams case, (e) Hildy’s telling Walter that she’s remarrying, and (f) Walter’s introduction to Bruce. To grasp the construction of other lengthy scenes, you may divide them into similar segments. It may be, in fact, that the somewhat theatrical feel of the film comes from its practice of segmenting its scenes by character entrances and exits (rather than, say, by frequent shifts of place). In any event, the developing patterns of character interaction contribute a great deal to the hubbub and speed of the film.

The scenes function, as we would expect, to advance the action. As we saw in
Chapter 3
(
pp. 82
–84), classical Hollywood cinema often constructs a narrative around characters with definite traits who want to achieve specific goals. The clash of these characters’ contrasting traits and conflicting goals propels the story forward in a step-by-step process of cause and effect.
His Girl Friday
has two such cause–effect chains:

1. The romance.
   Hildy Johnson wants to quit newspaper reporting and settle down with Bruce Baldwin. This is her initial goal. But Hildy’s editor and exhusband, Walter Burns, has a different goal: he wants her to continue as his reporter and to remarry him. Given these two goals, the characters enter into a conflict in several stages. First, Walter lures Hildy by promising a nest egg for the couple in exchange for her writing one last story. But Walter also plots to have Bruce robbed. Learning of this, Hildy tears up her story. Walter continues to delay Bruce, however, and eventually wins Hildy through her renewed interest in reporting. She changes her mind about marrying Bruce and stays with Walter.
   
2. Crime and politics.
   Earl Williams is to be hanged for shooting a policeman. The city’s political bosses are relying on the execution to ensure their reelection. This is the goal shared by the mayor and the sheriff. But Walter’s goal is to induce the governor to reprieve Williams and thus unseat the mayor’s party at the polls. Through the sheriff’s stupidity, Williams escapes and is concealed by Hildy and Walter. In the meantime, a reprieve does arrive from the governor; the mayor bribes the messenger into leaving. Williams is discovered, but the messenger returns with the reprieve in time to save Williams from death and Walter and Hildy from jail. Presumably, the mayor’s machine will be defeated at the election.
   

The crime-and-politics line of action is made to depend on events in the romance line at several points. Walter uses the Williams case to lure Hildy back to him, Hildy chases the Williams story instead of returning to Bruce, Bruce’s mother reveals to the police that Walter has concealed Williams, and so on. More specifically, the interplay of the two lines of action alters the goals of various characters. In Walter’s case, inducing Hildy to write the story fulfills his goals of embarrassing the politicos and of tempting Hildy back. Hildy’s goals are more greatly changed. After she destroys her article, her decision to report on Earl Williams’s jailbreak marks her acceptance of Walter’s goal. Her subsequent willingness to hide Williams and her indifference to Bruce’s pleas firmly establish her goals as linked to Walter’s. In this way, the interaction of the two plotlines advances Walter’s goals but radically alters Hildy’s.

Within this general framework, the cause–effect sequencing is complex and deserves a closer analysis than space permits here. But consider, for example, the various ways in which Walter’s delaying tactics (involving his confederates Duffy, Louie, and Angie) set up short-term chains of cause and effect in themselves. Also interesting is the way Bruce is steadily shouldered out of the romance plot, becoming more and more passive as he is shuttled in and out of precinct jails. In this regard, Earl Williams undergoes a parallel experience as he is manipulated by Hildy, the sheriff, the psychologist, and Walter. We could also consider the function of the minor characters, such as Molly Malloy (Williams’s platonic sweetheart), Bruce’s mother, the other reporters, and especially Pettibone, the delightful emissary from the governor.

We could also note how the scenes hook into one another: an event at the end of one scene becomes a cause leading to an effect—the event that begins the next scene. For example, at the end of the first scene, Walter offers to take Bruce and Hildy to lunch; scene 2 starts with the three of them arriving at the restaurant. This exemplifies the linearity of classical narrative: almost every scene ends with a dangling cause, the effect of which is shown at the beginning of the next scene. In
His Girl Friday,
this linear pattern helps keep the plot action moving rapidly forward, setting up each new scene quickly at the end of the previous one.

The cause–effect logic of the film illustrates yet another principle of classical narrative structure: closure. No event is uncaused. (Even Pettibone’s arrival is no lucky accident, for we know that the governor is under pressure to decide about the case.) More important, both lines of action are clearly resolved at the end: Williams is saved and the politicians are disgraced. Bruce, having gone home with mother, leaves Walter and Hildy preparing for a second honeymoon no less hectic than their first.

So much for causality. What of narrative time? Classical Hollywood cinema typically subordinates time to the narrative’s cause–effect relations, and one common way is to set a deadline for the action. Thus a temporal goal is wedded to a causal one, and the time becomes charged with cause–effect significance. The deadline is also a convention of the newspaper genre, adding a built-in time and suspense factor. But in
His Girl Friday,
each of the two plots has its own deadlines as well. The mayor and the sheriff face an obvious deadline: Earl Williams must be hanged before next Tuesday’s election and before the governor can reprieve him. In his political strategizing, Walter Burns faces the other side of the same deadline: he wants Williams reprieved. What we might not expect is that the romance plot has deadlines as well.

Bruce and Hildy are set to leave on a train bound for Albany and for marriage at four o’clock that very day. Walter’s machinations keep forcing the couple to postpone their departure. Add to this the fact that when Bruce comes to confront Hildy and Walter, he exits with the defiant ultimatum “I’m leaving on the nine o’clock train!” (Hildy misses that train as well.) The temporal structure of the film, then, depends on the cause–effect sequence. If Earl Williams were to be hanged next month, or if the election were two years off, or if Bruce and Hildy were planning a marriage at some distant future date, the sense of dramatic pressure would be lacking. The numerous overlapping deadlines under which all of the characters labor have the effect of squeezing together all the lines of action and sustaining the breathless pace of the film.

Another aspect of
His Girl Friday
’s patterning of time reinforces this pace. Though the plot presents events in straightforward chronological order, it takes remarkable liberties with story duration. Of course, since the primary story action consumes about nine hours (from around 12:30
P.M.
to around 9:30
P.M.
), we expect that certain portions of time
between
scenes will be eliminated. And so they have been. What is unusual is that the time
within
scenes has been accelerated.

At the start of the very first scene, for example, the clock in the
Post
office reads 12:36; after 12 minutes of screen time have passed, the same clock reads 12:57. It’s important to note that there have been no editing ellipses in the scene; the story duration has simply been compressed. If you time scene 13, you will find even more remarkable acceleration. People leave on long trips and return less than 10 minutes later. Again, the editing presents continuity of duration: it is story time that goes faster than screen time. This temporal compression combines with frenetically rushed dialogue and occasionally accelerated rhythmic editing (for example, the reporters’ cries just before Williams’s capture) to create the film’s breakneck pace.

Space, like time, is here subordinate to narrative cause and effect. Hawks’s camera moves unobtrusively to reframe the characters symmetrically in the shot. (Watch any scene silent to observe the subtle balancing act that goes on during the dialogue scenes. An example is shown in
5.144
–
5.146
.) Straight-on camera angles predominate, varied by an occasional high-angle shot down on the prison courtyard or on Williams’s cell bars. Why, we might ask in passing, does the prison receive this visual emphasis in the camera angle and the lighting?