How to Watch a Movie (13 page)

We have seen this place earlier in the film, alight and alive with customers, gold in its décor and in the sheen of the liquor bottles. The bar is there still, but empty and unstocked. Jack sits on a stool. His gloom mounts. He covers his face to shut out the world, perchance to dream. And when he removes his hands, on a cut, he sees Lloyd, the perfect barman (Joe Turkel), in front of shelves of glowing liquor. “What'll it be, Mr. Torrance?” asks Lloyd. The cut has restored the old trade of the bar and Jack's propensity for booze. But it is his future, too, the moment when ghostly story claims him for the Overlook and begins to detach him from his family. As a cut, it is both ecstatic and sinister, and the lesson of that possible marriage is not to be forgotten.

Cutting can hurt, or add an inadvertent panache to the violence it is dramatizing. For decades, Sergei Eisenstein was revered for the rigorously controlled, almost metronomic editing he used in the Odessa Steps sequence of
Battleship Potemkin
. Many of the townspeople of Odessa have gathered on the steps to cheer the mutinous sailors on their ship. Then the order is given for soldiers to disperse that crowd. In white tunics and black boots they advance with rifles and fixed bayonets. Their power is unstoppable and cruel. We see a woman's face slashed. We see screams—these are images that Francis Bacon used in some of his paintings. A baby in a carriage bounces down the steps unattended. There is no doubt left about the merciless violence of the soldiers and the suffering of the citizens. But
Eisenstein elects to present this action in tightly edited sections that fit together tongue and groove—a look of horror, the slash of a sabre, the line of jackboots. There is a drive and rhythm in the editing. No such effect had been seen before: this was the demonstration of a lot of Soviet theorizing over editing. It does have the stamp of a successful exercise. Almost involuntarily, the spirit of the sequence is shared between victims and tyrants. But the cutting enforces the attack of cold steel and amounts to a subliminal endorsement of it. Eisenstein never intended that, but as with so many brilliant theorists possessed by dynamic graphic talent, the sequence could get out of control. (Note: no massacre on the Odessa steps ever occurred, though it has passed into folklore by now.)

Similar tensions arise in Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will
when she is glorying in the impacted mass of storm troopers and the eminent solitude of Adolf Hitler. Hitler is hardly photogenic, but the persistent celebration of his figure (with sunlight spilling in his saluting palm) is matched by the wall-like solidarity of his troops. And Riefenstahl is still condemned as a fascist artist. The use of what we call montage (radically organized material, constructed through the editing) in both films is ideological. It is akin to the dynamic cutting in King Vidor's
Our Daily Bread
(1934), where a group of farmers make a chain of water supply for a field.

Cutting can be a masking operation, an exercise in discretion. In the very candid love scene in Nicolas Roeg's
Don't Look Now
, the editing removed any glimpses of genitalia which the wholehearted actors—Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie—had to have revealed during their performance. That was their compact with Roeg, but it was a safeguard against censorship, too. Was it protectiveness that pushed Roeg to his finest
measure? The lovemaking (unusually tender and free) is crosscut with events some twenty or so minutes after sex as the two of them repair their faces and dress to go out. It is an uncanny effect, and another playing with time, for abandonment rubs shoulders, and other parts, with composure. Nothing is said in
Don't Look Now
, where the looking
is
everything. No way of making the sequence could be offered in a novel, say. It is uniquely cinematic, critically reliant on editing, and inspired by time, film's most abiding and elusive subject.

Film wants us to see momentary things. It wants to show us something we have never seen before, and may not see again. Often, those glimpses turn on sex and violence. But those very topics have often led to distress and indelicacy. Pornography was not widespread in 1972 (the year of
Don't Look Now
), but now that it is an ocean we see how difficult it is to catch sexuality on film. It doesn't exactly photograph; it can't be seen or felt within the wrestling match of naked antics. So the authentic eroticism of
Don't Look Now
's love scene is the more remarkable for the tension between modesty and explicitness, and its acuity in time. This may be the first lovemaking the couple have had since their child drowned, and it may be the last before the husband dies.

Nor can we really show a killing. There are still laws against such things, so the special effects of death have become hysterically ingenious. But suppose Hitchcock had said, Let us simply film the
Psycho
shower murder in one fixed shot—rather as Ozu might have done, or even as Hitchcock might have done it in
Rope
. So Norman would appear and stab Marion many times. Leaving aside the matter of the knife doing real damage, the simplicity of direct coverage would be intolerable. Norman's arm would weaken. Marion might gasp and urinate
as her body gave way. Then the various degrees of censorship would have to intervene. And so the plain, unadorned brutality of a murder has hardly been shown in film. It is still the object of anticipation, dread, and desire; it is cloaked in that melodrama. So gradually, with time, we have come to respect murder more. Movie has given it a glamour that is unthinkable in life.

Of course, there are so many ways of being discreet and melodramatic, of cutting out the hideous instants, while letting pain and damage be implicit. But Hitchcock falls into the kind of trap that faced Eisenstein in
Potemkin
. He makes such an intricate, elaborate construct of the killing that his technical aplomb, his glee, cannot help showing. The murder is frightening, of course, but it is not free from Hitchcock's black humor or his pride at having managed it so well. He is a brilliant murderer. That is there in the surprise of the event itself and the technical mastery that boasts, I can show it without quite showing it. It is a set piece, a tribute to his own virtuosity and wit, and done with a flagrant artfulness that won't permit the censor to interfere in his razorsharp cuts. It's the money scene.

What this opportunity to edit amounts to is one more intrusion on the alleged lifelike veracity of film. I asked you to appreciate that the simple shot—that lovely chance to see—was also an encouragement to analysis. That quest is redoubled by the potential of editing which is always ready to offset the level of actuality and to introduce a scheme of cross-reference. Put the two together—film and cutting—and we have a language so intense it is a marvel that we still teach our children to read, write, and spell, while omitting a curriculum that begins with an investigation of film. No wonder we feel adrift.

9

WHAT DO YOU HEAR?

S
ound seems to complete the ghostly contract movies have with life. Now the process sounds like life as well as looking like it. But realize that sound is another kind of editing. Sound cuts into the picture; it adds music to the visual stream; it can insert a narrator's voice; it adds so many other nuances of sound effect to what we might call the silent film. You can experiment yourself. Take a famous stretch of silent film—try the opening of
Sunrise
, where the City Woman lures and seduces the rural husband to come out to the swamp. Run the scene with different types of music: Sinatra singing “I've Got You Under My Skin”; something from Debussy's
La Mer;
Donna Summer singing “Love to Love You, Baby”; the opening to the last movement of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony; or a sitar raga played by Ravi Shankar.

That range is comic, yet they all work. Just about any music plays with any stretch of film, or any sound track: the
Sunrise
scene would play with a very heavy-handed “swamp” sound track—cicadas, hyenas laughing in the distance, and the sound of heat—I mean the pressure of sweltering atmosphere; or try it with just the mournful wind of the prairies and the creak of dry trees. The characters shift as we listen to them.

Different scores edit or organize a picture. They take it toward a different meaning:
La Mer
makes the adulterous affair lyrical; Donna Summer turns the film and its 1927 iconography into camp satire; Sinatra makes us chuckle over the sexual obsession; while the sitar begins to suggest that this small local infatuation—heady and damaging, perhaps—is just a pebble on a large beach.

As the “invention” of sound was labored over in the 1920s, the target achievement that obsessed its inventors was to make it synchronized: to have the sound of talk as lips moved; to hear the sound of a shot as we see the flash of a gun; and for the footsteps of Frankenstein's monster to match his movements on screen. That can be done. But in time filmmakers learned that asynchronicity had a point, too. So sound can begin two or three seconds before its proper sequence. A voice does not have to come from the mouthing face. And a particular sound effect can leap out of the overall naturalism of sound like a warning. In
A Dangerous Method
, Jung shocks and challenges Freud by anticipating that a cracking noise will occur, irrationally, in the room where they are sitting. The noise comes: Freud says it is accidental but explainable; Jung prefers to regard it as irrational but indicative. The auditory does not have to be a meek record of life any more than the pictures need to be accurate. Sound can have its close-ups and long shots.

Alfred Hitchcock was old enough to have made silent films. He had come into the business as a graphic designer. All his working life he spoke of “pure cinema,” putting the stress upon visual storytelling and his own ability to angle shots and their compositions so that they seemed loaded with a psychological meaning that made talk superfluous. If he wasn't simply a purist, he was a meticulous craftsman willing to talk about filmmaking relying on visual manipulation, and being somewhere between a practical joke and veiled cruelty. Like many practical jokers he was seldom to be trusted. His
Blackmail
(1929) so straddled the coming of sound that it ended up being done in silent and sound versions. Hitch took a woman (played by Anny Ondra) who has stabbed and killed a sexual predator. He then had her mesmerized by a background conversation in which the recurring word “knife” was picked out of the blur of sound with expressionist intensity until the word was like the thrust of a knife in her mind. That was unprecedented and off camera. On camera, the Czechoslovakian Ondra was pretty and appealing, but her English was wretched. So Hitch had Joan Barry, fluent and accomplished, standing off camera saying the lines as Ondra fluttered her lips

Thirty years later, as
Psycho
was being made, Hitchcock's devoted crew were uneasy. Many of them were from the television unit he had assembled in the 1950s for
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
. Now they were making a feature film, but one that departed from Hitch's own norms in going back to black-and-white. A crew on a film hardly knows what's in the director's mind. He doesn't have time to tell them, and he may not be clear himself. The crew see fragments of a picture coming to uncertain life. Long before the “auteur” theory, crews looked at directors in the way shipboard life relies on the wisdom of the
captain. They want to have someone in charge, just to hold off the chaos that frequently threatens a picture.

So the crew on
Psycho
felt this project was a departure for their boss. They knew that what had started out as a Paramount picture ended up being done at Universal. There were rumors that that was because original bosses flinched at the tastelessness of the project. There were worries that the whole thing was not going to work, that it might seem ridiculous and grotesque. Then one day the composer Bernard Herrmann appeared with a rough track of his first attempts at a score for
Psycho
. Herrmann was an illustrious maverick, a difficult collaborator sometimes, but he had composed the scores for
Citizen Kane, On Dangerous Ground, Vertigo
, and
North by Northwest
, among others. He played what he was planning for
Psycho
(of course, he had had many consultations with Hitchcock) and the mood on set changed. The music explained that unique film to the doubters. The tastelessness was lifted up to the level of a grim, piercing opera. The music was a sky in which this daring picture could fly.

All of which sounds like a happy resolution, as if any problematic film could be tidied up and made sweet with a generous application of music, like syrup being poured on old pancakes. Alas, there are too many pictures where that policy seems to have been followed, and where music sinks to the level of muzak. Sometimes music is stripped in and out, like cheap carpeting. On
Chinatown
, shortly before the film was released, various parties felt Phillip Lambro's score was inadequate. The producer, Robert Evans, was never one to shirk bold action. He turned to another composer, Jerry Goldsmith, and gave him ten days to write a fresh score. The result is famous, moody, wistful, fatalistic, and romantic. Those words are only gestures
toward an adequate description, but you may be humming the opening refrain to
Chinatown
as you read.

Music is one part of the story. In the shower sequence from
Psycho
, it's possible to distinguish many other sound elements: the roar of the running water; the screams of Marion Crane (though it is not clear whether Janet Leigh is doing the screaming); the faint but unmistakable sounds of a knife hacking at flesh (accomplished with a water melon); the violent rise and fall of the music, to suggest the knife thrusts as well as the terror; and, I think, a level at which the music and the screams are blended electronically.

Those strands of sound have been balanced and mixed in one married sound track, but notice how different interests are served by the marriage: the sounds of water, of a knife hacking, and of screams might be said to be live sound from an actual event. But the music is far more complicated. Is it Marion's point of view, or Norman's? Is it us being told how to be afraid? Or is it Hitchcock the ringmaster stoking up the atmosphere, because we might not be fully upset without it? Is it even some neutral, observing force—we could call it fate—that is witnessing this hideous incident? Is it the spirit of fear that lives in old motels at night? Is it another “once upon a time”? That last question is relevant because music goes all through the film, and covers several different characters, or scenes, where no one is present. Is the music even akin to a narrative tone, like the rhythm in a prose narrative?

When Goldsmith's music starts up on
Chinatown
, before a character has appeared, let alone spoken, does it not represent the mood and sadness of the story to come, a flavor of Los Angeles in 1937, or 1937 as viewed and felt from 1974, nostalgia for the noir spirit? For surely that music is signaling the
emotional terrain of the film, and clearing its throat as if to say, Now, let me tell you a sad story…. Yet the mournful chords of
Chinatown
's opening music are a long way from the bawdy humor of its first scene.

Nothing is said in the shower scene in
Psycho
, beyond screaming, but it's instructive to consider how many levels of voice there are in the film. There is the off-camera sound of “mother” berating Norman, a voice in the air, not attached to a person, but oddly echoing and disturbing. There is the closing voice of the mother noting how she is not going to kill that fly—and I don't think it is the voice used earlier. (Paul Jasmin and Virginia Gregg contributed to these personae.) There are the voices Marion hears during her drive north, into the night and the rain, the voices of possible pursuit and punishment. There are even the voices of the characters talking together. Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh make a subtle and touching supper scene, oddly gentle and calming, before the outburst of the shower. They sound hushed, alone together; it feels like night. These voices are essential to the drama, and (as noted) Norman's is the first kind voice after a series of nagging, grating speakers. In the voice itself, in the quality of its talk, and in the intimate way it is recorded, Norman seems to be a rescuer, a friend, even a lover. Anthony Perkins has the wrong voice for a psychopath—which only shows how tricky those guys can be.

When I talk of the way
Psycho
is recorded I am touching upon a wealth of craft more easily understood in practice than described. But voices in a movie need to be placed: they can be in a field, a dining room, in a secret place shared with another person, in the course of a kiss, on the edge of madness, inside the speaker's head, or in a cave of loneliness. The voice can be surrounded by rebarbative metal surfaces, in an empty room,
or in a velvet alcove. More than that, it can offer an attitude to the story. Thus, Carol Reed's voice-over at the start of
The Third Man
is brisk, cynical, worldly, and in an open space; George Sanders's narrative as Addison DeWitt in
All About Eve
is knowing, insinuating, gossipy, snide, and actorly—and in a private room; and in
The Magnificent Ambersons
, Orson Welles's narrative is fond, amused, and omniscient yet ready for a kind of tragedy that knowledge cannot prevent. It could be a voice looking into a dying fire late at night. Reed has been recorded in a studio without undue fuss or care; Sanders has been treated with DeWitt's odd mixture of self-love and self-loathing; and Welles's narrator comes from the heart of his own rosebud. Of those three, Welles knew and cared the most about sound. He had been raised in radio. He had won his chance at a movie because of the daring and cheek behind his 1938 broadcast of
The War of the Worlds
.

Before Welles, no movie director had had such aptitude for sound, or such experience with its potential for trickery. Sound was still novel in 1938 (the era of the Mercury Theatre on the Air). When it came to the movies, first in 1927, it was so laborious, so difficult, and so limited in its achievements that there were ample reasons to disapprove of it. Moreover, the accident of history meant that the enormous investment required to equip movie studios and then the theaters for sound coincided with the impact of the Depression. The audience shrank drastically as new investment was needed. Many film practitioners lamented the loss of purity and eloquence that the silent film had reached. But nothing impeded public appetite for the new asset.

Early sound encumbered the camera. It had to be put in a soundproof box, so it could not move as freely as it had done
in
Sunrise
, say. A number of movie stars discovered that they could not sound American, fluent, or as beautiful as their faces. Garbo is a charismatic screen personality enhanced by speech—but she possessed and learned to develop a seductive deep voice that suited her face. In addition, she rarely said too much. John Gilbert was less lucky: he sounded more like Chaplin than Ronald Colman. This is the material of a film like
Singin' in the Rain
, where Debbie Reynolds's character talks sweet to replace the wretched voice of the silent star played by Jean Hagen. That film treats the transition as comic, but it was tragic, too.

Aesthetically and technically, a principle was revealed in these maneuvers. The audience loved sound for a variety of reasons: for songs and music; for the gunfire in the gangster films of the new age; for the sepulchral groans and howls of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the horror films that set in with
Dracula
and
Frankenstein
. The singing movie star was on his and her way: Bing Crosby, Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, and even Dietrich, who sings in
Morocco
and then kicks sexual expectation forward a decade or so with the kiss she bestows on a pretty girl in the audience. That kiss occurs in a suspenseful hesitation that signaled another bonus with sound: at last people could be quiet, thoughtful, or inward. The locus of acting had shifted from pantomime to being. That seemed like naturalism, the way people wondered in real life, so sound seemed to complete the realistic capacity of film—the lifelike illusion.

Because they were technologically separate, voice and face did not have to fit. From speed or penury, or just because it amused him, on several later films Orson Welles used his own voice to dub in lines for other actors. You can regard that as a
mischievous habit, but it may have deeper meaning. In
Kane
, the disappointed husband takes over Jed Leland's negative review of Susan Kane in her night at the opera, and completes it, with venom. On
The Exorcist
, as the child Regan's head revolves and she curses everything in sight while projectile vomiting, director William Friedkin had Mercedes McCam-bridge do the child's satanic voice. The result is shattering, even if Friedkin was unkind enough to deny McCambridge a credit—perhaps he wanted the otherworldliness of the voice to prevail. There is a legend that there is something of Debra Winger in the voice of E.T. Jack Hawkins was operated on for throat cancer in 1966, and for the last seven years of his career he mimed while other actors dubbed in his voice.