A Blogathon Index

If you're curious as to what's going on blogathon-wise, or you want to drop a mention to someone trying to put together a list, you should so stop by Weepingsam's blog The Listening Ear and give a shout out.

-- that is all --

Dory on Kelly Green

Ok, so I've just done something rather unusual for me: I entered an online photography contest. This post is in part an enticement (of you, the reader) to vote on two upcoming contests (for me, preferably, the writer, filmmaker and photographer). Of course, you don't have to. I'll still continue to write about many a lovely topic. JUST BELOW, in fact, is a look at Terrence Malick's use of sound to support story and characterization in Badlands (1973). Stay tuned for a seriously in-depth look at editing in Fellini's Amarcord (1974).

I may also write something about John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974) but no promises on that one. If you have a thought about whether I should tackle Cassavetes and from what angle, feel free to leave a comment. I'm feeling rather open to suggestion (it's the weather) and would love to take your thoughts.

Cheers.

(...and check out JPG Magazine, all you web-surfing faerie folk!)

Sound & Sympathy in Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973)

Terrence Malick's haunting, lyrical re-envisionment of the 1950s Starkweather-Fugate killing spree provides an interpretative and non-judgmental perspective of what it might have been like for a fifteen-year-old girl to have absconded with her father's murderer and passively participate with the subsequent domino-like murders that followed. Through a combination of sound techniques, the subtler, more nuanced aspects of the story help to shed light on how a situation like that might have played out in real life. Told in a sparse voice-over with a reflective journal writing-like quality and a series of non-traditional sound choices, Badlands manages to convey the empty, nowhere feel of a small town where boredom might prevail over reason.

Malick shows that ennui like a hairline fracture, separating its two main characters -- Kit and Holly -- from everything but their most natural surroundings. That implicit, diegetic context imbues the film with a great sense of symbolism concerning the loss of innocence, coming of age, and self-realization; and, as the story progresses and Holly simultaneously comes out of shock and withdraws from Kit, the voice-over takes on new strength and self-awareness -- just like any journal would when the writer, secure in solitude, abandons everything but her own voice.

Holly chooses a different path...

Similarly, sounds that are and aren't used in Badlands denote certain moods and reinforce the disconnect between these characters and their environment. Kit cuts out early from collecting trash in the opening scene and stops to crush a can under his boot in the alley, and then kick it away. Meanwhile, Holly practices baton twirling quietly during her voice-over. Later, when the father discovers his daughter has become intimate with Kit, her mouth moves soundlessly and instead we hear her voice over telling us about her father punishing her for it by shooting her dog. We also hear the gunshot. Kit sits up awake in bed during another voice over which tells us, without letting us listen along, that he hears what sounds like the sea in a conch shell when he's away from her. In both of these instances, the film allows its audience to infer by imagination how these scenes may sound and feel; they are contemplative and open to interpretation, inviting and engaging the senses to open up to these two characters and their unusual and normally unsympathetic dilemma.

Certain other omissions in the soundtrack stand out as well. One interesting consideration is that many unpleasant or simply more mundane sounds don't reach the audience's ears, such as the cattle feeding when Kit gets hired on a ranch after losing his position as a trash collector. Instead, we hear Holly's sweet, lilting voice-over and are left to infer that Kit's mind is, as she he claims, elsewhere and more with us as we watch them. That binding effect between audience and characterization works well, and Malick is very careful not to throw in any distractions, rendering the "noise" level of Badlands practically non-existent. Like a good poem, there is no extra line, word, or letter that does not serve some muscular purpose to the film's bare bones. Diegetically, we hear only the sounds that hold importance or significance to its characters, and the absence of diegetic music speaks volumes. Holly tells the audience about her piano lessons, but we do not hear them; likewise, when we are told that her father has switched her lessons to concentrate on the clarinet as a way of making a lady of his wayward daughter, we do not hear the clarinet either, not even when we see her with the reed in her mouth. This not only serves to evoke the truer world of the characters' inner lives but to create a great sense of quiet, lucid emptiness within the frames.

Only a moment after Holly, still and silent clarinet in hand, runs to greet her father coming home, the scene in which Kit shoots him begins. Thus far, the sequence of events has been natural: the couple has met and fallen in love, and Kit has approached his girlfriend's father to attempt have a man-to-man conversation with him. Yet the underlying events upset the balance of things: Kit is twenty-five to Holly's fifteen, and she lied to her father right after meeting the significantly older man. We hear the lie in direct dialogue in an otherwise affectionate scene and then the next time we see Kit and her together, birds are chirping lazily in sunshine and their relationship is obvious and progressing quickly. So when he shows up after failing to get any satisfaction from his girlfriend's father about being left alone to enjoy his time with Holly, and enters the house to start packing her clothes without speaking to her about it, the unnatural act of entering seems more natural than it otherwise might. Had it not been for the gun in his hand, both the real life story and the film would've gone much differently. [1]

But Malick makes as much use of the small-town sounds as possible to house the first and most important shooting scene in a sturdy, almost amicable fashion. Directly after the shot, a neighborhood dog barks. Kneeling by her father, we hear the words, "This is Holly," delivered by a Spacek completely in touch with the fact that her character has little identity to lose. The use of music is minimal and accompanied by rocking, handheld camera movement that conveys almost a slight Dutch angle sense that helps to keep the audience in suspense as to what kind of character Kit might turn out to be after all, now that he has evolved from reticently charming to wieldy. A cut to the basement where Kit drags the dead man gives way to a cut of him emerging from the basement into cricket-laden evening with a toaster in hand, which he then declares that he has found even though no former dialogue supports that it was lost. We are left, again, to our imaginations to decide how much of the relationship we see unfold is real and how much of it falls into a strained, gray area where two people simply co-exist.

An aural and visual treat, Badlands takes care to ensure that the non-diegetic music does not distract from the story, but enhance it instead. Often the score serves to convey emotions too complex to be translatable through any other means, and these are placed most often in transitions. After Kit leaves the house with the father in the basement, the bereft daughter wanders the upstairs with a cigarette that would have been foreign to her only weeks prior, trying to make some sense of everything that has happened but unable to. This is cued not just by the music but by the lack of voice over when we see her move to a window and watch two boys sitting on a curb across the street. Her separation from her youth before her time is obvious and apparent, and the music grows louder and more frenetic later when Kit sets fire to her house in an attempt to make the entire affair look like a murder-suicide that ended in arson.

This includes a brilliant scene in which the newly minted murderer records a suicide note that claims that the reasons for the tragedy "are obvious" onto a record that he then places in a turntable on repeat only yards away from the blazing inferno they leave behind. By this point in the film, everything from Holly's childhood has disappeared: her father, her mother's memory, her dog, and her home. As the setting changes from restless town to daunting wilderness in the titular surroundings, the ease with which these two got so far and the understandability of her absolution of him becomes ever more apparent.

[1] It should be noted that Malick took great creative license with the Starkweather-Fugate story. In reality, Charlie (Kit) Starkweather was nineteen and had already killed a gas station attendent when he showed up at the fourteen year-old Caril's house. He murdered both her parents and then proceeded to choke the babysitter to death while his young girlfriend made him a sandwich. It's difficult to get a read on the real-life events and perceptions fifty year later, but somehow Malick recreates a family structure that allows Spacek's character to mature onscreen and be pitted against the popular views of her involvement with Starkweather, which is an interesting commentary in and of itself. In the film, even the Texas Rangers who hunt him down find the mass-murdering Kit charming and respectable while Holly feels the glaring judgment of their captors.

It seems that in reality, Caril Fugate would've received a kinder reception after having both parents murdered and being kidnapped from her babysitter, but it's hard to say where Malick pulled that aspect from. It does, however, make for excellent, character-driven storytelling.

directions (2007)

Here's the third entry in a series of shorts inspired by the notion of colliding consciousness. The final cut and score are still in the works...

For those of you not quite in the know, the film stars Penn State-New Kensington's own reclusive, hard to find Danielle Donahue whose career is already being fertilized over at Rotten Tomatoes. Give it up, folks. This was Dani's first film that didn't involve oodles of blood and first work with a director who said more than, "...okay, go!"

Enjoy.

Coming Soon... gods in disguise (2007)

Moving forward in the world of independent filmmaking, Unclear Pictures will unveil its look at social and environmental conditions in modern Greece on June 1 of this year. The short documentary will deal with the last days of the anarchists' siege of the University system.

Stay tuned...

Low Key Lighting in a Billy Wilder Noir

The opening sequence of Double Indemnity sets the tone and the pacing of the entire film. In roughly ten shots, a car careens in the middle of the night and runs a stop light before finally parking in front of a locked, dark office building. Within moments, the audience can see that the man in the car is a trusted employee of an insurance firm, that he has been shot, and that he is spending what might be his final moments recording a confession via Dictaphone for his boss and role model to discover after he’s gone.

By the second scene, the audience has been informed of all that has happened; what’s left to ascertain is how it happened. The insurance salesman’s Achilles heel and foreshadowing for the film make themselves known in that next, vital scene. Symmetrical cinematography provides a solid basis to grasp how it is that the hero is taken in and left for dead, but the camerawork also uses gentle subterfuge in the meeting scene between Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson that creates a lopsided sense of space and a power balance between its main characters. Since the plot’s mainstay composition is the power struggle between these two, studying this scene lends insight and even some stability to what is a very steamy and turbulent romance-murder. It is the events of the second scene upon which the protagonist can ruminate and conclude that that’s the point at which he should have walked away; so, it is no mistake that a dying man begins his story here.

The first shot of the second sequence establishes the expensive house set on a nice vista where a simple pan reveals children playing ball in the driveway and an ice cream truck taking a leisurely drive through the neighborhood. The sense of movement in this first shot establishes the flow as the ice cream truck proceeds off screen in the opposite, angled direction that Walter Neff goes as the camera tilts and he ascends the elegant stairs. The camera then renders a medium shot of Neff as the housekeeper answers the door. Their conversation is shot almost completely as an exterior shot, but Mrs. Dietrichson, whose husband’s insurance coverage is up for renewal, appears in nothing but a bath towel on a railed landing at the top of the stairs. The frame quickly cuts from an interior medium shot of Neff with the housekeeper to the lady of the house up above them.

The low angle of the shot at first reveals nothing more spectacular than Phyllis Dietrichson’s scantily-clad appearance, but the return shot on Neff as he takes off his hat is a high angle shot, somewhat closer. It is in this interplay that the first power struggle takes place, but it won’t be the last. Mrs. Dietrichson ventures closer to the railing in the next cut back to her, unafraid to let him see her even as the housekeeper watches. Though prescribed societal roles would suggest that the woman should feel more vulnerable in a situation such as this, it is the insurance salesman who is disarmed in a second high angle shot, perhaps even fooled by a return to the low angle in which Phyllis moves slightly right within the frame, somewhat obscured by a rug hanging over the railing. Upon the third high angle framing of Neff, he continues the tease in a remark about pigeons, but in the last low angle shot of Phyllis, the angle is much steeper. Her seeming timidity is now understood to be just part of the flirtation; she still seems to hold the upper hand.

At the very least, she clearly asserts her position.

To regain symmetry after this power play, the camera returns to the medium shot that normally would have followed Neff’s entrance more substantially. This time, though, the lighting has brighter notes, as if the two had stepped into the light and Neff had all but revealed himself. The camera pans to the living room as Neff walks toward it and then cuts to an establishing shot in which only the entrance of the living room and the mirror can be seen in the foreground, while the staircase from which Phyllis must eventually descend comprises the ominous background. All of the shots thus far have been angled in such a way to keep movement in a uniform position, and the shot of the staircase follows suit; i.e., the direction of the stairs inside the house matches those without the house.

To lend the living room a sense of 360 degree space, the camera then follows Neff around the room in a carefully constructed manner. He walks to the piano in a pan shot, the camera cuts to an over-the-shoulder close-up of pictures of Lola and Mr. Dietrichson, and the audience is greeted with a second establishing shot of the greater part of the living room, in which the two will spend most of their time together in just a few minutes. At the tail end of this series of shots, there’s a slight pan to follow Neff’s movement, but the camera stops and he walks into a spot of light. The next cut reveals a close-up tracking shot of Mrs. Dietrichson’s feet descending the inevitable steps. A quick zoom-out at the bottom of the steps reveals that she’s just now finishing up with buttoning her blouse, and the shot continues tracking until she goes to the mirror to admire herself and exits the shot. Neff follows her out of it, too, as the camera remains more or less on the mirror.

This sort of stop-gap sense of motion continues. Just as Neff paced around the room in a circular manner, now Phyllis will pace, too, as part of her coquettishness. But special attention should be paid to symmetry, also. First, the characters sit down into a still medium shot, she in a chair somewhat lower than him and he on the arm of the couch. Thus the second power play begins. He notices her anklet, and she uncrosses her legs. The camera tilts and pans as Phyllis gets up from the chair and it pans back and forth as she paces. When she pauses to ask Neff two questions, a brief cut reveals a medium shot of Neff still sitting on the arm of the couch, now somewhat lower than her. The camera returns to Phyllis, panning again as she resumes her seat within the same frame the pair originally sat. She re-crosses her legs and Neff’s attention is once more seized by the anklet, made clear by a close-up on his face. It’s also the cue for the third power struggle in the scene.

The camera tilts, pans and slightly zooms in on the two as they stand and move clear of the couch. It’s as close together as they get in this scene while facing each other. A close-up on Phyllis as she tells Neff that there’s “a speed limit in this town” is quickly followed by a close-up on him telling her to give him a ticket. The next and last close-up Phyllis mentions her husband and the flirtation swiftly ends. Or so it seems.

In the final shot of the scene, the camera’s medium tracking shot on Neff traces their path into the living room in the first place. First, it moves to the mirror where he reclaims his hat and then to the door, where the two have one final exchange of words. It is clear from the way the scene ends that whatever happened between these characters has not ended, but rather just begun.

The most tangible words of the opening sequence is probably the bit about how Neff “didn’t get the money, and [he] didn’t get the woman.” There’s an ambling sense to this scene, in the way that the motion is constructed, that sets off the inevitability of the entire affair – romance and murder, to boot. It’s as though just in the course of daily motion (a prerequisite in the insurance business) that a person can never foresee very well in what direction his life might go at any moment, not even an insurance salesman.

Things Happen: Reversals of Fortune in Ford's Stagecoach (1939) & Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1956)

Since classic Hollywood cinema by Bordwellian definition deals in reversals of fortune ad nauseum, this treatise will examine the specific vehicles of catharsis employed in these next two films. Ford's titular object and Sirk's small 1950s town provide, respectively, compression and the ultimate denouement necessary to off-set its characters' accomplishments, each doing so in a unique way. Where the literal stagecoach brings together a rag-tag ensemble through proximity, the more conceptual town actually eats at the sense of space between two people until it seems like there's simply no room for a relationship. The difference between the uses of mise-en-scene in these films, beyond the obvious adjustment for makeup and costume in black and white, speaks to a meaning deeper than the surface stories. The lighting and setting especially contribute to the psychological parameters of the characters' relationship to each other and to their setting, the cohesive and centrifugal forces of these plots.

Ford was making a Western. A train could have been the natural option of vehicles, but it would have ousted the potential threat of attacking Apaches and allowed its passengers too much leg room. The stagecoach instead redirects the eye to its passengers rather than the setting. The long shot of it moving through the desert establishes and re-establishes the wild surrounding it, both letting the audience know that the gang is on the move and reminding it of what a small capsule careens through this unknown country. Inside, though, space is constructed in such a way to study each character. Since the relationships between certain characters change substantially by the end of Ford's film, special notice should be given to the placement of those characters within the narrative, lighting and the costuming that offers more than standard, Western denotative functions.

Social position feeds the main conflict and resolution of Stagecoach. Although the natives present the variable of a potentially hostile threat, they remain as such; it is the people whose lives intersect on the journey who threaten the peace more intimately. While inside of the vehicle, the shots are largely formal, medium compositions that dance between straight shots and more angled ones. Part of the justification for this lies in keeping the conversation participants and their respective seats in the coach straight, to witness who is looking and speaking to whom and who is avoiding eye contact and discussion. John Wayne, as the black sheep of the pack, sits in the odd seat on the coach's floor, allowing for nearly 360 degrees of camera movement which the cinematographer uses to compress the air between the stuffier inhabitants when appropriate. It also allows for a variety of exterior events to be visible through the coach windows. Partly in keeping with the development of the characters, but also to aid the impact of the eventual surprise of the Indian attack, the camera only leaves the coach interior when the action justifies it wholesale.

The director makes good use of the film's mise-en-scene at the intermittent stops outside of the coach, too. If the coach is his characters' catalyst, the breathers between act as air sacs for expansion upon the theme of social justice. The scene which exposes the society woman to be pregnant provides ample goodies that demonstrate the changes occurring in the group in subtle ways. After she faints at the news of her husband's wounding, the rest of the gang rushes in to see her, and for that brief moment, they are all the closest together that they will ever be. The lighting of that scene has the advantage of existing in one of the larger interior sets used, and it interplays with the suspense not only in terms of shadows against a wall but also in terms of significant costuming highlights.

While much of the costuming in Stagecoach is denotative of societal rank (as with the banker, who wears decidedly authoritative black dress) or ancestral background (like the doctor who wears an Irish-style derby to set off his accent) Ford also personalizes each actor's garb. By doing so, he opens up the floodgates of symbolism through clothing. The gambler, for instance, wears a spotlessly white hat that glows in a spike of light during the suspenseful delivery scene; yet, doubts had been raised during his introduction regarding his status as a gentleman. Whether the glow is meant to be sinister or not, it is intriguing because his character has so many shades of nuance -- and in a way, that is reflected in the hat. An even greater development exists between the society woman and the more coquettish one that we can assume to be either a dancer or a woman of looser morals.

The society woman rejects every offer of help from the woman, often in the form of an item of clothing that would wam her. By the film's end, the new mother not only uses the clothing but accepts it as a gift. In this way, Ford allows the personalization of costuming to permeate the cathartic bonds that the stagecoach helps to create.

Sirk's town in All That Heaven Allows sets the pace of the film from the opening scene of a church's bell house, upon which the clock hands read as noon. The town, like the time, is already in full swing; at least, as much as any sleepy, little American town can be. Yet the town will also share another characterisitic with time: both are products of human invention and, as such, are transient. To support the themes of self-reliance and independence introduced in the film, time is used as a suggestion, perhaps, that its illusory power has as little true consequence as the town that is the psychological obstacle to Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman's romance. Many of the motifs in the film likewise support the natural world of American transcendentalism, but Sirk does not limit the mise-en-scene to the typical perception of all things New England.

The spacing of the characters, like the objects in the setting, is airy and uncluttered. Very little physically separates the actors in Sirk's melodrama besides light and dark. Characters are alternately alone and close together, as they need to be, as if to suggest that all is well and to reinforce the naturalness of independent thought through independent action. In her own home, the film never once shows the mother in her kitchen surrounded by gadgets; it is the children who bring some small sense of clutter to the film, when the son mixes drinks or when the daughter plays with her mother's makeup. Sirk even goes so far as to create a sense of cacaphony visually speaking during the party, by placing people chaotically throughout the frames on the evening that ends in social disaster. Meanwhile, on the hipper side of town, Rock Hudson's friends present a more ordered universe as they sit to eat at a long table that, although arranged at a 45 degree angle to the room's walls (denoting, perhaps, their differences with society), has seats in a uniform pattern for people to dine together charitably.

After the more chaotic party, Sirk reveals the clock again, in the full darkness of midnight. The temporal reality foreshadowed at the film's opening now takes on a deeper meaning and the interior lighting follows suit. When there are misunderstandings between Jane Wyman and her children, for example, they exist more in the shadows of the frame than in the lighted parts. It is interesting to note that that particular phenomenon of people conversing in shadows takes place only in the house that once belonged to her and her now-dead husband. By such extension, his ghost reaches into her life as effectively as the town reaches into the main relationship. Vibrant colors and patterns of light -- especially upstairs in the more familiar, personal rooms -- further emphasizes the haunted feeling without resorting to pointing to it through dialogue or special effects.

The absolute vibrancy of such shots acts as a relief from the story's progress, even if the diversion is one from romantic conflict to mother-daughter tension. Opening up the characters' relationships, these lighting choices add a whole, new dimension to the film that may have been more flat had it not begged the audience's attention to the strangeness of these people's lives. A woman in emotional solitary confinement, a daughter who feels like she knows better than her mother and an overprotective, fickle son would have played much differently -- as if these were people we had already met and there was no real story here -- without the lighting and color choices.

Character development especially benefits in certain areas. Consider the scene in which the busybody best friend attempts a heart-to-heart with Jane Wyman. The friend realizes that the housekeeper can hear them despite the vacuum cleaner and the action moves from this:

to this:

Although Sirk never spells it out, such actions clearly delineate the understood separation between society people and the working class in small-town America and underscores the social conflict resulting from Wyman seeing her gardener. By contrast, Rock Hudson's friends make no such separation and the audience can realize this by comparing the difference between a catered party that is already in full swing at the busybody's house and the more rustic do-it-yourself shindig that happens across town:

where Wyman discovers Walden:

Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of All That Heaven Allows is the museum-like quality of much of the setting. Exteriors reveal a very New England-looking autumn, but interiors often appear very serene, with a sense of almost sterile grace. The cold, damp grey of the old mill -- which Wyman prefers to the dowdier yet cozier house Hudson sleeps in -- would be uninviting were it not for the fireplace and the view. Sirk even uses framing to depict a sense of artistic stasis, exampled by this shot in which Wyman looks more like a bust on display than a woman about to go somewhere:

Such images are beautiful and haunting, with an organic quality between them, including a reference to the dead father's trophy on the mantelpiece that appears in a later visual reference on the patio at the party when a neighbor attempts to kiss Jane Wyman. [1] The reference is book-ended by the son's later protests against Rock Hudson marrying into the family, during which he brings up the trophy again, none the wiser that were Wyman to marry a man more acceptable to him and their society friends that she would be reduced to little more than the trophy that she sees reflected in the TV set the children buy her as a consolation to her widowhood. In that moment, the denouement is complete as Wyman realizes the falsity and emptiness of the life that stretches before her if she continues to care what other people think of her.

Although Sirk's approach is more subtle and perhaps craftier than Ford's, each film still exists within the framework afforded it. The distractions that occur within each film serve purposes in conjunction with -- and not contrary to -- the films' best interests. The singing Apache woman may seem at first like a considerable and even jumpy digression from the film's internal movement toward peaceable relations and certainly from its explicit movement toward the end of the coach ride, but it acts as cover for horse thieves to get away, distracting both the audience and the on-screen characters at once through unexpected entertainment. The early, somewhat shocking medium shot/jump cut of the banker warns the audience that something is not right without giving away an important plot point that would have detracted more from the film than the shot does had it been gleaned early.

These considerations promote the pleasure of viewing, the addition of information occurring only when necessary. Perhaps more important, though, to the filmic world is the sense that each film acknowedges that duration is short and fleeting, that the stagecoach ride can only last as long as a town or a memory's hold upon a person. In that sense, each film takes a greater place within the cinematic world, each aware of its own transience and mortality as surely as anyone who ever lived in the Old West; or anyone who has walked the streets of a small town with her thoughts miles away in Walden's Pond; or anyone who has ever noticed how silly and filmic real life can be.

[1] It is impossible for me to determine whether I would have picked this out on my own, so I must give credit where credit is due: former film blogger Andy Horbal first pointed it out in a post complete with screen grabs. Check it out.