Style and Technique in the Cinema

-random thoughts on cinema

Technique:

-how does the story unfold technically?

-“technique” refers to what we might refer to as “discourse”

-story and discourse

-story is the set of actions that constitute a narrative. The story is the basic set of actions carried out by a set of characters or actants.

-story may be narrated in many ways, the most obvious being “linear”: beginning, middle and end.

-but think of a film such as Christopher Nolan’s MEMENTO (2000).

This film tells its story backwards. The plot unfolds in a linear fashion, but in reverse beginning with the end of the story and proceeding to the end, which is the beginning.

-this brings us to discourse: how the story is presented.

-stories may be linear or non-linear. A good example of a non-linear presentation of story is Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994).

-various shifts in plot can interrupt a linear telling: e.g. flashback (analepsis), flash forward (prolepsis), dream sequences, fragmented sequences (various characters with differing stories as in CITIZEN KANE orRASHOMON, 1950).

-discourse in cinema refers to more than the manner of setting out the plot: it also includes such things as camera position and composition (mise en scene), camera movement, cutting, casting and acting, lighting, sound, long takes/short takes.

Camera Position and Composition

-where the camera is positioned relative to what we see. Close to the action, politely distant from the action, removed from the action

-looking up at the people and place, looking down on the action and place, or looking directly at the action and place on a normal eye level.

-how are things arranged in the frame? Like painting, the cinema frames its images. It offers us a semiotic field. Our eye finds direction in what we see. In other words, the composition directs our sense of what is important within the frame. (An obvious feature here is the use or non-use of deep focus.)

Camera Movement

-does the camera track the action or does it simply record in a stationary position?

-does the camera pan horizontally or vertically, from a dolly or from a track?

-does the camera track from a hand-held camera or from a helicopter?

-is camera movement fluid or erratic?

-the wipe and the iris.

-how does the camera record the speed of the action? Slow motion, fast motion.

-the tracking shot from Welles’s A Touch of Evil (1958)

-or any film by Robert Altman. Altman's camera prowls and scans and investigates and examines. It rarely remains stationary.

Cutting

-shot and scene: the shot is the specific picture we see at any moment as the film moves in front of us (the picture may be static or in motion); the scene is the collection of shots that form one sequence of action (a fight scene, for example, may be comprised of many shots. Check out Welles’s Chimes at Midnight).

-the close-up shot – from The Searchers (1956)

-left on the cutting room floor. Remember Kevin Costner and The Big Chill (1983).

-shooting out of synch, and then piecing the picture together – sort of like a jigsaw puzzle that you can create as you go along.

-classic cutting is unobtrusive, cutting away from a shot only after the business of that shot is over. In classic cutting, we see the action as “normally” as possible. Hollywood cinema from the 30s through the 60s most often used this type of cutting. In the wake of certain television shows and MTV, a different kind of cutting has taken prominence.

-quick cutting or montage may take more than one form, but essentially it involves cutting pieces of film into each other in a way that draws attention to the cutting itself. This type of cutting can be frenetic, as in many music videos.

-montage in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Casting and Acting

-casting has a degree of serendipity to it, but since the beginning of cinema, casting has been connected with celebrity. We sometimes speak of a film as an actor’s film (e.g. a Clint Eastwood film or a Bette Davis film, etc). The connection between the actor and the character is often intimate – Angelina Jolie is Lara Croft! That really is Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible films. Some times an actor will play a character with the same name – hasn’t Jackie Chan done this? Or what about Being John Malkovich?

Often a film will cast against type – e.g. Collateral Damage with Tom Cruise or Once Upon a Time in the West with Henry Fonda. The force of the character comes from our knowledge and expectations of the actor.

-acting can take several forms from over-acting to method acting or inept acting to classical acting to silent acting. And sometimes, the camera does the acting.

Lighting

-the most obvious aspect of lighting comes in the difference between black and white filming and colour filming.

-neither black and white nor colour is one-dimensional. Lighting can make much difference in the black and white effect (see The Big Combo and Blonde Venus). As for colour, various colour effects are possible through the use of lighting and film stock. A film can accentuate one colour and de-accentuate others. The texture of the colour can change.

Sound

-silence, music, natural sound, voices.

Long takes/Short takes

Sample film: Tod Browning’s The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)

Style

-now what about style?

-style derives from the manner in which a film uses technique. We might associate style with various components of a film: the director, the cinematographer, the actors, even the designers (see the work of William Cameron Menzies, for example – Things to Come 1936, The Maze 1953, Invaders from Mars 1954, and even Gone with the Wind 1939).

-director: often, perhaps most often, we think of style in film as the product of a director’s vision. Wes Anderson or Quentin Taratino have discernible styles that include such things as sensibility (difficult to define, but not impossible), use of colour, kinds of characters and stories (Howard Hawks worked in just about every genre, and yet he consistently shows an interest in similar types of men and women), use of camera (Robert Altman is noted for his almost continuously moving camera), use of sound and so on.

-cinematographer: the person who does the photographing can have an impact on the style of a film. John Alton who photographed The Big Combo can make a routine film special with his stylish lighting. Gregg Toland brings similar stylish flourishes to Citizen Kane. William Clothier has made many a mediocre film worth watching.

-actors: obviously actors can bring style to a film. We have distinctive actors such as Johnny Depp, Carrie Anne Moss, Kevin Spacey, Renee Zellwegger or Humphrey Bogart, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford (alas!), Clark Gable who may or may not be fine actors, but who have something that lights up a screen. We also have the likes of Meryl Streep or Marlon Brando who can carry a film with the force of acting, a force that crosses over into style.

-style is what separates a film that is familiar in its use of conventions (amounting to cliché) from one that is unique.