Nerves in Patterns on a Screen: An Introduction to Film Studies

By Garry Leonard and Deirdre Flynn

Movies offer us images (and usually sounds) that “throw our nerves in patterns on a screen” (Eliot). In other words, they express the neurological hyperactivity of modern subjects. Films are affect machines, in this respect. Each has its own heartbeat (narrative highs and lows), dramatic expansions and contractions (montage), and changing patterns and light (cinematography). The following chapters looks at films that have made impacts both in the history of film and, more broadly, in historical events of the Twentieth Century. Each chapter explores the ways in which modernity (the socio-historical, economic, and cultural context of the films) intersects with film content (character, plot, and various mise-en-scène elements that are part of the film’s narrative) and with cinematic form (camera angles, shot types, editing, lighting, sound, and other cinematic elements that are not part of the story itself) in web-like relationships. At the same time, each chapter will consider the diachronic (across linear time) dynamic whereby films influenced their time and vice-versa. By looking at the way audience’s own understanding of characters or events were (and continue to be) influenced by, for instance, German Expressionistic settings or Russian Formalist montage, we can learn a lot about how subjects were (and continue to be) “directed” to see the world and to view themselves in it. By honing this ability to view films critically and consciously through a study of over 20 important films produced from 1895-2013, we can begin to identify the elements that have made film among the most powerful art forms of the 20th century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780987806246

Book preview

Introduction

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor –

And this, and so much more? –

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1920)

In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, possibilities seem to flicker up before the speaker, sudden and full of drama, only to abruptly end with no hint of resolution like an endless serial running on a continual loop. He notes, for instance, I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker. Certainly an older allusion would have to be to a fire flicker[ing], but in this poem the speaker explicitly refers to the new visual entertainments emerging as a dominant art from in the 1920s when he states, as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen. The magic lantern was more of a primitive slide projector than a moving picture, but as Fred Guida notes, many visual effects and story telling techniques that are generally assumed to be the exclusive province of the motion picture … were actually inherited from the magic lantern. The familiar pan or panning shot … the dissolve in which one image slowly fades out as another fades in (55). As well, the use of two projectors made it possible to cut directly from one slide to the next in much the same way in which a film director cuts from one shot to another (ibid.) Most pertinent to the flickering tableaux in movies, Terry Borton explains that the existing images were episodic. In other words, he states. they did not tell a story with a visual beginning, middle, and end. The existing images froze a moment in time… . His images, in tandem with the kind of narrative progression associated with watching a motion picture … through an implosion of words and images, a narrative, indeed a movie, was created in the mind of each individual viewer (qtd. in Guida 60). In this sense, Eliot’s poem itself operates like a magic lantern, a neo-cinematic optical device, throwing up patterns on a screen, where the screen, in this case, is the mind of each individual viewer/reader.

Movies offer us images (and usually sounds) that thr[ow our] nerves in patterns on a screen (Eliot). In other words, they express the neurological hyperactivity of modern subjects. According to Ben Singer, we modern subjects are particularly jumpy as we suffer from modernity’s ideological shelterlessness instrumental rationality, socioeconomic explosiveness, and neurological stressfulness (72). Singer explains these four deprivations of modernity and their effects on subjects as follows:

As a moral and political concept, modernity suggests the ideological shelterlessness of a postsacred, postfeudal world in which all norms and values are open to question. As a cognitive concept, modernity points to the emergence of instrumental rationality as the intellectual framework through which the world is perceived and constructed. As a socioeconomic concept, modernity designates an array of technological and social changes … : rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population growth; the proliferation of new technologies and transportations; the saturation of advanced capitalisms; the explosion of a mass consumer culture; and so on… . [W]e are also dealing with a fourth major definition of modernity: … a neurological conception of modernity. (72)

According to Singer, movies (especially melodrama films) express these stresses (throw them up on a screen) and, in some cases, provide relief from them. One way they do this is through repeated exposure: they take us through a series of strong emotional twists and turns such that we gradually grow accustomed to, and perhaps immune, to the intensity of the shocks and explosions that surround us.

Films are affect machines, in this respect. Each has its own heartbeat (narrative highs and lows), dramatic expansions and contractions (montage), and changing patterns and light (cinematography). Viewers engage with these affect machines viscerally, such that we are like Charlie Chaplin who dives into the machine in Modern Times. As we move through these affect machines we identify with some characters and empathize with others and, in the process, engage in something dynamic and experiential. When the credits roll and the lights go up, we find ourselves suddenly out of this affect machine and, in many cases, restored, rejuvinated, ready to face (and/or challenge) the world again.

What is so interesting about this power cinema is that films can not only affect how we feel in the moment but actually shape who we become in our lives, possibly even at a neurological level, as neurologist Antonio Damasio notes:

The aspects of the self that permit us to formulate interpretations about our existence and about the world are still evolving, certainly at the cultural level and, in all likelihood, at the biological level as well. For instance, the upper reaches of self are still being modified by all manner of social and cultural interactions and by the accrual of scientific knowledge about the very workings of mind and brain. One entire century of movie viewing has certainly had an impact on the human self, as has the spectacle of globalized societies now instantly broadcast by electronic media. As for the impact of the digital revolution, it is just beginning to be appreciated. In brief, our only direct view of the mind depends on a part of that very mind, a self process that we have good reason to believe cannot provide a comprehensive and reliable account of what is going on. (13)

Moving pictures speak to and possibly shape embodied consciousness, or what Damasio refers to here as the upper reaches of the self. They do so not only through content (character, plot, and various mise-en-scène elements that are part of the film’s narrative) but also through form (camera angles, shot types, editing, lighting, sound, and other cinematic elements that are not part of the story itself). When brought together in effective ways, this content and form evokes what avant-garde filmmaker Agnès Varda refers to as sleeping emotions, which, she says, are in us all the time, half-sleeping, so one specific image or the combination of one image and sound, or the way of putting things together, like two images one after another, what we call montage, editing-these things ring a bell [and t]hese half-asleep feelings just wake up (132). Powerful cinematic expression wakes up the internal movie theatres of individuals (ibid.), even as it generates a social imaginary, which, according to Charles Taylor, is not a set of ideas about how to live but rather a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life (172). Cinema thus operates at the intersection of modern subjects and the rapidly changing modern world in which these individuals struggle to find balance and meaning.

In its overdetermined status as a modern art form generated by modern technologies and focused on modern dilemmas (even if the narrative takes place in ancient times, the themes are translated in ways that engage modern viewers), cinema exists in a web-like, rhizomic relationship with modernity. Rhizomes are like converging root systems all tangled together. They are non-hierarchical but interrelated in random, unregulated networks in which any element may be connected with any other element (Bogue 107). Films are, themselves, rhizomes of form and content. In addition, they are rhizomes that not only arise out of modernity but also interact with modernity and within individuals in extended web-like relationships. Sometimes they encourage individuals to embrace the status quo and other times they influence groups to challenge dominant ways of thinking and acting. Though cinema often projects fantasies, these fantasies can have significant effects in reality.

The following chapters looks at films that have made impacts both in the history of film and, more broadly, in historical events of the Twentieth Century. Each chapter explores the ways in which modernity (the socio-historical, economic, and cultural context of the films) intersects with film content (character, plot, and various mise-en-scène elements that are part of the film’s narrative) and with cinematic form (camera angles, shot types, editing, lighting, sound, and other cinematic elements that are not part of the story itself) in web-like, rhizomic relationships, like those cultural philosopher Siegfried Kracauer articulates when trying to describe Georg Simmel’s methodology: All expressions of spiritual/intellectual life are interrelated in countless ways. No single one can be extricated from this web of relations, since each is enmeshed in the web with all such expressions (232).

The chapters are organized diachronically, for the most part, following the evolution of cinematic form from 1895 to the present. For, as the Russian theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein notes,

It is always pleasing to recognize again and again the fact that our cinema is not altogether without parents and without pedigree, without a past, without the traditions and rich cultural heritage of the past epochs. It is only very thoughtless and presumptuous people who can erect laws and an esthetic for cinema, proceeding from the premises of some incredible virgin-birth of this art! (232)

At the same time, each chapter will consider the diachronic (across linear time) dynamic whereby films influenced their time and vice-versa. By looking at the way audience’s own understanding of characters or events were (and continue to be) influenced by, for instance, German Expressionistic settings or Russian Formalist montage, we can learn a lot about how subjects were (and continue to be) directed to see the world and to view themselves in it. By honing this ability to view films critically and consciously through a study of over 20 important films produced from 1895-2013, we can begin to identify the elements that have made film among the most powerful art forms of the 20th century.

Works Cited

Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.

Damasio. Antonio. Self Comes to Mind. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.

Eisenstein, Sergei. Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today. Film Form. 195-255.

Guida, Fred. A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations: Dicken’s Story on Screen and Television. North Carolina: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2000. Print.

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament. Trans. Thomas Levin. London. Harvard UP, 1995.

Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts.

New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Print.

Varda, Agnès. Interviews. Ed. T. Jefferson Kline. Mississippi: UP of Mississippi, 2014. Print.

Chapter 1

Arts of Exposure: From Still Photography to Way Down East

In The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema (New York Time Review of Books, 15 Aug. 2013) Martin Scorcese responds to a hypothetical critique of cinema:

Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as fantasy and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.

Scorcese here addresses three aspects of cinema that drew him personally to film and that have made film the preeminent art form of the 20th century: first, the often emotional relationship between film viewers and the movies they see; second, the power of cinematic language; and third, the ongoing dialogue between film and life.

Cinema’s First Vision:

Using light to project things moving through time and space

These three factors were actually the catalyst and converter for the invention of moving pictures and for every innovation since. Cinema’s First Vision—using light to project things moving through time and space—was, in fact, triggered by a bet, so the intended viewer was both emotionally and financially invested in the film. The bet was made by a California Governor in 1872 (Leland Stanford), and it involved horses: do they lift all their feet while trotting and galloping, or do they keep at least one foot on the ground at all times. Stanford bet that horses lifted all the feet at some point, but he was not able to prove this due to the blurring effect of motion. He hired Edward Muybridge to use photography to do what the naked eye could not do: a single image made Stanford the winner, showing that horses are airborn at points when they trot and gallop. In the process of doing this work, Muybridge saw something remarkable: he could create a moving effect by quickly moving each still image (he had placed cameras at intervals along the track, such that when the horse hit a string, the camera snapped a shot) by placing them on a glass disk and spinning this disk in front of a light source. He called this device a zoopraxiscope and described it as follows: [I]t is the first apparatus ever used, or constructed, for synthetically demonstrating movements analytically photographed from life, and in its resulting effects is the prototype of the various instruments which, under a variety of names, are used for a similar purpose at the present day (Animals in Motion). The zoopraxiscope was an intermediary device between the magic lanterns of the seventeenth century and the first moving-picture-camera (the cinematograph), which was eventually created six year later. The zoopraxiscope created a new effect—not of images projected on walls, but of animals moving through time and space. This device pushed innovation, as photographers and scientists around the world started toying with moving image machines.

The American inventor Thomas Edison was immediately working on such devices, as was the British photographer William Friese-Greene, whom Scorcese mentions as inspirational. In fact, the two were in a heated race to create the first movie camera. Friese-Green was fascinated by the old-fashioned magic lantern and he took this as a point of departure for his obsessive work creating a moving image, something he actually succeeded in doing, but only at great expense. Indeed, he patented his chronophotgraphic camera, but then he went bankrupt and had to sell it. It eventually ran out. Meanwhile back in the US, Edison was developing the kinetascope, which he first showed in prototype 1891, adding a sound-element in 1895 (in what he called the kinetaphone). Edison’s kinetascope was a big attraction at circuses. You’d put in a coin and stand and watch the moving image through a hole. In many ways, it’s like watching a short, funny cat video on Youtube, only without the endless ability to link to another one. It also paves the way for one side-trajectory in cinema’s evolution toward the narrative art form it became—that being the cinema of attraction. This type of cinema is by no means gone, as my Youtube reference suggests. In fact, as we will see in later chapters, elements of this cinema of attraction will later arise in avant-garde cinematic practices aimed at disrupting viewers’ experience of being inside a story-world when watching a film. However, before the power of narrative film could be challenged, it had to be established. The race was on, and, at first, it was mostly a race of technological innovation.

In the lead were two sets of brothers: the German brothers, the Skladanowsky’s and some French brothers, the Lumière brothers. Both were scrambling to develop something better than Edison’s peephole. They wanted to be able to project the image on a screen, as you could with Friese-Greene’s chronophotographic camera. It seemed that the Skladanowsky brothers had beaten the Lumière brothers when they held a screening in Berlin on November of 1895, with something they called the Bioscop. There was a problem, though. They didn’t perforate the edges of the celluloid so they had little control of the speed of the projection, and the audience was unimpressed. Two months later, the Lumière Brothers figured it all out. In December of 1895 they held a screening in Paris with their device: the cinématographe.

Suddenly you could shoot film, develop film, and project it all in the time it took to set up your tripod and camera. The creative possibilities were endless, but only if you think about the device creatively, as one through which to create art and communicate experiences. This is something the Lumière brothers did not fully realize when they made and screened Train Arriving at the Station or Workers Leaving a Factory, although they inadvertently set the stage for such narrative film by creating a stable viewing-point for the camera and by suggesting the possibility of a backstory and future-story as characters enter and exit the shot. Instead, they viewed the cinématographe in the context of the cinema of attraction. Gunning alludes to this common view as a conception that sees cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power (whether the realistic illusion of motion offered to the first audiences by Lumière, or the magical illusion concocted by Méliès), and exoticism. In hindsight we can see that the narrative possibilities for this new camera are endless, but at the time both brothers saw the cinema as a means to expose viewers to some new vision of reality. For this reason, they saw cinema as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever (Louis Lumière).

This is arguably one of the least correct predictions in modern history. How could the primary inventors of cinema as a commercial form have been so wrong about their own invention? The short answer might be that they were inventors, not sociologists or artists. They were innovators at the cutting edge in one field and of the technology available to them (the camera was heavy, so difficult to move; the lenses were primitive, with no capacity for zooming or shifting angles, and editing was not yet conceived, so one roll of film was shot for each film). Despite these limitations, the Lumière brothers do give evidence of cinematic genius in Train entering the Station. For instance, the location of the camera is at a deliberate angle so that the train arrives. The very notion of having it arrive rather than being there is an early discovery of how to involve an audience, how to make them feel like an audience. Many if not most of the people seeing this film had never seen a film before, so they had no idea how to watch" it, but all of them had gone to a train station to await the arrival of someone.

So the Lumières constructed a viewing position for the audience. This was new, as Scorcese notes in his article:

The Lumière brothers weren’t just setting up the camera to record events or scenes. This film is composed. When you study it, you can see how carefully they placed the camera, the thought that went into what was in the frame and what was left out of the frame, the distance between the camera and the train, the height of the camera, the angle of the camera—what’s interesting is that if the camera had been placed even a little bit differently, the audience probably wouldn’t have reacted the way it did.

Scorcese pinpoints three critical elements that the Lumière Brothers implemented from their first films: they used light (and darkness); they created a sense of movement, and they created a sense of time. All these elements come into play and position the viewer in a different reality; they create, in other words, the reality effect of cinema. They also suggest a fundamental destabilizing vision with respect to objective reality: namely, they show that reality is an effect of one’s constructed viewpoint. In train entering the station, a subject position is created for the audience—an effect of reality is created. However, it is then broken as people exit the frame, making clear that it is a frame, that there is a camera, and that this camera is mechanically recording what is in front of it and no more. This breaks the reality effect. It makes the viewing subject aware of him or herself as a viewer in a reality that is separate from the reality inside the movie.

The Lumière brothers were less interested in the philosophical, artistic, and expressionistic power of cinema and more interested in the reality outside of the movie, and, in fact, they turned increasingly to ethnography—sending operators around the world to record bits of the world. As Valerie Orlando argues, The Lumière brothers were known for the cameramen they sent out all over the world. Many traversed the well-established colonial empire and filmed the environments of exotic others across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, sending the film stock back home to eager audiences (7). Cinema thus satisfied two growing urgencies: to catalogue colonial expansion and accumulation, and to control the gaze of those back home, far from the colonies. According to Orlando, [t]hese early films fueled colonial desire and were a pivotal mechanism in sustaining the empire (ibid.). However, some of the films also seem to critique colonial practices, at least inadvertently. For instance, the short documentary-type film taken in Indochina, Children Gathering Rice, shows two European women dressed entirely in white throwing rice on the ground as ragged local children scramble to pick up each grain in the foreground. This is another interesting way in which cinema occupied a central role at the intersection of historical reality and the reality effect: the Lumière brothers and their European colleagues were all scrambling to put moving things on screen, just as all of all of Europe was scrambling to colonize North and West Africa, and the two urgencies intersected in diverse and potentially unexpected ways, depending on the image hunters (les chasseurs d’image) whom the Lumière brothers hired and depending upon the films the Lumières screened. In this process, the Lumière brothers could be said to also intersect the cinema of attraction with what we now refer to as documentary filmmaking, another important trajectory in cinema’s development.

It took a different type of innovator to imagine the non-realistic narrative capacity of cinema. This was Georges Méliès, the Great Wizard of Cinema. Like most other people interested in photography and cinema, Méliès was present at the famous showing of train arriving at the station. He immediately approached the Lumière brothers asking to buy a camera. They refused—as they had refused everyone else—because they were convinced cinema was a novelty, and that novelty would be extinguished even more quickly if more people got cameras. Méliès was a magician and he was also an inventor who had been building automatons and other mechanical devices, and he quickly cobbled together a working camera of his own.

One day he was filming a trick act and he camera jammed. After it was fixed, they tried something else. It was only when viewing the entire film that Méliès saw the people of the first act turn into the people of the second. Even Méliès, who knew what really had happened, didn’t see what really happened—he saw people turn into other people—he saw magic. Now we call it stop action. Méliès arguably marks the beginning of a new vision in cinema. It could do more than use to project things moving in time and space. Now cinema could show you a different reality, one that did not necessarily fit into the parameters of what could be perceived in everyday life. In addition to developing stop motion cinematography, Méliès developed double exposure techniques. He tried running the film through the camera to photograph something, then carefully taking the same strip of film and running it through the camera again—a double exposure—something that allowed him to explore elements of horror and comedy in ways audiences could not explain.

Méliès’s next discovery was probably the most important, and it is the one that would quickly be perfected by D.W. Griffith. He stopped the camera, then began it again. Only he did this not to make things appear and disappear, not to show a man and ghosts, but to suggest a causal relationship between the first shot and the second. Thus, in Voyage to the Moon, he shows a sequence of people building a spaceship. Then he shows a sequence of scientists boarding the completed spaceship. Then he shows the spaceship ignition being lit. Then he shows a picture of the moon with a face. Finally, he shows a rocket ship embedded in the moon’s eye—and the viewers surmise that the rocket ship has landed. Then people disembark from the rocket ship and they are on the moon. Of course, in reality, he filmed people in front of the ship, stopped, then drew and filmed the shot of the moon, then shot them coming back out after their trip. This is in-camera-editing because the concept of cutting film and splicing it to some other shot was not yet possible. So Méliès invents in-camera editing influenced by stage productions, where scenery gets changed and props get moved around and all the camera does is to start and stop.

Méliès opens up the possibility of telling stories in film, at least to a point, although we are still locked in in-camera editing, without the power of parallel editing, montage, camera movement, and other extradiegetic cinematographic techniques. Keep in mind that the story is not the same as the plot. According to Looking at Movies, the term story refers to all narrative elements that are explicitly presented on the screen, as well as to all events that are implicit or that we infer to have happened but that are not explicitly presented. The plot, on the other hand, is everything that we see and hear in the film. Once we can understand the backstory and infer a future, we are freed from the sense of limitation, of being chained to the camera. We are now able to experience an illusion of plenitude. The audience moves from nervous observer (What is this? What am I supposed to see? If I don’t see it in the next few seconds I’ll miss it.) to the more leisurely, even luxuriant perspective of the voyeur ("I’m peeking at all there is of interest to see. My eye is able to go where it needs to, and the camera will take me there.). We watch as a story unfolds before us, seeing all that we need to see on screen (that is, seeing the diegetic elements—including story details, plot elements, characters, setting, and objects—that create the universe inside the film), which are enhanced and clarified by what we see or hear that is not part of the actual narrative (that is the non-diegetic elements, such as musical score, lighting, credits, intertitles, and blocking). In other words, we have more expansive diegetic elements and some non-diegetic elements. However, we have a relatively limited cinematic apparatus, at this point.These extra-diegetic elements are limited to new in-camera editing techniques (double-exposure and stop-motion photography), and does not yet include elements such as editing, montage, camera shot variety, camera angles, camera movement, lens work.

The non-diegetic and extra-diegetic elements are what distinguish cinematic language from other languages. Cinematic language is the visual vocabulary of film. It is composed of many integrated techniques and concepts we will discuss throughout this book. All of these connect the viewer to the story while either concealing the means by which they do so (in propaganda and mainstream genre films, for instance) or exposing the very constructedness of the fictions we take to be real (in avant-garde cinema, for example). At its most basic, cinematic language is created by shots (unbroken span of action captured by an uninterrupted run of a motion-picture camera) joined together through editing (the joining together of discrete shots) such that each transition from one shot to another moves the viewer through time and space. Just as words form sentences, shots form sequences, and sequences come together to form scenes. These scenes, which are like paragraphs in writing, come together to form narratives. Like mainstream written stories, mainstream cinematic narratives rely on smooth transitions from one sequence/idea to another. We therefore have cuts that make sense inside the narrative, and we have fade-outs or fade-ins that make sense given the narrative. In the process of following the movement and light on screen, we enter the world of the film, feeling what characters feel and thinking about our own lives in relation to this.

Cinema’s Second Vision:

Telling affectively evocative stories through editing and cinematography

Cinema’s reality effect thus arises at the