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Two or Three Things I Know about the Filmic Object
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Why do precisely these objects which
we behold make a world?
— Henry David Thoreau (1)
… photographs are of the world, in
which human beings are not ontologically favored over the rest of nature, in
which objects are not props but natural allies (or enemies) of the human
character.
—Stanley Cavell (2)
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1. Quoted in the preface of Stanley
Cavell, The World Viewed: Enlarged
Edition (Cambridge
MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979).
2. Ibid.,
p. 37.
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Coffee and the World
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Teeming
with alluring consumer goods and groceries, Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967)
nonetheless abstains from dwelling on these desirable objects until its closing
tableau. The film is instead arrested by something unassuming – a cup of coffee
– in an elaborate scene one-third in. It is precisely this mundane object that the
camera beholds which makes a world. In a café bar, the camera restrains its intimacy
with the occupants, but moves increasingly close to the unexceptional object. A
stir. The swirling coffee turns into a spiralling galaxy in fast motion. A sugar
cube drops. Bubbles surface, forming and departing. Stars born and unborn. These
extreme close-ups, like the images of nature in Godard’s late films, inspire an
overwhelming experience of awe. With a whispering voice-over that mediates and
muses on the essence of existence and communication, this curious scene dares
to transcend the limits of filmic presentation – of ‘what can be represented,
of what we can grasp’ (3) – which leads further to the questions of how things
are filmed and how they can be grasped. Through a cup of coffee, the film
achieves the disclosure of the poetic possibilities in and of this object, encountering
the sublime when it is unanticipated – a powerful sensation that cinema never
falls short. Turbulence in tranquillity; weight in the insignificant; grandeur
in the minute; the beauty in and of the perfunctory. Coffee and cosmos. It is
the universe in a cup, a world in a shot. (4)
The
transformation of the coffee in Two or
Three Things forcefully renders Cavell’s answer to the question ‘what
becomes of things on film?’. The relation between a thing and its filmed
projection, Cavell proposes, is ‘thought of as something’s becoming something
(say as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, or as a prisoner becomes a count, or
as an emotion becomes conscious, or as after a long night it becomes light)’.
(5) These examples hint at a metamorphosis which involves difference (i.e.,
prisoner or count) and continuity
(i.e., night into light) but, most
importantly, invokes liveness (caterpillar
and butterfly; emotion and consciousness).
Mystical as it may sound, the liveness of the object can be understood as
Cavell’s account of ‘ontological equality’ in film. If objects are as alive,
thus present, on film as their human
counterparts, they can naturally be
allies or enemies of the characters. And indeed, the author closes ‘What
Becomes of Things on Film?’ with a brief discussion of what the coffee becomes
in Godard’s film, and how the images of the object should be interpreted
together with the shots of the human figures in the scene.
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3. Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2013), pp. 74-5. In his insightful discussion of the role of nature and natural beauty in Godard's late films, Morgan argues that these images are not only an aesthetic preoccupation but also relate to historical and political concerns. Natural imagery, he asserts, is ultimately Godard's way of exploring the medium's possibilities.
4. Although this essay concerns only how film calls
attention to objects and gives them significance in the fictional world, there
is another possibility, for objects to call attention to themselves due to
their ‘natural weight’ (Cavell, p. 25). See Christian Keathley, ‘Otto Preminger
and the Surface of Cinema’, World Picture,
no.2 (2008).
5.
Cavell, ‘What Becomes of Things on Film?’ in Themes out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North
Point Press, 1984), p. 174.
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In
a place where not only space but solitude is shared, the camera in Two or Three Things connects, if not
intimates, the characters through objects. The swirling and bubbling of the
coffee is not presented in a single continuous take, but broken down into
several shots, scattering them across the scene. The object is first introduced
as an insert, sandwiched between a close-up of the female protagonist Juliette
(Marina Vlady) gazing off-screen, and a profile shot of a stranger in the
café-bar. ‘Maybe an object is what serves as a link between subjects, allowing
us to live in the society, to be together’ – the narrator whispers, as if letting
us, and only us, in on a secret. ‘We are in the habit of
reading consecution as consequence’. (6) This succession of images, which
recurs throughout the scene, appears to establish a curious pattern of human/object
volley, with a myriad of ambiguous gazes and a web of points-of-view. It is as
if the coffee cup somehow demands our attention, gazing back at us. Little by
little, the coffee stains and soaks up the filmic space. The small café-bar expands and escalates into a world, a world that envelops and
embraces subjects and objects alike: ontological equality. The coffee serves as
a link between these strangers, allowing them to cohabit, to be together. Faces
and the universe. The scene exemplifies cinema’s adeptness in connection
and association.
Connecting
in cinema, in its most technical, material sense, involves cutting, decision-making
and piecing: editing. At the centre of Godard’s style is an aesthetic of
juxtaposition and a politics of the dialectic. Sensitive to these
characteristics, Cavell reads the pairing up between a barman drawing a beer
and the coffee cup shots as ‘a rebuke to our willingness for a poetic
meditation on universal origins when we do not even know where the beer and the
coffee we drink on earth come from’. (7) This interpretation is not only
responsive to the film’s critique of capitalism and its alienating effect, but
also demonstrates the usefulness of an ‘object-responsive’ approach to cinema.
In a film where ‘dead objects are still alive; living people are often already
dead’, the heightened presence of objects and the object-like presence of
subjects are crucial guides to our understanding. While most cinema theories champion
the human characters and their psychology, there also exists a possibility to
understand a film with or through its objects. A beer and a coffee: they
collide and open up a new dimension of understanding the sequence, illuminating
a materialist undertone in an otherwise predominantly metaphysical scenario.
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6. Jacques Aumont, Montage (Montreal: Caboose, 2013).
7. Cavell, ‘What Becomes’, p. 182.
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If
Cavell deepens the significance of the coffee cup scene by broadening the scope
of his discussion to an ideological consideration, Brian Henderson develops the
‘philosophical puzzles’ posed by the film into a matter of film-philosophy. ‘It
seems to me that Godard’, Henderson writes, ‘does not resolve his philosophical
puzzles with philosophy, but with cinema’. The remedy to the isolation and
self-absorption of the scene is offered elsewhere in the film:
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Toward the end of the sequence, the voice-over speaks of a rising of consciousness. Godard achieves this cinematically, not philosophically, by cutting to four fluid, somewhat repetitive shots of Juliette walking outside. Aided by Beethoven's String Quartet #16, the passage suggests a rising up out of the coffee cup and the isolation/immobility of the cafe into motion, space, joy. Even if that too is solitary, the sense of emergence into the world from the prison of the self, and into clarity from ambiguity, is achieved strikingly. (8) |
8.
Brian Henderson, ‘Harvard Film Studies: A Review’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 35, no. 4 (Summer 1982), p. 33.
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To
translate abstract ideas into audiovisual materials and to convey concepts with
concision are the filmic medium’s distinguished possibilities for entertaining
a unique engagement with philosophy. To discover a world in a coffee cup and to
rediscover the world outside are Two or
Three Things’ exceptional achievements, created by its nuanced organisation
of image and sound, and its equally subtle handling of its subjects and
objects. The film ‘returns to us and extends our first fascination with
objects, with their inner and fixed lives; and it studies what is done in and
with them’. (9) It treats object as subject.
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9. Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 43.
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Two or Three Things
I Know About Her studies what is done in and with a coffee. As a centripetal force, the object invites immersion: a diving into the solitary,
if not solipsistic, universe that it creates. As a centrifugal force, the object encourages conversation: a reaching out to the solace of the entire fictional
universe. From a cup of coffee to the world, it seems that we have gone very
far. Nevertheless, as Godard’s film teaches us, they can actually be one and
the same.
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Immersion
and conversation, centripetal and centrifugal forces, object functions and the
world. These are ideas appropriated from Raúl Ruiz’s novelistic theory about
the elemental filmic unit: the shot. ‘Every shot of a film is a world that is
separate from other shots’. Nevertheless, independence and autonomy are not the
sole attributes of shot-worlds; they further assert a ‘will to connect’. (10) In this sense, Ruiz’s theory is
simultaneously about continuity and discontinuity, connection and disconnection,
or in Jerry Lewis’ words, ‘hanging here’ and ‘groping there’. A film’s
achievement in turn rests upon ‘the co-existence and intermingling of these
functions – not the polemical privileging (whether for classicist or modernist ends)
of one over the other’. (11) Ruiz’s insights into the two equally crucial
spectatorial involvements – immersion and conversation – can be re-appropriated
and turned into a productive approach to the filmic object. His theory
addresses the tensions between spectacle and succession, the energy flowed and
halted in a film, proposing a solution of synthesis without compromising any
position.
The
spectacle of the object (and the energy it radiates) is a fascination of early
writings on film. (12) Jean Epstein, for example, attributes the ‘purest
expression of cinema’ to its rendering of photogénie,
the ‘photogenic’ aspect of things, a quality of ‘personality’ and ‘mobility’. He
champions cinema’s power of animism, its ability to bestow the gift of life on
things, such as we find in ‘charms and amulets’. Objects in film possess a mystical,
morphing quality. They are unassuming yet unfamiliar, sublime and unfailingly
alive. Cinema ‘inscribe[s] a bit of the divine in everything’, and everything
in turn is united into a ‘single order’,
one with ‘majestic vitality’ – a prefiguration of Cavell’s ontological
equality. Indeed, Epstein praises the capacity of objects – ‘a revolver in a
drawer, a broken bottle on the ground, an eye isolated by an iris’ – to develop
personalities, rising into consciousness. (13) In a famous passage, he elaborates
the narrative opportunities offered:
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10. Raúl Ruiz, ‘The Six Functions of the Shot’, Screening the Past, Issue 35 (2012).
11. Adrian Martin, ‘Hanging Here and Groping There: On Raúl Ruiz’s “The Six Functions of the Shot”’, Screening the Past, Issue 35 (2012), 12. For example, the Surrealists, with their particular
interest in the everyday object, keenly discuss objects in film; see Paul
Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and Its Shadow:
Surrealist Writings on the Cinema (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001).
13.
Jean Epstein, ‘The Cinema Seen from Etna’ and ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’ in Sarah Keller and Jason N.
Paul (eds.), Jean Epstein: Critical
Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp.
287-292; 292-6. Emphasis added.
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There was a time not so long ago when hardly a single American drama was without a scene in which a revolver was slowly pulled out of a half-open drawer. I loved that revolver. It seemed the symbol of a thousand possibilities. All the desires and desperation that it represented, the multitude of combinations to which it was a key. It allowed us to imagine all sorts of endings, all kinds of beginnings; and all of these endowed this revolver with a kind of freedom and moral character. (14) |
14. Ibid., p. 290. Emphasis added.
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‘A
thousand possibilities’: Epstein is referring to the dramatic potential of the
filmic object, its freedom to have a thousand probable and plausible dialogues
with other objects and subjects alike, its desire and desperation not only to perform
but also to provoke the narrative imagination. This particular idea of
object-becoming-character (to paraphrase Cavell) is what prevents Epstein’s
account of the filmic thing and thingness from being read as a mere cinephilic
fixation, if not an outright idiosyncrasy. The photogénie of the filmic object
is simultaneously a matter of its specificity and ‘variations in space-time’, its
centrifugal and centripetal forces. (15)
Epstein’s invocation of the revolver is
emblematic: an object which is among the most cinema-destined things par excellence. It affects and carries,
absorbs and triggers drama (or tragedy). Immersion and conversation: the filmic
destiny of the revolver. However, Epstein does not solely accredit photogénie to the object’s singularity
and circulation in a film, but also to how
it is filmed. The revolver
returns (again!) in his writing; and, this time, he specifies the revolver-character
transformation in the use of a close-up – ‘the soul of the cinema’. (16) Tight
framing succeeds in bringing out the object’s ‘impulse towards – or remorse for
– crime, failure, suicide’. (17) In this sense, not only can a close-up of
an object call attention to itself and its connotations, it can also evoke
contents elsewhere in the film, carrying meanings. Being attentive to the flow of the narrative and the filmic
devices, Epstein’s idea of photogénie is less aesthetically and critically naïve than it has appeared to some.
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15. Ibid., p. 294.
16.
Jean Epstein, ‘Magnification and Other Writings’, October, Vol. 3 (Spring 1977), p. 9.
17. Epstein, ‘On Certain
Characteristics’, p. 296.
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Gun II
Wes (Gene Barry) is
having his measurements taken for a tailor-made rifle in Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957). Bodies close and intimacy grows:
he woos the gunsmith’s daughter, Louvenia (Eve Brent). Their bodily language is
playfully flirtatious, their verbal exchange safely suggestive. The two
negotiate the making of the firearm as much as they tease their courting
prospect. Wes and Louvenia have fun making love and making business. Shying
away from the girl’s hint at marriage, the man withdraws. Fleeing to the other
side of the shop, he picks up what he is supposedly bargaining for: a rifle.
Wes looks into the barrel and the film cuts to his POV. Tender music swells,
stirring up romance. Louvenia is hardly a doomed figure under the mercy of the
lethal object (a prevailing visual motif, for instance, in Fritz Lang’s cinema)
but a framed token in a trinket, an image of cherished love, not terrible
death.
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‘Never saw any
better. This kind of rifle’s worth hanging around for’: Wes’ double entendre triggers the zoom-in of
the camera. Louvenia’s image escalates in the circular frame until it becomes
blurry. It is as if Wes leans toward her, approaching a kiss. Fade-out. The
film abruptly cuts to a close-up of the couple embracing and kissing. The
effect is shocking but moving, dazzling but refreshing: the film succeeds in
making an otherwise threatening scenario affectionate. Not only can a rifle
kill in Forty Guns, it also couples:
its deadly effect is defunct, but its predatory power remains. ‘What is cinema?
A girl and a gun’, Godard, following D.W. Griffith, proclaims. This scene in Forty Guns explores the profound
potentials of the filmic object. The rifle brings together a man and a woman;
unites the onlooker and the looked; bridges spectacle and story; collapses
smooth movement and rough editing; condenses sexuality and violence, love and
death. It ‘set[s] things in motion … provoke[s] and articulate[s] a play
of enigmas and investigations, of mystery and knowledge’. (18) It is a complex
Epsteinian object that entertains ‘a thousand possibilities’. No wonder the gun
is so insistently beheld in cinema.
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18. Lesley Stern, Dead
and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing (Montreal: Caboose, 2012).
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Vase
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Nevertheless,
an object, if unanchored and unmotivated, risks becoming indistinct, even
obscure. The inserts of daily objects in Yasujirō Ozu’s cinema are notable
cases in point: neon lights in lonely streets, teapots on tables, laundry hanging
in the sun. These recurring shots encourage interpretation as much as they resist
it, stubbornly remaining an obscure object in criticism. A sizable amount of
critical literature revolves around seemingly out-of-place, inanimate things in Late Spring (1949), probing their significance. (19)
Noriko (Hara Setsuko) is getting married. She and
her father (Ryû Chishû) are enjoying each other’s company in their last trip
together, their final moments of closeness before the imminent parting. It is
bedtime. The camera alternates between two close-ups of her and a medium shot
of a vase. Close-ups and an object. Action and reaction shots. Is it not the dispositif of the famous Kuleshov experiment, the very muscle and bone of cinematic POV?
But, unlike the experiment, in which the contents of the close-ups are kept
identical, Noriko’s expression changes between shots. Reading
‘consecution as consequence’: if Kuleshov experimented with what and how
emotion can be communicated through cinema, the vase-insert seems to beg the
question: how does the flight of emotion happen? To paraphrase Pedro Costa’s
film title: where does the hidden smile lie?
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19.
For a survey of the debate and an insightful reading of that scene, see William
Rothman, ‘Notes on Ozu’s Cinematic Style’, Film
International, Vol. 4, Issue 22 (2006), pp. 39-40.
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Most accounts of this scene follow the logic of linearity
and cause-and-effect; they limit themselves in trying to understand what the
succession of shots conveys, circumscribing the rich possibilities enabled by
the ambiguous shot organisation. A complementary or alternative way of reading
the scene would be sensitive to the conversations between shots, to the nuanced
synthesis between form and content, and to the complex interactions between
style and substance. Apart from contemplating the meaning of the vase, it is also
productive to acknowledge and respect the ambivalence of this character-vase
exchange, especially in a film where privacy is observed and secrecy respected. Healthy human relationships are based on
respect, which requires us to consider each other’s privacy. There are always
some aspects of other people’s lives that are inevitably out of sight, unclear
to us. Cinema, on the contrary, has the almost uncanny (some say voyeuristic)
privilege of bearing witness to the unadorned moments of its characters’ lives,
catching them unawares and unprepared. Sometimes, it even reveals their inner
feelings and intimates their thoughts. An enormous number of films, mostly
commercial ones, champion character transparency and motivation. Nevertheless,
we should not mistake this convention as cinema’s vocation (there exist films
that are led by actions, animated by light and shadows, inspired by ideas or
driven by rhythm). As a delicate portrayal of human relationships, Late
Spring reminds us that not knowing the psychological details of
other people, even of our own beloved, is the very fact of our existence,
something to be accepted.
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Throughout,
father and daughter stubbornly keep their intentions and designs hidden from
each other. The camera, observant to and yet complicit with them, sometimes
bars the viewer from accessing crucial information. Just as the high dramas are often deliberately elided (most notably,
Noriko’s wedding), the vase scene is an inventive variation on this preoccupation,
a microcosm of elliptical narration. What is missing and what is present in the
scene are equally central to our understanding. The vase insert eclipses
Noriko’s reflective flight as much as it crystallises her thoughts. (20) Our
engagement with the character is disrupted but her change of mind, like in some
other dramatic moments, simply continues off-screen. Noriko emotes; however,
the emoting is deliberately withheld from the viewer. Here, the unrepresented speaks
to style and meaning, and fits into the design of the whole. The achievement
and secret of Late Spring, and notably of this sequence, lies in its
eloquence and elegance in expressing themes of reticence, muted pathos and
regret over things lost.
The scene’s ambivalence in intention and impact is what
prompts its diverse, devoted critical discussions past and present. We fetishise
certainty, just as we are forever obsessed with pursuing motivations and
meanings in cinema. A missing expression and a vase: Late Spring is
comfortable with not showing us everything. Yet, in another way, the film opens
our eyes to all things human, natural and man-made: after the vase-character
exchange, the camera cuts back to the object, then to a landscape of rocks. Before
resting, it gazes on a pair of old friends (the father and his pal). An arbitrary
conceptual leap? No; a poetic and appreciative concern for everything in this
world. ‘Human beings exist
on the same continuum as all this natural matter’. (21)
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20.
‘[T]hose thoughts [that] shuffle indistinctly between, perhaps, the possible
still tranquillity of marriage and vague feelings of non-human, ornamental
lifelessness, of being stilled’. See
Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the
Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Trowbridge: Flicks
Books, 2000), p. 137.
21. Adrian Martin, ‘Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick’, Rouge, no. 10 (2006). |
Chest
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In
or out of frame, objects can always find a way to assert a strong presence.
While an on-screen vase perplexes us in Late Spring, an off-screen chest
persists in haunting us in Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948). In fact, not only does the latter present us with a
series of objects, it is also permeated by these very objects, moving on, with
and through them. The chest which the action hinges upon; the rope which kills
and incriminates; the hat which is both a clue and a piece of evidence; the gun
which threatens and summons attention. These objects, however, depart from their
ordinary functions, and perform according to a perverse logic. It is as if their
latent, dark potentials are brought forth by the sick minds of the murderers.
The ‘chest-coffin’ turns into a ceremonial dining table; the lethal rope bundles
books for the victim’s father; the hat reminds us of a dead man. Although the
revolver, surprisingly, is therapeutic rather than deadly – the gunshot at the
dénouement is a call for help, not a cry for blood. These objects unleash the
uneasiness accumulated throughout, transcending the claustrophobia imposed by a
confined narrative space. Rope not
only adeptly employs objects for narrative suspense and succession, but also
explores their prospects for surprise.
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Suspense and surprise: Hitchcock exercises these mutually
complementary qualities, creating an intimidating world of relentless
oppression. (22) To understand this complex mechanics, we can follow the
journey of the chest. Concealing the corpse, the object, from the very
beginning, drives the action – the likely (un)exposure of its content is the
source of narrative momentum and suspense. But surprisingly, the murderers,
with a sense of ingenuity and perverse bravado, do not hide the chest but call attention
to it by turning it into a dining table. Quietly sitting in the middle of the
party, the object invites the guests’ passing speculations and mocks their
recklessness. The film, meanwhile. Spends
time scrutinising the sick minds of its anti-heroes. The chest is pushed to the
periphery of the narrative, yet persistently lurks on the edge of the frame.
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22. Although the
filmmaker often prioritises suspense over surprise in interviews, his films in
fact incorporate both elements majestically, as in the shower scene of Psycho (1960).
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The object’s stillness offsets the camera’s
fluidity: the chest is confident in the latter’s omnipresent knowingness, in
its ability to find its way to reveal the morbid secret. For example, in a
perilous scenario after the dinner party, the camera observes the action from
an angle that expertly produces one of the rare moments of conventionally heightened
suspense. Trying to replace the books back into the chest, the housekeeper travels
back and forth to the dining room three times. The camera patiently captures
the ‘interaction’ between her and the object, in a careful framing that
excludes the murderers, suggesting their ignorance of the precarious situation
(although they can be heard off-screen). Rupert (James Stewart), pertinently
placed on the edge of the frame, will prove to be an important figure in the crime’s
exposure. It is only when the housekeeper and Rupert eventually attempt to open
the chest that one of the killers suddenly breaks into the frame, disturbing
the calmness of the shot and interrupting the precarious situation. The shot
teases discovery, milks suspense and toys with our anticipation. (23) The chest
is waiting silently to be exposed by the knowing camera – it is all a matter of
time.
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23. For a penetrating discussion of
the shot, see V.F. Perkins, Film as Film:
Understanding and Judging Movies (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1993), pp. 124-7.
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While Rope unfolds, its narrative space
becomes enclosed; the camera moves dangerously close to the chest-coffin and
its revelation. ‘By the relentless increase of our confinement Hitchcock makes
us feel that the exposure is as necessary as it is inexorable’. (24) In a film
where the illusion of real-time is strived for, the presence of the object, in
fact, thickens with time and the materiality of it is slowly realised. Not
unlike the ‘bomb under the table’ that the filmmaker often spoke about, the
chest is a bomb that steadily approaches explosion – a timed exposure. That is
why, when the object is finally opened, the camera’s view is totally eclipsed
by the chest. (25) A blackout. It is as if time has stopped in the fictional
world. A truly breathtaking moment; this cinematic gesture not only reveals the
corpse but also releases the darkness and emptiness of the antiheroes’
misguided ideal.
The pressure of time is strongly felt during Rope,
and is only deflated after the gun is shot, near the ending; the ensuing
anticlimactic temps mort soothes as well as distresses. The pathos of
the moment is the earned corollary of the subtle, overall design — as painful
as it is relieving. Hitchcock succeeds in manoeuvring the chest from the cusp
of the viewer’s consciousness to the central stage of the drama. As the camera
gently pulls back in the very last shot, it gradually confines all three main
characters plus this object in the frame. The tableau hints at the equality
between human figures and the realm of the inanimate within the filmic world. The
chest has travelled far and become a truly weighty object by the time of
this shot. We feel its heaviness; we recognise its significance. To paraphrase
Robert Bresson, ‘the object looks as if it wants to be there’. (26) In fact, it
needs to be there.
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24. Ibid., p. 90.
25. It is, in fact, a ‘seamless’ way to disguise the cutting.
26.
Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer,
trans. Jonathan Griffin (London: Quartet, 1986), p. 101.
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Telephone |
‘Some
objects seem to want, more than other objects, to be there. They look back at
us, they want to be touched’. (27) Indeed, not only can inanimate objects rise
into our consciousness through the use of découpage,
they can also be invested with life when being touched, handled – when
interacting with characters. This kind of interaction (the little ‘business’ of
film performance), if handled with imagination and delicacy, carries powerful
dramatic and expressive potential, and often enables a disclosure of the ‘real
action’ under the ‘pretext action’. (28) But how does an object look back at
the characters and invite their touch? ‘The telephone rings. All is lost’,
Epstein proclaims. (29) Here, he is referring to the destruction of photogénie by the
pressing narrative demand in classical Hollywood film: a call needs to be
answered, the telephone demands to be picked up, the story has to move on, the
spell of cinema lost. Nevertheless, a phone call is not necessarily inimical to
the charm of film – the diversity of approaches to a telephone conversation allows
for rich possibilities of suspense, drama, meaning and spectacle to play out.
‘I
want to be alone’, the ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) distressfully
declares in Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding,
1932), in a breathy delivery that is scant of self-pity but full of self-absorption.
It is as if she is addressing herself: Grusinskaya really wants to be, and already
is, alone. The paradox of revealing her feelings yet maintaining her solitude
exemplified by the line is subsequently developed into the character’s very
existence. In this case, telephone conversation – an essentially solitary
communicating experience – is a perfect way to fulfil the dancer’s wish to be
alone, and yet be known. There are twenty-one phone calls in Grand Hotel; she participants in most of
them and devotes a large amount of her screen time to the most elaborate of
them.
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27.
Lesley Stern, ‘Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, no. 1, (Autumn
2001), p. 335.
28. Keathley, ‘Otto Preminger’.
29. Jean Epstein, ‘The Senses 1(b)’, Afterimage, No. 10 (1981), pp. 9-16.
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Charles
Affron, in his exquisite and exhaustive study of Garbo’s acting, praises the
extraordinary interactions between the performer and objects. Garbo’s glances possess
a ‘self-awareness and areas of feeling’ that ‘[invest] the flowers [in A Woman of Affairs (Clarence Brown, 1928)]
with all the energy lodged in her eyes, abolishing […] the distance between
people and things’. Garbo’s touches ‘seem to fondle a room and its objects [in Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)],
creating a version of a love nest for remembrance.’ ‘Her love for a man is
evoked in the solitary contact[s] with [these] object[s]’. Describing the three
telephone calls Grusinskaya makes in Grand
Hotel, Affron discusses how the performer, in one, ‘uses the instrument to
extend conversation into reverie’, and then sustains it by ‘twist[ing] the
phone several times before putting it down’. And how she later skilfully
‘transforms the phone three times from surrogate lover to frustrating
instrument’. Garbo, in Affron’s account, is at her most eloquent when among the
inanimate. (30)
Communication
fails Grusinskaya: her phone calls always end up in a rueful retreat from or to
the receiver. Nevertheless, there is an occasion when the character successfully
connects and communicates to others. After a night with Baron von Geigern (John
Barrymore), her chéri, the ballerina anxiously telephones him soon after his departure.
Expelling the maid and the impresario from her room, she secures and prepares a
private world for romantic yearning. Grusinskaya closes her eyes
and calls out her beloved’s name amorously, ‘cherish[ing] and cradl[ing] the
phone with [a] tenderness’ that she reserves for the Baron. (31) The
character’s absorption demands the audience’s attentiveness as well as the
camera’s immersion. The film stays with her and follows her actions patiently.
Grusinskaya is in a state of nervous euphoria: the liveliness she dancingly
exhibits earlier in the scene transforms into a choreography of restless eyebrows
and darting eyes. The mercurial vicissitude of her countenance parallels the
intensity of her shifting emotions: from longing to expectancy to relief to
exhilaration, all rendered in a seamless continuum. Garbo mobilises her face
and body with a ballerina’s delicate precision, elegant dexterity and
effortless fluidity. The resulting expressions are abstract but affective.
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30. Charles
Affron, Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977), pp. 125, 128; 180-1; 146, 160.
31. Ibid., p. 159.
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Her
vitality passes on to the phone, endearing and investing it with ‘a life as
vibrant as her own’. (32) The object summons the presence of the lover in her
mind’s eye, even substitutes for his absence. Intimacy at a distance;
togetherness when being alone. Grusinskaya finds familiarity and comfort in
this otherwise importuning object, making it dance with her. A ballerina and a telephone: they are mutually responsive, equally alive. All her vigour and
hopeful spirit eventually gather and pay off in her final line: ‘Just to tell
you that I am happy’. From ‘I want to be alone’ to ‘I am happy’, Garbo animates
an object to carry her eloquent performance, transcending the aloneness of the
character, creating a world of joyous oneness.
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32. Ibid., p. 127.
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Little
does Grusinskaya know that this brief telephone conversation with the Baron
will be their last. The object which she so lovingly dances with is the very weapon
that Preysing (Wallace Beery) uses to kill her beloved. Oblivious to his tragic
demise, the ballerina, still in a sunny mood, calls again at night. Instead of
lingering on Garbo’s lively interaction with the receiver, the camera – for the
first and only time – cuts away during this call. The deviation creates a
subdued pathos. The Baron’s presence can be no longer summoned; the film shows
us the trace of his eternal absence – his empty room. ‘The telephone rings. All
is lost’. The unanswered call rings the loss of Grusinskaya’s love. Frustrated,
the character renders the phone as a surrogate for the Baron: ‘longing for
him…, invoking him, and despairing at his absence’. (33) ‘Where are you? Where
are you?’ she desperately reiterates the question to the receiver, as if it really
reincarnates her lover. Fade to black. The film replies with a shot showing the
Baron being transported out of the hotel. Exit the Baron. End of Grusinskaya’s
short-lived romance.
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33. Ibid., pp. 161-2.
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This
telephonic exchange between the character and the camera suggests the vulnerability
of Grusinskaya’s private cocoon of togetherness – the outside world is always unaccounted
for, and unknown to her. Aliveness (of Grusinskaya) and death (of the Baron) both
hinge upon the same object: the telephone communicates and separates, intimates
and then betrays this ballerina. It is ‘not fixed in its
identity but has the capacity to be […] things’ that are menacing or
alleviating – hence ‘the mutability of things in the cinema’. (34) Grusinskaya,
however at home with the object, is deemed to ‘[suffer] the solitude that is
not overcome by love’ (35) – and certainly not through a telephone.
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34.
Stern, Dead and Alive, p. 319.
35. Cavell, The World Viewed, pp. 206-7.
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Objects and the World
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Things
mutate in film. At the end of Two or
Three Things I Know About Her, the camera pulls back from a pack of
Hollywood Chewing Gum and encompasses the museum of groceries on a bed of
grass. This camera movement gestures a ‘rising of consciousness’ (to use
Henderson’s phrase): from an object to a gallery of objects, the blocks of
items slowly transform into a housing complex miniature. This tableau replaces the
images of apartment buildings and bleak landscapes seen at the film’s beginning,
reimagining a world of consumerism and capitalist obsessions. Not only does
this playful, inventive final image achieve a powerful political rhetoric; it
also neatly establishes a conversation between these objects and the world of
the film. From an object to a spectacle to an allegory to a discourse to a
presence that has risen into our consciousness – the ‘thousand possibilities’
the filmic object opens up are tellingly captured in this shot. ‘Something’s
becoming something’: it is precisely these objects we behold that make a world.
Indeed, the fictional world and its objects value each other and are mutually
dependant, intricately linked.
Cinematic
objects are alive when they achieve growth in our consciousness. They impress
and evoke, figure and gesture, perform and transform. This is why a coffee, a
rifle, a vase, a chest, a telephone, or a pack of Hollywood Chewing Gum, all behold
us and tell two or three things about a film, and also about the ontological
equality of cinema.
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from Issue 5: Shows |
© Hoi Lun Law and LOLA, September 2014. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |