How to Watch a Movie (8 page)

You can argue that she heard the word from outside the door, or that there was someone else inside the room who'd heard it and told her. But we are not shown those things, and that which is not shown hardly exists. Every movie is not just a story, or a mystery, it is an information system in which things are revealed to us as the film thinks fit. Welles could have shot the death of Charles Foster Kane—this is what we are talking about—in a conventional master shot where we see Kane in his last chair. We might gather how he dies. He might have company or attendants. We could hear the word and see the ball slip from his lifeless hand. Then the nurse steps forward. That would make it clear, or clearer. But it is essential to this great film that Welles wants the moment vivid, but mysterious, unsettling and fascinating. It's up to us. In other words, he has invited the spectator to be a part of his film as it begins. He's telling a story but he wants us to remember he's building a film, too, in which we must be active.

After all, at the end of the film the printed word “Rosebud” will be picked up by an unwitting worker—it is the painted name on a boy's old sled—and tossed into the furnace. Then the camera will close in, the music will rise to an anguished but exhilarated emotional peak, and we will see the scroll lettering of “Rosebud,” but only for a few seconds before the word melts away in the heat.

Do you see the affinity with the opening of a movie that is organized as a question, What does Rosebud mean? Just as
no character in the film is seen to have heard the last word, so none of the searchers discovers this possible answer to what it signifies. Except for us, alone and together. Does it help to know that Orson Welles all his life loved conjuring and magic? Do you begin to grasp how fully you must watch if you hope to see?

6

WHAT IS CINEMATIC INFORMATION?

A
French surveillance film inspector once studied five thousand hours of a mysteriously neglected parking lot on the outskirts of a city. He was attentive to the same fixed frame, and he reported on how few cars parked there and of how the drivers were hunched, and had lowered gazes. Were they spies, or criminals? They displayed those characteristics—if you assumed that the professions lived up to a movie reputation. But then someone who knew the city reassessed the five thousand hours. What the analyst had missed was that just out of the fixed shot was a Camembert factory.

The first lesson in seeing movie is for the filmmaker. Every time a member of the audience looks at any shot, or single frame, he or she will assume that everything in that frame was chosen, organized, and presented as a significant element of
the movie, and that anything omitted does not exist. We say that such images partake of “composition.” That kind of order is reassuring, for we realize, deep down, that the screen could show us anything it liked—shocking images thrown in our faces in brazen defiance of the thing called continuity. Luis Buñuel's
Un Chien Andalou
(1929) was like that, a short film that starts with a woman's eye slashed open with a razor and then pours a riotous stream of dream imagery into the wound. Why does she deserve that? Why do we? Because we were sitting patiently expecting order?

A key word here is “frame” and all it implies. In that Ray Bradbury story, “The Veldt,” where whole walls are screens, the setup seems regular and controlled, but the lions don't share that understanding. The frame is the rectangular form that amounts to the window of cinema. In
Rear Window
, when Jeffries looks across his courtyard he sees a series of frames or screens, one or two for every apartment. It seems obvious that the frames separate the things inside them from those outside of them. But those externals take at least two forms: the contiguous space that we take for granted and which may have been in the frame seconds before in a panning or tracking shot; and the things that have no physical existence but which work as an idea stroking the facts of the story. The sound of wind is a good example of that. Thus, there is that difference between Orson Welles's emphatic abbreviation of Kane's death and the master shot I imagined that might show Kane's room in the context of Xanadu and the other people there who wait on his death. That is why our hearing “Rosebud” is so important, and why the opening of
Kane
takes place less in a particular room in a special palace, but instead in the mind of the dying man and the ambiance of forlorn wealth. The whispered word,
echoing in his head, suggests the space at Xanadu is actually small, cramped, and like a cave.

The information counts for something—it always does. So the 2014 war film
Fury
took great pains over having a true-to-1945 Sherman tank, to battle those bad (but superior) German tanks. Maybe the best part of that film is in showing how five men lived inside the Sherman and had their war. But information is often warped by suggestion, poetry, and the demands of fiction.
Fury
is crazy in wanting to have pitched battles with German tanks and have us believe they are decisive enough to deserve Brad Pitt's time and our interest. But the art direction over the antique tank ignores the total air superiority the Allies had by April 1945. If the Germans had any tanks left, air strikes were called in to incinerate them. But that is history. So
Fury
is framed, and so are we.

For decades films were shot in what was called a golden frame, or an Academy frame, with a ratio of height to width that was 1.33:1. Just think for a moment of the meanings, or the antagonism to meaning, in a frame that is indefinite and not rectangular—a screen like a puddle, an impression, or a bloodstain—like the thing seen in dreams, or in life (for our vision, optical and imagined, is not framed). That golden frame is rarely used now and for a long time when films from that era were shown on television, the format was adjusted so that the height was rather less and the width rather more than was intended. Some television networks adhere to the old shape (Turner Classic Movies, for instance) and your television set may have a way of adjusting to the old shape. But for fifty years now, the format of films has been fudged on television.
The new medium always had a dilemma when it wanted to show formats that had been designed to defeat television. One of those formats was CinemaScope (begun in 1953), where the ratio was 2.66:1. That made for horrific renderings (known as “pan and scan”) where sometimes the TV image of a Scope film was little more than the space between two people at opposite edges of the frame, perhaps with just their noses showing.

CinemaScope was the subject of many jokes, in part because it was a gimmick meant to distract us from television, but also because it became associated with empty spectacle, especially religious epics that were moribund in so many aspects of plot or content that the inert oblong (the letterbox, as it was called) was easily derided. A terrible slackness was felt, as one essential method of the filmmakers was squandered. As a result the viewer trusted nothing and looked less closely.

But Scope was as good as its material and its users. To take one example: Nicholas Ray's
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955), in Scope, is a largely interior story, set in southern California and concerning life in high school: it is the James Dean–Natalie Wood–Sal Mineo classic referred to earlier. Ray was one of the finest frame composers film has ever had; he had learned from Frank Lloyd Wright the beauty and energy of the horizontal frame, especially in domestic interiors where it might seem awkward or ill-suited. Ray used Scope to make rooms melodramatic and full of tension.
Rebel
is a film about emotional space in which the extra width is a way of emphasing the loneliness of characters, the claustrophobia of their family life, and the epic, romantic possibility of liberty or escape. I suspect Ray would have made as fine a film using the Golden frame (the way he shot
They Live by Night, On Dangeous Ground
, and
In a Lonely Place
), but he had Scope and he made it feel alive with unease.

That's what we expect of any screen format. But meaning begins in those shapes (the page format of a book has similar consequences). It's reasonable to say that
Rebel
in Scope matches the domestic space in affluent southern Californian homes, just as it catches the loneliness of Dean's character lying in the gutter awaiting arrest, the infinite grandeur in the Planetarium, and the peril of the clifftop “chickie run” that is a crisis in the action. Equally, there is an astonishing moment where the wide-angle camera represents Dean lying on a sofa and then goes through a semicircle as he sits up. That sounds excessive or like showing-off, but in the film itself it helps us place Dean's character not just as a rebel but as the most sentient being in the film. It is Dean's command of space that subtly contradicts the film's title, for this is a story about a troubled kid who
does
understand a lot about life, including the way his parental generation (postwar America) has fucked up. He does have a cause, and it involves life itself, liberty, confidence, and purpose. On the page this may sound schematic, but on screen it is something felt before it is understood.

You see, we feel the frame. Let me offer another example: the films of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, most notably his
Tokyo Story
(1953). Ozu made movies about family life, settled hierarchies, and domestic interiors; they seem simple at first, though the resignation of the characters, to fate or unhappiness, is often more demanding than the parables of happiness in American films. Nicholas Ray wanted to believe that rebellion could remake the world—it has been an American fallacy—while Ozu understands that melodramatic alteration will be buried in time; that is his limitation.

Ozu usually shot in black and white with a golden frame. He preferred static shots, where the camera did not move, while human action toils within the still frame. That sounds
formulaic and nearly ritualistic, but if you watch
Tokyo Story
—a film that could be fruitfully paired with
Rebel Without a Cause
—notice how much the stillness contributes to the feeling of enclosure. It is orderly, calm, and pleasing; yet there are hints of claustrophobia and confinement. The choice of framing is an immediate threshold to complexity, for it makes the rooms seem safe containers while never losing the prospect of prison. Ozu's way of seeing is humane and fair, to be sure, but it contains the seed of resignation and repression.

There has always been a struggle in the movies between having us feel safe, or ready for adventure. In
Locke
, say, the car interior is confining and oppressive, but its solitude gives Ivan a strange calm in which he can still feel he's captain of his ship. That struggle is rooted in experience, but it spells out the economics of the film business, too. Film has offered adventure, hope, fantasy, and escape for those of us encased in poverty, limitation, and quiet desperation. So the business of film gathered as many security routines as it could think of: you have to pay to get in; you should be there on time; you sit in a seat in a row of seats; the music is “movie music,” which says here we go again; the picture has stars who are admirable in part because of their familiarity; and it has story structures like those we have known before. So it soon became a principle of factory filmmaking: do what we did before.

But audiences want it different, too. They want something they've never seen before. They want new faces, outrage, and the playfulness of danger, even though they don't want the locomotive or the wall of blood to come off the screen and into the auditorium. So many movies, and not just old ones, whisper to us about how they are going to work. It's like driving: on the roads we keep to one side of the road; we halt at stop signs; we
observe certain speed limits; and we try not to crash into each other. Yet many movies about cars thrill to the breaking of all those rules—think of the car chases in
The French Connection
or
Bullitt
. Just as films say, Wouldn't you like to pretend you're shooting someone or making love to a phenomenal beauty, so they take our neurotic fears for our scratch-free cars and also say, Let's go wild! Driving is the only ease in Ivan Locke's life.

The headlong nature of film, the resemblance to a wild river or going out of control, is instructive. In the 1920s, in Paris, the leaders of the Surrealist movement were intrigued by movie. It was part of their credo to yearn for “automatic” elements in art—things not labored over or chosen, but taken at random or powered by a machine. Film seemed closer to that than any other medium. So they had a sport of going as a group to a cinema, not in time for the movie's start, but later on, so they arrived in the middle, fumbling and tripping in the dark. They sat down in front of the inexplicable action or plot and struggled to make sense of it—to turn sensation into information. They believed that made them attentive to the essence of cinema and appreciative of the power of mystery. But then, after ten minutes or less (for as early as the 1920s movies worked in habitual ways), when they agreed that they had worked out what was happening, they got up and left. But they went down the street to another movie house and entered that dark and its unfathomable story—until they knew where they were. Then they escaped again.

Does that sound absurd, expensive, and an irritation to others in a settled audience? It's not that far from the mood in which we go to a “new movie.” Orson Welles said how, as a boy, he usually went into a film while it was playing and left when he realized that's where he had come in. That's harder
now, because screenings are separated and punctuality is called for. But it's worth trying, for it opens the mind and sometimes makes us smarter—as well as “wrong.” In January 1956, I went to see James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
(some films haunt our lives). I was fifteen and Dean had been dead for about three months. My desire to see him was such that I got there early enough to be waiting in the lobby with many other people for the next show to begin. Some rebellious impulse prevailed and I went in early.

The packed theater was quiet and tense. The CinemaScope screen was like a horizon where one might roam. We were in the Planetarium scene near the end (though I didn't know what it was, and I knew next to nothing about the story in advance). Plato (Sal Mineo) has taken refuge there. He has a gun. Jim (James Dean) goes into the building to talk him out. The police are outside with their guns and searchlights. What I saw was the young vulnerable face of Mineo and the seemingly older and more experienced look of Dean.

Now think of what I was seeing in terms of information: In 1955, when the film was made, Sal Mineo was sixteen, and Dean was twenty-four. Nothing had been done to hide that age difference in two alleged high-school seniors. Dean seemed older, more knowing, more in control, and whereas Mineo looked like a wild kid, Dean was groomed, nearly suave and elegant. If you look at that film closely, his carefully combed hair is seldom out of place. More than that—and here we get into delicate, difficult territory—Dean had a look of darkness in his face, a more fatalistic experience than Mineo had yet had. He was like an older brother to the kid.

Jim asks Plato for the gun—to look at it. Plato is unsure, but he wants Jim to like him, so he passes the gun over. Unseen
by Plato, Jim slips the bullets out of the gun and then gives it back to Plato. In the whole arc of the film, this is a protective gesture, meant to save the boy. But what I had seen in isolation was a ruse, a way in which an older person had deceived a kid. It was one mind manipulating another, and that small piece of action seemed to fit the brooding disquiet in Dean's face and his bearing. It would always affect my vision of him as not just an achingly sincere, misunderstood young man, but a watchful, withdrawn master of events, full of purpose and calculation. He wasn't just a lost character; he was a budding director. There is a scene in the earlier
East of Eden
where his character, Cal, deliberately takes an older but more innocent brother to see the whorehouse mother (Jo Van Fleet) they have never been told about. It is a scene full of power, vengefulness, and malice, and one of the best things Dean ever did.