Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film, 3rd Edition [3rd edition] 0393932796, 9780393932799
Since their invention a little more than a hundred years ago, movies have become one of the world’s largest industries a...
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THIRD EDITION

LOOKING AT

MOVIES

THIRD EDITION

LOOKING AT

W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By mid-century, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college, and professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees. Copyright © 2010, 2007, 2004 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Since this page cannot accommodate all the copyright notices, the Permissions Acknowledgments section beginning on page 559 constitutes an extension of the copyright page. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Third Edition Editor: Peter Simon Senior Project Editor: Thomas Foley Senior Production Manager: Benjamin Reynolds Developmental/Manuscript Editor: Carol Flechner Electronic Media Editor: Eileen Connell Managing Editor, College: Marian Johnson Assistant Editor: Conor Sullivan Book design: Lissi Sigillo Index by Cohen Carruth, Inc. Developmental Editor for the First Edition: Kurt Wildermuth Authors’ photograph: Joshua Curry Cover design: Leo Hageman

The text of this book is composed in Benton Modern Two, with the display set in Interstate Bold Composition by TexTech International. Digital art file manipulation by Jay’s Publishers Services. Drawn art by ElectraGraphics, Inc. Manufacturing by the Courier Companies—Kendallville, IN. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barsam, Richard Meran. Looking at movies : an introduction to film / Richard Barsam and Dave Monahan.—3rd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-393-93279-9 (pbk.) 1. Motion pictures. 2. PN1994.B313 2009 791.43—dc22

Cinematography. I.

Monahan, Dave, 1962– II.

Title.

2009033758 ISBN 978-0-393-11652-6 (ebook) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT 1234567890

MOVIES AN INTRODUCTION TO FILM R I C H A R D B A R S A M & D AV E M O N A H A N

B

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK • LONDON

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About the Authors

RICHARD BARSAM (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. He is the author of Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (rev. and exp. ed., 1992), The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker (1988), In the Dark: A Primer for the Movies (1977), and Filmguide to “Triumph of the Will” (1975); editor of Nonfiction Film: Theory and Criticism (1976); and contributing author to Paul Monaco’s The Sixties: 1960–1969 (Vol. 8 in the History of the American Cinema series, 2001) and Filming Robert Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story”: The Helen Van Dongen Diary (ed. Eva Orbanz, 1998). His articles and book reviews have appeared in Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Film Comment, Studies in Visual Communication, and Harper’s. He has been a member of the Executive Council of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Editorial Board of Cinema Journal, and he cofounded the journal Persistence of Vision. DAVE MONAHAN (M.F.A., Columbia University) is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work as a writer, director, or editor includes Ringo (2005); Monkey Junction (2005); Prime Time (1996); and Angels Watching over Me (1993). His work has been screened internationally in over fifty film festivals and has earned numerous awards, including the New Line Cinema Award for Most Original Film (Prime Time) and the Seattle International Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Best Animated Short Film (Ringo).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

v

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Contents To Students xiii About the Book xv Acknowledgments xix

CHAPTER 2 Principles of Film

Form

27

Learning Objectives 28

CHAPTER 1 Looking at Movies 1 Learning Objectives 2

Looking at Movies What Is a Movie?

28

Form and Content

28

Form and Expectations

2

Patterns

3

Ways of Looking at Movies

Film Form

5

Invisibility and Cinematic Language 7 Cultural Invisibility 9 Implicit and Explicit Meaning 11 Viewer Expectations 13 Formal Analysis 14 Alternative Approaches to Analysis 20

33

35

Fundamentals of Film Form

39

Movies Depend on Light 39 Movies Provide an Illusion of Movement 42 Movies Manipulate Space and Time in Unique Ways 44

Realism and Antirealism

50

Verisimilitude 52

Analyzing Movies 23

Cinematic Language

Screening Checklist: Looking at Movies 23

Analyzing Movies 56

Questions for Review 24

Screening Checklist: Principles of Film Form 56

Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 24

Questions for Review 57

53

Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 57

CONTENTS

vii

CHAPTER 3 Types of Movies 59

CHAPTER 4 Elements of

Learning Objectives 60

Narrative

The Idea of Narrative Types of Movies

Learning Objectives 114

60

What Is Narrative?

64

Narrative Movies 64 Documentary Movies 65 Experimental Movies 70

Hybrid Movies Genre

The Screenwriter

114 115

Evolution of a Typical Screenplay 116

Elements of Narrative

76

78

Theme 81 Setting 82 Presentation 82 Character Types 83 Story Formulas 83 Stars 83

Six Major American Genres

119

Story and Plot 120 Order 125 Events 127 Duration 128 Suspense versus Surprise 132 Repetition 133 Characters 134 Setting 138 Scope 139 Narration and Narrators 140

Genre Conventions 81

83

Gangster 83 Film Noir 86 Science Fiction 89 Horror 92 The Western 95 The Musical 98

Looking at Narrative: John Ford’s Stagecoach 142

Evolution and Transformation of Genre What about Animation?

113

101

103

Analyzing Types of Movies 108 Screening Checklist: Types of Movies 108 Questions for Review 109 Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 109

Story 142 Plot 144 Order 144 Diegetic and Nondiegetic Elements 144 Events 144 Duration 147 Suspense 147 Repetition 147 Characters 147 Setting 147 Scope 149 Narration 149 Analyzing Elements of Narrative 151 Screening Checklist: Elements of Narrative 151 Questions for Review 151 Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 152

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 5 Mise-en-Scène 155

CHAPTER 6 Cinematography 207

Learning Objectives 156

Learning Objectives 208

What Is Mise-en-Scène? Design

156

208

The Director of Photography

161

The Production Designer 162 Elements of Design 164

International Styles of Design 175 182

Framing: What We See on the Screen 183 Onscreen and Offscreen Space 184 Open and Closed Framing 185

Kinesis: What Moves on the Screen 191 Movement of Figures within the Frame 192

Looking at Mise-en-Scène

208

Cinematographic Properties of the Shot

Setting, Decor, and Properties 164 Lighting 167 Costume, Makeup, and Hairstyle 169

Composition

What Is Cinematography?

194

Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow 194 Sam Mendes’s American Beauty 198 Analyzing Mise-en-Scène 204 Screening Checklist: Mise-en-Scène 204 Questions for Review 205 Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 205

210

Film Stock 210 Black and White 213 Color 215

Lighting 218 Source 219 Quality 220 Direction 220 Style 224

Lenses 226

Framing of the Shot

229

Implied Proximity to the Camera 232 Depth 236 Camera Angle and Height 242 Eye Level 242 High Angle 243 Low Angle 243 Dutch Angle 244 Aerial View 246

Scale 246 Camera Movement 247 Pan Shot 249 Tilt Shot 249 Dolly Shot 249 Zoom 251 Crane Shot 251 Handheld Camera 254 Steadicam 255

Framing and Point of View 256

Speed and Length of the Shot Special Effects

257

261

In-Camera, Mechanical, and Laboratory Effects 261 Computer-Generated Imagery 262

CONTENTS

ix

Analyzing Cinematography 266

Analyzing Acting 317

Screening Checklist: Cinematography 266

Screening Checklist: Acting 317

Questions for Review 267

Questions for Review 317

Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 267

Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 318

CHAPTER 7 Acting 269

CHAPTER 8 Editing 319

Learning Objectives 270

Learning Objectives 320

What Is Acting?

What Is Editing?

270

Movie Actors 271

The Film Editor

The Evolution of Screen Acting

276

Early Screen-Acting Styles 276 D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish 277 The Influence of Sound 278 Acting in the Classical Studio Era 280 Method Acting 283 Screen Acting Today 285 Technology and Acting 289

Casting Actors

291

Aspects of Performance

295

Types of Roles 295 Preparing for Roles 296 Naturalistic and Nonnaturalistic Styles 298 Improvisational Acting 300 Directors and Actors 301

How Filmmaking Affects Acting

303

Framing, Composition, Lighting, and the Long Take 303 The Camera and the Close-up 306 Acting and Editing 308 308

Barbara Stanwyck in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas 311 Hilary Swank in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby 313

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CONTENTS

322

The Editor’s Responsibilities 324 Spatial Relationships between Shots 324 Temporal Relationships between Shots 325 Rhythm 331

Major Approaches to Editing: Continuity and Discontinuity 335 Conventions of Continuity Editing 335 Master Shot 337 Screen Direction 339

Editing Techniques That Maintain Continuity 340

Factors Involved in Casting 291

Looking at Acting

320

Shot/Reverse Shot 340 Match Cuts 341 Parallel Editing 344 Point-of-View Editing 347

Other Transitions between Shots 347 The Jump Cut 347 Fade 350 Dissolve 351 Wipe 351 Iris Shot 351 Freeze-Frame 352 Split Screen 354

Looking at Editing 355 Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s City of God 359 Analyzing Editing 364 Screening Checklist: Editing 364 Questions for Review 365 Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 365

Characterization 404 Themes 406 Analyzing Sound 407 Screening Checklist: Sound 407 Questions for Review 407 Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 408

CHAPTER 9 Sound 367 Learning Objectives 368

What Is Sound?

368

Sound Production

369

Design 370 Recording 371 Editing 371 Mixing 372

CHAPTER 10 Film History 411

Describing Film Sound

Learning Objectives 412

373

What Is Film History?

Pitch, Loudness, Quality 373 Fidelity 374

Sources of Film Sound

Basic Approaches to Studying Film History 413

375

The Aesthetic Approach 413 The Technological Approach 414 The Economic Approach 414 Film as Social History 414

Diegetic versus Nondiegetic 375 Onscreen versus Offscreen 377 Internal versus External 378

Types of Film Sound

379

Vocal Sounds 379 Environmental Sounds 381 Music 383 Silence 388 Types of Sound in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds 389

Functions of Film Sound

393

Audience Awareness 394 Audience Expectations 395 Expression of Point of View 396 Rhythm 397 Characterization 399 Continuity 399 Emphasis 400

Sound in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane Sources and Types 402 Functions 403

412

401

A Short Overview of Film History

415

Precinema 415 Photography 415 Series Photography 416

1891–1903: The First Movies 417 1908–1927: Origins of the Classical Hollywood Style— the Silent Period 421 1919–1931: German Expressionism 423 1918–1930: French Avant-Garde Filmmaking 426 1924–1930: The Soviet Montage Movement 427 1927–1947: Classical Hollywood Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age 430 1942–1951: Italian Neorealism 434 1959–1964: French New Wave 437

1947–Present: New Cinemas in Great Britain, Europe, and Asia 440 England and the Free Cinema Movement 441 Denmark and the Dogme 95 Movement 442 Germany and Das neue Kino 443

CONTENTS

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Japan’s Nubero Bagu 444 China and Postwar Filmmaking 444

Financing in the Industry

481

Marketing and Distribution

The People’s Republic 445 Hong Kong 445 Taiwan 446

483

Production in Hollywood Today

486

Maverick Producers and Directors 489

1965–1995: The New American Cinema

447

Analyzing Film History 453 Screening Checklist: Film History 453 Questions for Review 454 Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 455

Thinking about Filmmaking Technologies and Production Systems 490 Screening Checklist: Filmmaking Technologies and Production Systems 490 Questions for Review 491 Movies Described or Illustrated in This Chapter 492 For Further Viewing 492

Further Viewing

CHAPTER 11 Filmmaking

495

Academy Award Winners for Best Picture 495 Sight & Sound: Top Ten Best Movies of All Time 498 American Film Institute: One Hundred Greatest American Movies of All Time 499 Entertainment Weekly: One Hundred Greatest Movies of All Time 502 The Village Voice: One Hundred Best Films of the Twentieth Century 505

Technologies and Production Systems 459

Further Reading

Learning Objectives 460

Permissions Acknowledgments

The Whole Equation

460

Index

Film, Video, and Digital Technologies: An Overview 462 Film Technology 462 Video Technology 465 Digital Technology 465 Film versus Digital Technology 466

How a Movie Is Made

467

Preproduction 467 Production 469 Postproduction 470

The Studio System

471

Organization before 1931 471 Organization after 1931 471 Organization during the Golden Age 473 The Decline of the Studio System 476

The Independent System

477

Labor and Unions 479 Professional Organizations and Standardization 480

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CONTENTS

Glossary 567

509

543 561

To Students In 1936, art historian Erwin Panofsky had an insight into the movies as a form of popular art—an observation that is more true today than it was when he wrote it: If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies the social consequences would be catastrophic.1

Decades later, we would hardly know what to do without movies. They are a major presence in our lives and, like personal computers, perhaps one of the most influential products of our technological age. In fact, some commentators feel that movies are too popular, too influential, too much a part of our lives. Since their invention a little more than a hundred years ago, movies have become one of the world’s largest industries and the most powerful art form of our time. A source of entertainment that makes us see beyond the borders of our previous experience, movies have always possessed powers to amaze, frighten, and enlighten us. They challenge our senses, emotions, and intellect, pushing us to say, often passionately, that we love (or hate) them. Because they arouse our most public and private feelings—and can overwhelm us with their sights and sounds—it’s easy to be excited by movies. The challenge is to join that enthusiasm with understanding, to say why we feel so strongly about particular movies. That’s one reason why this book

encourages you to go beyond movies’ stories, to understand how those stories are told. Movies are not reality, after all—only illusions of reality—and (as with most works of art) their form and content work as an interrelated system, one that asks us to accept it as a given rather than as the product of a process. But as you read this book devoted to looking at movies—that is, not just passively watching them, but actively considering the relation of their form and their content—remember that there is no one way to look at any film, no one critical perspective that is inherently better than another, no one meaning that you can insist on after a single screening. Indeed, movies are so diverse in their nature that no single approach could ever do them justice. This is not a book on film history, but it includes relevant historical information and covers a broad range of movies; not a book on theory, but it introduces some of the most essential approaches to interpreting movies; not a book about filmmaking, but one that explains production processes, equipment, and techniques; not a book of criticism, but one that shows you how to think and write about the films you study in your classes. Everything we see on the movie screen—everything that engages our senses, emotions, and minds—results from hundreds of decisions affecting the interrelation of formal cinematic elements: narrative, composition, design, cinematography, acting, editing, and sound. Organized around chapters devoted to those formal elements, this book encourages you to look at movies with an understanding and appreciation of how filmmakers make the decisions that help them tell a story and create

Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 280. 1

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the foundation for its meaning. After all, in the real life of the movies, on the screen, it is not historians, theorists, or critics—important and valuable as their work is—but filmmakers who continually shape and revise our understanding and appreciation of film art. The second century of movie history is well under way. The entire process of making, exhibiting, and archiving movies is fast becoming a digital

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TO STUDENTS

enterprise, especially outside of the mainstream industry. As the technology for making movies continues to evolve, however, the principles of film art covered in this book remain essentially the same. The things you learn about these principles and the analytic skills you hone as you read this book will help you look at motion pictures intelligently and perceptively throughout your life, no matter which medium delivers those pictures to you.

About the Book Students in an introductory film course who read Looking at Movies carefully and take full advantage of the accompanying DVD and other support materials surrounding the text will finish the course with a solid grounding in the major principles of film form as well as a more perceptive and analytic eye. A short description of the book’s main features follows.

A Comprehensive Overview of Film Recognized from its first publication as an accessible introduction to film form, Looking at Movies has expanded its coverage of other key topics in its Third Edition to be as comprehensive as possible, too. Three new and significantly revised chapters tackle important subject areas—film genres, film history, and the relationship(s) between film and culture—in an extensive but characteristically accessible way, thus rounding out the book’s coverage of the major subject areas in film studies.

New Chapter 1, “Looking at Movies” Focusing on the formal and cultural “invisibility” at play in film, this entirely new chapter strives to open students’ eyes to the machinations of film form and encourages them to be aware of the unspoken cultural assumptions that inform both the filmmakers’ work and their own viewing. A sustained, jargon-free analysis of Jason Reitman’s Juno (2007) anchors the chapter and points students immediately toward the goal of acquiring the single most important skill in the study of film: an analytical eye.

New Chapter 3, “Types of Movies” This chapter, built from the previous edition and from entirely new material, significantly expands Looking at Movies coverage of documentary, experimental, and animated films, and offers an entirely new, twenty-five-page introduction to film genre that helps students see why and how genre is such an important force in film production and film consumption. Six major American film genres—the gangster film, film noir, the science-fiction film, the horror film, the Western, and the musical—are discussed in depth.

New Chapter 10, “Film History” This new chapter provides a brisk but substantial overview of major milestones in film history, focusing on the most important and influential movements and filmmakers.

A Focus on Analytic Skills A good introductory film book needs to help students make the transition from the natural enjoyment of movies to a critical understanding of the form, content, and meaning(s) of movies. Looking at Movies accomplishes this task in several different ways:

Model Analyses Hundreds of illustrative examples and analytic readings of films throughout the book provide students with concrete models for their own analytic work. The sustained analysis of Juno—a film that many undergraduates will have seen and enjoyed but perhaps not viewed with a critical eye—in

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Chapter 1 discusses not only its formal structures and techniques, but also its social and cultural meanings. This analysis offers students an accessible and jargon-free introduction to most of the major themes and goals of the introductory film course, and it shows them that looking at movies analytically can start immediately—even before they learn the specialized vocabulary of academic film study.

DVD Tutorials Disc 1 of the Looking at Movies DVD offers 25 separate “tutorials”—written directed, and hosted by the authors—that complement and expand upon the book’s analyses. Ranging from 1 minute to 15 minutes in length, these tutorials show students what the book can only describe, and they further develop students’ analytical skills.

“Screening Checklists” Each chapter ends with an “Analyzing” section that includes a “Screening Checklist” feature. This series of leading questions prompts students to apply what they’ve learned in the chapter to their own critical viewing, in class or at home. Printable versions of these checklists are available on the Looking at Movies website, at www.wwnorton.com/ movies.

“Writing about Movies” Written by Karen Gocsik (Executive Director of the Writing & Rhetoric Program at Dartmouth College) and Richard Barsam, “Writing about Movies” is a clear and practical overview of the process of writing papers for film-studies courses. This supplement is packaged free of charge with every new copy of Looking at Movies and is also available on the Looking at Movies Web site, www.wwnorton.com/movies.

The Most Visually Dynamic Text Available Looking at Movies was written with one goal in mind: to prepare students for a lifetime of intelligent and perceptive viewing of motion pictures.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

In recognition of the central role played by visuals in the film-studies classroom, Looking at Movies includes an illustration program that is both visually appealing and pedagogically focused, as well as accompanying moving-image media that are second to none.

Hundreds of In-Text Illustrations The text is accompanied by over 700 illustrations in color and in black and white. Nearly all the still pictures were captured from digital or analog sources, thus ensuring that the images directly reflect the textual discussions and the films from which they’re taken. Unlike publicity stills, which are attractive as photographs but less useful as teaching aids, the captured stills throughout this book provide visual information that will help students learn as they read and—because they are reproduced in the aspect ratio of the original source—will serve as accurate reference points for students’ analysis.

Five Hours of Moving-Image Media The two DVDs that are packaged with every new copy of Looking at Movies offer 5 hours of two different types of content:

> On disc 1 are the 25 tutorials described above. These DVD tutorials were specifically created to complement Looking at Movies, and they are exclusive to this text. The tutorials guide students’ eyes to see what the text describes, and because they are presented in full-screen format, they are suitable for presentation in class as “lecture launchers” as well as for students’ self-study. > On disc 2, we offer a mini-anthology of 12 complete short films, ranging from 5 to 30 minutes in length. These short films are accomplished and entertaining examples of the form, as well as useful material for short in-class activities or for students’ analysis. Most of the films are also accompanied by optional audio commentary from the filmmakers. This commentary was recorded specifically for Looking at Movies and is exclusive to this text.

Accessible Presentation; Effective Pedagogy Building on its reputation as the clearest and most accessible introductory film text available, Looking at Movies, Third Edition, has been revised to be even clearer and more direct in its presentation of key concepts than its previous editions. The first three chapters of the book—“Looking at Movies,” “Principles of Film Form,” and “Types of Movies”— new to the Third Edition, provide a comprehensive yet truly “introductory” overview of the major topics and themes of any film course, giving students a solid grounding in the basics before they move on to study those topics in greater depth. Having proven popular with students and teachers who used the Second Edition, the pedagogical features introduced in that edition have been retained. The following sections describe the highlights of the text’s pedagogy.

> More than 250 quiz questions test students’ retention of core concepts.

> Printable versions of the end-of-chapter screening checklists allow students to take notes during screenings. > The entire “Writing about Movies” supplement is available in convenient searchable and downloadable PDF format. > The full text of the glossary is available online for easy reference.

ebook

Learning Objectives

An ebook version of Looking at Movies is also available, offering students an alternative to the printed text that is less expensive and that offers features—such as animated frame sequences of select illustrations—that are unique to the ebook. Students buying the ebook also receive the two supplementary DVDs. Visit www.nortonebooks.com for more information.

A checklist at the beginning of every chapter provides students with a brief summary of the core concepts to be covered in the chapter.

Ancillaries for Instructors

Extensive Captions

Instructor Resource Disc

As in previous editions, each illustration in Looking at Movies, Third Edition, is accompanied by a caption that elaborates on a key concept or that guides students to look at elements of the film more analytically. These captions expand on the in-text presentation and reinforce students’ retention of key concepts.

Questions for Review “Questions for Review” at the end of each chapter test students’ knowledge of the concepts first mentioned in the “Learning Objectives” section at the beginning of the chapter.

Chapter-by-Chapter Pedagogical Materials on the Web (www.wwnorton.com/movies)

> Chapter overviews provide a short prose summary of each chapter’s main ideas. > The “Learning Objectives” section reviews core concepts for each chapter.

For each chapter in the book, there are over 50 lecture PowerPoint slides that incorporate art from the book and concept quizzes; the Instructor Resource Disc also includes a separate set of art and figures from the book in PowerPoint and JPEG formats.

Test Bank Available in Microsoft Word–, ExamView-, Blackboard-, and WebCT-compatible formats, the test bank for Looking at Movies offers nearly 500 multiple-choice questions.

WebCT and Blackboard Coursepacks These ready-to-use, free coursepacks offer chapter overviews and learning objectives, quiz questions, streaming video of the DVD tutorials, questions on the DVD tutorials and short films, the test bank, and more.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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DVD Questions Suitable for classroom discussion or for evaluation purposes, these 130 questions guide students’ analysis of the short film clips and help them to understand the concepts described in the tutorials.

Norton Instructor Resources Site The test bank, a brief instructor’s guide to the DVDs, course Packs, and a sample syllabus are among the resources available at the online Norton Instructor Resources Site: wwnorton.com/instructors.

A Note about Textual Conventions Boldface type is used to highlight terms that are defined in the glossary at the point where they are

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ABOUT THE BOOK

introduced in the text. Italics are used occasionally for emphasis. References to movies in the text include the year the movie was released and the director’s name. Members of the crew who are particularly important to the main topic of the chapter are also identified. For example, in Chapter 6, on cinematography, a reference to The Matrix might look like this: Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999; cinematographer: Bill Pope). The movie lists provided at the end of each chapter identify films that are used as illustrations of examples in the chapter. In each case, only the movie title, year, and director are included. Other relevant information about the films listed can be found in the chapter itself.

Acknowledgments Writing a book seems very much at times like the collaborative effort involved in making a movie. In writing this Third Edition of Looking at Movies, we are grateful to our excellent partners at W. W. Norton & Company. Chief among them is our editor Pete Simon, who guided us through the planning, compromise, and preparation that resulted in this revised, expanded edition. Other collaborators at Norton were Carol Flechner, developmental/manuscript editor; Thomas Foley, senior project editor; Marian Johnson, managing editor; Benjamin Reynolds, senior production manager; Eileen Connell, e-media editor; Jack Lamb, media designer; Katie Hannah and Spencer Richardson-Jones, marketers; and Conor Sullivan, assistant editor. It has been a pleasure to work with such a responsive, creative, and supportive team, and we believe that our collective efforts have resulted in a much stronger book. Richard Barsam thanks the friends and colleagues who contributed suggestions for this edition, including Luis-Antonio Bocchi, Richard Koss, Vinny LoBrutto, and Renato Tonelli. In particular, I am delighted that Dave Monahan, with whom I worked closely on the First and Second Editions, has now brought his perspective as a teacher and filmmaker to his new role as a coauthor. For this edition, he reworked several chapters and, for the DVDs, created new tutorials and coordinated the selection of the short films. He is tireless in his energies, inventive in his approach to solving problems, and always frank in his opinions—in short, a perfect collaborator. Finally, I am grateful to Edgar Munhall for his interest, patience, and companionship. Dave Monahan would like to thank the faculty and students of the Film Studies Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. My

colleagues James Kreul, Mariana Johnson, Shannon Silva, Andre Silva, Tim Palmer, Todd Berliner, Chip Hackler, Lou Buttino, Glenn Pack, and Sue Richardson contributed a great deal of expertise and advice. In addition, many film-studies students contributed to the new and revised DVD materials by working on film crews, reviewing and rating short-film submissions, assembling filmmaker commentaries, and scouring movies for new examples and illustrations. Students Leo Hageman, Felix Trolldenier, and Brandon Smith deserve special thanks. Leo and Felix created the animation and graphic-design elements featured in the revised tutorials; Brandon did everything from assisting with film editing to building a homemade teleprompter. I’d also like to thank my wife, Julie, and daughters, Iris and Elsa, for their patience, support, and encouragement. Most importantly, I would like to thank my friend and mentor Richard Barsam for inviting me to be his writing partner. He’s an insightful teacher and a generous collaborator. My contributions to this edition are a product of his guidance and inspiration.

Reviewers We would like to join the publisher in thanking all of the professors and students who provided valuable guidance as we planned this revision. Looking at Movies is as much their book as ours, and we are grateful to both students and faculty who have cared enough about this text to offer a hand in making it better. The following colleagues provided extensive reviews of the Second Edition and many ideas for improving the book in its Third Edition: Donna Casella (Minnesota State University), John G.

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Cooper (Eastern Michigan University), Mickey Hall (Volunteer State Community College), Stefan Hall (Defiance College), Jennifer Jenkins (University of Arizona), Robert S. Jones (University of Central Florida), Mildred Lewis (Chapman University), Matthew Sewell (Minnesota State University), Michael Stinson (Santa Barbara City College), and Michael Zryd (York University). The following scholars and teachers responded to a lengthy questionnaire from the publisher several years ago, and their responses have shaped both the Second and Third Editions in countless ways: Rebecca Alvin, Edwin Arnold, Antje Ascheid, Dyrk Ashton, Tony Avruch, Peter Bailey, Scott Baugh, Harry Benshoff, Mark Berrettini, Yifen Beus, Mike Birch, Robin Blaetz, Ellen Bland, Carroll Blue, James Bogan, Karen Budra, Don Bullens, Gerald Burgess, Jeremy Butler, Gary Byrd, Ed Cameron, Jose Cardenas, Jerry Carlson, Diane Carson, Robert Castaldo, Beth Clary, Darcy Cohn, Marie Connelly, Roger Cook, Robert Coscarelli, Bob Cousins, Donna Davidson, Rebecca Dean, Marshall Deutelbaum, Kent DeYoung, Michael DiRaimo, Carol Dole, Dan Dootson, John Ernst, James Fairchild, Adam Fischer, Craig Fischer, Tay Fizdale, Karen Fulton, Christopher Gittings, Barry Goldfarb, Neil Goldstein, Daryl Gonder, Patrick

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Gonder, Cynthia Gottshall, Curtis Green, William Green, Tracy Greene, Michael Griffin, Peter Hadorn, William Hagerty, John Harrigan, Catherine Hastings, Sherri Hill, Glenn Hopp, Tamra Horton, Alan Hutchison, Mike Hypio, Tom Isbell, Delmar Jacobs, Mitchell Jarosz, John Lee Jellicorse, Matthew Judd, Charles Keil, Joyce Kessel, Mark Kessler, Garland Kimmer, Lynn Kirby, David Kranz, James Kreul, Mikael Kreuzriegler, Cory Lash, Leon Lewis, Vincent LoBrutto, Jane Long, John Long, Jay Loughrin, Daniel Machon, Travis Malone, Todd McGowan, Casey McKittrick, Maria MendozaEnright, Andrea Mensch, Sharon Mitchler, Mary Alice Molgard, John Moses, Sheila Nayar, Sarah Nilsen, Ian Olney, Hank Ottinger, Dan Pal, Gary Peterson, Klaus Phillips, Alexander Pitofsky, Lisa Plinski, Leland Poague, Walter Renaud, Patricia Roby, Carole Rodgers, Stuart Rosenberg, Ben Russell, Kevin Sandler, Bennet Schaber, Mike Schoenecke, Hertha Schulze, David Seitz, Timothy Shary, Robert Sheppard, Charles Silet, Eric Smoodin, Ken Stofferahn, Bill Swanson, Molly Swiger, Joe Tarantowski, Susan Tavernetti, Edwin Thompson, Frank Tomasulo, Deborah Tudor, Bill Vincent, Richard Vincent, Ken White, Mark Williams, Deborah Wilson, and Elizabeth Wright. Thank you all.

THIRD EDITION

LOOKING AT

MOVIES

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CH APT ER

ON E

Looking at Movies

Learning Objectives After reading this chapter, you should be able to ✔ appreciate the difference between passively watching movies and actively looking at movies. ✔ understand the defining characteristics that distinguish movies from other forms of art. ✔ understand how and why most of the formal mechanisms of a movie remain invisible to casual viewers. ✔ understand the relationship between viewers’ expectations and filmmakers’ decisions about the form and style of their movies. ✔ explain how shared belief systems contribute to hidden movie meaning. ✔ explain the difference between implicit and explicit meaning, and understand how the different levels of movie meaning contribute to interpretive analysis.

medium. With so much experience, no one could blame you for wondering why you need a course or this book to tell you how to look at movies. After all, you might say, “It’s just a movie.” For most of us most of the time, movies are a break from our daily obligations—a form of escape, entertainment, and pleasure. Motion pictures had been popular for fifty years before even most filmmakers, much less scholars, considered movies worthy of serious study. But motion pictures are much more than entertainment. The movies we see shape the way we view the world around us and our place in that world. What’s more, a close analysis of any particular movie can tell us a great deal about the artist, society, or industry that created it. Surely any art form with that kind of influence and insight is worth understanding on the deepest possible level.

✔ understand the differences between formal analysis and the types of analysis that explore the relationship between culture and the movies. ✔ begin looking at movies more analytically and perceptively.

Looking at Movies In just over a hundred years, movies have evolved into a complex form of artistic representation and communication: they are at once a hugely influential, wildly profitable global industry and a modern art—the most popular art form today. Popular may be an understatement. This art form has permeated our lives in ways that extend far beyond the multiplex. We watch movies on hundreds of cable and satellite channels. We buy movies online or from big-box retailers. We rent movies from video stores, through the mail, even from supermarket vending machines. We TiVo movies, stream movies, and download movies to watch on our televisions, our computers, our iPods, and our cell phones. Unless you were raised by wolves—and possibly even if you were—you have likely devoted thousands of hours to absorbing the motion-picture 2

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Movies shape the way we see the world No other movie featuring a homosexual relationship has earned the level of international critical acclaim and commercial success of Brokeback Mountain (2005). The film, made for a relatively paltry $14 million, grossed $178 million at the box office, eventually becoming the eighth highest-grossing romantic drama in Hollywood history. Academy Awards for Best Director (Ang Lee) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, from a short story by Annie Proulx) were among the many honors and accolades granted the independently produced movie. But even more important, by presenting a gay relationship in the context of the archetypal American West and casting popular leading men (Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal) in starring roles that embodied traditional notions of masculinity, Brokeback Mountain influenced the way many Americans perceived same-sex relationships and gay rights. No movie can singlehandedly change the world, but the accumulative influence of cinema is undeniable.

And there is much more to movies than meets the casual eye . . . or ear, for that matter. Cinema is a subtle—some might even say sneaky—medium. Because most movies seek to engage viewers’ emotions and transport them inside the world presented onscreen, the visual vocabulary of film is designed to play upon those same instincts that we use to navigate and interpret the visual and aural information of our “real life.” This often imperceptible cinematic language, composed not of words but of myriad integrated techniques and concepts, connects us to the story while deliberately concealing the means by which it does so. Yet behind this mask, all movies, even the most blatantly commercial ones, contain layers of complexity and meaning that can be studied, analyzed, and appreciated. This book is devoted to that task—to actively looking at movies rather than just passively watching them. It will teach you to recognize the many tools and principles that filmmakers employ to tell stories, convey information and meaning, and influence our emotions and ideas. Once you learn to speak this cinematic language, you’ll be equipped to understand the movies that pervade our world on multiple levels: as narrative, as artistic expression, and as a reflection of the cultures that produce and consume them.

What Is a Movie? Now that we’ve established what we mean by looking at movies, the next step is to attempt to answer the deceptively simple question What is a movie? As this book will repeatedly illustrate, when it comes to movies, nothing is as straightforward as it appears. Let’s start, for example, with the word movies. If the course that you are taking while reading this book is “Introduction to Film” or “Cinema Studies 101,” does that mean that your course and this book focus on two different things? What’s the difference between a movie and a film? And where does the word cinema fit in? For whatever reason, the designation film is often applied to a motion picture that is considered by critics and scholars to be more serious or challenging than the movies that entertain the masses

at the multiplex. The still loftier designation of cinema seems reserved for groups of films that are considered works of art (e.g., “French cinema”). The truth is, the three terms are essentially interchangeable. Cinema, from the Greek kinesis (“movement”), originates from the name that filmmaking pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière coined for the hall in which they exhibited their invention; film derives from the celluloid strip on which the images that make up motion pictures were originally captured, cut, and projected; movies is simply short for motion pictures. Since we consider all cinema worthy of study, acknowledge that films are increasingly shot on formats other than film stock, and believe motion to be the essence of the movie medium, this book favors the term used in our title. That said, we’ll mix all three terms into these pages (as evidenced in the preceding sentence) for the sake of variety, if nothing else. To most of us, a movie is a popular entertainment, a product produced and marketed by a large commercial studio. Regardless of the subject matter, this movie is pretty to look at—every image is well polished by an army of skilled artists and technicians. The finished product, which is about two hours long, screens initially in movie theaters, is eventually released to DVD, and ultimately winds up on television. This common expectation is certainly understandable; most movies that reach most English-speaking audiences have followed a good part of this model for three-quarters of a century. And almost all of these ubiquitous commercial, feature-length movies share another basic characteristic: narrative. When it comes to categorizing movies, the narrative designation simply means that these movies tell fictional (or at least fictionalized) stories. Of course, if you think of narrative in its broadest sense, every movie that selects and arranges subject matter in a cause-and-effect sequence of events is employing a narrative structure. For all their creative flexibility, movies by their very nature must travel a straight line. A conventional motion picture is essentially one very long strip of film stock. This linear quality makes movies perfectly suited to develop subject matter in a sequential progression. When a medium so WHAT IS A MOVIE?

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Narrative in documentary Just because a film is constructed from footage documenting actual events doesn’t mean it can’t tell a story. Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins (2005) presents the Antarctic emperor penguins’ annual cycle of courtship, breeding, and migration as a compelling and suspenseful narrative.

compatible with narrative is introduced to a culture with an already well-established storytelling tradition, it’s easy to understand how popular cinema came to be dominated by those movies devoted to telling fictional stories. Because these fiction films are so central to most readers’ experience and so vital to the development of cinema as an art form and cultural force, we’ve made narrative movies the focus of this introductory textbook. But keep in mind that commercial, featurelength narrative films represent only a fraction of the expressive potential of this versatile medium. Cinema and narrative are both very flexible concepts. Documentary films strive for objective, observed veracity, of course, but that doesn’t mean they don’t tell stories. For example, the struggle to survive and procreate that is depicted in Luc Jacquet’s nature documentary March of the Penguins (2005) makes for compelling narrative. Even the most abstract experimental film may assemble images in an order that could be thought of as a kind of narrative. While virtually every movie, regardless of category, employs narrative in some form, cultural differences often affect exactly how these stories are presented. Narrative films made in Africa, Asia, and Latin America reflect storytelling traditions very different from the story structure we expect from films produced in North America and Western Europe. The unscripted, 4

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minimalist films by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, for example, often intentionally lack dramatic resolution, inviting viewers to imagine their own ending.1 Sanskrit dramatic traditions have inspired “Bollywood” Indian cinema to feature staging that breaks the illusion of reality favored by Hollywood movies, such as actors that consistently face, and even directly address, the audience.2 Compared to North American and Western European films, Latin American films of the 1960s, like Land in Anguish (Glauber Rocha, 1967, Brazil) or Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968, Cuba), are less concerned with individual character psychology and motivation, instead presenting characters as social types or props in a political allegory.3 The growing influence of these and other even less conventional approaches, combined with emerging technologies that make filmmaking more accessible and affordable, have made possible an ever-expanding range of independent movies created by crews as small as a single filmmaker and shot on any one of a variety of film, video, and digital formats. British director Michael Winterbottom shot his refugee road-movie In This World (2002) on location across Afghanistan and Pakistan with a handheld video camera, a three-person crew, and a cast of nonactors recruited from an Afghan refugee camp. American Jonathan Caouette used consumer-grade home-movie software to arrange snapshots, VHS video diaries, and answeringmachine messages into his harrowing movie memoir Tarnation (2003). In This World and Tarnation managed to garner a small measure of commercial and critical attention. Even further out on the fringes of popular culture, an expanding universe of alternative cinematic creativity continues to flourish. These noncommercial movies innovate styles and aesthetics, can be of any length, and exploit an array of Laura Mulvey, “Kiarostami’s Uncertainty Principle,” Sight and Sound 8, no. 6 (June 1998): 24–27. 2 Philip Lutgendorf, “Is There an Indian Way of Filmmaking?” International Journal of Hindu Studies 10, no. 3 (December 2006): 227–256. 3 Many thanks to Dr. Mariana Johnson of the University of North Carolina Wilmington for some of the ideas in this analysis. 1

Cultural narrative traditions The influence of Sanskrit dramatic traditions on Indian cinema can be seen in the prominence of staging that breaks the illusion of reality favored by Hollywood movies, such as actors that consistently face, and even directly address, the audience. In this image, Dr. Arya (Naseeruddin Shah), the villain of Rakesh Roshan’s Bollywood blockbuster Krrish (2006), interrupts the action to taunt viewers face-to-face with the lies he will tell to conceal his crimes.

exhibition options—from independent theaters to cable television to film festivals to YouTube. For a sample of the kinds of movie being made outside of conventional commercial frameworks, view the short films on disc 2 of the Looking at Movies DVD.

No matter what you call it, no matter the approach, no matter the format, every movie is a motion picture: a series of still images that, when viewed in rapid succession (usually 24 images per second), the human eye and brain see as fluid movement. In other words, movies move. That essential quality is what separates movies from all other two-dimensional pictorial art forms. Each image in every motion picture draws upon basic compositional principles developed by these older cousins (photography, painting, drawing, etc.), including the arrangement of visual elements and the interaction of light and shadow. But unlike photography or painting, films are constructed from individual shots—an unbroken span of action captured by an uninterrupted run of a motion-picture camera—that allow visual elements to rearrange themselves and the viewer’s perspective itself to shift within any composition. And this movie movement extends beyond any single shot, because movies are constructed of multiple individual shots joined to one another in an extended sequence. With each transition from one

shot to another, a movie is able to move the viewer through time and space. This joining together of discrete shots, or editing, gives movies the power to choose what the viewer sees and how that viewer sees it at any given moment. To understand better how movies control what audiences see, we can compare cinema to another, closely related medium: live theater. A stage play, which confines the viewer to a single wide-angle view of the action, might display a group of actors, one of whom holds a small object in her hand. The audience sees every cast member at once and continuously from the same angle and in the same relative size. The object in one performer’s hand is too small to see clearly, even for those few viewers lucky enough to have front-row seats. The playwright, director, and actors have very few practical options to convey the object’s physical properties, much less its narrative significance or its emotional meaning to the character. In contrast, a movie version of the same story can establish the dramatic situation and spatial relationships of its subjects from the same wide-angle viewpoint, then instantaneously jump to a composition isolating the actions of the character holding the object, then cut to a close-up view revealing the object to be a charm bracelet, move up to feature the character’s face as she contemplates the bracelet, then leap thirty years into the past to a depiction of the character as a young girl receiving the jewelry as a gift. Editing’s capacity to isolate details and juxtapose images and sounds within and between shots gives movies an expressive agility impossible in any other dramatic art or visual medium.

Ways of Looking at Movies Every movie is a complex synthesis—a combination of many separate, interrelated elements that form a coherent whole. A quick scan of this book’s table of contents will give you an idea of just how many elements get mixed together to make a movie. Anyone attempting to comprehend a complex synthesis must rely on analysis—the act of taking something complicated apart to figure out what it is made of and how it all fits together. WAYS OF LOOKING AT MOVIES

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3 The expressive agility of movies Even the best seats in the house offer a viewer of a theatrical production like Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street only one unchanging view of the action. The stage provides the audience a single wide-angle view of the scene in which the title character is reintroduced to the set of razors he will use in his bloody quest for revenge [1]. In contrast, cinema’s spatial dexterity allows viewers of Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation to experience the same scene as a sequence of fifty-nine

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6 viewpoints, each of which isolate and emphasize distinct meanings and perspectives, including Sweeney Todd’s (Johnny Depp’s) point of view as he gets his first glimpse of his long-lost tools of the trade [2]; his emotional reaction as he contemplates righteous murder [3]; the razor replacing Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) as the focus of his attention [4]; and a dizzying simulated camera move that starts with the vengeful antihero [5], then pulls back to reveal the morally corrupt city he (and his razors) will soon terrorize [6].

A chemist breaks down a compound substance into its constituent parts to learn more than just a list of ingredients. The goal usually extends to determining how the identified individual components work together toward some sort of outcome: What is it about this particular mixture that makes it taste like strawberries, or grow hair, or kill cockroaches? Likewise, film analysis involves more than breaking down a sequence, a scene, or an entire movie to identify the tools and techniques that comprise it; the investigation is also concerned with the function and potential effect of that combination: Why does it make you laugh, or prompt you to tell your friend to see it, or incite you to join the peace corps? The search for answers to these sorts of questions boils down to one essential inquiry: What does it mean? Unfortunately, or perhaps intriguingly, not all movie meaning is easy to see. As we mentioned earlier, movies have a way of hiding their methods and meaning. So before we dive into specific approaches to analysis, let’s wade a little deeper into this whole notion of hidden, or “invisible,” meaning.

Invisibility and Cinematic Language The moving aspect of moving pictures is one reason for this invisibility. Movies simply move too fast for even the most diligent viewers to consciously consider everything they’ve seen. When we read a book, we can pause to ponder the meaning or significance of any word, sentence, or passage. Our eyes often flit back to review something we’ve already read in order to further comprehend its meaning or to place a new passage in context. Similarly, we can stand and study a painting or sculpture or photograph for as long as we require in order to absorb whatever meaning we need or want from it. But up until very recently, the moviegoer’s relationship with every cinematic composition has been transitory. We experience a movie shot—each of which is capable of delivering multiple layers of visual and auditory information—for the briefest of moments before it is taken away and replaced with another moving image and another and another. If you’re watching a movie the way it’s designed to be experienced, there’s no time to

contemplate any single movie moment’s various potential meanings. Recognizing a spectator’s tendency (especially when sitting in a dark theater, staring at a large screen) to identify subconsciously with the camera’s viewpoint, early filmmaking pioneers created a film grammar (or cinematic language) that draws upon the way we automatically interpret visual information in our “real” lives, thus allowing audiences to absorb movie meaning intuitively . . . and instantly. The fade-out/fade-in is one of the most straightforward examples of this phenomenon. When such a transition is meant to convey a passage of time between scenes, the last shot of a scene grows gradually darker (“fades out”) until the screen is rendered black for a moment. The first shot of the subsequent scene then “fades in” out of the darkness. The viewer doesn’t have to think about what this means; our daily experience of time’s passage marked by the setting and rising of the sun lets us understand intuitively that significant story time has elapsed over that very brief moment of screen darkness. A low-angle shot communicates in a similarly hidden fashion. When, near the end of Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007), we see the title character happily transformed back into a

Cinematic invisibility: low angle When it views a subject from a low camera angle, cinematic language taps our instinctive association of figures who we must literally “look up to” with figurative or literal power. In this case, the penultimate scene in Juno emphasizes the newfound freedom and resultant empowerment felt by the title character by presenting her from a low angle for the first time in the film. WAYS OF LOOKING AT MOVIES

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“normal” teenager, our sense of her newfound empowerment is heightened by the low angle from which this (and the next) shot is captured. Viewers’ shared experience of literally looking up at powerful figures—people on stages, at podiums, memorialized in statues, or simply bigger than them— sparks an automatic interpretation of movie subjects seen from this angle as, depending on context, either strong, noble, or threatening. This is all very well; the immediacy of cinematic language is what makes movies one of the most visceral experiences that art has to offer. The problem is that it also makes it all too easy to take movie meaning for granted. The relatively seamless presentation of visual and narrative information found in most movies can also cloud our search for movie meaning. In order to exploit cinema’s capacity for transporting audiences into the world of the story, the commercial filmmaking process stresses a polished continuity of lighting, performance, costume, makeup, and movement to smooth transitions between shots and scenes, thus minimizing any distractions that might remind viewers that they are watching a highly manipulated, and manipulative, artificial reality. Cutting on action is one of the most common editing techniques designed to hide the instantaneous and potentially jarring shift from one camera viewpoint to another. When connecting one shot to the next, a film editor will often end the first shot in the middle of a continuing action and start the connecting shot at some point further along in the same action. As a result, the action flows so continuously over the cut between different moving images that most viewers fail to register the switch. As with all things cinematic, invisibility has its exceptions. From the earliest days of moviemaking, innovative filmmakers have rebelled against the notion of hidden structures and meaning. The pioneering Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein believed that every edit, far from being invisible, should be very noticeable—a clash or collision of contiguous shots, rather than a seamless transition from one shot to the next. Filmmakers whose work is labeled “experimental”—inspired by 8

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2 Invisible editing: cutting on action in Juno Juno and Leah’s playful wrestling continues over the cut between two shots, smoothing and hiding the instantaneous switch from one camera viewpoint to the next. Overlapping sound and the matching hairstyles, wardrobe, and lighting further obscure the audience’s awareness that these two separate shots were filmed minutes or even hours apart from different camera positions.

Eisenstein and other predecessors—embrace selfreflexive styles that confront and confound conventional notions of continuity. Even some commercial films use techniques that undermine invisibility: in The Limey (1999), for example, Hollywood filmmaker Steven Soderbergh deliberately jumbles spatial and chronological continuity, forcing the spectator to actively scrutinize the cinematic structures on screen in order to assemble, and thus comprehend, the story. But most scenes in most films that most of us watch rely heavily on largely invisible techniques that convey meaning intuitively. That’s not to say that cinematic language is impossible to

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Invisible editing: continuity of screen direction Juno’s opening-credits sequence uses the title character’s continuous walking movement to present the twenty-two different shots that comprise the scene as one continuous

spot; you simply have to know what you’re looking for. And soon, you will. The rest of this book is dedicated to helping you to identify and appreciate each of the many different secret ingredients that movies blend to convey meaning. And, luckily for you, motion pictures have been liberated from the imposed impermanence that helped create all this cinematic invisibility in the first place. Thanks to DVDs, VCRs, and TiVo, you can now watch a movie much the same way you read a book: pausing to scrutinize, ponder, or review as necessary. This relatively new relationship between movies and viewers will surely spark new approaches to cinematic language and attitudes toward invisibility. That’s for future filmmakers, including maybe some of you, to decide. For

action. In every shot featuring lateral movement, Juno strolls consistently toward the left side of the screen, adding continuity of screen direction to the seamless presentation of the otherwise stylized animated sequence.

now, these viewing technologies allow students of film like yourself to study movies with a lucidity and precision that was impossible for your predecessors. But not even repeated DVD viewings can reveal those movie messages hidden by our own preconceptions and belief systems. Before we can detect and interpret these meanings, we must first be aware of the ways expectations and cultural traditions obscure what movies have to say.

Cultural Invisibility The same commercial instinct that inspires filmmakers to use seamless continuity also compels them to favor stories and themes that reinforce WAYS OF LOOKING AT MOVIES

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Exceptions to invisibility Even Juno deviates from conventional invisibility in a stylized sequence illustrating a high-school jock’s secret lust for “freaky girls.” As Juno’s voice-over aside detailing Steve Rendazo’s (Daniel Clark) fetish begins, the movie suddenly abandons conventional continuity to launch into a series of abrupt juxtapositions that dress a generic girl posed like a paper doll in a rapid-fire

viewers’ shared belief systems. After all, the film industry, for the most part, seeks to entertain, not to provoke, its customers. A key to entertaining one’s customers is to “give them what they want”— to tap into and reinforce their most fundamental desires and beliefs. Even movies deemed “controversial” or “provocative” can be popular if they trigger emotional responses from their viewers that reinforce yearnings or beliefs that lie deep within. And because so much of this occurs on an unconscious, emotional level, the casual viewer may be blind to the implied political, cultural, and ideological messages that help make the movie so appealing. 10

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succession of eccentric accessories. The moment Juno’s diatribe ends, the film returns to a smooth visual flow of events and images. While this sequence is far from “realistic,” its ostentatious style effectively illustrates the trappings of teenage conformity and the ways that young women are objectified.

Of course, this cultural invisibility is not always a calculated decision on the part of the filmmakers. Directors, screenwriters, and producers are, after all, products of the same society inhabited by their intended audience. Oftentimes, the people making the movies may be just as oblivious of the cultural attitudes shaping their cinematic stories as the people who watch them. Juno’s filmmakers are certainly aware that their film—which addresses issues of abortion and pregnancy—diverges from the ways that movies traditionally represent family structures and teenage girls. In this sense, the movie might be seen as resisting common cultural values. But what they

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may not be as conscious of is the way their protagonist (main character) reinforces our culture’s celebration of the individual. Her promiscuous, forceful, and charming persona is familiar because it displays traits we often associate with Hollywood’s dominant view of the (usually male) rogue hero. Like Sam Spade, the Ringo Kid, Dirty Harry, and countless other classic American characters, Juno rejects convention yet ultimately upholds the very institutions she seemingly scorns. Yes, she’s a smart-ass who cheats on homework, sleeps with her best friend, and pukes in her stepmother’s decorative urn, yet in the end she does everything in her power to create the traditional nuclear family she never had. So even as the movie seems to call into question some of contemporary America’s attitudes about family, its appeal to an arguably more fundamental American value (namely, robust individualism) explains in part why, despite its controversial subject matter, Juno was (and is) so popular with audiences.

Implicit and Explicit Meaning 2 Cultural invisibility in Juno An unrepentant former stripper (Diablo Cody) writes a script about an unrepentantly pregnant sixteen year old, her blithely accepting parents, and the dysfunctional couple to whom she relinquishes her newborn child. The resulting film goes on to become one of the biggest critical and box-office hits of 2007, attracting viewers from virtually every consumer demographic. How did a movie based on such seemingly provocative subject matter appeal to such a broad audience? One reason is that, beneath its veneer of controversy, Juno repeatedly reinforces mainstream, even conservative, societal attitudes toward pregnancy, family, and marriage. Although Juno initially decides to abort the pregnancy, she quickly changes her mind. Her parents may seem relatively complacent when she confesses her condition, but they support, protect, and advise her throughout her pregnancy. When we first meet Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), the prosperous young couple Juno has chosen to adopt her baby, it is with the youthful Mark [1] that we (and Juno) initially sympathize. He plays guitar and appreciates alternative music and vintage slasher movies. Vanessa, in comparison, comes off as a shallow and judgmental yuppie. But ultimately, both the movie and its protagonist side with the traditional values of motherhood and responsibility embodied by Vanessa [2], and reject Mark’s rock-star ambitions as immature and self-centered.

As we attempt to become more skilled at looking at movies, we should try to be alert to these cultural values, shared ideals, and other ideas that lie just below the surface of the movie we’re looking at. Being more alert to these things will make us sensitive to, and appreciative of, the many layers of meaning that any single movie contains. Of course, all this talk of “layers” and the notion that much of a movie’s meaning lies below the surface may make the entire process of looking at movies seem unnecessarily complex and intimidating. But you’ll find that the process of observing, identifying, and interpreting movie meaning will become considerably less mysterious and complicated once you grow accustomed to actively looking at movies rather than watching them. It might help to keep in mind that, no matter how many different layers of meaning there may be in a movie, each layer is either implicit or explicit. An implicit meaning, which lies below the surface of a movie’s story and presentation, is closest to our everyday sense of the word meaning. It is an association, connection, or inference that a viewer WAYS OF LOOKING AT MOVIES

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makes on the basis of the explicit meanings available on the surface of the movie. To get a sense of the difference between these two levels of meaning, let’s look at two statements about Juno. First, let’s imagine that a friend who hasn’t seen the movie asks us what the film is about. Our friend doesn’t want a detailed plot summary; she simply wants to know what she’ll see if she decides to attend the movie. In other words, she is asking us for a statement about Juno’s explicit meaning. You might respond to her question by explaining: “The movie’s about a rebellious but smart sixteen-year-old girl who gets pregnant and resolves to tackle the problem head on. At first, she decides to get an abortion; but after she backs off that choice, she gets the idea to find a couple to adopt the kid after it’s born. She spends the rest of the movie dealing with the implications of that choice.” This isn’t to say that this is the only explicit meaning in the film, but we can see that it is a fairly accurate statement about one meaning that the movie explicitly conveys to us, right there on its surface. Now what if our friend hears this statement of explicit meaning and asks, “Okay, sure, but what do you think the movie is trying to say? What does it mean?” In a case like this, when someone is asking in general about an entire film, he or she is seeking something like an overall message or a “point.” In essence, our friend is asking us to interpret the movie—to say something arguable about it—not simply to make a statement of obvious surface meaning that everyone can agree on, as we did when we presented its explicit meaning. In other words, she is asking us for our sense of the movie’s implicit meaning. One possible response might be: “A teenager faced with a difficult decision makes a bold leap toward adulthood but, in doing so, discovers that the world of adults is no less uncertain or overwhelming than adolescence.” At first glance, this statement might seem to have a lot in common with our summary of the movie’s explicit meaning, as, of course, it does—after all, even though a meaning is under the surface, it nonetheless has to relate to the surface, and our interpretation needs to be grounded in the explicitly presented details of that surface. But if you compare the two statements more closely, you can see that the second one is 12

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more interpretive than the first, more concerned with what the movie “means.” Explicit and implicit meanings need not pertain to the movie as a whole, and not all implicit meaning is tied to broad messages or themes. Movies convey and imply smaller, more specific doses of both kinds of meaning in virtually every scene. Juno’s application of lipstick before she visits the adoptive father, Mark, is explicit information. The implications of this action—that her admiration for Mark is beginning to develop into something approaching a crush—are implicit. Later, Mark’s announcement that he is leaving his wife and does not want to be a father sends Juno into a panicked retreat. On her drive home, a crying jag forces the disillusioned Juno to pull off the highway. She skids to a stop beside a rotting boat abandoned in the ditch. The discarded boat’s decayed condition and the incongruity of a watercraft adrift in an expanse of grass are explicit details that convey implicit meaning about Juno’s isolation and alienation. It’s easy to accept that recognizing and interpreting implicit meaning requires some extra effort, but keep in mind that explicit meaning cannot be taken for granted simply because it is by

Explicit detail and implied meaning in Juno Vanessa is the earnest yuppie mommy-wannabe to whom Juno has promised her baby. In contrast to the formal business attire she usually sports, Vanessa wears an Alice in Chains T-shirt to paint the nursery. This small explicit detail conveys important implicit meaning about her relationship with her husband, Mark, a middle-aged man reluctant to let go of his rock-band youth. The paint-spattered condition of the old shirt implies that she no longer values this symbol of the 1980s grunge-rock scene and, by extension, her past association with it.

definition obvious. Although explicit meaning is on the surface of a film for all to observe, it is unlikely that every viewer or writer will remember and acknowledge every part of that meaning. Because movies are rich in plot detail, a good analysis must begin by taking into account the breadth and diversity of what has been explicitly presented. For example, we cannot fully appreciate the significance of Juno’s defiant dumping of a blue slushy into her stepmother’s beloved urn unless we have noticed and noted her dishonest denial when accused earlier of vomiting a similar substance into the same precious vessel. Our ability to discern a movie’s explicit meanings is directly dependent on our ability to notice such associations and relationships.

Viewer Expectations The discerning analyst must also be aware of the role expectations play in how movies are made, marketed, and received. Our experience of nearly every movie we see is shaped by what we have been told about that movie beforehand by previews, commercials, reviews, interviews, and word of mouth. After hearing your friends rave endlessly about Juno, you may have been underwhelmed by the actual movie. Or you might have been surprised and charmed by a film you entered with low expectations, based on the inevitable backlash that followed the movie’s surprise success. Even the most general knowledge affects how we react to any given film. We go to see blockbusters because we crave an elaborate special-effects extravaganza. We can still appreciate a summer movie’s relatively simpleminded storytelling, as long as it delivers the promised spectacle. On the other hand, you might revile a high-quality tragedy if you bought your ticket expecting a lighthearted comedy. Of course, the influence of expectation extends beyond the kind of anticipation generated by a movie’s promotion. As we discussed earlier, we all harbor essential expectations concerning a film’s form and organization. And most filmmakers give us what we expect: a relatively standardized cinematic language, seamless continuity, and a narrative organized like virtually every other fiction film we’ve ever seen. For example, years of watching

movies has taught us to expect a clearly motivated protagonist to pursue a goal, confronting obstacles and antagonists along the way toward a clear (and usually satisfying) resolution. Sure enough, that’s what we get in most commercial films. We’ll delve more deeply into narrative in Chapter 4. For now, what’s important is that you understand how your experience—and, thus, your interpretation—of any movie is affected by how the particular film manipulates these expected patterns. An analysis might note a film’s failure to successfully exploit the standard structures or another movie’s masterful subversion of expectations to surprise or mislead its audience. A more experimental approach might deliberately confound our presumption of continuity or narrative. The viewer must be alert to these expected patterns in order to fully appreciate the significance of that deviation. Expectations specific to a particular performer or filmmaker can also alter the way we perceive a movie. For example, any fan of actor Michael Cera’s previous performances as an endearingly awkward adolescent in the film Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007) and television series Arrested Development (2003–2006) will watch Juno with a built-in affection for Paulie Bleeker, Juno’s sort-of boyfriend. This predetermined fondness does more than help us like the movie; it dramatically changes the way we approach a character type (the high-school athlete who impregnates his teenage classmate) that our expectations might otherwise lead us to distrust. Viewers who know director Guillermo del Toro’s commercial action/horror movies Mimic (1997), Blade II (2002), and Hellboy (2004) might be surprised by the sophisticated political and philosophical metaphor of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) or The Devil’s Backbone (2001). Yet all five films feature fantastic and macabre creatures as well as social commentary. An active awareness of an audience’s various expectations of del Toro’s films would inform an analysis of the elements common to the filmmaker’s seemingly schizophrenic body of work. Such an analysis could focus on his visual style in terms of production design, lighting, or special effects, or might instead examine recurring themes such as oppression, childhood trauma, or the role of the outcast. WAYS OF LOOKING AT MOVIES

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mon analytical approaches to movies. Since this book considers an understanding of how film grammar conveys meaning, mood, and information as the essential foundation for any further study of cinema, we’ll start with formal analysis—that analytical approach primarily concerned with film form, or the means by which a subject is expressed. Don’t worry if you don’t fully understand the function of the techniques discussed; that’s what the rest of this book is for. 1

Formal Analysis

2 Expectations and character in Juno Audience reactions to Michael Cera’s characterization of Juno’s sortof boyfriend, Paulie Bleeker, are colored by expectations based on the actor’s perpetually embarrassed persona established in previous roles in the television series Arrested Development and films like Superbad [1]. We don’t need the movie to tell us much of anything about Paulie——we form an almost instant affection for the character based on our familiarity with Cera’s earlier performances. But while the character Paulie meets our expectations of Michael Cera, he defies our expectations of his character type. Repeated portrayals of high-school jocks as vain bullies in movies like Anthony Michael Hall’s malicious Jim in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) [2] have conditioned viewers to expect such characters to look and behave very differently than Paulie Bleeker.

As you can see, cinematic invisibility is not necessarily an impediment; once you know enough to acknowledge their existence, these potential blind spots also offer opportunities for insight and analysis. There are many ways to look at movies and many possible types of film analysis. We’ll spend the rest of this chapter discussing the most com-

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Formal analysis dissects the complex synthesis of cinematography, sound, composition, design, movement, performance, and editing orchestrated by creative artists like screenwriters, directors, cinematographers, actors, editors, sound designers, and art directors, as well as the many craftspeople who implement their vision. The movie meaning expressed through form ranges from implicit narrative information as straightforward as where and when a particular scene takes place to more subtle implied meaning, such as mood, tone, significance, or what a character is thinking or feeling. While it is certainly possible for the overeager analyst to read more meaning into a particular visual or audio component than the filmmaker intended, you should realize that cinematic storytellers exploit every tool at their disposal and that, therefore, every element in every frame is there for a reason. It’s up to the analyst to carefully consider the narrative intent of the moment, scene, or sequence before attempting any interpretation of the formal elements used to communicate that intended meaning to the spectator. This chapter’s tutorial on disc 1 of the Looking at Movies DVD provides additional analysis of Juno as well as an overview of other core concepts covered in the chapter.

For example, the simple awareness that Juno’s opening shot [1] is the first image of the movie informs the analyst of the moment’s most basic and explicit intent: to convey setting (contemporary middle-class suburbia) and time of day (dawn). But

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only after we have determined that the story opens with its title character overwhelmed by the prospect of her own teenage pregnancy are we prepared to deduce how this implicit meaning (her state of mind) is conveyed by the composition: Juno is at the far left of the frame and is tiny in relationship to the rest of the wide-angle composition. In fact, we may be well into the four-second shot before we even spot her. Her vulnerability is conveyed by the fact that she is dwarfed by her surroundings. Even when the scene cuts to a closer viewpoint [2], she, as the subject of a movie composition, is much smaller in frame than we are used to seeing, especially in the first shots used to introduce a protagonist. The fact that she is standing in a front yard contemplating an empty stuffed chair

from a safe distance, as if the inanimate object might attack at any moment, adds to our implicit impression of Juno as alienated or off-balance. Our command of the film’s explicit details alerts us to another function of the scene: to introduce the recurring theme (or motif) of the empty chair that frames—and in some ways defines—the story. In this opening scene, accompanied by Juno’s voice-over explanation “It started with a chair,” the empty, displaced object represents Juno’s status and emotional state, and foreshadows the unconventional setting for the sexual act that got her into this mess. By the story’s conclusion, when Juno announces “It ended with a chair,” the motif—in the form of an adoptive mother’s rocking chair—has been transformed, like Juno herself, to embody hope and potential. All that meaning was packed into two shots spanning about twelve seconds of screen time. Let’s see what we can learn from a formal analysis of a more extended sequence from the same film: Juno’s visit to the Women Now clinic. To do so, we’ll first want to consider what information the filmmaker needs this scene to communicate for viewers to understand and appreciate this pivotal piece of the movie’s story in relation to the rest of the narrative. As we delve into material that deals with Juno’s sensitive subject matter, we must keep in mind that we don’t have to agree with the meaning or values projected by the object of our analysis; one is not required to like a movie in order to learn from it. Our own values and beliefs will undoubtedly influence our analysis of any movie. Our personal views provide a legitimate perspective, as long as we recognize and acknowledge how they may color our interpretation. Throughout Juno’s previous eighteen minutes, all information concerning its protagonist’s attitude toward her condition has explicitly enforced our expectation that she will end her unplanned pregnancy with an abortion. She pantomimes suicide once she’s forced to admit her condition; she calmly discusses abortion facilities with her friend

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Leah; she displays no ambivalence when scheduling the procedure. Approaching the clinic, Juno’s nonchalant reaction to the comically morose prolife demonstrator Su-Chin reinforces our aforementioned expectations. Juno treats Su-Chin’s assertion that the fetus has fingernails as more of an interesting bit of trivia than a concept worthy of serious consideration. The subsequent waiting-room sequence is about Juno making an unexpected decision that propels the story in an entirely new direction. A formal analysis will tell us how the filmmakers orchestrated multiple formal elements, including sound, composition, moving camera, and editing, to convey in thirteen shots and thirty seconds of screen time how the seemingly insignificant fingernail factoid infiltrates Juno’s thoughts and ultimately drives her from the clinic. By the time you have completed your course (and have read the book), you should be prepared to apply this same sort of formal analysis to any scene you choose. The waiting-room sequence’s opening shot [1] dollies in (the camera moves slowly toward the subject), which gradually enlarges Juno in frame, increasing her visual significance as she fills out the clinic admittance form on the clipboard in her hand [2]. The shot reestablishes her casual acceptance of the impending procedure, providing context for the events to come. Its relatively long ten-second duration sets up a relaxed rhythm that will shift later along with her state of mind. As the camera reaches its closest point, a loud sound invades the low hum of the previously hushed waiting room. This obtrusive drumming sound motivates a somewhat startling cut to a new shot that plunges our viewpoint right up into Juno’s face [3]. The sudden spatial shift gives the moment resonance and conveys Juno’s thought process as she instantly shifts her concentration from the admittance form to this strange new sound. She turns her head in search of the sound’s source, and the camera adjusts to adopt her point of view of a mother and the toddler sitting beside her [4]. The mother’s fingernails drumming on her own clipboard is revealed as the source of the tapping sound. The sound’s abnormally loud level signals that we’re not

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hearing at a natural volume level—we’ve begun to experience Juno’s psychological perceptions. The little girl’s stare into Juno’s (and our) eyes helps to establish the association between the fingernail sound and Juno’s latent guilt. The sequence cuts back to the already troubledlooking Juno [5]. The juxtaposition connects her anxious expression to both the drumming mother and the little girl’s gaze. The camera creeps in on her again. This time, the resulting enlargement keys in our intuitive association of this gradual intensification with a character’s moment of realization. Within half a second, another noise joins the mix, and Juno’s head turns in response [6]. The juxtaposition marks the next shot as Juno’s point of view, but it is much too close to be her literal point of view. Like the unusually loud sound, the unrealistically close viewpoint of a woman picking her thumbnail reflects not an actual spatial relationship but the sight’s significance to Juno [7]. When we cut back to Juno about a second later, the camera continues to close in on her, and her gaze shifts again to follow yet another sound as it joins the rising clamor [8]. A new shot of another set of hands, again from a close-up, psychological point of view, shows a woman applying fingernail polish [9]. What would normally be a silent action emits a distinct, abrasive sound. When we cut back to Juno half a second later, she is much larger in the frame than the last few

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times we saw her [10]. This break in pattern conveys a sudden intensification; this is really starting to get to her. Editing often establishes patterns and rhythms, only to break them for dramatic impact. Our appreciation of Juno’s situation is enhanced by the way editing connects her reactions to the altered sights and sounds around her, as well as by her implied isolation—she appears to be the only one who notices the increasingly boisterous symphony of fingernails. Of course, Juno’s not entirely alone—the audience is with her. At this point in the sequence, the audience has begun to associate the waiting-room fingernails with Su-Chin’s attempt to humanize Juno’s condition. Juno’s head jerks as yet another, even more invasive sound enters the fray [11]. We cut to another close-up point-of-view shot, this time of a young man scratching his arm [12]. At this point, another pattern is broken, initiating the scene’s formal and dramatic climax. Up until now, the sequence alternated between shots of Juno and shots of the fingernails as they caught her attention. Each juxtaposition caused us to identify with both Juno’s reaction and her point of view. But now, the sequence shifts gears; instead of the expected switch back to Juno, we are subjected to an accelerating succession of fingernail shots, each one shorter and louder than the last. A woman bites her fingernails [13]; another files her nails [14]; a woman’s hand drums her fingernails nervously [15]; a man scratches his neck [16]. With every new shot, another noise is added to the sound mix. This pattern is itself broken in several ways by the scene’s final shot. We’ve grown accustomed to 18

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seeing Juno look around every time we see her, but this time, she stares blankly ahead, immersed in thought [17]. A cacophony of fingernail sounds rings in her (and our) ears as the camera glides toward her for three and a half very long seconds—a duration six times longer than any of the previous nine shots. These pattern shifts signal the scene’s climax, which is further emphasized by the moving camera’s enlargement of Juno’s figure [18], a visual action that cinematic language has trained viewers to associate with a subject’s moment of realization or decision. But the shot doesn’t show us Juno acting on that decision. We don’t see her cover her ears, throw down her clipboard, or jump up from the waitingroom banquette. Instead, we are ripped prematurely from this final waiting-room image and are plunged into a shot that drops us into a different space and at least several moments ahead in time—back to Su-Chin chanting in the parking lot [19]. This jarring spatial, temporal, and visual shift helps us feel Juno’s own instability at this crucial

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narrative moment. Before we can get our bearings, the camera has pivoted right to reveal Juno bursting out of the clinic door in the background [20]. She races past Su-Chin without a word. She does not have to say anything. Cinematic language— film form—has already told us what she decided and why. Anyone watching this scene would sense the narrative and emotional meaning revealed by this analysis, but only a viewer actively analyzing the film form used to construct it can fully comprehend how the sophisticated machinery of cinematic language shapes and conveys that meaning. Formal analysis is fundamental to all approaches to understanding and engaging cinema—whether you’re making, studying, or simply appreciating movies— which is why the elements and grammar of film form are the primary focus of Looking at Movies. For a formal analysis of The Night of the Hunter, view the tutorial “Lighting and Familiar Image” on disc 1 of the Looking at Movies DVD.

Alternative Approaches to Analysis Although we’ll be looking at movies primarily in terms of the forms they take and the nuts and bolts from which they are constructed, any serious student of film should be aware that there are many other legitimate frameworks for analysis. These alternative approaches analyze movies more as cultural artifacts than as traditional works of art. They search beneath a movie’s form and content to expose implicit and hidden meanings that inform our understanding of cinema’s function within popular culture as well as the influence of popular culture on the movies. One would be wrong to assume a relatively mainstream American comedy like Juno unworthy of such scholarly analysis. Given the right interpretive scrutiny, any film may speak eloquently about social conditions and attitudes. Considering that the protagonist is the daughter of an air-conditioner repairman and a manicurist, and that the couple she selects to adopt her baby are white-collar professionals living in an oversized McMansion, a cultural analysis of Juno could 20

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explore the movie’s treatment of class. An analysis from a feminist perspective could concentrate on, among other elements, the movie’s depiction of women and childbirth, not to mention Juno’s father, the father of her baby, and the prospective adoptive father. Such an analysis might also consider the creative and ideological contributions of the movie’s female screenwriter, Diablo Cody, an outspoken former stripper and sex blogger. A linguistic analysis might explore the historical, cultural, or imaginary origins of the highly stylized slang spouted by Juno, her friends, even the mini-mart clerk who sells her a pregnancy test. A thesis could be (and probably has been) written about the implications of the T-shirt messages displayed by the film’s characters or the implicit meaning of the movie’s running-track-team motif. Some analyses place movies within the stylistic or political context of a director’s career. Juno’s young director, Jason Reitman, has made only one other feature film, Thank You for Smoking (2005), a satire whose protagonist is an enthusiastic spokesman for the tobacco industry. But even that very short filmography provides opportunity for comparative analysis: both of Reitman’s movies take provocative political stances, gradually generate empathy for initially unsympathetic characters, and favor fastpaced expositional montages featuring text, graphics, and first-person voice-over narration. Another comparative analysis could investigate society’s evolving (or perhaps fixed) attitudes toward “illegitimate” pregnancy by placing Juno in context with the long history of films about the subject, from D. W. Griffith’s 1920 silent drama Way down East, which banished its unwed mother and drove her to attempted suicide, to Preston Sturges’s irreverent 1944 comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and its mysteriously pregnant protagonist, Trudy Kockenlocker (whose character name alone says a great deal about its era’s attitudes toward women), to another mysterious, but ultimately far more terrifying, pregnancy in Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby. Juno is only one of a small stampede of recent popular films dealing with this seemingly evertimely issue. A cultural analysis might compare and contrast Juno with its American contemporaries

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Comparative cultural analysis A comparison of Juno’s treatment of unwanted pregnancy with other films featuring the same subject matter is but one of the many analytical approaches that could be used to explore cinema’s function within culture, as well as the influence of culture on the movies. Such an analysis could compare Juno with American films produced in earlier eras, from [1] D. W. Griffith’s dramatic Way down East (1920) to [2] Preston Sturges’s 1944 screwball comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, to [3]

Roman Polanski’s paranoid horror film Rosemary’s Baby (1968). An alternate analysis might compare Juno with the other American films released in 2007 that approached the subject with a similar blend of comedy and drama: [4] Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up and [5] Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress. A comparative analysis of these movies’ international contemporaries, such as [6] Cristian Mungiu’s stark 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days (2007), might reveal differences between American and European sensibilities. WAYS OF LOOKING AT MOVIES

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Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, 2007) and Waitress (Adrienne Shelly, 2007), both of which share Juno’s blend of comedy and drama, as well as a pronounced ambivalence concerning abortion, but depict decidedly different characters, settings, and stories. What might such an analysis of these movies (and their critical and popular success) tell us about our own particular era’s attitudes toward women, pregnancy, and motherhood? Knocked Up is written and directed by a man, Juno is written by a woman and directed by a man, Waitress is written and directed by a woman. Does the relative gender of each film’s creator effect those attitudes? If this comparative analysis incorporated Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu’s stark abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days (2007) or Mike Leigh’s nuanced portrayal of the abortionist Vera Drake (2004), the result might inform a deeper understanding of the differences between European and American sensibilities. An unwanted pregnancy is a potentially controversial subject for any film, especially when the central character is a teenager. Any extensive analysis focused on Juno’s cultural meaning would have to address what this particular film’s content implies about the hot-button issue of abortion. By way of illustration, let’s return to the clinic waiting room. An analysis that asserts Juno espouses a “pro-life” (i.e., antiabortion) message could point to several explicit details in this sequence and to those preceding and following it. In contrast to the relatively welcoming suburban settings that dominate the rest of the story, the ironically named Women Now abortion clinic is an unattractive stone structure squatting at one end of an urban asphalt parking lot. Juno is confronted by clearly stated and compelling arguments against abortion via Su-Chin’s dialogue: the “baby” has a beating heart, can feel pain, . . . and has fingernails. The clinic receptionist, the sole onscreen representative of the pro-choice alternative, is a sneering

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cynic with multiple piercings and a declared taste for fruit-flavored condoms. The idea of the fetus as a human being, stressed by Su-Chin’s earnest admonishments, is driven home by the scene’s formal presentation analyzed earlier. On the other hand, a counterargument maintaining that Juno implies a pro-choice stance could state that the lone onscreen representation of the pro-life position is portrayed just as negatively (and extremely) as the clinic receptionist. Su-Chin is presented as an infantile simpleton who wields a homemade sign stating, rather clumsily, “No Babies Like Murdering,” shouts “All babies want to get borned!” and is bundled in an oversized stocking cap and pink quilted coat as if dressed by an overprotective mother. Juno’s choice can hardly be labeled a righteous conversion. Even after fleeing the clinic, the clearly ambivalent mother-to-be struggles to rationalize her decision, which she announces not as “I’m having this baby” but as “I’m staying pregnant.” Some analysts may conclude that the filmmakers, mindful of audience demographics, were trying to have it both ways. Others could argue that the movie is understandably more concerned with narrative considerations than a precise political stance. The negative aspects of every alternative are consistent with a story world that offers its young protagonist little comfort and no easy choices. Speaking of choices, the examples above illustrate only a few of the virtually limitless approaches available to advanced students and scholars interested in interpreting the relationship between culture and cinema. But before we can effectively interpret a movie as a cultural artifact, we must first understand how that artifact functions. To begin that process, we must return our focus to the building blocks of cinematic language, starting with the principles of film form, the subject of our next chapter.

➜ Analyzing Movies As we said at the beginning of the chapter, the primary goal of Looking at Movies is to help you graduate from being a spectator of movies—from merely watching them—to actively and analytically looking at them. The chapters that follow provide very specific information about each of the major formal components of film, information that you can use to write and talk intelligently about the films you view in class and elsewhere. Once you’ve read the chapter on cinematography, for example, you will have at hand the basic vocabulary to describe accurately the lighting and camera work you see onscreen. As you read the subsequent chapters of this book, you will acquire a specialized vocabulary for describing, analyzing, discussing, and writing about the movies you see. But now, as a beginning student of film and armed only with the general knowledge that you’ve acquired in this first chapter, you can begin looking at movies more analytically and perceptively. You can easily say more than “I liked” or “I didn’t like” the movie, because you can enumerate and understand the cinematic techniques and concepts the filmmakers employed to convey story, character state of mind, and other meanings. What’s more, by cultivating an active awareness of the meanings and structures hidden under every movie’s surface, you will become increasingly capable of recognizing the film’s implicit meanings and interpreting what they reveal about the culture that produced and consumed it. The following checklist provides a few ideas about how to start.

Screening Checklist: Looking at Movies ➤ Be aware that there are many ways to look at

movies. Are you primarily interested in interpreting the ways in which the movie manipulates formal elements such as composition, editing, and sound to tell its story moment to moment, or are you concerned with what the movie has to say in broader cultural terms, such as a polit