Longing For Cinema

At Denison University in the early 1980s, I signed up for a survey class, Cinema 101, thinking it would be the arts equivalent of the “rocks for jocks” geology class and therefore an easy A. The joke was on me. The professor, Elliot Stout, was a highly entertaining man who wore Madras jackets, bow ties and looked like a cross between Zero Mostel and Moe from the Three Stooges. He was also set on making the cinema half of the theater and cinema department a full-fledged undergraduate film school, which meant 16mm Bolex and Arriflex cameras, primitive double-system editing equipment, and prehistoric synch-sound recorders. It also meant the academic study of film, film history and film criticism. Film history took me to the immediate post-revolutionary period in Russia, and the work of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. Film theory exposed me to Eisenstein’s montage theory, which in turn necessitated a detour into dialectics (which we referred to as “diuretics”) and Soviet history. I survived, and following the montage trail got me to Alfred Hitchcock, the most famous practitioner of montage. Montage means cutting. The idea is that cinema, alone among art forms, can take shot A and juxtapose it with shot B to create meaning C, which depends on the sequence of shots for its worth. The famous example is a sequence beginning with a shot of a man’s expressionless face. Shot B is a bowl of steaming soup. Shot C is the same as shot A. Shot B was changed — a child crying, a glorious landscape. Asked what the sequences represented, Russian audiences said hunger, sympathy and awe, respectively. Films to that point — between 1917 and the mid-1920s — often consisted of static shots, with actors moving around within the frame. There was not a lot of cutting between camera angles, in part because the cameras were bulky and not easily moved. It was not far from simply filming a stage set. There was nothing uniquely cinematic about it, once audiences got used to the very fact of a “moving picture.” Prof. Stout used the cropdusting scene in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” as the standard for the montage technique of telling a story. In the scene, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), who has been mistaken for a secret agent and framed for a murder, embarks on a series of completely ludicrous adventures as he tries to clear his name. He gets instructions to meet the man who can clear up the mystery: take a bus way out on a rural highway west of Chicago, in the Great Plains.He gets off the bus (in the same famous suit he wears throughout most of the picture). Nothing happens. So far, so good. A car goes by — and keeps going. Ditto a second car and a truck. A third car drives up to the highway from somewhere in the barren fields and drops off a passenger, presumably waiting for the bus going in the opposite direction. The two men look at each other. Thornhill walks across the road, and asks the man if he’s waiting for someone. “No,” the man replies. He’s waiting for the bus. And that’s it for the dialogue, except for the bus passenger observing a small plane in the distance. “That’s funny,” he says. “That plane’s dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.” In his interview with Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut asked about the cropduster scene, observing that the airplane does not appear until the scene is well established. Truffaut said: “The scene is completely silent for some seven minutes; it’s a real tour de force.” Truffaut also noted that all the shots in the scene are of roughly equal length; the tension of the unfair struggle between Thornhill and the pilot is not accelerated by using shorter and shorter cuts. Hitchcock’s response: “Here you’re not dealing with time but with space. The length of the shots was to indicate the various distances that a man had to run for cover, and, more than that, to show that there was no cover to run to.” Unhappily, this kind of craft is rarely seen in current films — especially not in the age of computer-generated effects. Hitchcock was a pioneer in special effects, but he used them to help tell the story. Today the effects are the story. I note also that Hitchcock manages to incorporate the set-up on the rural road, the ambiguous dialogue with its foreshadowing; the action sequences, culminating in the plane colliding with an oil tanker and Thornhill’s escape to Chicago in an extended montage that switches between the objective and subjective camera; combines studio and location footage; includes the typically Hitchcockian combination of humor and dread; and does it all in about 10 seamless minutes of screen time. Now imagine a contemporary director approaching the same scene. There would be music. There would be swearing. There would be the Glowering Two-Shot so beloved of modern directors, of two faces looking stern and tough at each other. And there would certainly be explosions. But would it be Hitchcock? I doubt it. Which brings me to my point. There is too much technology and not enough craft in today’s films, which increasingly feel like extended hallucinations. Vulgarity is equated with edginess. Explicit and hyper-real violence is mistaken for action. And the Glowering Two-Shot allows even the most immobile actor to appear competent. It’s not cinema anymore. It’s television or a video game, on a much bigger screen. And boy is it tiresome.