At left: Hitchcock's "Notorious." Bergman on strong axis. Grant at left. Bergman lighter, Grant shadowed. Grant above, Bergman below. Movement toward lower right. The attention and pressure is on her.
I've mentioned from time to time the "shot at a time" sessions I do at film festivals and universities, sifting through a film with the help of the audience. The e-mails I receive indicate this is perceived as some kind of esoteric exercise. Actually, it's something anyone can do, including you, and you don't need to be an expert, because the audience, and the film itself, are your most helpful collaborators. Of course it would be wise to research a film you hope to dismantle in public, and be familiar with its director and context, but I believe the process in its pure form could be applied to a film you've never even heard of. I want to tell you how.
This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago's Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. "You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?" he asked me. "You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class."
I did. The results were beyond my imagination. I wasn't the teacher and my students weren't the audience, we were all in this together. The ground rules: Anybody could call out "stop!" and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them. A couple of years later, when I started doing shot-by-shots at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the conference founder, Howard Higman, described this process as "democracy in the dark." Later he gave it a name: Cinema Interruptus. Perhaps it sounds grueling, but in fact it can be exciting and almost hypnotic. At Boulder for more than 30 years, I made my way through a film for two hours every afternoon for a week, and the sessions had to be moved to an auditorium to accommodate attendance that approached a thousand.
One thing I quickly discovered was that even much smaller audiences can contain someone who can answer any question. In "The Third Man," if a character spoke German, there would be a German speaker. If a scene required medical knowledge, there would be a doctor. A Japanese film at Boulder turned up Japanese speakers, experts on the society, students of the director. There would be somebody who could tell you what a Ford truck could and couldn't do. Or a rabbi, a physicist, an artist, a musician. When Criterion asked me to record a commentary track on Ozu's "Floating Weeds," I reflected that I didn't know a fraction of what Donald Richie or David Bordwell knew about Ozu (and Richie was already doing the film's silent version). How to talk for two hours about the visuals of a film where every scene is a single static shot? I took the film to Boulder, and together we discovered there was a rich abundance of things to say.
Of course you don't simply creep along and talk about what you're looking at. It helps to have a grounding in basic visual strategy. When the Sun-Times appointed me film critic, I hadn't taken a single film course (the University of Illinois didn't offer them in those days). One of the reasons I started teaching was to teach myself. Look at a couple dozen New Wave films, you know more about the New Wave. Same with silent films, documentaries, specific directors.
I bought some books that were enormously helpful. The most useful was Understanding Movies, by Louis D. Giannetti, then in its first edition, now in its 11th. He introduced me to the concept that visual compositions have "intrinsic weighting." By that I believe he means that certain areas of the available visual space have tendencies to stir emotional or aesthetic reactions. These are not "laws." To "violate" them can be as meaningful as to "follow" them. I have never heard of a director or cinematographer who ever consciously applied them. I suspect that filmmakers compose shots from images that well up emotionally, instinctively or strategically, just as a good pianist never thinks about the notes. It may be that intrinsic weighting is sort of hard-wired. I am not the expert to say. I can observe that I have been through at least 10 Hitchcock films and not found a single shot that doesn't reflect these notions.
I already knew about the painter's "Golden Mean," or the larger concept of the "golden ratio." For a complete explanation, see Wiki, and also look up the "Rule of Thirds." To reduce the concept to a crude rule of thumb in the composition of a shot in a movie: A person located somewhat to the right of center will seem ideally placed. A person to the right of that position will seem more positive; to the left, more negative. A centered person will seem objectified, like a mug shot. I call that position somewhat to the right of center the "strong axis."
Now what do I mean by "positive" or "negative?" I mean that these are tendencies within the composition. They are not absolutes. But in general terms, in a two-shot, the person on the right will "seem" dominant over the person on the left. Does this apply even to films from cultures that read right to left or top to bottom? From my treks through many Asian films, yes, it seems to.
There are many other rules of thumb. I will outline some broadly, and if you're interested you can examine them in films, or read about them in books by such as Giannetti or David Bordwell (both often used as textbooks). They will not use the same terms, and by no means do I imply they would agree with me; I am summarizing my own beliefs, based on hundreds of shot-by-shot experiences over the years. But they are scrutinizing films with the same intense curiosity, and that's the real point. Consider Bordwell, whose great book on Ozu uses many panels of individual frames to illuminate a director who virtually never moved his camera, and yet whose compositions are alive with visual strategy.
In simplistic terms: Right is more positive, left more negative. Movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so. The future seems to live on the right, the past on the left. The top is dominant over the bottom. The foreground is stronger than the background. Symmetrical compositions seem at rest. Diagonals in a composition seem to "move" in the direction of the sharpest angle they form, even though of course they may not move at all. Therefore, a composition could lead us into a background that becomes dominant over a foreground. Tilt shots of course put everything on a diagonal, implying the world is out of balance. I have the impression that more tilts are down to the right than to the left, perhaps suggesting the characters are sliding perilously into their futures. Left tilts to me suggest helplessness, sadness, resignation. Few tilts feel positive. Movement is dominant over things that are still. A POV above a character's eyeline reduces him; below the eyeline, enhances him. Extreme high angle shots make characters into pawns; low angles make them into gods. Brighter areas tend to be dominant over darker areas, but far from always: Within the context, you can seek the "dominant contrast," which is the area we are drawn toward. Sometimes it will be darker, further back, lower, and so on. It can be as effective to go against intrinsic weightings as to follow them.
Now let me walk you through a single shot from Hitchcock's "Notorious." The situation: Cary Grant, a U.S. agent, is in love with Ingrid Bergman, the daughter of a Nazi spy. He recruits her to go undercover and seduce a Nazi (Claude Rains) who has fled to Rio and is part of a plot. Consider that he has essentially called upon the woman he loves to live with (i.e., sleep with) another man, as her patriotic duty. He is conflicted about this, resents it, is jealous, begins to think of her as a slut ("notorious").
In the Rio office of U.S. intelligence, Grant's chief is positioned on the strong axis. Grant enters and talks to him, standing on the right (positive). Bergman enters, and begins to discuss her relationship with Rains. As she speaks, Grant walks to the left of the composition. She continues. He turns his back to us. We all instinctively read this as negative/rejecting/angry. Bergman goes into still more detail. Grant walks into the background. Wow. Now the picture has the intelligence chief as the stable presence on the strong axis, Bergman in the positive right foreground, Grant in the negative left background, and the "movement" from right front to left back, underlining the central emotional reality of the film, which will inform all of Grant's behavior.
Of course I should employ quotation marks every time I write such words as positive, negative, stronger, weaker, stable, past, future, dominant or submissive. All of these are tendencies, not absolutes, and as I said, can work as well by being violated as by being followed. Think of "intrinsic weighting" as a process that gives all areas of the screen complete freedom, but acts like an invisible rubber band to create tension or attention when stretched. Never make the mistake of thinking of these things as absolutes. They exist in the realm of emotional tendencies. Often use the cautionary phrase, "all things being equal" -- which of course they never are.
You and those joining you will also find yourselves discussing color, lighting, shadows, construction, characters, dialogue, acting, history, sources, influences, and messages both obvious and buried. Anything and everything. It truly is a democracy in the dark. Everything worth noticing on the screen will eventually be seen by somebody. For example, I had been through "Citizen Kane" at least 30 times before I took it to the Savannah Film Festival, and someone noticed a detail I had never seen before. I write about it here.
Now you're on your own. DVDs make it so easy. Never be doctrinaire. Depend on the audience. If you want to see the process in action, Jim Emerson, the editor of this site, continues the tradition every April at Boulder. It's free and open the public, like the whole conference, which is like nothing else I've ever experienced. You can Google the Conference on World Affairs to get the times, places and dates..
Photo above: Peter O'Toole after his lifetime achievement award at the Savannah Film Festival, flanked by critic Roger Ebert and actor Jason Patric. (Photo by Mark Von Holden)
"Notorious," "Floating Weeds" and "Citizen Kane" are all in my Great Movies collection.
Do you suppose the right:left::positive:negative aesthetic of most films derives from a subconscious thought of the right hand dominant over the left hand? When the thought first popped up, I thought it was rather silly; but the more I read in your writing, the more I mulled over the traditions of right- versus left-handedness. Varying between different cultures, it seems that left-handedness is either exotic, discouraged, or demonized - either way, it's considered abnormal. For instance, my father is naturally left-handed, but was disciplined in school to use his right hand (I am also left-handed, but was never forced into using my weaker hand); another prime example would be the Satan, who is described to be left-handed, thus stemming the tradition that left-handedness is the devil's hand and evil.
In that regard, perhaps the right-positive, left-negative aesthetic has been ingrained in our subconscious for many generations that it is a "rule of thumb" in compositions, especially movies. The same imagery of up-positive, down-negative is applicable to the concept of heaven and hell, ascent and descent - the sort of intrinsic, inexplicable desire to touch what we cannot reach rather than to sink into the depths of darkness.
Whatever the reason, it seems that the most successfully artistic endeavors are those which pluck upon our innermost humanity which we cannot explain.
Ebert: I suspect our visual perceptions are innate even before we become aware of handedness, and that heaven and hell got their locations via the same innate tendencies. But what do I know? What I do know is: Someone reading this will inform us. Commentators on a blog entry work just like the audience at a shot-by-shot session. Someone always knows. (/b>
This is a fascinating topic, and I have found that Jennifer Van Sijll's Cinematic Storytelling is a very useful book to help illustrate these ideas. I'm sure that this topic is covered in many texts, but Van Sijll utilizes still shots from films and devotes a section to each single storytelling concept, which helps to make things very clear.
I had never considered this shot-at-a-time style of watching, but will try it myself. Are there films from the last few years that you would consider particularly valuable for this exercise?
Ebert: Maybe "No Country for Old Men."
In regards to your comment about audience participation and knowledge: "Democracy in the Dark". How wonderful that putting enough people together in a room eventually yields the answers we are looking for. Why does this not work consistently in government bodies? Does the addition of darkness (or anonymity, in the case of the internet) bring large groups to a more pro-active state of mind? Can we dim the lights on congress and improve their efficiency?
The modern director, whose films demand that I notice such intricate composition, is Paul Thomas Anderson. All five of his films seem to consciously apply these things. All five of them are masterpieces. With these techniques widely explained and appreciated, how could they not be used consciously by wise directors? It seems rather like a tool of cinema rather than a fortunate happenstance.
I recently watched Tarkovsky's "Stalker" and was struck by some of the things you talk about here. The concurrence of your post and my watching that film is serendipitous, as it helps me put into words some of the things I thought about that film. You could use the entire movie as an illustration of these points: as Writer and Professor follow the directions of Stalker, they usually move into the foreground of the scene (following the thrown bolt, of course), while Writer moves away from him on a the occasions when he is being obnoxious.
My favorite scene of the movie is a sequence of objects filmed underwater, a very deliberate scene with a sense of progression: drugs, money, God, guns, a discarded bolt (guidance?).
An astounding movie, the first of Tarkovsky's I've seen.
I would agree, too, that No Country for Old Men bears study scene-by-scene, frame-by-frame. It was easily the best and most carefully filmed movie I saw last year, in my opinion.
Damian, I hesitate to discuss politics--it's such a negative influence on discussion--but remember that movie dissections are essentially free of corrupting factors. There is no money, no power changing hands when we say something about a movie. The same cannot be said of the legislative process.
Hi Roger, I have often wondered what you meant by "Shot at a time" analysis. Have you considered/examined who is actually responsible for the construction of shots using such techniques? Is it the Director? The Story Board Artist? The DP (Cinematographer)? Set Designer? Many directors use the same team for many movies so could it be that the director seems to be the motivating force when his role was to pick the DP who had the eye for the shots he likes?
I work with kids, teaching filmmaking workshops using home video equipment. I teach kids to use the "Rule of Thirds" to help in placing the focus of attention of a scene. Kids get it quickly. Sometimes parents seem baffled until after they see it demonstrated, then suddenly they get an "Aha!" moment and often comment that they didn't understand why their personal family photos were not very good until this moment.
How long does it take to do your Shot at a time analysis for a single film? I'd like to try it as an exercise with our local film co-op's monthly workshop. Is there one film that you could recommend as a good way to help learn this process?
Thanks and best wishes,
Don Tingle
Ebert: I think the director and cinematographer work together, in varying degrees of which one decides. In cases like Bergman and Nykvist, one of the greatest teams ever, I almost imagine they are telepathic. You could start with "Notorious," or "The Third Man"--lots of tilt shots, which imply that the world has lost its balance.
Where I grew up, we had one "specialty theatre" as you might call it. They played art films and on rare occasion an older film such as Gone with the Wind. But there was never a chance that people would actually discuss what they had seen, let alone dissect it shot-by-shot.
But during one summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I took part in a filmmaking program put on by the North Carolina School of the Arts (now the University of North Carolina School of the Arts). High school students from all over the country came to learn about movies and create their own.
The most interesting part of the experience for me was actually dissecting a film for the first time. What truly made it memorable was that the instructor was a real filmmaker, Gary Hawkins, a documentarian on loan from Duke University.
We only had time to go over a few scenes rather than an entire movie, but he enlightened me and no doubt the rest of the class with many subtle details and nuances that can be revealed upon shot-by-shot analysis.
These are the films/scenes I remember watching in that class:
-Notorious, when Bergman is trying to steal the key from Claude Rains
-A Buster Keaton silent film (don't know which one), when Keaton enters some sort of hotel and tries to get the attention of a woman on a balcony by throwing a piece of paper up to her with a note written on it (here Hawkins taught us his idea of a character being "in Utah" because if two shots are not clearly connected, then for example in this Keaton film, the woman on the balcony might as well be in Utah for all we know. But in connecting the two scenes by having the characters throw a piece of paper back and forth, the geography of the scene is completely established).
-The Lady from Shanghai, the chase sequence preceding the house of mirrors sequence.
-Documentaries his students at Duke had made, including one that took the style of the fly-on-the-wall and followed a group of men in their 70's who formed a ping-pong club and invited professionals from Korea to help train them.
Sometimes, I have the feeling that I lack the necessary breadth of knowledge of film. I know many films and many filmmakers, from Tarkovsky to Errol Morris, but when I think of all there is to know, I am nearly crushed by all that I do not.
That said, in my humble opinion, it is looking at films through means of dissection that can best inform a novice filmmaker or anyone who wishes to better appreciate film. That, and the actual process of making a film.
Ebert: I love the concept of "Utah." BTW, that's the school that produced David Gordon Green and most of his team, together ever since.
I had thought of the right/left in terms of right brain /left brain and those implications. I hadn't really applied it to movie analysis. My original idea came from looking at Renoir's "On the Terrace" with the additional organization scheme over each of the subject's shoulders. Many of the dominant, sub-dominant and background organizational approaches are applicable with music. Higher frequencies, greater intensity, pitch changes draw attention. Descending frequencies at the same intensity do not draw the same attention that a held higher frequency does. I suppose there is a common triage just past the sensory organs that organizes our attention and stimulates the approprate evocative synapse path.
Hey RE
It was a wonderful moment at the Savannah Film Festival when the young lady revealed the new moment of insight into one of the films many secrets. I will not spoil your review of this information, because I am sure everyone would rather jump to your url once its posted and get all of the details. But,I will say "Ranch." Everyone applauded it that day, and it was a great moment to experience.
Thank you for the information in this new post. As I further endeavor into the world of film making, I take every example, especially Hitchcock-ian, that I can get. Recently I did the shot-by-shot with North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Rear Window. Amazing. Many people don't think of it, but to me "The Trouble with Harry" is one of his finest and most overlooked films which stands in the shadow of the afore mentioned titles.
Someone asked you "how long does it take to go through a single film." It has been true with me that at least tripling the original run time would be accurate, of course depending also on the group you are with. I can tell you one thing, as I found out, it is a great "filter" of who is serious and who is not. In this current ADD generation it doesn't take long to decipher the wheat from the chaff.
I know this is slightly-off topic, but speaking of "Notorious", I just DVR'd it off TMC the other day. You know TMC. Turner's penance for unleashing colorization on the world. :) I haven't seen it yet, but I really look foward to it!
It's yet another one of those movies, like "Sunrise" and "M", that I likely wouldn't have wound up with any interest in had it not been for you.
Dear Roger,
Do you believe that the emotion or so-called "stirring quality" which many films share, arise from the presense of such things as the "intrinsic weighting", or vise versa as you so eloquently put?
Rather, is it foremost a bi-product of the 'aesthetic realities', which arise during the process of film making itself? In turn, does the application of the director's vision, the editing and the emotional weight of the film's subject and actual matter, somehow in themselves create a playing field, in which the clay can be molded to produce the most dynamic outcome?
Movies are very much like the buffets at great restuarants. As viewers, we're given all of these great choices, many of which stem from your own cognitive views or emotional experiences, which in turn, come from our unique way of seeing the world.
This forces us to choose what foods we need the most, which helps to mold and shape the viewing experience, in a way, we pinpoint and shape the scenes as they evolve on the screen, be it the way we choose to, the outcome will undoubtedly be different each and every time. And while, so much at the forefront of the experience is dependent upon mood, critique and emotional weight on our part, it goes without saying that the film we see each time does not change, rather it is our perception of the experience which has been molded to suit the reality of the situation. All in all, movies don't have to be a passive outing.
I don't say this to sound smart or to bore you (I myself am neither that smart or even exciting), rather I ask these questions because I've always been fascinated by what the movies actually hope to accomplish.
Indeed, how much of a film is sheer accident and how much of it is the original vision of the film makers? And yet, I believe the creative mind can only take you so far. In order for most films to work (in my opinion), both creatively and visionarily, something magical must take place. There is a kind of abtract rhythm of motion, or rather an aesthetic quality of being, which attributes itself more to the cohesion of actors involved, the voodoo of locations and the sensibility of time and space, more than the director's or even the writer's hands molding their creative sculptures.
I am with you, I think, when I say that things must have balance. Both the technique, the writing and acting must somehow magically evolve to suit the needs of the material and/or intent of the subject. It can safely be said that any film(s) which digress from this common bond go astray, both in execution and intent. How is this acheived? I can say out loud that I wish I knew (People like Spielberg, Hitchcock and Scorsesse seem to have more of a grasp of it than most people). As Martin Scorsesse once said in an interview to paraphrase: We become these people as we watch the films and mold our own experience.
I have been a film student for some time now, and I am often disappointed by the lack of depth to which many professors go in studying these films with students. What often occurs is a kind of dry heave, a paint by numbers kind of lesson plan which reflects not only the disinterest but the lack of credibility of all those involved.
And yet, it seems to be that these so-called 'film-schools' or universities are not teaching film or how to do it, rather they are channeling empty rhetoric as to the: Who, what, when and how of film making and the business (emphasis "business"). I would very much like to see a lesson plan which openly reflects the joy of making film as well as the application of proven commodities. Perhaps something like your shot-by-shot analysis (now that sounds like fun, as opposed to sitting in a dark room and then writing about what you saw).
One of the reasons why I became more interested in the movies, was your excellent commentary on Proyas' "Dark City" (which is probably one of my all time favorite films). Your comments didn't really illuminate me to the aesthetic quality, intent or material of the film, rather it did something entirely different and far more interesting. It forced me to see that there are different approaches to what we can do in viewing art, more roads we can opt to travel and more reasons for expressing ourselves.
As an art form, the movie is a living, breathing organism, and there is a genuine thrill that comes from watching a great film unfold. I have now seen Dark City at least 100 times, and each time is more informative and unique than the last, enriching my viewing experience so that I may experience happiness, sadness, poignancy and clarity; and maybe even share that experience with some family and friends, hoping they experience the same thing.
Before, I admit, I would only go through life watching a movie once and then later think nothing of it, now I can sit back and watch "Who Frammed Roger Rabbit?", "The Seventh Seal" and "Citizen Kane" a thousand times and still not get enough. Fun? yes. Informative, certainly. A waste of time? Apsolutely not. You gave me that gift Roger, and I'm grateful for that.
I look forward to the decades of movies as well as all forms of storytelling ahead. Lets hope that the gifts to tell decent stories never fade. Your many great thoughts, being one of those.
Best Regards,
Steve C.
Ebert: The presence is indeed there, but technique alone does not make a film great. Story, direction, acting and cinematography do. You can't compose a symphony without a written score, but everything depends on how it is performed.
Thanks Roger for the lesson on "reading a movie" But I will never do it as well as you! I understand you have lost your vocal ability however you can still dissect your favorite movies for us! RiffTrax has a comic way of commenting on movies shot by shot. You and some friends could use this system to do the same. Obviously someone would have to read your lines for you but I'll bet that will not be a problem. I have heard your commentary for Citizen Kane over and over. With this system you can do any movie you want without being on the actual DVD. And yes I would pay for the audio file. Rifftrax, from the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" guys, charges about $3.
I applied the golden ratio to a couple of recent movies and was impressed with what i found.
In "Sweeney Todd" the ratio is used to enhance Jonnhy Depp's entrance. At the arrival at London, Anthony Hope is singing to our right in the foreground. Then the camera begins to move very discreetly, allowing Todd to enter the frame from the farther right and even closer to the foreground. This, along with the impact of music and Depp's apperance, help to surpise and even shock us, setting the mood of the entire film in the process.
In "Michael Clayton" during the last "negotiation" scene. Clooney is on the right on every scene and Tilda Swinton on the left.
This gives Clooney the position of power in the scene, even in the shots from his back, giving the impression of being an impenetrable wall to Swinton.
Note: After i saw "Clayton" i was left under the impression of Clooney actually being on the left during the scene. It was only through youtube that i realized he wasn't, but the effect of the scene was similiar nonetheless.
Do you supose the ratio can also wotk alternally? Perhaps there could be people to whom an inverted or alternate use of the ratio would appear as effective as the more normal one.
Wow, great article. I've been watching movies pretty seriously since the start of this year, I'd say I've averaged one a day. I'm starting to appreciate movies as more of an art form in adddition to entertainment, and articles like this are the reason for that. If it weren't for you I wouldn't look at movies the way I do now, but you can put certain things that we all feel into perfect words and make us realize it more than we thought we could (or at least, you do for me).
If it weren't for you I wouldn't be watching movies like Fargo, Almost Famous, Saving Private Ryan, and many others. You've helped me articulate just what I enjoy about a movie and what I don't, and, like I said before, you help me appreciate movies as an art form, and articles like this are what feed my drive to continue watching movies. I've gone from blockbusters to acclaimed American films to most everything now. You've helped me realize that a complex, dramatic plot or being from a foreign country doesn't stop a movie from being just as good (and usually better) than an exciting summer blockbuster packed with explosions.
I, soon, am going to take a film class in my college, one in which we simply watch movies and talk about them. Our textbook is Understanding Movies, by Giannetti, a book that very much so pleased me when I read it. It went into great detail about directors and techniques, as you already know. I'm pleased that it's not a film class that will be primarily focused on "commercial" films, but that will, as well, show us films we haven't seen (perhaps).
I would love to sit down and do a shot-by-shot analysis. A couple of months ago, around June, my brother and I sat down one night and started Batman Begins up. It was late, but we were really in the mood to watch it, especially since The Dark Knight was coiming out soon. We started it up, and we couldn't have gotten more than half an hour through the entire thing, because we stopped it so many times to note shots, sound, lighting, angles, camera movement. Everything. It was fantastic to do. Probably the closest I'll get to a shot-by-shot for the time being.
Recently, I was given Criterion's The Adventures of Antoine Doinel as a gift. I had already seen Truffaut's The 400 Blows, but that was it. It's so interesting, though, to go through and view how different directors take similar material. Some directors have very specific meanings for their shots, like Sydney Lumet, who always takes the time to plan things out early. Some, though, merely present us with ideas, or with information, and we are supposed to gain our own opinion on it. That could be said, I would say, about most New Wave directors, especially Godard, one of those directors whose work feels very ambiguous of its meaning. Maybe it has none. Art for art's sake is still art. I just find it interesting that, taking a look at the works of the French New Wave, one might have a difficult time dealing with a shot-by-shot analysis, because, often, it appears as though there is no reason for a specific shot, other than to simply show the action happening (like David Mamet speaks of in On Directing Film). Whether a film, or a given shot, for that matter, has meaning is up to the director. I love the idea of finding things that a director did not intentionally put in, but that people see as something important anyway. Great stuff.
Savvy
On the handedness, some Latin words might interest you. Honest! :)
Above = super
Below = infra (as in inferior)
Left = sinister
(Right = dexter, not so interesting)
For what it's worth...
In some of your 'Great Movie' reviews that I read from time to time you've discussed the shot-by-shot process you've gone through and I've always been fascinated at the concept. I for one have yet to watch a film in that process, but I try to keep a keen eye as a film speeds along.
Do you hold a certain degree of credit or requirement for a film before you take it shot-by-shot? I tend to enjoy analyzing current films as opposed to ones that have aged for some time solely for the fact that everyone else hasn't had the chance yet. I'm especially curious if you would ever analyze 'Juno' shot-by-shot. A grand film, but is it one that can be analyzed shot-by-shot?
You should start thinking of posting a new section devoted to the little details you noticed only in shot-by-shot viewings! Perhaps 'On Second Thought'?
Have you ever encountered a filmmaker who intentionally tries to subvert these tendencies? Such as using a right tilt for a sad scene, placing the action in the background or trying to break the "Rule of Thirds?" And if so, how did you feel it worked as a film?
Ebert: Not deliberately, no, but possibly through sheer cluelessness. I have a feeling Ed Wod mightgqualify, but I'm not about to go look and see.
This style of movie-watching (and re-watching) was shown to me by a man called Alexandre Philippe, a very nice and entertaining filmmaker who produced a series of similar "shot by shot deconstructions" of films here at the Starz Film Centre in Denver, CO (though they were from a storytelling, rather than filmmaking perspective).
It has led me to a completely new appreciation and understanding of cinema, and to him and Roger I am eternally grateful. I love movies, they are my religion, the cinema is my church.
There is something wonderfully satisfying about digesting a piece of art you love on this level -- it forces you to become intimate with it (and by extension the filmmakers) in a way you certainly would not otherwise.
It's also interesting to me how much a person can learn about themselves doing this...your biases, your initial subconscious reactions to things of which you aren't even aware.
I love all you guys, thanks!
Too bad we can't do this online. Have an online forum, with a movie streaming (copyright issues probably stop this.. unless it gets by on some kind of waiver) and people can all contribute to the discussion. I love talking about movies. And would love to o this with a movie with a group.
Hi Mr. Ebert,
Q. Le's comment, in turn, brought to mind a scientific article about how our upper limbs work. The article explored the relationship between the right hand and the left using simple experiments such as writing on a piece of paper, threading a needle and holding a glass of water, then having it taken away. It turns out that work done by the dominant hand is largely supported by the nondominant one. The nondominant hand plays a subtle, complementing, and largely unappreciated role to its dominant counterpart; all of this owing to quick interaction between the right and left celebral hemispheres.
Using the (audience's) left and the right celebral hemispheres. Subtle. Complementing. Sounds like the very same mechanisms at work in the background of that "Notorious" scene (sic). Now I know one other aspect that sets a genius director apart from a common one. Thanks, Mr. Ebert.
Truly,
Robert
Taoyuan City, Taiwan
P.S. Mentioned article is "One Head, Two Hands" by Eric Haseltine, from Discover Magazine, December 2002
I love this article. I had heard of your "frame-by-frames" and I was hoping you would one day put it in at least brief>/i> writings. I'm struggling hard to become a film critic here in Venezuela (at least I'm already a journalist) but I still lack some theory (I guess I make up for it ith love for films, I guess). I'm going to try this with my copy of The Seven Samurai. And then I'll buy Gianetti's book. I just wish I had more friends who like to discuss films.
I do hope you continue to recover.
In relation to your left/right analysis. A few years ago, an animator told me that various rules had been established regarding Warner Bros animation (and presumably other animation companies). Among them whenever Bugs or Daffy traveled to the right it indicated he was moving toward something, to the left meant he was running away from something. While I suppose this could be linked to our Western culture of reading left-to-right and the storyboarding process, I'm certain I'd heard similar things in an Art History course when the prof was discussing John Berger's book "Ways of Seeing".
The Filmmakers' Club I sponsor at the high school I work at has asked me to talk to them this Wednesday about Cinematography. I definitely will take the "shot-by-shot" approach to the few scenes I'll have a chance to show. What warms my heart about the whole thing is that the students (mostly high school sophomores and juniors) REQUESTED this topic. They're the ones who want to learn how to read movies, and I look forward to sharing with them what you have pointed out to me, Roger.
very impressive. i read it carefully and i found it very impressive. mr ebert i am from iran and i read your reviews every time and some times i translate them into persian and publish them on www.movieland.ir. wish you healthy. recently i translate dog day afternoon's review(great movies) and so many visitors read it. all found it impressive. what else? visit our website whenever you could. have a good time......bye for now....
You've mentioned before in your columns that "strong" motion tends to go left to right across the screen while "weak" action goes right to left, so I occasionally keep my eye out for this phenomenon. I noticed it recently in Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited." During most of the film, the brothers move only from right to left - towards their past, their dead father, their insecurities with themselves and each other. However, after the cathartic moment later in the film, the brothers only move left to right - a visual signal that something has been resolved and everything is going to be alright.
I often wonder whether these visual cues are intentional on the part of the director or not, but in this case I have no doubt. The effect was too frequent and consistent. However, this raises another question - what affect do such choices have on the viewer who isn't specifically looking for them?
Ebert: Presumably, we shouldn't be looking for them. They function all the same.
Thank you for addressing this topic. I sometimes feel people are becoming "film illiterate" in this country. Make no mistake: I don't think everyone needs to become a high-minded snob when discussing film. But I am often disappointed when my friends can't even make the slightest effort to think about a film and read into it a little bit.
We used Giannetti's book in my film class in college. That book, combined with an excellent teacher, helped me get so much more out of movies.
One film that I think is great to study is "The Graduate." While not my favorite movie, I think there is a lot to discuss, and we certainly talked about it in my group. For one thing, the opening title sequence perfectly illustrates the right=good/left=bad dynamic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxWkCHt8owc
Benjamin is constantly moving left...and perhaps backwards in life? Afterwards, we see him sitting in front of a fish tank, which first establishes the water motif that is used repeatedly in the movie. The scene where Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson first meet is overflowing with hidden cues (notice the jungle patterns).
I don't mean to chew up too much bandwidth, but the left/right impact has always interested me. One of the things I used to do to deconstruct music was to reverse the headphones. It does change perception. I've wondered if viewing a movie through a mirror or on the other side of the screen could also change those perceptions. Text would be disconcerting.
As to if the golden triangle and spatial relationships are intentionally framed during shooting, I would offer a qualified yes. While most art students learn this early on, the adaption to film might not be as explicit. However, at some point, whether by intuition or study, a director, editor, cinematographer and actor knows what makes a shot, or scene work. There is an underlying craft essential to any art. But. there also needs to be a unified vision to its' implementation.
I read with interest your comments on Savannah and your piece on IMDB on the subject of reading films it was an eye opener. As a 56 year old man I now feel as though I have wasted a good portion of the 3000 viewings I estimate to have seen in my life. I enjoyed probably 65% of them, 'put up with' 15% and disliked 20%. Overall I have not really 'watched' any of them nor understood what was happening on screen that was possibly being 'read' by my brain but certainly not by me. I now don't know whether to laugh or cry I feel inadequate! Whilst your fame has spread to the UK I would like to know where I could read your musings on a more regular basis online.
Ebert: Relax! Your moviegoing has not been wasted. You don't have to be aware of these things for them to do their work on you.
I've always been really intrigued by this idea. It really illustrates what I think is the power of film: it can convey thoughts, emotions, and ideas, through visuals. You don't have to spell everything out. Very few art forms can do that. In writing, you can be subtle, but at a certain point you have to spell out your idea. It's very hard to avoid that. With film, a single image, or a series of well-edited images can do more than words can.
A perfect example of this one of my favorite movies, Michael Mann's "The Last of the Mohicans." In the theatrical version, the ending is perfect. The little dialogue that is said and even more important the editing and the cinematography all add to the elegaic and sad feeling. In the extended version (the only DVD version in the US) the scene goes on longer where the characters repeat everything the images said before that. The emotions of the ending are ruined. The visuals of a film can convey subtle ideas and emotions perhaps better than words can. Nothing has to be spelled out.
I can't wait for "The Dark Knight" to come out on DVD because I noticed things on repeated viewings that I hadn't noticed before and almost all of them had to do with the visuals. (Spoiler alert) There are lots of little clues about what's going to happen next: like the camera pushing in on Ramirez as she puts Dent in the car that isn't taking him home.
I know lots of people who can't understand why I am so opposed to making widescreen films fullscreen. The original composition is easily as important as the dialogue.
Every time I watch "Citizen Kane," I recall your experience during one shot for shot analysis when the chair moves in Kane's childhood home. I've gone through that movie essentially shot for shot for a class and it's a miracle, all the little things you discover each time.
In moving from right to left, I'm thinking of two recent examples: Jack Nicholson's entrance in The Departed, where his character walks from right to left (not to mention Scorsese's use of X's to show which characters are going to die, an homage to "Scarface") and the gas station scene in "No Country For Old Men" where Chigurh is always on the right and the attendant is always on the left. There's also an interesting play on it in the beginning of "Jackie Brown," as Jackie goes down a moving walkway but always remains on the right, giving her character power even as she moves toward menacing forces. (A play on the same scene from "The Graduate," but Benjamin veered to the left a little bit more in that one.)
It's interesting to also think about tilt shots, especially in movies that use them for no point (cough Battlefield Earth). Alfonso Cuaron has used tilt shots in a couple of his movies to show characters who are not entirely there, most notably "Great Expectations."
As a film student I love looking at things like this, especially when the director is subtle about it. I think the most successful films are the ones that incorporate these ideas without pounding the audience over the head with them. Thanks Roger.
Interesting article... I'll be sure to tell my cinematographer about this. Although I am aware that lighting ought to be arranged so as to emphasize which character the audience should concentrate on in one particular scene, I have never before noticed the positioning in the frame of a camera in regards to right to left providing any significant meaning.
In Batman Begins the most striking and coming of age scene was when Bruce creeps down the cavern tunnel. The camera is close with him as he climbs in from the right and moving towards the left of the screen, the claustrophobia of the surroundings from the scene of his childhood nightmare (thanks to the camera's vicinity) helps to betray the impish smile which "grown-up" Bruce gives at the beginning of the scene as he looks into the darkness.
As he wanders leftward into the dark and dares to illuminate only slightly that beautifully large set - the music, the actor, the bats, and literally the camera explode into an immediately wider scope in order to activate the engagement of the audience from one smaller scale to a larger in the passing of an instant second.
At first the bats on close-up we sense the eerie feel of Bruce's relationship with these animals. How they symbolize the trauma of his own past and how repulsed and attracted to them as he is to his own pain and guilt. But thanks to the clever shift to the wider angle, courtesy of Wally Pfister, these swirling emotional continuity points immediately become purged by the cathartic imagery... And with that, the audience's fear is calmed by the sheer awe of this moving dark portrait.
From this we sense Bruce has fully accepted a spiritual symbiosis with these animals and only from the widest angle can we see him at the center of the screen, little blue lamp beholding his embrace with a cyclone of bats. A celebration of fear in these animals gravitating around its calm, luminous center... the Batman. And we know immediately that this is the first time in any Batman movie where we see Bruce become Batman without having to wear the suit.
And what about cameras that are moving in the opposite direction from the actors? Naturally they outrun each other at some point and since it's the camera that assumes our vision's output, the actor is the one that leaves the screen first but his / her significance can still prevail through what he's left behind in the directional capacity of the camera. (at least, that's the camera's responsibility to pick up on the story) Whatever's on the trail of events that come before him / her, the camera scoops back the road from which the actor was moving away from. This widens capacity for clues and MacGuffins to take shape in the absence of the actor, no?
I'm talking about the kind of storytelling tracking shots that appear in movies like Goodfellas.
Being the smartest and brightest blog readers in the weboverse, I challenge any and all members to think of a plausible way, using existing web tools and technology, that we could conduct a "shot by shot" analysis online, led by Roger. Points to ponder:
- Is typing too prohibitive to allow a smoothly functioning forum?
- Web conferencing allows shared applications, like access to a 'pause' button. Could this replace the anonymous 'STOP!'?
- Would new rules of etiquette apply?
- Would Roger even be interested?
- Can anyone volunteer resources? (i.e. appropriate servers and technology)?
- Is this a pipe dream?
I just read your most recent blog entry regarding shot-by-shot analyses of movies. You've refered to them before and I've found it both fascinating and daunting. Your blog was very enlightening. My question: how many movies do you feel are crafted deliberately or artistically, employing at least unconscious the rules you've mentioned? Are even lightweight/fluff type movies (that is, solid and enjoyable movies, but not particularly thought-provoking [ie. "Transformers" or "Shoot 'em Up"]) meticulously crafted down to each shot and frame? Or are only a handful of movies that carefully crafted, while the majority of movies are made with a "that looks cool, let's print it" attitude?
Ebert: In theory, the "rules" don't dictate how movies are made, but simply observe.
I was actually surprised about the left-right film shot tendency, until I thought more about it. The reason for it may go back to evolutionary biology. (Side note: I am well aware that hemispherology went out of vogue for good reason before I was even born, but what follows is generally accepted by biologists).
Women almost universally tend to hold babies on the left side of their bodies. Why? Because the auditory information goes to the left ear, which is then processed in the right side of the brain. The lobe on the right specializes in processing emotional information, so presumably this is adaptive because a mother can instantaneously be attuned to a baby's needs.
So I was puzzled about the "dominant" person on the right side of the screen shot then monopolizing the left brain lobe instead if it was supposed lend emotional weight to the character. However, it makes sense if the evolutionary mechanism that makes cradling babies on the left adaptive is because it is better at recognizing potentially negative emotions or outcomes. Perhaps sensing danger in particular is what the right side of the brain gathers best from the left visual (and auditory) field.
My conjecture would be that because most people are right-handed and thus analyzing input with the left side of their brains during daily activity using their dominant side, it is the left visual (and auditory) field that more effectively screens any "sinister" predatory activity. Surely you've seen prey animals with eyes on either side of their heads looking up at you with their left eye while eating?
Ebert: This is very intriguing. And of course you're right about what side mothers usually hold their babies on. There must be a reason.
Having read previous articles of yours discussing the joys of the shot by shot process I decided to enlist a willing friend to dissect Wild Strawberries. The process was marvelous and the movie opened up in unexpected ways. While we had expected to spend the majority of the time analyzing the freudian dream sequences, instead, we spent hours discussing the nuances and implications of the relationship between the characters.
Before beginning I thought the process might be a bit pretentious (choosing Bergman didn't help), but I did find the experience truly rewarding. the twenty minute arguments and discussions we had over a five second stretch of film were some of the most exciting and passionate moments as filmgoer that I have ever had.
An even greater worry was that I was afraid that after the process I would no longer want to watch Wild Strawberries ever again. Not so! After nine hours of watching, re-watching, discussing, and re-discussing, I found myself wanting to watch the movie again for now I felt I had a greater appreciation for the film and could enjoy it even more after this form of extreme analysis. The next time I watched Wild Strawberries I did indeed enjoy the film more than I had from any past viewing.
I would like to thank you Mr. Ebert for indirectly introducing me to this wonderful form of film madness.
Hi Mike S. @ August 31, 2008 6:43 PM
I think your proposition can be achieved through the slideshow technique (such as the ones found in automatic/manual photo-browsing websites like Kodak Gallery or Yahoo! OMG!.)
Best regards,
Robert
Taoyuan City, Taiwan
This is helpful! I will be teaching a Religion and Film course in the Spring and have been realizing more that I am very textually focused when I watch movies. I think about the words and not the pictures. My husband and I took the scene-by-scene approach watching Ikiru and I couldn't get over how deliciously beautiful the swing scene was. We played it again and again like you would play a really great Dylan song. How do you transform what filmmaker's enflesh back into word? Lecturing seems daunting.
Peace,
J
How drunk is Peter O'toole there? he looks pretty sloshed.
I find this extraordinary, extreme. My preferred method to watch a film is to take it in in silence and in one sitting, give it my singular concentration, try and hush my inner critic (or my inner Ebert, who sits upon my shoulder, like the Great Gazoo in the Flinstones) and let it build from moment to moment as it was intended. The shot-by-shot process of dissection utterly dismantles the cumulative experience of suspense, the keystone of Hitchcock's work, the dictatorship of pacing set by any auteur. It also dismantles the unity (as per Aristotle) of the experience. This does not make it a sin but it begs the question: why, why on Earth?
The title is apt; this is an application of a technique of reading to cinema. It seems a particular kind of reading developed through long exposure to the instantaneous reference information. Clearly this process began long ago but I think the online world has intensified it.
Consider: An audience here is being used as a reference tool, with all the immediacy of a Google search. In a theatre if we miss or don't understand something we flag it in memory and return to it after it is finished, if we still care. Films therefore have to be censored of the atypical so as not to raise too many question marks in the minds of the audience. If an unfamiliar word is used it will be provided with a definition within the film. Becoming accustomed to instant clarification, the litany of question marks involved in an uninterrupted process like a feature film makes us tetchy, dissatisfied, to the point of taking the extraordinary step of forcing an animated art form into stasis, whilst we collect our thoughts.
It is also a deliberate translation of visuals into words, interpretations, meanings. This is where the pleasure centre is, this is the central erogenous zone. The visual sense is there but it is quickly subjected to the animus of words, the dialect of homo criticus. In pausing we get a stronger, more sustained flow of this but lose the flow of the film itself.
2001: A space odyssey is the preminent example of a film which gives you the space to think whilst the film is running, by pausing long enough on each take. This makes the film inexhaustible to the right kind of audience, boring and tortuous to others. The more you enjoy your own thoughts, the more effective the film is. The pace is set by Kubrick's mind, slower and deeper, I suspect, than most of ours.
Schindler's List, in contrast, cuts from each take a moment too soon for the mind to fully take it in. This gives the film its extraordinary pace, makes a challenging film easy to take in, and makes a long film seem "too short" as Ebert notes in his review. Like a book it is less the overall length that makes it difficult to complete so much as the length of the individual chapters. (From IMDB: 2001 clocks in at 141 mins, Schindler's List at 195 mins. Which do you remember as longer?)
I think in popular film the aim should be to cut away at the point at which the visual symbolism or effect is comprehended (not merely recognised) but not long enough for the viewer to a) delve into their own thoughts and so lose concentration, b) become self-conscious about the process of viewing a film. In arthouse film I often see scenes which irritate me precisely because they inspire thoughts like: wow, what a great idea for a visual symbol (with the after-taste that one comes to think it a bad symbol). Three examples: The car-beach thing in "Terms of Endearment", the bicycle "Oh, Susanna!" scene in "The Sheltering Sky", and the children-draped-in-porn-running-down-the-hill scene in "Rain". It works for a little while but it stays on screen long enough to break the spell.
Pausing to think about what you read is the mark of a mature reader, critic and student. It is worth taking the time to comprehend each sentence, imagine each scene, look up words you don't know, make a conscious attempt to remember each part and think about its relationship to the work as a whole. I am starting to read this way with "Tender is the night", a book I read at nineteen and have never stopped reading, to find that at least half of what I have read hasn't sunk in, and that there is a whole other book of which I didn't take any notice.
Popular writing mirror films in that they try and exclude words or phrases which will cause you to break the suspense and pick up your dictionary. You should be able to read these without stopping, with any ornamental words purely as ornament (what, by God, is so essential to romance about a chaise-longue?) and not as crucial information. The better your vocabulary, language and memory skills, the more you are able to approach complex books without interrupting the flow.
I think children are more intimate with rythmn and flow and the sheer aesthetics of words. As an adult reader it becomes difficult to silence the critical faculty and become absorbed in a work of art. Such absorption is anathema to an adult reader, politically and ethically reckless & prone towards misunderstandings and imprecision. The joy, however, is in the unspoiled effect of new art, the gradual building of mood and understanding, the joy of having something strategically and carefully raised into your consciousness that was never there before.
The ultra-forensic examination is only appropriate to films of which we are already achingly familiar; where suspense, surprise and novelty are long forgotten, and where we are attempting to extract whatever secret joys we missed the first dozen times. It is a symptom of the poverty of quality cinema and the desperation of a hungry audience.
Yes, by God, I think this is an extreme way to view a film. It is in total opposition to my desires at self-hypnosis, which is a difficult thing to achieve, given all the obstacles my education and habits have placed in the way. To abandon myself to forensics, the hard edge of my critical side, would be uncomfortable to me, and wrong. That does not, of course, mean it is wrong for you (whomever you are, in the thousands.)
P.S., to put on my law student's cap for a moment, the whole business of the law is undoing the damage done by absolutes, usually by layman rule-makers. To speak of 'laws' as absolutes seems imprecise to me. Meditate on 'Thou shalt not kill' for even a moment and one starts to subject this ostensibly absolute statement to exceptions according to circumstances; that is, you start doing the work of a lawyer. Articulating the exceptions and distinctions is the real work of lawyering. The rule itself is simply the subject, a political or ethical concept, to which the law applies its reasoning and experience. It is a law but the decisive element (of concern, for example, to a defendant) is the particular application of that law.
Rules of cinema developed from observation might be more akin to an adage, a kind of folk-wisdom, and just as generic and liable to fallacy. I am not sure I am convinced by any of the observations about composition here as having any real consistency or general application. If the rule is defined to make allowance for its breach, what is it? A statistic?
I think, though, that films use such strategies as axioms on which they are built, often borrowed from other films and might from time to time form a general cultural syntax. A consistent logic might be applied to a film even where the axiom is arbitrary, like the right/left dominant/submissive axiom, and then suddenly this consistency creates meaning purely through association ("Saw evil break out of the north").
Fixity allows us to create structures; we need bricks of uniform size to build a house, rules of grammar to build sentences. If we find out, after everything, that our house is built on sand, we've still got a house in the meantime before the hurricane.
Cinema has its overall syntax but each film has its own syntax. Bertolucci explains that when he made "The Sheltering Sky" he associated the sun with Port, the male element, and the moon with Kit, the female. Hot colours are associated with the male and cool with the female. Knowing this I can see and love his cinematic language, but it exists only for this film, because it was consciously built into its structure. It is arbitrary and almost in opposition to the pink-and-blue assignments of Western genderism, but knowing it is there, it works, it deepens the associations of the visuals.
It is the pathology of the Western world to value the specific over the general and the axis on which individualism is built, hence the total intolerance of generalisation and the nagging, persistent efforts to underline the uniqueness of all experience. If you can find a solid generalisation and a rationale for why it is true, that is solid gold, but mostly we only find fool's gold, a simulation of how we might feel should we ever really know the truth.
I don't believe in the Golden mean. I don't know that I believe in symmetry either, except for a purpose (a single flower has symmetry, but a bunch of flowers are displaced). An example: After the singular logic of the dress or toga, men seemed to want to differentiate themselves from women by cutting their clothing into two parts, arbitrarily at the middle of a man, hugging his belly-button, making his buckle an ornament. It looks preposterous and works to emphasise a man's middle-aged girth by making it into his equator. When Abe North voices the desire to saw a waiter in two, I think of it as the natural extension of the human facility of dividing things in half, for no reason but for the joy of dividing things in half.
I would rather wear a dress, loose and flowing, or a Kurta, like Indian men. I do not wear a dress only because it would violate a social law, a value system built into the very design. I want to wear lipstick to accentuate my lips; mascara to accentuate my eyelashes; but these things are reserved for women and to do so would be dimly threatening, traces of a broken covenant. There are visual laws which are like real laws, having a moral, a standard and a victim.
Ebert: An entry in itself! Quite true about "2001" and "Schindler." One observation: Men do not cut their bodies in half by their belts, but usually wear their belts higher than that. That follows theory, which suggests that the strong horizontal axis is above the true center. But applying that theory here would be ridiculous: Certainly we wear our belts because of where they seem to fit, and because we don't want a belt riding on our genitals. Don't get me started on kids who wear their pants at half mast.
Back in 2000 I attended one of Roger's shot by shot sessions at the Virginia Film Festival. Over three days we took apart Hitchcock's The Birds and it was a startling eye opener for me. Despite having always been a fairly rabid movie fan, I had never really seen all that was in a movie until that moment. It was always obvious to me that movies were made and constructed by people but the attention to detail had largely escaped me previously. Now I pretty much can't watch a movie without all the ideas that Roger (and others in the audience) brought up now factoring into my reactions. Hitchcock movies in particular took on a whole new life because I had not previously known much about him as a person and so never recognized how much of his tastes and personality permeated his movies.
I just wanted to say thanks Roger. It was an enlightening experience that added a lot more appreciation to watching movies. I even went right out and picked up the Giamatti book on your advice, plus another on directing whose title momentarily escapes me. This is also my favorite "meeting a famous person" story to tell friends because not only did I get to meet and talk movies with the guy who I had been watching talk movies on TV since I was a kid, but a few minutes later I found myself at the next urinal to that very same person. Surreal.
I read that over 2/3 of the population are right-eye dominant (visual) over the left (critical thinking). Therefore, being right or left handed does not determine what side you use, as I think Q. Le was saying. And if that means right-brained, or subjective, that may mean that we the right-sided majority tend to subjectively or emotionally connect with the right side before the left side, the analytical. So, maybe with "Notorious", Hitchcock is wanting us to emotionally connect with Ingmar Bergman on the right and then take notice or anaylize on the left what is happening and why etc.
As for the devil:
Up and down I think have to do with old astronomy personified by Dante's Inferno where god is at the outside the sphere of the universe being farthest away (representing good) and the devil representing gravity (representing the bad) having an ominous pull on everything on earth.
Left and right hand, I'm not sure. Like in the Gospel According to St. Matthew it says "...when thou doest alms (gives to the poor)
, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand is doing". When all that is summed up it goes on to basically mean that when you are doing something spiritual it is between you and god...so, the left hand for some reason had a connection with pride and I guess, basically the thinking, while the right hand represented what you should be feeling. If I may get a little Star Wars here, or Bruce Lee or whatever...you could also replace right hand with meaning "the force"--like the out of body experience of being in the moment where you have this awareness and your movements come with such ease its like your body is weightless. Or as Bruce Lee said in "Enter the Dragon"..."the word "I" does not exist"...when I want to kick, it kicks all by itself.
Ebert: The Biblical quotation is so intriguing. It could be paraphrased as "give with your heart, not your mind." As for the Bruce Lee quotation, it could be widely applied. An experienced pianist does not play the notes. They play themselves. And an experienced writer, I believe, doesn't write word by word, but takes dictation from that place within his mind that knows what he wants to say.
Have you ever done a shot-by-shot analysis of a poorly received movie? I'm not talking about something you are personally revolted by (like say, the remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"), but just a film that is generally thought to be poor by everyone who watches it. I'm personally thinking of movies like "Plan 9 from Outer Space" or "Gigli". It seems to me that this shot-by-shot analysis of a film everyone hated would also be educational in understanding why some films "just don't work."
-Nick C
Ebert: Nope, never have.
Thank you for in-depth article. I've always been interested in your shot-by-shot sessions and wondered how they worked.
One of my favorite films for doing this with is actually Evil Dead 2. It's one of those rare films that feels like it was "made", to me...like Nana's pressed flower cards as opposed to the Hallmark ones. I'm wouldn't say it's a particularly "great" film, but I do think that it is well crafted and a lot of love went into it. A film like this excites me because I can feel the work that went into it and know a few knuckles got bloodied in its making. Like the wobbly hat in Citizen Kane, we become aware of the stage hands, which makes us aware of the stage, which makes us appreciate the staging...which makes us write long blathering sentences.
When I compare that to one of Raimi's more recent works, Spider-Man, I just feel kind of...unsure about the whole thing. Can CGI shots be dissected in the same way? In Evil Dead, you know everyone is standing about discussing what they can and can't do, where the camera should go, who needs to be moving what around, what needs to be conveyed and, most importantly, can it be done with 15 bucks and a hammer. A shot of Spider-Man, twipping around through the city though, is probably just left in the hands of a few animators who are told to make it "look kinda neat". Is it directed by the director in the same way as in-camera shot would be? I get the feeling it isn't, as a lot of the time CGI shots seem to have a style breaking that of the all of the live action shots.
On the other hand, I do feel that something entirely constructed by animators would make for an interesting shot-for-shot analysis. Wall-E was incredible, for example, and the amount of detail in those some of those shots is probably mind blowing. You can tell that some real talented artists worked on that, and in a world where every single little object is made and placed in exactness, I'm sure you'd find some neat surprises you'd never catch in real time. Or take Snow White, even (please), each frame of that was hand drawn by old school artists! These might be interesting ways to test some of your theories.
Thank you for this easy to understand guide to one aspect of amateur film analysis. I have always appreciated that your reviewing approach elicits a wide range of knowledge while being accesible and understanding to what average moviegoers understand and feel about films.
I am much more emotionally driven in watching movies so I would not typically notice these details, but I am certain these points will function to help me understand the way visuals work in the future. Though i'm certain many more will come to mind, your article puts me in the mind of Dr. Strangelove and the dominating triangular shape of the war room, one of the most famous sets ever created. The thirds are certainly important here... I appreciate your user friendly insights and I hope to pass them on to whomever would want to join me in exploring movies further, and maybe even a few who don't.
a great technique for understanding a well-directed movie. i applied it to the first half of 'No Country for Old Men' and saw things i never would have guessed were there. (some stuff, i have to wonder whether it was done on purpose or just happened that way. other elements were, obviously, done in a conscientious manner). adds a new level of interpretation and enjoyment. thanks
Filmishmish and Keith Carrioza are very likely correct; I was going to post something similar a few days ago, but they beat me to it with far better posts than I could have ever accomplished. Here are a couple of articles, one of which backs up their assumptions, and another which offers more insights into how our evolutionary hardwiring gave us the cognitve equipment to "read" a film and compose one visually:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070323135954.htm
http://www.physorg.com/news139138581.html
But there may be a simpler reason as to why we view right-hand motion as positive and "forward": In the Northern hemisphere, we first learned how to tell time by the rightward procession of the sun across the sky, and later, by the movements of shadows made by the sun's procesion (actually, it's the Earth's procession, but I won't belabor the fact). And then there's the fact that in the West, we typically read from left to right, so we are conditioned to follow that sort of grammatic sequence in following a narrative.
In the Introduction to Filmmaking course I took as an undergrad, this right-left lopsidedness was explained by looking at TV talk shows and news programs. In nearly all of them, the host, or interviewer is on the right, in order for that figure to appear dominant in the discussion. The sole exception was Larry King, who seemingly subconciously wanted to emphasize the gravitas of his guests by placing them on the right hand side of him. Also notice how on newscasts, there is a strange symmetry: the newsperson will be in the foreground, but on the right-hand side, and your eyes will be drawn to something way in the background on the right, resulting in a strange "balance of focus". It also helps to pay attention to weather forecasts; check out the movements of the weatherperson as she or he moves across the blue screen. They'll start out on the right, and will do most of their pointing once they have moved to left-hand side of the screen.
I have two ideas for future film scholars: 1)compare the compositions of paintings over the centuries before film, and after film became an all-pervasive medium. Is cinema simply following a long-standing visual tradition? How has visual composition in film affected composition in other art forms? 2)Compare compositions in East Asian films before and after left-to-right texts became the de facto norm. Were film compositions affected as well? Have the traditional flexibility of those scripts (which can be presented vertically as well as horizontally) also resulted in a more flexible visual grammar for film? Vertical script is still very common for fictional writing in China and Japan; does this affect the text in any way? And what about filmmaking in countries where scripts are still normally read right-to-left (e.g. Bangladesh)?
Ebert: In all the years with Siskel and on all the incarnations of the show, I always quietly made sure I was seated on the right. When Roeper came aboard, the producers insisted I "belonged" in "Gene's seat." Sentiment won over visual strategy. Did I really think it made a difference? Yes, I really did.
In responding to Solomon Wakeling's entry: you don't like the dissection of something that was meant for passive entertainment. It's a good point, but for Ebert, these shot by shot sessions are an event unto themselves. They are interactive discussion sessions where the entertainment value is as much determined by what's on the screen as by who's in the audience. The more diversity the better.
I don't especially happen to be popular enough to attract doctors, linguists, and cultural experts, so I'm pretty much going to stick to my passive viewings. Unfortunately, I have enough trouble engaging those around me in any discussion of films outside of "Did you like it?" In fact, I am always discouraged from film analysis. Having a deeper understanding of films is a real annoyance to people who happen to agree with your general aversion, but would never, ever read past your first sentence.
I absolutely love watching Ozu using shot-by-shot, composition analysis. I've gone shot by shot on select scenes (not the whole film by any means, not even close) on more than one occasion while watching "Tokyo Story" at home, for example.
You haven't mentioned Eisenstein or the Russian/Soviet Montage school, but would you agree that you almost can't watch those films without employing shot-by-shot analysis, at least at some point? I don't think you can really critically engage with their (the applicable directors') practice of film-making without stopping the film and going frame by frame, since their practice is so predicated on juxtaposition of shots.
But how about the moment in "Boogie Nights" where William H. Macy talks to Ricky Jay about the photography of the film they're about to shoot? There's a ceaseless background action in that scene, of Macy's wife having sex with someone in the driveway. The composition is Macy on the left, Jay on the right, sex in the middle. The CAMERA doesn't seem to favor one action over the other. While the sex might be out of focus, it's still just as prominent as the dialogue.
Have they achieved an entirely neutral composition? Is that even possible?
Ebert: Maybe not so neutral. Backgrounding it makes a point about the casual attitude toward sex in their world. Wouldn't you stop talking and turn around and watch that? And the b.g. movement assures that we will notice it. Filmmakers are vigilant about preventing b.g. extras and action to steal attention away from f.g., unless they want it to. When an added or unknown character is noticable in an over-the-shoulder shot (in booth behind a star in a restaurant, for example), that person inevitably will figure somehow in the f.g. Extras are notorious for trying to call attention to themselves, and DPs are famous for preventing them.
"Understanding Movies" was one of the very first film books I purchased when seriously beginning my appreciation for cinema. Amos Vogel's "Film As a Subversive Art" is also highly recommended (if one can stand to not be able to track down 75% of the films he mentions!)
I can't wait for a Notorious reissue on DVD so I can follow your “reading”. I saw Notorious on TCM the other night (before I read your article) and had a small reading “epiphany” in the scene where Grant realizes Bergman may be being poisoned by Rains. In the scene Grant asks his boss (Calhern) permission to go to Rains mansion to possibly rescue Bergman. In the scene Grant is standing (superior position) while Calhern is laying down on a bed eating something (passive/ambivalent position). I will perform a complete “read” when and if a DVD of Notorious comes out.
Funny you should mention David Bordwell. About thirty years ago I attended a lecture where Bordwell analyzed the opening shots (about four or five minutes of run time) of the Maltese Falcon. He was looking at how the “Hollywood” style of setting a scene or an entire film.
WARNING: This contains some spoilers!!
It's a bit funny, now that you've brought up this point about the dominance of right over left, I find myself realizing how true this really is. How often do we see a grand, sweeping, epic shot to the left? It always sweeps to the right. Boats, trains, and planes move to the right. It seems every method of transportation in the movie world goes to the right.
An example of this right dominance that really sticks out in my mind is the absolutely incredible fight sequence in "Oldboy". In the scene, Oh Daesu (or Dausu Oh, depending on which part of the world you are), fights off a number of enemies down a narrow hallway. He is trying to fight his way toward the right. The fight goes back and forth as to who is in control. When Oh Daesu is getting beaten, he falls back to the left. But when he has control, he beats his enemies back to the right. He may still be on the left side of the screen at times (I don't recall exactly), but his movements are to the right when he is dominant, and back to the left when he is not in control.
What a perfect example to use, with the film "Notorious". I hope this doesn't spoil the film for anyone, but I think the ending is a great example of foreground vs. background. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman walk out of the house, and in front of the camera, leaving a defeated (and in major trouble) Claude Rains in the background. When the camera zooms out on a character and leaves him or her in the background, it gives us a feeling of defeat, sadness, hopelessness, or uncertainty. Take for example, "The Third Man". Once again, I may be spoiling the ending for some people, hence the disclaimer. At the end of the film, Holly is waiting next to his car, on a long, lonesome street. He sees Anna walking towards him. As she gets closer and closer, the feeling of hope and joy begins to rise with each step. Suddenly...she walks right past him. Suddenly, Holly is in the background, alone, heartbroken. The camera being far away from him adds considerably to the sympathy we would feel if he were close to the camera. It gives the character a feeling of isolation. The fact the character is alone on a vast and empty street makes for a profound, lasting image.
Ebert: Left background, of course. And earlier, the mysterious grave is always placed on the left. And in the ominous scenes on the ferris wheel, Harry Lime is on the dominant right.
You're welcome to your clown-pants if that is what works for you, though I must admit the 'sk8tr' fashion style is equally mystifying to me. In fact I think suspenders have greater logic than belts, given the nature of gravity, but no-one seems to wear them anymore, except farmers in movies, or the Amish (in movies).
From Mamet's 'State and main':
"The truth is that you should never trust anybody who wears a bow tie. Cravat's supposed to point down to accentuate the genitals. Why'd you wanna trust somebody whose tie points out to accentuate his ears?"
Women's fashion isn't blameless either; high heels seem designed to obstruct a women's ability to walk. How is she meant to run in an emergency, or is that the point? Is there any justification for corporate footwear? People who work in offices are often on their feet despite how they are portrayed - to find a file, hold a discussion with someone in another office, answer a phone or move to a different computer. They should wear joggers, for the sake of efficiency and safety, with something done about the death-trap of loose laces. In eighties films girls wore joggers and played sports (I am thinking of "The Karate Kid"), what on Earth happened? Nineties fetishism persists into the more extreme millenium expressions like CFM boots.
Part of the terror of 9/11 is that it was an attack upon the white collar centre of the world, a class of people for whom work safety seemed obsolete and distant. These issues are a joke, until they are not.
Dear Mr. Ebert,
I recently came across some research into the split-brain by Dr. Michael Cazzaniga of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. He wrote two books about it, "The Ethical Brain", and "Human, The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique".
Since the left brain controls the right side of the body it is dominant in the right visual field as well. The left brain is also dominant in language and hypothesis making. The most unique feature of the left brain, according to Dr. Cazzaniga, is an ability he calls the "Interpreter". The "Interpreter" is constantly trying to tell a story and build a personal narrative about why things are happening the way they are. We automatically, perpetually project intent from our 'right screen' to our left brain and back again.
Dr. Cazzaniga hypothesizes that if all our past stories, rules, and religions were erased, our left brain, with the assistance of the "Interpreter" would immediately set about inventing new storylines, rules, and religions within a month. This is because we need explanations for what we experience emotionally. Our "Interpreter" is one of the things that make humans unique as a species and as individuals.
Hello Mr. Ebert,
Matthew 6:3, But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth...
That, to me, is a very high form of altruism. The underlying moral is that we should guard against the vanity of righteousness, i.e., doing good to show off, hypocrisy. Reading through Matthew 3:6 should further open up the meaning of the third verse. When Jesus uttered those words, he was basically saying that any benefaction must be done as low key and as quiet as possible; to the point that "even the left hand doesn't know." This is obviously a generalization since most people give alms with their right hand. However, it really makes no difference which hand performed the good act as long as the other hand doesn't know (a metaphorical impossibility that nonetheless strengthens the message of meekness & modesty). As such, this has more to do with spiritual integrity than the difference between the cerebral hemispheres' lateralized functions.
As for the doctrine of hellfire, there are certain Christian denominations that believe that hell is simply the state of inexistence. In this doctrine, hell is neither up, nor down. It is simply nothingness.
Best regards,
Robert
@ Shawn Maguire. I can see the value in the exercise for, say, a film student or professional in the field. For an ordinary viewer I am not comfortable with the idea, and I will try and suggest some reasons why. Ebert gets away with it for two reasons: 1. it is his job and 2. he comes from a time when cinema formed part of the ethos, the 'movie generation' as he reports that they were called. I accept it as an historical allowance, with his review of "The Dreamers" providing some fascinating insights into where his enthusiasm comes from. I find I can't permit myself the same enthusiasm.
For a modern audience to discuss and delve into film in this way without a purpose makes me a little uneasy, reminding me of the horrid and parasitic discussions I witnessed in "Dawson's Creek", a series which had a strong and lamentable influence on my generation, generation Y. I dislike the series because it involved putting words into the mouths of young people that they don't use, unless you prompt them to. Of course all drama involves writing scripts for others but there are ways which are authentic and others that are contrived. Pop culture has a place in dialogue (it works seamlessly, for example, in "Juno") but not if it has the same effect as the aliens in "Invasion of the body snatchers". There are echoes of this technique in "Knocked Up" and I hate it because it provides a too easy font of source material, with no need to delve into how real people live and what they talk about. More importantly HOW they talk about it. In art this is a minor sin, but in life I think it becomes a major one.
Ok so in this the discussion is not about pop culture necessarily but high art, but if I examine my feelings I still can't commit to it, I can't think of it as an enjoyable process unless it has some end justifying it. Although I can enjoy art criticism and might read it as an independent exercise, if I am trying to enjoy the experience of a gallery I will do it alone. I will study the visuals of themselves, often for a long time, but leaving my thoughts and criticisms for later. I don't like tours, I don't like head-phones, I don't like extraneous words annexed to my visual experience.
I think when I first read this piece I under-estimated the effect of the "democratic" element to this exercise. From what little experience I have had of American teachers, although they are democratic they are also highly individualised, and a class easily becomes a one man show, a collection of set-pieces in a performance. My university insists upon student discussion by the easy means of factoring it into the assessment process (that is, by the use of force), usually at about 20%, so the process of a round table discussion is natural to me. I am also deeply egalitarian in my thinking and will often disagree with a teacher, and will usually say so without fear or favour, often consciously trying to 'teach' them something, if I think I have something to teach. I suspect most people outside the education system don't have this experience, or left it behind them a long time ago, so I can see the value of this as a social event for a certain class of people - but not for me.
I enjoy film when it is art and watch it closely even when it is not because it is a centre of power and I ought to be aware of it. I realise I have just written over a thousand words on a film theory, but my motives are only partly for the love of film. If you imagine the same technique Ebert describes to a speech given by say, Barak Obama, you might get a hint as to how I feel. Politics is an essential part of life but only if taken in a measured and slightly cynical way, and so it is - to me - with film. I can see that there is room in the world for true believers, but I would be the one in the back of the room, or outside smoking a cigarette and watching the stars.
The internet provides a wonder of democracy; certainly I am consistently astonished that I have access to someone with the pre-eminence and talent of Roger Ebert. I long ago developed the theory that I ought to write in blogging directly with marketing people in mind (including political researchers), telling them of my consumption habits, desires and observations of others, hoping that in doing so I might garner some influence. I don't yet have any proof of its effectiveness but I believe in it. It is the popcorn-eaters who control the destiny of Hollywood and to the extent that their observations are representative and articulate of the aspirations of a class of people, their words have power and interest to the puppet masters and money men.
Here is the film I would make if I was a producer with all the money and influence in the world: I would make "Tender is the night" into a film, with Tim Burton as director, since he is the only director with the right note of gloomy romanticism. I know it has already been made into a film but it deserves an interpretation worthy of 200X. I would cast Johnny Depp as Abe North, for his soulful eyes and Cherokee lips. I would use Malcolm Lowry's screenplay as a starting point, because why the hell not? The two writers are seldom concieved of together and yet if you examine their two major books their is a startling similarity in their technique and major themes, despite the surface differences. Note especially the opening paragraphs of "Volcano" and "Tender" and you can see what I am talking about. I can imagine these characters in the same universe, with Lowry's characters playing Hell to Fitzgerald's Heaven.
The still photography of Edward Steichen might give some indication of what I envision.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f7/Steichen_flatiron.jpg/247px-Steichen_flatiron.jpg
I would cast Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Dr. Richard Diver and Nicole Diver. The audience will object but that is okay, it will inspire a morbid curiosity and set alight the tabloids with speculation, whilst at the same time illustrating the professionalism of which they are both eminently capable. The book involves the breakdown of a marriage in which each party maintains the utmost dignity, manners and love for each other (unlike most divorces) and I think they could do justice to it. They are at the right age and stage of their careers for the roles, as the book deals with concepts of public/private, money and fame. Like Scott (and his protagonist), Cruise was from a humble background and made his success through pleasing others. If you look carefully at his films the characters are showy and superficial, but they always learn a lesson, there is something gained. He is so far from a normal person now that it is unreasonable to expect him to act like one, but he has wisely chosen roles of late which reflect the public's ambiguous feelings about him, and I think he could be compelling playing a character who lives a life that mirrors the unreality (and reality) of his own.
Kidman is a deeply intelligent actress and I'm sure she could do something with it. It could act as a counter-point to "Eyes wide shut", dealing with similar themes, but not drenched in Kubrick's coldness and cruelty. Watching it there is a nagging sense that it seems to have had an effect on their marriage (note the guarded confession Cruise makes on the DVD commentary, suggesting that the film would have put a strain on their marriage had it been made earlier). I don't think it should be allowed to stand as the final statement on who they are (by creating other fictions, we are forced to conclude that neither can be true, that what we think we see is only one of many potential images that they might present. We have to engage with them, once more, as actors, not as playthings in a soap opera.) As audience member I am giving permission for the industry to reflect on themes made from the stuff of their glittery lives and to reclaim their craft from out of the soap-bubbles. I want *these* people to be enthusiastic about their life and work, to make fine art and to chatter ad nauseum about every detail. That is their role, their work, the realisation of their creative drive.
For the man in the street: no, they have their own, different lives.
I would (bear with me) cast Britney Spears as Rosemary Hoyt. Her beauty and talent have become under-appreciated with her notoriety. She has the lovely brown eyes of an anime cartoon and a face which is just a little too cute, rather like the young Drew Barrymore or Alicia Silverstone. She has yet to establish herself as an actress, but if you recall her music videos, you can see how much she can do with proper direction and editing - she is confident and expressive. Like a lot of young women she was also brought up to please rather than to develop any independent sense of identity. It is her only flaw and it is not her fault - it can be overcome. That she shaved her head and started carrying a gun should be a surprise to no-one. I liked her much better knowing that she had finally pierced the illusions that were created around her, even if she has yet to establish anything more. As new celebrity she has the right level of naivety and new world freshness for Rosemary, as contrast to the other suggested actors seasoned celebrity.
Ebert: I would point out that by no means do I watch every film while constantly applying the "rules." If the film is working, the first time through I should in a way be thinking of only the film. By the way, "anonymous," I respect your desire for privacy, but why not adopt a nom de plume so readers can connect your posts and address you directly in their comments? You could always choose, oh, I dunno, Chuck Kane.
Ack, I forgot to put my signature. Since accidently posting my email as my name here (a habit from another blog) I have suddenly won dozens of lotteries. Oxfam, apparently, wants to send me a million dollars.
Ebert: Turns out I have an uncle in Nigeria who has left me the oil fields. Will only cost me $500 to get a copy of his will.
Yet another great post- if only a teacher at LIU was inspired by this entry...
With that said, I'd like to ask yet another question (I'll try to stay on topic in the future). Have you considered adding "Waking Life" to your great movies collection? Since I revisited both the film and your review yesterday, I was moved by how perceptive your claim was that the movie is "like a cold shower of bracing, clarifying ideas." Though I've seen it five times, the passionate conversations always feel fresh and never cease to inspire me. What am I inspired to do, you ask? I'm inspired to listen- to learn. I want others to feel the same way, and perhaps this is as good a time as any to write a new review about how this movie is more powerful now than it ever was. Its a movie that gives us hope- stupid, stubborn hope. I have no problem with that. I embrace it when I find it.
By the way, if you feel there's nothing to add to your original review, you can at least place the movie in your 'overlooked dvd of the week' section. I think even those who didn't care for the movie will be inspired by where the hyperlink leads them. That review was just what I needed at this point in my life. Long live ideas!
Ebert: It's circling to land.
I was delighted by your short reply to Greg Friedman: "Presumably, we shouldn't be looking for them [visual cues]." This knowledge is for filmmakers, not for viewers. Before I go see another movie, I'm going to have to try and forget what I just read. (Don't worry, it should be easy, my wife says I have early stage Alzheimers.)
All the talk about background and foreground reminded me of a short bit of footage I saw on TV years ago, maybe on SNL (?). It was a stationary camera set up to record a street scene. There was a voiceover by a narrator, apparently the director. He would say "Cue the woman with the baby carriage", and she would appear and walk past the camera on the sidewalk, and it went on like this for a several minutes, with the director at intervals saying stuff like "Cue the 1956 Desoto... Cue the kid on the skateboard... Cue the couple holding hands..." -- which would all appear on command. Then all of a sudden he goes "Hold it, hold it, what's that building doing in the background, it's spoiling the whole shot, we're going to have to re-shoot. Lose the building." And three seconds later this huge apartment building in the background implodes in a spectacular cloud of dust.
The tendency for right and top to be dominant over left and bottom goes all the way back to Ancient Greek art, at least. Friezes and pottery depicting battles between a Greek and a centaur (representing their Persian rivals) or an Amazon warrior follow this rule.
However, the Ancient Greeks' idea of who was on the "right" was different than ours. When we see a character on the right side of the screen from the viewer's perspective, we say he or she is on the "right." But the Greeks saw an image of battle from the perspective of the characters on the frieze or jar, looking out. So, if a character was on the left side on the frieze, he was really on the "right." And the action of the scene would always go from the victor on the top left (from our perspective) down to the defeated on the bottom right.
I'm sorry if this doesn't seem to make sense, my art history professor explained it far better.
Anyway, below are links to two examples, I hope they help. You can click on the image to enlarge it.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/m/marble_parthenon_metope.aspx
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/b/black-figured_wine_jar.aspx
I was watching Neil LaBute's "Your Friends And Neighbors" last night and noticed how LaBute was incredibl wise in his shot compositions. When Ben Stiller is attempting to seduce Amy Brenneman, he is always on the right, but later in the film when both Brennaman and Catherine Keener turn on him, he is always on the left and the women are on the right. In a moment of vulnerability, where Jason Patric tells the story about his best sex, the camera begins with him in the middle but slowly zooms in to frame his face to the left. When Ben Stiller confronts Aaron Eckhart to say his wife is the best sex he's ever had, he approaches from the right, and later when he is apologizing to Eckhart in the theater, he is on the left. And perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but during Stiller and Keener's first sex scene (which ends poorly) their sexual movements are right to left.
How LaBute has not appeared in the Great Movies, I'll never know :)
Just wanted to add that I read a study several years ago which discussed not only the shopping habits of the middle class American consumer, but their method of shopping. The vast majority of people (cannot recall the percentage) turn to the right upon entering a store--especially a big box store. BB stores are set up this way to take advantage of this fact.
It's everywhere, man..... eek!
I would love to not only do some classic serious film using the technique you describe, but also do a musical: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Singin' in the Rain. A Fred and Ginger movie would be fun, too. I'm off to rewatch Little Miss Sunshine, looking for this stuff. Fascinating!
roger,
I'm an architect and all the things you stated also apply in architecture, for instance, people have a tendency to turn right when they enter a building.., symmetry represents statis,... etc.. and it has much in common with the chinese practice of feng shui about placement of buildings and objects in them.
an interesting read called "101 things I learned in architecture school" by mathew frederick illustrates many of thes concepts as well.
Don't stop teaching! I've never been a film student but I've always been a film lover. Your commentary to 'Casablanca' rates, imho, as the best commentary ever done that's not done by Jim Cameron. Do you yourself enjoy commentaries, and if so, any recommendations' I have always felt a twinge of envy whenever you would mention your shot-by-shot analysis. I wish I could have attended your classes.
I recently read that MIT has posted its entire curriculum (lectures, labs, etc.) online for free. When I heard that, I thought I'd start auditing some physics courses. It also made me wish you had archived your film classes while you still had your voice. I think it's a brilliant idea to open this activity and include your world audience'surely you could sweet talk someone into allowing you to post shot by shot images from a film or even just selected scenes and allowing us all to create the largest shot-by-shot run-through ever done. Talk about finding some real experts.
This kind of educational opportunity reminds me of a comment by Frances Ford Coppala (I believe in the documentary 'Hearts of Darkness') that right now there's some fat girl who's being exposed to all of this information about making movies and she's going to grow up with that knowledge and go on to make the greatest film in history. Just think how great it would be to have Uwe Bowl, Paul W. S. Anderson, or Brett Ratner actually making watchable movies!
As to your thoughts about movement, balance etc., just a few things I often notice when watching the masters:
Eye Lines: The eyes are the window to blah, blah blah' It's true, though. Psychologists say that simply looking at someone with dilated pupils makes us excitable. One thing I always notice in masterful filmmakers is the way they use eye lines to work an edit. Talk about filming out of continuity, Peter Jackson shot 'the Lord of the Rings' movies over the course of more than a year. He did pickups as much as two years after principle photography wrapped. How does he make a conversation between Frodo and Sam work even when he's filming the reverse shots months apart and in a different location' He puts the eyes in the same sweet spot every time. How effective it is to locate eyes along the golden lines. I'd love for you to elaborate on this technique.
Over-the-shoulder: I've heard it said in director commentaries that the over-the-shoulder camera placement adds tension to the shot. I think it was Cameron who spoke on this, saying that the audience has an innate sense that the central character is vulnerable to attack in this position. I recall Werner Herzog's great doc 'My Best Fiend Klaus Kinski' when he shows Kinski's famous way of entering a shot by pivoting into frame. Was it called a 'Kinski spiral' or something' In Alfoso Cuaron's 'Children of Men' we follow Clive Owen's character through a war zone in exhilarating terror. It's an amazing, nerve rattling sequence.
Point of view shots: I first became aware of POV when an episode of 'M*A*S*H' was told entirely from the point of view of a wounded soldier (brilliantly, the solider was wounded in the throat and could not speak). I realized that by becoming the eyes of a character, I came to think of the cast in an entirely different, far more personal light. POV is an amazing tool of generating empathy. How strange, then when it is used to show us what a killer (or monster) sees (as in the horrid 'Dream Catcher'). I always thought POV was underused and frequently used badly.
A variation of the OTS and POV is the actor as camera operator technique Darren Aronofsky uses in 'Requiem for a Dream.' It sure is jarring but beautifully articulates the inner turmoil of the characters.
And lastly, I've always thought that the skewed angle you refer to as a 'tilt' to be more commonly known as a 'Dutch angle' owing to its popularity among Dutch film makers of a certain era. I've always despised Dutch angles and I think its overuse sank 'Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas.' Its most egregious use can be found (as was mentioned above) in 'Battle Field Earth.' Simply unwatchable.
I just read Stephen Pinker's geat book 'the Stuff of Thought.' In it, Pinker takes a careful look at language to show the hidden mechanisms that operate unconsciously on our thinking. Very similar to your analysis. Both make me think that it's important to know the rules before you can break them. And that breaking them correctly often yields wonders.
Nick Coccellato asks if you've ever applied the analysis to bad movies. I might recommend the book 'Good Script, Bad Script' which looks at bad films from a screenwriter's perspective to figure out why films like 'Cutthroat Island' suck.
I've read through the talkbacks here for this blog entry, and am pleased as punch to see that nobody has really brought up the white-elephant in the room, at least in my estimation.
And that is: How does one tell whether one is watching a carefully considered movie (in which every shot has been fussed over, for artistic/subliminal effect) as opposed to when one is watching a film that is put together in a much more rote fashion? (all the while accepting that even a half-assed movie these days is liable to have absorbed a thing or two about filmmaking by osmosis; this is why there are no more truly incompetent movies, but there are just as many bad ones)
And I guess I'm not talking too much about my own abilities as a film-viewer (or the rest of us who think taking the time out to write something about film is not a waste of a small chunk of life); I'm talking about the very specific nature of the modern audience to increasingly "check out" and decide they don't like a movie based entirely on much more superficial aspects of the film in question. It drives me crazy, for instance, to hear people dismiss the STAR WARS prequels based on "bad dialogue" when there's so much vital visual storytelling on display...
I want to bring up two 2008 movies, both of which I just saw, one of which I loved, one of which I really kinda hated, and BOTH of which get very low scores on Rotten Tomatoes (which certainly implies that shallow criticism doesn't begin and end with amateur online hacks)...
Vadim Perlman's THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES was despised right out of the gate for being a heavy-handed, hackneyed melodrama, and on its surface, I can see where the negativity is coming from: it's got a "twist" we've seen before, plus the first few scenes feature some very 'off' teenage dialogue - and since the Tarantino Revolution, "off dialogue" is just about the only criteria most people use to judge a film. (i.e, "They aren't talking like real people, therefore this movie is made by stupid out-of-touch people, so i will no longer investigate any other aspects of the film")
But I caught on VERY quickly that LIFE was a very fussed-over, very passionate and moving film, and that while it may not entirely original, the WAY in which it was about what it was about was the key, 100%.
But a film like that demands a lessened-ego on the part of the viewer to appreciate. It demands someone who isn't looking to snarkily pass snap judgment on a movie as soon as they can and move on ("I could do that better," etc), but instead someone who is willing to say 'Okay, this is movie is a direct communication between an obviously engaged filmmaker and me, as the viewer. Let's see what happens if I go along with it? No, this is not what I expected, but perhaps it's something else?'
Thankfully, I'm usually that second guy myself (as, I imagine, are the rest of you), and I was able to get past the missed beats in the first act and discover that LIFE is a strikingly cinematic venture, and a real heart-breaker in a truly painful, earned way. (I suppose I was primed to 'look into' the picture, as it was the second film of a director I quite admired, and now admire more)
On the other hand, a true piece of hack-work like 88 MINUTES (featuring Al Pacino in the worst hairdo of his career, and I've see REVOLUTION and CRUISING) is a film that, if stumbled upon, can cause anyone to think the art of film-reading is an utter waste of time; 88 MINUTES is a film cobbled totally from second-hand tropes (that extends to the filmmaking itself), without any sense of passion or commitment on anyone's part to deliver anything other that a film you couldn't deny was, at the very least, a completed and releasable piece of work. And no more. (And it's not even 88 minutes long, which would have been nice! It's 107!)
So how can we educate the world at large that some films "are" and some films "aren't", and the ones that "are" deserve to be treated with more respect and attention than the ones that "aren't". Ang Lee's film HULK displeased a lot of people who were looking for a movie where they could check their brains at the door (never an aim of mine); what that got instead was a film that most definitely "was", and was being asked to be read and observed thoughtfully. This was rejected totally. And so Uni then produced a HULK film this year that "wasn't" - and, while it made the same amount of money, it certainly seemed to go over better with the public for not having any kind of interesting artistic aims.
So I guess what I'm saying is that, through the dual fault of Hollywood and the audience, the very IDEA of a film as possibly being a truly textured, passionate sort of world-within-itself, with its own rules, to be looked at the way you would a painting, with no pretense or ego on your part... well, that very idea has been muddied, and the audience no longer even knows to look for the greater, deeper experience, even when it's right in front of them. (As good as THE DARK KNIGHT is, it generally spoon-feeds its audience.)
It's easy with buildings, right? I can tell by looking at a Gaudi that it has some inherent worth (beyond functionality) above some ugly brick thing in downtown LA. Why are we not trained to see movies the same way?
Or are we dealing with an audience that just wants to put their feet up, and don't care if it's in a Gaudi or a converted brewery?
Roger,
Thanks for the informative article. This discussion of the language of movies reminded me of some of the artwork I saw in Europe. Specifically, a general observation is to see which figure was looking out at you, the observer. While touring the "Residenz Museum in Munich, there are many, many tapestries on the walls as you walk through. Presumably, visitors to the palace would see these tapestries as they made their way to see the king, and it was interesting to observe which figure was looking at you. Typically, there was only one figure that made eye contact. One tapestry had a dog under a dinner table looking at you. Another, was a scene of horses marching off to a battle (moving from bottom right, to upper left). The perspective places you as one of the knights riding in the column, but you are lagging behind. The figure looking at you is someone ahead who looks back with a disapproving look, implying keep up and do your duty. The last tapestry was one I believe was hung in the King's bedroom; it was a scene of his throne room looking out at the court. What was interesting is that no one is making eye contact, since no one was equal to the king. These tapestries probably would fall under political propaganda, but they work because of many of these same rules used in film.
Hello to Mr. Ebert and Yancy Bearns,
Actually, when this blog was posted, the movie that instantly came to mind was "Fanny and Alexander." If ever there was a film so beautifully composed, then this jewel of Ingmar Bergman must be it.
Which reminds me: I have yet to watch its TV version. The Criterion has been sitting on the shelf these past three years, always dusted (which makes it hard to collect dust,) but always neglected. Mea culpa.
Best regards,
Robert
Roger,
I participated in a "Democracy in the Dark" screening of Raging Bull that you held in Philadelphia maybe 10 years ago (and you were also kind enough to autograph my copy of Ebert's Book of Film). I just wanted to thank you for one of the greatest experiences I have ever had watching film.
For whatever it's worth, incarcerated psychiatric patients and other prisoners will almost always pace the yards counter-clockwise. Do they pace clockwise in Australia?
Reading through all these posts, I noticed that almost all the movies referenced were a few decades old. Except for one mention of Keaton and possibly another of Ozu, everything was post WWII.
Which makes me wonder where these rules came from and how they developed. Were they used in silent films as much as they are today? Or rarely then and more so as the years passed? Was one or a few film makers responsible for their discovery or did they simply accumulate gradually? Were silent film makers ignorant of them but able to create effective films nonetheless?
Ebert: In general, as true then as today.
Mr. Ebert, I just revisited "Fanny & Alexander" and noticed two important points which eluded me before. First, Bergman's characters move to the left A LOT. Secondly, his strong axes mostly tilt to the left. Below is a video, taken from the television version, to help illustrate these points. The opening scene of the brook, seen as flowing to the left, was cut off from the theatrical version.
http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=pAmpLqjXe08
I have always felt that there was something about "Fanny & Alexander" which grated at the human psyche. I attributed this to the explosion of colors and the seemingly careful composition of each shot. Never did it occur to me that most of the shots were also out of normal convention. Death, dragging his scythe on the wooden floor, moved to the left (as seen by Alexander during his nap under the table). How can the director put his characters along the same motion unless he were making a statement?
I've seen examples that showed, at least to me, that people who come from cultures where they read right to left, such as is sometimes true in Japan and China, tend to reverse this rule you mention. I think it may have something to do with that, as we are trained from an early age to think of the essentially 2 dimensional medium of film as similar to reading, even the entire screen is alive with movement.
In a film like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which has to be one of my favorite films of all time, I'm not quite sure it would be safe to hold to these ideas, since at any time sympathies for the characters shift or even disappear ("poof!").
The danger is in assuming intent behind these rules. For us it's an interesting psychological exercise, but for a filmmaker who is perhaps violating these rules, I imagine it can be a frustrating experience that those of us who pay attention to such things will interpret the filmmaker's work based upon symbols instead of what's actually going on on screen.
It reminds me of a frustrating discussion I had with a film student, who insisted that all movies have three acts. I disagreed, and he replied with the adage "well, everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end." That the end and beginning cannot in themselves be considered acts seemed to be lost on him. He couldn't interpret things outside of the three act framework because it was all too pleasing to the mind to be able to set a film inside it. In my view, at least, he was limited BY this framework, despite it being a method to understand movies better.
Still, any method is a great way to begin, at the very least, to understand these man-made mysteries.
A film that struck me hard as a young man, 'Antonioni's Blow Up," has stuck with me for years and years, and I vowed that I would write a review/analysis of the film, now that it's on DVD.
What I didn't see in your blog posting is the remarkable discovery I made that when you stop a film (in my case, to have time to write down what the previous scene had stimulated), you see a whole lot more than when you don't. My guess is that in order to see a film in real time, your brain must suppress a lot of observations, because you just don't have time to process them. When you stop watching for a moment, the brain activity that is normally suppressed has time to bring into consciousness what would ordinarily be lost.
Anyway, a wonderful discovery...
http://www.michaelbroschat.com/MontlakeBlog/DisplayBlog.aspx?permalink=53
Dear Roger,
I was listening to the Filmspotting podcast a few weeks ago and the chaps were talking about "The Killing" in their classic heist marathon. They noted how Stanley Kubrick has the frame composition leaning to the right initially - characters, objects etc moving to the future as you believe. As their plan begins to fall apart, a reversal occurs and the camera shifts to a right-to-left flow, as if the characters are going in the wrong direction .. back to the past and further from riches.
I actually remember when you wrote about "Mulholland Drive" after your shot-by-shot analysis and saying that you admired it even more than when you first saw it. If it ever goes into your Great Movies canon I look forward to hearing how the analysis has enhanced your perspective on it.
All the best,
David
Hi Roger,
I love the process of shot-by-shot analysis (a process I think of as "close reading"), and it's something I've had to do on my own since the film school I went to either wasn't familiar with the practice or didn't care enough to implement it. I've done close readings of shots and scenes from Tokyo Story and Ordet (which was one of your Great Movies recently, I was pleased to note), to name just a couple. This is usually just for my own private pleasure and enrichment (consciousness cannot precede expression, as many folks wiser than me have said), although I have occasionally posted an essay or two on blogs that no one reads. Whatever the case, it's enough for me simply to write them down. I also do close readings of prose fiction as well (I am not quite smart enough to tackle poetry), which is where I get the phrase "close reading" in the first place. I simply appropriated the phrase to describe the process I use with film. If I used this process with poetry, I might call this process "film scansion."
I was a bit concerned, however, with this concept of "rules" and "tendencies." I noticed many of your readers are harping on this "rules" aspect, as if a shot-by-shot analysis of a film is an end-all-be-all explanation of how a film works. To your credit, you stated that these tendencies are not absolutes, but I also don't think that even these tendencies are ultimately very important in the appreciation of film. The idea that "left-to-right movement is generally positive motion, while right-to-left is generally perceived as negative", for example, along with the other tendencies you've noticed in films, really does nothing for my own intellectual examination of a film. They CAN be, if they actually contribute something to the artist's personal vision (which usually means the artist has to be at least emotionally aware of them), but if it is simple rote filmmaking, these tendencies are best ignored lest your readers go on a scavenger hunt for similarities in films and miss the all-too-key differences. I'll try to explain.
When I do a close reading of literature, I am using ONLY the text, nothing else. While trends and fashions in literature or mores of the author's contemporary society do have an impact on that author's work, that impact, to me, is small and almost irrelevant (in fact, I'm much more interested in how the artist's vision ignores and/or surpasses those values). With a TEXT ONLY approach (meaning I'm dealing with nothing but the printed word and what I, as a reader, bring to that wonderful interaction, that communion with the author), I find that the experience is infinitely more rewarding. I don't just discover things about the author, his/her society, or the process of writing itself; I discover things about my own self and my own world view. That is what it means, I think, to be a great artist. In Hamlet, Shakespeare isn't just telling a story about a morose kid who kills his uncle out of revenge. It is not the plot that makes the play fascinating, nor is it the era in which Shakespeare is writing, or the accepted playwriting style-of-the-times. Rather, Shakespeare takes the very concept of revenge and views it from every conceivable angle, sometimes flipping it on its head. Revenge and loyalty, revenge and anger, revenge and grief, revenge and remorse, revenge and piety, etc. etc. He accomplishes all of these thoughts and feelings through words --through monologue, through dialogue, through long-winded soliloquies and through witty repartee. Through WORDS.
With film, it is IMAGES. Yes, the images are vitally important. Yes, the camera movement, and the movement of the actors is important, as is the acting itself. Yes, the framing of the camera is important. Color or tone, lighting, pacing, sound. All of those things work cohesively. But when we say things like "Character A walks to screen left emphasizing 'negative' movement" or "Character B is placed in the right foreground putting our focus on them", I am simply thinking to myself "Yes, yes, all of this is well and fine, but what does it DO? What does it SAY? That our sympathy should be for Character B? The story already told me that. That Character A is grappling with the past? The story already told me that too." These little emotional cues seem to me like gimmicks, whether the filmmaker is aware of making them or not. If all of this is to tell me that audiences will react to certain types of framing and composition in similar ways, that tells me more interesting things about biology/sociology than it does about art or the artist's vision. It's precisely the reason I detested most of the so-called "film theory" classes in school, because the thing that always seemed to be missing from the discussions of the films was the art itself. Art, to me, is not interesting for these "tendencies", as if genius filmmaking is something that can be breathed in the air. Art, to me, is personal and is more interesting for its lack of "tendency" and for its originality. It is less interesting if it looks like it had just come from a Hollywood assembly line, or that the filmmaker had a textbook open on their lap during the shoot. And perhaps this response belongs in Jim Emerson's "Is it Art" conversation in his blog, not here! Or maybe both.
To sum up my concern, I think you are on the right track in your shot-by-shot analysis, and that you know that there are many ways of experiencing a film (and a myriad of points-of-view; after all, art is partly what we bring to it, not just what we get out of it), but your readers might be getting slightly side-tracked with this concept of screen space and what our visual tendencies are. You have stated several times here that these "rules" are not rules or absolutes, merely something that can be noticed and appreciated by some. And that is true. But I would like to suggest to your readers to dig much, much deeper. The great works of film art are those Shakespearean echo-chambers of ideas and concepts and beliefs and values and emotions. Using my crude examples, how does Character B's position on the screen not just put focus on that character, not just get the audience to empathize with them, but what does it tell us about the issues the artist/filmmaker is grappling with? If the answer is "nothing" then I think we should look elsewhere. Just as if one were to reduce a great work of art to its plot only to be left with something trite, cliche, or both, so it would be with reducing a film to visual tendencies of stimulation, whether biological or sociological. Both you and I want film students, scholars, critics and historians to analyze films by slowing them down and really paying attention to every nuance, excavating them with large hulking intellectual bulldozers, but what I think you're giving them here is little more than a hammer with no chisel. (Sorry to end this on a terrible metaphor, and for all the cluttered thoughts). Best wishes!
By way of feeding off of Robert Tan's comment on "Fanny and Alexander," and at the risk of turning this thread into a "what film would you really like to see analyzed shot by shot by Roger Ebert," a fairly recent film that has really stuck with me strongly since I watched it is Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love" (I saw the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, and didn't see it in cinema sadly). Some spectacular visuals in that film.
The breaking down of the work of art into its constituent parts is, in truth, the only way to truly understand it. What one does with the parts once one has them, however, is up for debate.
I find it curious that you turn to this strange lexicon for figure placement within shots. It reminds me of theories that the Post-Impressionists and Futurists used to organize color and line in their paintings-- the seemingly random, yet universalized, association of mood with certain compositional choices. Is there any scholarly evidence to support the notion that Hitchcock believed in this system?
Perhaps I am just biased because I am left-handed.
The most valuable lesson I have received in film was from Stuart Liebman, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. He eschewed shot-by-shot analysis in favor of the "segmentation" of the entire film-- its breakdown into clear narrative sequences. Using Roman Jakobson, Liebman advises a search for a "dominant" that runs throughout the entire film-- not a narrative theme or character trait, but a -formal device-, a use of camera movement, lighting, etc., that matches the larger narrative theme of the film. Not an easy thing to do, but a fascinating proposal: for the best directors, each film is a unified work of art, a whole directed by the laws of its dominant.
Mr. Ebert, what is your criteria for a "perfect" motion picture?
For some people, it's about the evolution of the story being told; the correctness of each step in the ladder, the balance of each character and all of their nuances. For others, it means that not a single frame (or for that matter, note in the soundtrack) of the movie is wasted, out of place or confusedly rendered. And for others, it's merely the fact that they could not enjoyed it any more.
The list goes on and on. It seems that the definition of the word "perfect" is ever changing, from individual to individual. The movies that you have listed as perfect (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, No Country For Old Men, The Producers) are more than likely to have simple and garden-variety flaws such as ill-matching continuity among a series of shots, or perhaps some overly obvious sound editing.
But it's not hard to see that you are a man who uses the word sparingly. So, Mr. Ebert, what does "perfect" mean to you?
Ebert: I don't have formal criteria. As Dwight Macdonald observed long ago, every time he made a list of what he was looking for in a movie, along came one to contradict his list. For me, it's a gut feeling: The conviction that a "perfect" movie had to be precisely what it was, and nothing else, in order to affect me so deeply.
Stories and storytelling has existed throughout all community. Some are better at it. Understanding how the parts achieve the whole is always worthwhile, but not to the exclusion of story. No effort should ever be initially approached as pieces. It exists within in entirety, which includes temporal pacing. But once the story is known, the glory of its' telling can illuminate more.
Movies include both visual and aural aspects. These are primal sensory inputs. The link to words and vocabulary of dialogue are formed through learning development, just as symbolic imagery. Those are the things that benefit from the collective intelligence.
But after analysis, there is nothing like the sensation of watching the story again with all the varied pieces locked in place. Nothing to lose, the world to gain.
Darren: but who is saying that? I don't think anyone here is relying strictly on the rule of thirds or shot by shot analysis to be the end all of film analysis or critique. Roger was quite clear that these movements to the right or left etc were not absolutes. Fair enough. I don't think any of us here see them as absolutes. It's more a case of once pointed out, it's hard to not see them.
Also, like any tool in artistic analysis, until it becomes well used one tends to harp on it (and it is, after all, the subject of the thread). Ask any sixth grade teacher about students and symbolism or metaphor. At first, the kids want everything to mean something in a story or they try to make metaphors out of anything, when these are newly acquired skills.
I look upon this topic (column?) as an Intro to Basic Film Techniques. I know I am grateful for a concrete reason for why I sometimes feel the way I feel about a scene or an entire film. Of course many, many elements are at work to evoke feelings in film, but it's enlightening (and fun) to discover one that not only is commonly used (whether consciously or unconsciously) by the director but also seems to reference our common biology.
Not that this means anything, but I don't approach reading the same way you do. I tend to not take works out of context, but that's not an absolute, either. ;)
One is not superior to the other, and I think most people vary their approaches to understanding depending on the subject matter or even something as simple as their mood. I don't think that people will stop seeing the whole because some of the structure has been revealed. If anything, it should lead to a deeper appreciation of the whole, no?
One of my favorite films is The Quiet Man. The sheer beauty of the craft in making it brings me to tears every time I watch it. Of course, the story is pretty good, too.
Roger, have you ever performed Cinema Interruptus on this movie?
Sir,
A very informative article.I request you to throw some light on Coen Brother films,i feel that there is something peculiar in their films.When i watched Blood Simple,Fargo and No Country for Old Men they all were talking of some eluding point which i could not figure out.
Eleanor,
I appreciate your response. I acknowledge in my own response that Roger does indeed emphasize that these principles are not absolutes. My concern, really, was the necessity of seeking out these principles in the first place. I was suggesting that several readers have already responded in the manner of: "Wow, I didn't know all this stuff was going on in my favorite films, now I can see my favorite films in a whole new light" (I won't point out any particular reader, but scroll and you'll find a couple). It is only my opinion (for what it's worth) that this "whole new light" is not really a whole new light at all, not in the artistic sense anyway. It's sort of like scansion in poetry where people try to figure out the meter. I see the fun in it, but what does it tell you about the whole work? That it was in iambic pentameter? So what? Interesting for aspiring poets, perhaps, but not really interesting for the (admittedly) Emersonian intellectual. Or so I think. Again, my opinion. I feel good film analysis on good films has to do with things other than biological/cultural/sociological/psychological responses. The intellect and spirit of the individual participant (the "soul" of the audience member, if you'll pardon the metaphysical intrusion)need to get involved and I feel it's far too distracting to go on treasure hunts for these sorts of larks. "Fun" as you say, and I say sure. Entertaining as well, probably diverting. But "enlightening"? How so? Because it teaches you about how films are made? Wouldn't you rather be taught how visions are made? How an artist uses his/her tools, craft, experience, awarnesses, energy and resources to tell us what they know about life and how they see things? And how this all reflects on us? I would. But these principles are just, as you say, Basic Filmmaking techniques. Why waste the energy needed to chase after them and pin them down?
You ask, "Who is saying that?" I suppose Roger is; didn't he title this article "How to read a movie"? I know he didn't mean it in that sense, but I'm not so sure some of his readers will see through that. Some of them will take it to heart that this is indeed how to read a movie, when there are of course other ways that are infinitely more rewarding. Namely by using the text, and only the text of the film, which I argue for. Not "tendencies" of filmmaking. Certainly not any sort of officially- or unofficially-established "rules" that pre-exist in several other films. I am glad we both agree that we should not take films out of their context. That is exactly what I am advocating. But unfortunately, that is also exactly what this sort of analysis does, imparting inherent traits to a filmmaker's style and setting it apart from vision. That is what I meant when I said art is missing from the discussion of film. Sorry for the length. I hope that makes some sort of sense.
Darren, this is just one lesson chapter among many that our beloved Professor Ebert will be giving us, pro bono. In a way, I consider this place to be a virtual school. I'm sure a lot of people do, too. So if we begin to act like people in a classroom (research, homework and all,) well, it simply says that we're only acting our part as students.
Please don't worry. All of us are aware that this is just one facet of looking at movies. Like I said, there are many more lessons to come, and certainly many more different researches and homeworks to be done. Thank you for bringing the subject up. We'll put it to heart.
Best regards,
Robert
The negative implications of "left" are so interesting. Consider the not-heard-much-anymore phrase, "That's so gauche." (Gauche, the French word for left). I will be paying much closer attention to the left, right, and middle actors in the films I see from now on! As always, Mr. Ebert, a fascinating article.
Hi Roger,
After reading this entry in your blog I decided to put the things you say into practice. Tonight I watched Touch of Evil for the first time, thinking it would be a great film to begin with. One thing that stuck with me is a shot of Quinlan early in the film when he first hears the piano music. He pauses under an overpass, lights a cigarette, a paper flies past him, and there's one of those towers in the background. Then Quinlan walks off, we get a clear view of the tower, and then the camera lowers to the people following Quinlan (this is recorded from TCM so I don't have a minute time).
My thought process was, "Why would Welles linger on those towers? They must be important later." And naturally at the end of the film Vargas climbs along those towers while getting his recording. It seems like little touches like these are what separate great directors from mediocre ones.
Another thing (somewhat off topic to this entry, but on topic with Touch of Evil): You write in your Great Movie review of the opening shot, "(I've always felt this cut is premature; better to hear the offscreen explosion, stay on Mike and Susan as they run to the burning car, and then cut.)" That was my instinct as well, but I second-guessed myself with the logic, 'Who am I to question Orson Welles' decisions?' I guess it's good to know I wasn't the only one jarred by the quick jump. But nonetheless, what a fantastic film.
Mr. Ebert,
I attended one of your shot-by-shots in Charlottesville years ago. Our film was The Birds. It was quite an experience. I had expected you to act in the role of expert but instead you were more like host. I could tell that you were learning from us as much as we were learning from you. It was like 300 friends all piled into a common friend's basement to talk about a common passion.
I wasn't a big fan of the movie but by the end of the weekend I had a much greater appreciation for it. I particularly enjoyed the focus on the birds landing on the jungle gym and the repeated shots of the back of blond haired heads. i'd watched the whole movie years earlier but never really saw it until then.
To the poster who asked about the annonymity of the dark, I would say that's very much in play. In our session, even I called for a stoppage to ask a question and I typically never utter a peep in such situations in a room of 300 strangers. I definitely encourage everyone to attend a workshop like this at least once...particularly one with Roger.
Thanks for all of your work both in print and in person.
After reading your article about the left being perceived as "negative" and the right as "positive" as far as film composition in concerned, I couldn't help but think about how film advertisement is composed.
Generally if a film has two major stars they will put the star with the most clout on the left of the one-sheet poster and the "lesser" star on the right which, in this context, interestingly opposes the left/right rule.
I assume after much tense negotiation between the stars' agents and the studio, they sometimes compromise by placing the name of the "right-side" star up higher on the poster and the "left-side" star's name down lower.
The fact we read from left to right, I presume, is the reason for this.
Wonderful, as usual, sir.
As an aside, I was wondering whu Costa-Gavra`s "Z", one of the list-toppers from your year-end Top 10 lists,(if I remember it right) has yet to be Greatmovied? I kind of admire that list of yours; can hardly wait for No Countary For Old Men gets there, either.
As another aside: Your appreciation for Ingmar Bergman has become even more alive and kicking after the solemn swede passed away. Well, I love Bergman, what`s your excuse?)
A few essentials from my endless thoughts:
1. I could count on my one hand the times I have thought or described anyone or anything as "dominant" or "submissive". As such to apply such words to visual descriptions hazards reductionism which we would not permit in any other kind of analysis. I think the eye is drawn to the pretty and the dangerous and an object will draw the eye only, to dominate so to speak, if it is intrinsically dominant. The other day I caught a spider in an empty wineglass on top of my international law notes. I studied the little creature for a few minutes - or to be more precise, I studied its effect on me. Mostly it pretended to be dead but sometimes it would flare up aggressively. These were small movements but the shape of the spider causes an astonishingly powerful response for such a little creature. I think whatever angle you shot the spider from, whatever space it occupied in the room, it would dominate the viewer's eyes. Likewise a pretty woman.
2. Disability rights are a preoccupation of mine and so when Ebert described this event I thought it might be unfair on the blind, interrupting the sound as well as the visuals. On further reflection I realise that the blind would perhaps have a particular interest in such an event, enjoying the discussions as much as anyone, especially since we rarely spend much time describing visual experience which is self-evident to us. I wrote an essay once on the history of photography and the hotch-potch of sources that I had to use to conduct the research taught me that our ability to translate visuals in to words is fairly primitive. As a rule I think all writing about visuals should be undertaken as if the audience were blind. This would not necessarily omit the poetry and pleasure of it; think of Hellen Keller describing the pleasures of being in the moonlight. Poetry can be analytical as much as empirical.
3. On enthusiasms which seem strange to others I have an anecdote which is illustrative. Living in communal housing I met a family last year who were involved in the dog grooming business. The daughter had an intellectual disability (of some kind or another, psych words are mutilations of language, eliciting the same kind of fear as the spider, and so I don't use them) and so her perceptions and use of language were different and charming. When I elicited surprise that there was a course on dog grooming, she replied "Woah, what planet have you been living on?"
Checkmate.
Hi Rodger
I also thank you for the lesson on reading a movie. It for me was also an aha moment for me. I applied it to a cartoon I was watching called "Johnny Quest" The series was overseen By the artist Alex Thoth and you can see the use of movement and placement of characters in the various scenes. I am not sure if most modern animators are aware of the psychology of these princilples. now i can't wait to some way to do my own shot by shot analyses of my favorite films
signed
a big fan
David G
"Girl With A Pearl Earring" makes great use of the "Golden Mean". Each scene is composed like a Vermeer painting.
It occurs to me that perhaps the relationship between right and left movement in terms of being the future/past, negative/positive may have something to do with the way we are conditioned (at least in english) towards reading text left to right.
The word to the right is always the one coming up, and the word to the left is done and gone. On paper, you experience the story as continuous motion to the right. Movement to the right on film may be more favorable because we are moving in a familiar direction (especially in a narrative context like a film) - whereas moving to the left feels negative because were doing it "backwards", or in shortform: Right = progression, left = regression.
That being said, im wondering how this could affect filmmaking in cultures that have different dominant writing directions, or low literacy rates - assuming this theory holds water at all?
Matt Rooney beat me to it: do any afficionados of Israeli, Arab or Iranian cinema see a difference? Or even Japanese films, given that Japanese books traditionally read from top to bottom, and right to left.
Dave asks if a filmmaker has ever intentionally tried to subvert some of the tendencies Mr. Ebert describes, and in his response, Mr. Ebert says that a director might not follow these tendencies out of "sheer cluelessness." I think this is the type of response that has Darren concerned, where what is intended as a tool to help stimulate analysis is being used as a shortcut to make value judgments about a director's work (not following tendencies = cluelessness). Furthermore, given that there is little to no evidence that filmmakers are consciously applying this "rule of dominance," I think Darren is correct in asking whether such a "rule" or "tendency" has any artistic relevance at all. I'd go further to wonder whether or not the tendency as described even exists with any regularity, or whether it is just the kind of thing one contrives to find, like some numerological pattern in the Bible.
Please don't misunderstand me. I think it's fun and enlightening to submit a film to close reading, and encourage anyone reading this to do so. I'd just encourage a bit more healthy skepticism about some of the theories Mr. Ebert is espousing.
Since reading Awake in the Dark, I've been thinking about how you could do this sort of analysis on-line. It definitely would not be the same thing, but the differences might be interesting in themselves.
I've posted one way this might be done here:
http://asteroid.divnull.com/2008/09/virtual-film-analysis/
Ebert: A very intriguing idea!
Sir,
Can you help me by telling how to interpret Coen Brother's 'BARTON FINK' ?
Ebert: Not easily, and who knows if I would be correct? Decide for yourself, and you're probably right.
Have you ever tested your right-dominance hypothesis by watching a film that was "flipped" right-to-left? Obviously, you'd have to skip by the opening titles, (or edit the film to project them normally), and it would work best on films that have little obvious text to give away the ruse.
Do you think this change would be instantly apparent, or would you be left with some feeling of unease that something was "not-quite-right" with the movie?
I was watching Psycho last night and I noticed in what I believe is the scene prior to the shower scene, Bates is center walking out of the motel check-in room. Then the camera swings so he is positioned on the right side of the screen, and he looks off, upwards to the left, to the house which has his mother, being his weakness. But him being dominant over what is about to happen has him on the right side and him looking up indicates he is not in complete control. Having read this the other day, it blew my mind how I probably wouldn't have even put that much thought into this shot that tells so much.
Raging Bull opens with that glorious, slow-motion imagery of the "Bronx Bull" pacing like a lion in his cage (Pietro Mascagni's "Cavaleria Rusticana: Intermezzo" - the score) :: what is he doing? Shadow boxing, right? Nope... not RIGHT!!! Shadow boxing to the left! (ha-ha) He is, through out the movie, in many significant cases, caged to the left side of the screen. This composition choice by Scorsese induces bias on the way that we perceive his behavior and his actions, right? Because, Scorsese wants us to see him as weak and insecure?
Then, we cut to a seemingly pathetic image :: a down-and-outter Jake is now sitting in his dressing room before a mirror*.... not pathetic at all but even more triumphant and metaphorical as the previous image (the wondrous things you can do with such a great juxtaposition of sequences)... why? Because Jake is to the RIGHT! He sits to the right and doesn't swing at the dark shadow at his feet, but contentedly recites his lines in front of a mirror :: the most grand images of contentment I have ever seen... not pathetic at all... he's content with himself and he can even manage to keep his chin up as a horrible two-bit comedian...... the mirror illuminated mirror reflection of himself.. he has become more introspective now... whereas before he would box the hell out of his shadow.....
AS YOU CAN SEE MY IDEAS NEED ORGANIZATION BUT I DEVELOPED THEM DOING YOUR TECHNIQUE... IT'S FUN! IT'S GREAT STUFF! I'M PASSIONATE JUST NEEED SOME DIRECTION.
Help me out, Mr. Ebert, I would appreciate it.
Also:
I feel the need to break down this masterpiece by Scorsese, because for me, I don't think I've seen a more honest and more emotionally charged movie..... EVER! It's the greatest. I'm left breathless every time I witness Jake sparring his own shadow to Intermezzo. I see that the image is a metaphor that exemplifies his personal / internal struggles (his guilt, his jealousy, his rage!)...
I am graduating this year from a high school in UT and because of your reviews and your amazingly helpful insights on this beautiful medium of art, I am strongly considering either A) becoming a filmmaker or B) becoming a film critic. Thanks for the inspiration, teacher.
Cory's on to something. Raging Bull is the greatest. I think I'll watch it a shot at a time too...
One of the cool things about DVDs these days is how easy it is to get screen captures of a given film to turn into a wallpaper. Because I like to do this, I've tended to look at films sometimes compositionally. Things I've noticed:
* Baz Luhrmann is amazingly composed. You can stop the action almost anywhere in a Luhrmann film, and it'll look like a still photograph. That is not the result one usually gets.
* Girl With a Pearl Earring is also absolutely amazing. The replication of Vermeer's light and composition throughout the film is meticulous beyond belief. (Kudos to cinematographer Eduardo Serra for that.)
* My favorite moment along these lines: In Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, when the character Mace (Angela Bassett) is delivering a speech to Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) about how memories are designed to fade... Lenny is crumpling in front of a poster of elephants. The first time I noticed this was at a special screening at the Chaplin Theater on Raleigh Studios' lot (the post-production studio across the street from Paramount), and Bigelow had a Q&A after the film. I told her this was, yes, the first time I noticed it, and was it intentional? The audience laughed, and there was a long pause. "No. I'm going to have to ask the art director about that..." (IMDb tells me it was John Warnke.)
FYI: I hold my daughter on my left hip because I am right handed and usually need my right hand free to be doing something else, like making her a sandwich (which I can actually do one-handed now, a new skill). My sister-in-law, who is left-handed, holds her daughter on her right hip.
Roger --
I've always been intrigued by your idea for independently made commentary tracks, where anyone who feels strongly about a particular movie can produce and distribute it over the Internet their own commentary track, to be played in conjunction with the movie. However, unless one counts the derisive commentary of "Rifftrax", the idea doesn't seem to have happened.
Might this idea of "shot-at-a-time" analysis be combined with that one? It wouldn't necessarily have to be in the form of audio tracks; I'm picturing a wiki-like website where people could post their own observations on particular shots or sequences. Assuming some good quality input and some mechanism to select the best observations, this could provide eventually provide some valuable guides to enhance a viewer's understanding of a film, and of films in general.
It would also be interesting to see what scopes worked for such websites. Obviously there are those films which individually have provided the subject matter for scores of theses and books; one could easily see such a wiki-like site being filled up just by observations on Citizen Kane. But I wonder what synergy we might see if a website decided to take all the films of a particular director as its focus, or even opened itself to all films in a particular genre or sub-genre. What could we learn about the conspiracy thriller, for example, if we gave people a place to compare their individual observations on the members of the species? Are there still mysteries to be unlocked in the giallo, or even in the humble American (sometimes Canadian) slasher film?
Hello Mr. Ebert;
I am from Persia (Iran) and love your reviews style.
I became a fan of you 5 years ago when realize that you love alfred hitchcock and Ingrid bergman like me. I have a private weblog about
hitchcock's masterpiece NOTORIOUS and incomparable actress
BERGMAN in persian on:
BADNAM.BLOGFA.COM
god bless you many years to continue writing beautiful reviews for moviegoers.
best regrds
Alfred
(b> Ebert: For years and years I thought "Notorious" was Hitchcock's best film, until I slowly settled on "Vertigo." Even to be Hitchcock's second best film is pretty good. I could look at either one again right now. I love your site's freeze-frames from the kiss between Cary Grant and Bergman. It was then said to be the longest kiss in the history of the movies, and for all I know, it still is.
Sounds like Film Theory, totally useless. And I know.
The first DVD commentary I watched was "The Score" starring Brando, DeNiro and Norton. The voice over was Frank Oz (Dir) and Rob Hahn (DoP). Since then, I've seen some that were very much better (like Michael Jeck - Seven Samurai, and Norm Jewison - The Cincinnatti Kid), and many more that were worse. The trick is to only watch commentaries that have experts. Avoid the 'actor' tracks unless you want to hear how great and sooo amazing other actors are.
The Score track was great because it touched on some of these principles you're talking about. Why DID they place the camera here? Why ARE those lights pooling in that particular way. This is where I began to enjoy movies at a whole new level. I find it fascinating, the amount of expertise that goes into a film. Now I understand why it can take a whole day to produce 60 seconds of film, or even more days for less screen time.
I thinks it's a pity that you can't (yet!) make more commentaries Roger. I really do. I've seen Floating Weeds twice as many times with your soundtrack then without. The same is true for Kane and Dark City. Casablanca has some catching up to do but eventually it will get there too. There was always something about Ozu's interior shots that I couldn't put my finger on until you pointed out his 'frame within a frame' shooting style. I also enjoyed your explanation of his 'scene integrity', the way he doesn't cut between scenes but allows each to start, progress and finish all on it's own. I could go on and on, you make so many interesting points, one after another and I'm here to tell you that we appreciate it!
I've scribbled "Understanding Movies, by Louis D. Giannetti" on my library list. And who knows, Boulder isn't TO far away and April is right around the corner. Do they have one of those Steak'NShakes you told us about?
Ebert: Nope. But there's Daddy Bruce's Bar-B-Q. Emerson and I will join the brilliant Ramin Bahrani in going through his "Chop Shop." Free and open to the public, April 6-10. www.cwa.com
CWA sounds very much like TedTalks ( www.ted.com ), which I'm addicted to. Perhaps the website will have a similiar video library of past speakers. I notice there are some youtube videos floating around.
www.cwa.com led me to a blank webpage. Perhaps it's down for maintenance, I will check back in a few days. However, I did find http://www.colorado.edu/cwa/information.html
Thanks for this!
Am surprised to see Floating Weeds on the top 100 list. I think that has got to be the most pointless remake. A Story of Floating Weeds did not require it.