I'm not particularly fond of the snatch-and-grab, shaky-cam style Kathryn Bigelow employs in "The Hurt Locker" -- or those fusillades of twitchy, punch-in and recoil zooms, either -- but I got past it pretty quickly. Unlike many other films in this style, "Hurt Locker" is guided by a steady hand and a solid intelligence. As Kathleen Murphy writes at MSN Movies:
... few recent films have been as consciously and masterfully directed, in real time and space, as "The Hurt Locker." Script, sound, cinematography -- every aspect of this movie serves clarity and coherence, forcing us to feel, in all of our senses, the awful vulnerability of flesh and blood, and the randomness of its destruction. Calling to mind tough art like Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and Picasso's "Guernica," "Locker" is not a pretty picture.
Bigelow delivers three-dimensionality the hard way: She moves and cuts her camera through a complex arena of wartime action as precisely as a sculptor's tool, exposing multiple forms of visceral fear and sudden death. Every inch of her dusty, sun-scorched Iraqi streets is wired to deliver nonstop tension; the human software threatened by instant dissolution in these badlands can't anticipate, post-blast, blithely slipping into a brand-new suit of flesh.
Let me give you just one tiny (but hugely significant), fleeting example of how Bigelow (a director whose work I've always gotten a charge from -- particularly her 1987 vampire movie "Near Dark" and her 1989 cop movie "Blue Steel") is fully on top of her game in "The Hurt Locker."
See the image at the top of this page? That shot, from one of the apartment buildings, looking down at the street where SSG William James (Jeremy Renner) is searching for an IED. It goes by fast, and you might not even notice it the first time. It's a little showy -- shot through that ironwork and calling attention to itself as the kind of thing some directors might think of as an "arty" shot. But Bigelow is better than that. The shot lasts a fraction of a second during a sequence in which shards of images are flying like shrapnel, and then we're back to work, down on the street with James:
Please notice the person in the opening just above James' shoulder (at right). People are always watching from the periphery -- and the men at work defusing the bombs have no way of knowing which of them are merely curious neighborhood residents and which present a threat. (Note: This doesn't represent the full scene, just a few shots out of many.)
A few shots later we're down in the street, scraping in the dust. James finds a shell, and the focus moves in close, down to a pair of wires. A few intense minutes go by. He clips a yellow one. Then a green one.
James gives the all-clear.
Tilt up from James' position in the street, past two men on a lower balcony to this man.
Only now are we given a few more shots that provide context for that image/fragment we saw earlier. The tension builds as the whole situation expands, thrown into a new context.
James discovers another, longer wire beneath his feet. The seemingly unconnected red one we've seen part of previously. This is the way the movie works: putting together the pieces of puzzles that are always shifting. And the scene isn't over by any means...
To kick it into higher gear, the earlier shot is repeated. Now we remember. And now we know it wasn't just a random, show-off shot. It's a POV shot. But who is the man to whom it belongs? And why is he watching?
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It is this precise shot that greatly undermines the effectiveness of The Hurt Locker for me. You see Jim, the movie does a super job of placing us within the state of mind of the EOD. That is how the film's shots are supposed to evoke.
But look at the sequence, and how it jolts us out of this state of mind. Here I pull excerpts out of my opinion of the film -
And here is where Ms. Bigelow dilutes the tension of these sequences, momentarily so, by switching perspectives and showing the Iraqi terrorists who have been assigned the task of detonating the bombs. Staff Sergeant William James (Mr. Renner), the maverick new bomb specialist with over 800 bombs to his name, finds himself in the middle of a Baghdad street, with a set of bombs surrounding him. Buildings and houses surround him. People peek. He doesn’t mind. We again have no idea what is supposed to happen. That is tension for you. Just then, Ms. Bigelow chooses to show the perspective of an Iraqi from within the confines of one of the houses, looking towards James. He comes down the stairs, looks James has already defused the bomb, and he walks away, dropping the detonator. It is a needless and more importantly a wrong shot, because (a) We do not learn anything about the Iraqi other than the little fact what his role is in the episode and (b) We are no longer gripped by the fear of the unknown, and now we are reduced to a little game of who’s going to get there first.
I wish to pose this question to anybody and everybody - Doesn't this sort of a perspective switch seem jarring, and pull us out of the illusion? You see, till now we feel like the EOD guy, and suddenly I see a POV of some Iraqi. Now, as an audience, who am I?
There’s another such instance, two rather, where this kind of perspective-switch completely skims away one layer of the tension, and relies only on the obsession of William James to make the sequence intriguing. The scene is the U.N. building, and the device is a car bomb, with carefully concealed wiring. No one knows what the source of detonation is going to be. The army, having created a safety perimeter, is now looking every where around. And just then, The Hurt Locker switches to the perspective shot of an Iraqi from atop a nearby building trying to fire at the car set it on fire. I agree, the primary source of the tension in this scene is not where the detonating bullet is going to come from, but the time James has on his hand before he can find the detonator amidst the wiring and defuse it before the fire melts it and the stuff explodes. Yet, this shot does two things – (a) Give us prior knowledge of where and when the bullet is going to come from, when there’s absolutely no need to. If, Ms, Bigelow would have edited out the shot, and instead chose to show us only the bullet coming out of nowhere, the panic would have been that much more intense. (b) It doesn’t even show the face of the terrorist, and so the guy is no more than a mere device in the framework of the scene.
Thanks for a well-reasoned counter-argument, Satish. I understand what you're saying, but I don't think it's necessary for Bigelow to literally lock us in to shots from the bomb squadders' POV. (And even if you wanted to make that literal case, surely someone surrounded by people watching from other perspectives in this situation must imagine what he looks like to them.) I think you have to consider where the excerpt I've chosen comes in the sequence -- after the encounter with the driver on the way to this location, and after the first bomb has been disarmed. Then the film adds another layer to the suspense. Yes, it turns out to be inconclusive... and that is precisely the point. The question -- the perception of threat, just after the threat was thought to be neutralized -- is the point of the scene. Rarely in the movie do we know for certain, until it's too late, the nature of the real threat and where it's coming from. The point is that some threats are identifiable and some are not. I appreciate the way that "outside" perspective is disconcertingly thrown in (I thought it was a directorial misstep at first) and then not accounted for until several minutes later. It's almost subliminal in the way it amps up the paranoia.
I know some have interpreted "Hurt Locker" as showing Iraqis as "bad people," but that seems naive -- and a deliberate misreading -- to me. If your movie is basically about three guys trying to disarm bombs (and "Hurt Locker" posits that as an existential human condition more than a tactical one) in a place where guerilla warfare is taking place in the streets, you must assume as a survival tactic that all the strangers around them/you present at least a potential threat until it can be determined otherwise. That's the moral horror of the situation: Who is innocent (or indifferent) and who is intends to cause you harm? One misjudgment can mean instant death -- for you or the other person. In the second scene you mention, I think Bigelow is exercising the other side of the classic Hitchockian dichotomy between suspense and surprise. Sometimes you know where the bullet (or the bomb) is, and sometimes you don't.
Jim, Thanks a ton for really addressing this little issue of mine. What you state, about the “outside perspectives”, and when you mention “about the literalism” that abounds my aesthetic of movie image interpretation, you really do hit the nail on my head.
That is what I intend to gather. As an audience, how do we react to such intense subjective framing? I mean, Ms. Bigelow actually doesn’t shake her camera ala most present filmmakers, but instead just burns images fast on our memory hard drive. We interpret it as visceral, but what it really is, I believe, is that these images, framed impeccably and lingering on for just the right amount of time (montage) coming in thick and fast, elicit primal reactions in us. In such a film, we react as we react in our everyday life. When you say that these outside perspectives create paranoia, you use the exact word to describe the feelings. Paranoia it is. Like in the car-bomb sequence, where we are paranoid about the man with the camera, and everybody around. The Hurt Locker isn’t about the people in Iraq, and I don’t think it intends to politicize them either. I mean, it is way better than the obligatory characterization of Black Hawk Down. The Iraqis here are, well, just people, and they are part of environment which the EOD has to deal with.
But the “key frames”, and when I say “key frames” I mean the ones which establish the bomb detonators in both the sequences, there seems to be the case that the frame is much more explicit and much more serious. As I remember watching it Jim, the outside perspectives where causally thrown in, but if I remember them correctly, these two scenes (of the guy from the window, and the sniper from the rooftop) are framed that much more tightly, and linger on for that much more longer. What is our reaction then? Don’t we then immediately sense that THIS IS THE GUY? I did so, but I wonder what the reactions were?
Replying to Satish's first comment--
In war, the enemy gets a vote. War, maybe better than any other circumstance common to the human condition, destroys illusions of solipsism. Eventually we do learn about the other guy, we learn what his perspectives and intentions were, and we learn how things finally turned out for him. This is inevitable, because when he kills one of our number, his reality intrudes very brutally into ours. So, the other guy's perspective is a legitimate one.
Now, SSGT James did not become aware of the window man's perspective while events were unfolding. For James, that awareness would have come together after the fact, in retrospect. The director could have walked us through that process with James, but doing so would have resulted in a substantially different movie. Better, for her purposes, to let us see the enemy's perspective in real time, and thereby avoid distracting us from the movie's intended themes. I am just back from Afghanistan myself, and that a Hollywood movie director could so accurately capture what war feels like is amazing to me.
Love this post. It's so rare where to find concise examples such as this that explain not only the work of a specific director in a specific movie, but of craft in general and what elevates the good from the generic.
Very good analysis of this sequence, Jim, but I'm afraid that I found myself generally unable to get past the "snatch-and-grab" aesthetics. Bigelow is a director I have enjoyed in the past also, but maybe there's something about me as an audience member that I'm unable to let the images process in my brain unless I have (what I call) "saturation time".
I do remember appreciating the choices of shots in this sequence, as well as the masterful later sequence in which the soldiers have a prolonged standoff with several snipers. But I think that, despite my appreciation for the intensity of the performances and Bigelow's commitment to atmosphere, what prevented "The Hurt Locker" from being a success for me was crystallized by a line I read in a review regarding the film's structure: basically, "The Hurt Locker" is "Twister" with IEDs instead of tornadoes. I understand that that's a little reductive towards a clearly thoughtful film, but I certainly did feel as if I was watching the same note being played over and over again in not particularly different ways.
You're right that the situations don't stray too much from the same formula, but I'd say our understanding/perception of the characters deepens as the movie goes on.
Alex, I believe the repetition is, in many ways, the point. The film does indeed intend to portray that, for some guys, war is home. War is a habit. War is a drug.
But unfortunately, Ms. Bigelow does telegraph this message well before the first frame. I wonder though, if the message had not been there upfront (or even at the end), would the film have been effective enough on its own for us to interpret it thus.
There are only a few film artists I agree with when it comes to that hyperkinetic editing you speak of. Bigelow is definitely one of them. Another might be Darren Aronofsky for works like "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream"--which are, similar to "The Hurt Locker," evocational of subjectivity and visceralit. I think the cut is an instantiation of the transient focus of the human eye. And, in that respect, it is more of an appropriate tool for filmmakers to use when they are tryng to evoke subjectivity. I don't think that when a camera pans, or tracks for that matter, it is an effective representation of what its like for a person to scan an area as their body and head shifts. Nonetheless, both the cut and the pan/dolly are grammatical tools of the cinema that are vehicles of denonative and connotative meaning. What peturbs me is what a-holes like Greengrass and Bay do with their films -- void of all formal meaning and grammar!
I basically agree with you.
But I get a bit skeptical when people develop ideologies based on aesthetic preferences, such as "longer takes are better than shorter takes" and "a steady camera is better than a handheld camera." Now, let me be clear: I absolutely agree that we are going through a phase in cinema where directors are overusing the shaky-cam and rapid editing techniques, using kineticism as a substitute for directorial control and talent.
However, I believe that many critics, by taking part in an appropriate and understandable backlash, go to far and start assuming that all instances of this type of style must preclude a bad movie.
Incidentally, the "long takes are better than short takes" philosophy, which Andre Bazin came up with decades ago, would suggest one of my very favorite directors - Yasujiro Ozu - made inferior films than his contemporaries. Ozu's movies averaged about 5 seconds per shot, while Mizoguchi's lasted around 12. But what this discrepancy really suggests, I think, is that many different styles of cutting can be successful in the hands of a competent director. The reason why many critics complain about fast cutting now is because so many bad directors are doing it.
But Kathryn Bigelow isn't Michael Bay, or even Paul Greengrass. She has elected to use this style for a reason, and in watching the Hurt Locker, I was always found myself properly oriented with respect to the characters and geography of the scene. What more can you ask?
I believe that some film writers have taken up the "long take/steady camera" preference and formed it into an ideology such that when they are confronted with a film with shaky camera work and a short ASL, they feel compelled to state their displeasure with it, even when the original objection they had to this style - incoherence - is not present.
To quickly answer Satish's question above, no the POV switch doesn't take me out of the film. For me the first shot just sets the tone of uncertainty and danger from any angle. Since we don't know who is looking, it's almost subliminal to me.
I'm not a big fan of the "shaky-cam" quick editing style either, though I think Bigelow uses it beautifully. In so many action sequences it seems designed to muddle and confuse more than anything else. The geography of a scene is lost in favor of a certain amount of blanket tension. Bigelow on the other hand never loses the layout of the battlefield. The jerks and shakes are used pretty judiciously and it gives the scenes a documentary-like immediacy without sacrificing sense.
Does anyone else see the ironwork on the balcony as kind of a subliminal minaret shape the way it's framed? A sort of reminder that the figure on the ground is a stranger in a strange land. Or am I just reading too much into it?
I didn't see the ironwork that way. But now that you pointed it out, I very much like that interpretation. I don't know if Bigelow intended for the framing of that shot to evoke that sort of reading, but as is often the case with works of art that are made with care and thought, good movies resonate with associations and interpretations that even their creators may not have intended.
If you want to take your "stranger in a strange land" comment even further, you could almost view that shot as resembling the portal of a space ship, with James in his suit looking like someone who would suffocate to death without his helmet. I seriously doubt that anyone was thinking this when they were making the movie, but a rich film with so many ideas floating around will engage a viewer's imagination in weird and wonderful ways.
I think it's the first IED sequence in the movie when Sanborn takes off his suit and there's the shot of him handing his helmet to his comrade, and then a shot of his comrade taking it, and then - I think - I wider shot of his comrade setting the helmet down on the ledge he's standing behind. I like this, because in a situation where time is of the essence, little things like that seem to last longer and create more tension. What's great about "The Hurt Locker" is the state of hyper-awareness it puts you in.
One of my favourite things about the movie is how bright it is, how the sunlight almost hurts. And I like how in the two night time sequences, as opposed to the rest of the movie, the threat is only imagined. I'm not sure why, but it's interesting.
Jim, please do bear with me, but The Hurt Locker and its editing pattern, and the choices it makes, somehow invoked the filmmaker inside me stronger than most films of 2009. So, I keep harping and arguing and mulling over what is, and what could have been.
In your argument, you invoke Hitchcock’s dichotomy, and that is the exact thing that keeps going on in my head. When to use shock, and when to use suspense. I don’t believe that either of them is superior to one another, but that both are devices that ought to be chosen for maximum impact. Manipulating the audience.
I invoke this scene. And later I invoke the sniper scene.
Here is my theory, and I intend to present the possibilities and want to know what the reactions were when you, and the readers here felt while watching the film. That would really provide me with insight about the darn thing works.
I say, in the sequence you mention here, when we first see the man looking from the window, we immediately realize this is not one of those casual onlooker shot. Or do we? I really wonder. It has been almost a year, but now that I press my memory what we feel the first time we see him, is that this is another of those onlookers too (Please do let me know about your reaction). But the film starts locking upon him, and using him more and more. He is always a device, and Ms. Bigelow is using him as one. He is another bomb too, as in, he is another variable. My question is does he enhance or does he take away the tension? As in, if we choose to completely remove the subject, and at best try to show only the reverse shots of him walking outside towards something, what we would be left with is the EOD dealing with the bare-knuckled predicament of dismantling a bomb (which could be ticking, or which could be triggered, or whatever.)
The Sniper Scene:
Does Ms. Bigelow really need to show us the perspective of the Iraqi snipers? I mean, if we don’t know how many people there are, and if we don’t see them dead (from the interior vantage point), doesn’t it greatly enhance the sequence. The EOD guys are tired yet unaware and paranoid, we are just intrigued by their predicament. Wouldn’t it have been better if the scene were edited for us to be in their shoes?
Jim, I wonder if The Hurt Locker is a classic case where tension is developed more if you don’t reveal all the cards. As in, the tension could be made more intense by letting it be absolutely unknown where and what and how. Right now, I believe, it is just the how.
And here I invoke another celebrated scene, which classically brings to mind the Hitchcock dichotomy. This is from Inglorious Basterds (sorry for the spelling), and more particularly the tavern scene.
The sequence/chapter dealing with the rendezvous at an isolated tavern might offer greater insight why the rest of Inglorious Basterds fails so miserably when viewed against the opening scene. I often think the tavern-sequence is a blunder. I say blunder because Mr. Tarantino, the supreme film scholar he is, overlooks his own belief. The scene contains a major surprise in the shape of a Gestapo officer, yet he is a shock, not a suspense. The scene, for a good part of its length, meanders, and we audiences are clueless. Only if Mr. Tarantino had made known to us this variable sitting behind in the darkness, we would have felt the underlying tension. I wonder how Mr. Tarantino missed this trick. It baffles me.
See, an establishing shot, right at the outset, would’ve revealed the Gestapo coming into the tavern, and placing himself where he eventually sits. Now consider the information we have –
(i) We already have the knowledge of his presence.
(ii) We already know he is one of those menacing ones, since we have the knowledge of his behavior when he picked up Shoshanna for the meeting with Goebbels.
(iii) We know, since Mr. Fassbender’s character says so, that Hammersmark picked up the tavern as a rendezvous point because it wouldn’t have no Germans.
(iv) As soon as Mr. Fassbender’s character claims so, we cut to Germans, but drunken Germans. And we do not feel that they pose any sort of danger, because their very appearance betrays a sense of submissiveness. I would even back up that appearance with Hammersmark’s audacity to discuss the plan on the very next table and under their very noses. So the drunken Germans are established as dumb.
Now, with the knowledge of the Gestapo officer, we would be tensed by the ignorance of the allies. We would want them not to speak loudly, and be careful, and not be complacent that they’re dealing with only a bunch of stupid drunken Germans. That ignorant complacence on their part is what we, as audiences, would so desperately want to convey to them. I think that would have involved us even more, and that is what in essence is tension.
The thing is, how well has Mr. Tarantino used the Gestapo guy, after establishing him in the previous chapter involving the Goebbels luncheon?
I wish to know the instincts of the filmmaker inside you, and other readers, and if you were the editor, how would you have manipulated the audience.
I think the first appearance of Hellstrom is supposed to be more funny than anything else (at least, I laughed in delight when I first saw him). The scene is about tension escalating slowly: drunken soldiers -> Willy won't leave them alone -> Willy questions Fassbender's accent -> Hellstrom appears -> Hellstrom questions Fassbender's accent -> Hellstrom won't leave them alone, etc, etc. Showing Hellstrom before Tarantino did wouldn't have been a bad decision, but I don't think it would've been necessary; it would've added more tension than the scene really needed at that point.
I know it's probably a passion, but, I think when you see any movie you kind of have to check your inner filmmaker at the door and idulge the director's. I don't mean don't ask questions or anything like that, but, well...I could watch "NCFOM" and spend the whole time thinking about how I would've done it, but, it'd distract me from how well the Coens did it. You know? Although, if a movie's not working for you I guess there's nothing else you can do.
I thought the ironwork signified both a minaret and a gunsight. Though Kathleen is right about the function of its initial ambiguity. Satish Naidu's dissent is well said, perceptive, and in my opinion unconvincing.
It's funny, when I first saw THL, my big takeaway was "How great to see a thriller that *doesn't* use snatch'n'grab!" I was really struck by how classical the compositions and cutting were, with each shot held long enough to absorb, camera movements mostly graceful, and framing deliberate. When I saw it a second time, I registered a lot more shakycam and quick cutting than I'd noticed the first time around, but I find it notable that my first impression was of a style closer to The French Connection than The Bourne Identity.
To sum up:
1) The Hurt Locker is basically a 2 hour long MTV music video. Every single shake, zoom, shake, zoom of the camera screams look at me! I'm a director! I'm directing a movie! I'd rather give the camera to a 6 year old and see what interesting bugs they film. It made the movie unwatchable, it was stupid, banal hackery, and it deserves no recognition.
2) Katherine Bigelow got the Oscar because she's a woman.
3) Katherine Bigelowe got the Oscar more specifically because she is James Cameron's ex-wife.
The movie could have been good with a different director. But really, an academy that gives Sandra Bullock an Oscar over Meryl Streep, it should be pretty obvious how mindlessly political their decision making process is.
I think you're way, way off. I don't remember an instant in "The Hurt Locker" when I saw the director bragging or showing off, I thought the movie was totally ground-level with the characters. The jerkiness is supposed to be nerve-wracking. Even if it was "banal hackery" the performances would be enough to give it more substance than an MTV music video. My advice would be, watch it again, with your prejudices turned down.
Bigelow won the Oscar because she was the one who was gonna win an Oscar this year. Who cares?
Anyone calling Kathryn Bigelow a hack has never seen a Kathryn Bigelow movie.
The funny thing about this blog entry is that the first image you posted is exactly the kind of shot we see so often in these dumb 3-D movies, which put something completely random in the immediate foreground simply to show depth - that "third dimension"!
Jim,
Is there any chance that you can PLEASE incorporate Michael Mann in some of these discussions of "snatch 'n grab" filmmaking? Here's why:
Bigelow is probably the best of the Greengrass-Bay "snatch 'n grab" style of editing, i.e., they use quick cutting, video/grainy filmstock to create something they hope is gritty and realistic.
Mann, on the other hand, despite all the research he does and how he trains his actors for months how to be cops and crooks, uses the "snatch 'n grab" in "Public Enemies," "Miami Vice," etc., to actually LESSEN the realism. Except for a few gunfights, I find his use of "snatch 'n grab" makes his films dreamlike and unreal.
There's your essay prompt, now write!
Has anyone considered that Bigelow is actually delivering this "bang" where it's not needed?
It sure works as a thriller. It has technical finesse, Renner is great, editing is superb and it should have won the Cinematography Oscar. One actually feels the heat, the oppressiveness of the weather.
But while I hate the preachy, oh-so-liberal Hollywood outings like Body of Lies, Rendition etc., I found this film to be as confused, hollow and facile as the others. It is more dubious than ambiguous. It is asking us, the viewers to be thrilled and experience the war as a drug. If this film were from the point of view of the Iraqis than it would have been regarded as simplistic and judgmental. An absence of point if view does not mean that a film has become complex.
For me, this is only a much better made version of Rambo, where all the "others" either lurk in the background and are cardboard cutouts. If they are not busy killing the U.S. soldiers than they occupy their empty hours by blowing themselves up and creating bombs out of murdered children.
Plus, the way the soldiers are represented it reminded me of the way poverty was shown in "Slumdog Millionaire." Completely apolitical as if this violence exists in a vacuum. As if it appeared on earth long before man made borders and felt the need for an army. Like the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey".
Bigelow, like Tarantino, is an intuitive director but not an intelligent one.
I understand what's being discussed here is more technical and I am probably polluting this discussion with the political. But this is a war film, somewhere it has to take a stand.
BTW, this is one of the best blogs I have ever come across. All the detractors of internet film criticism just need to be directed here (and the various amazing links it provides) to prove that film criticism is not dead but thriving on our computer screens.
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