August 3, 2010

Back when I was trapped reviewing mainly crap movies for CNN, I was sometimes asked by interested readers (incredibly enough, there were a few out there) if paying close attention to such “minutiae” as cinematography, music, and editing while watching a picture impinged on my overall enjoyment of the narrative. My answer was a somewhat exasperated “no,” because I viewed movies at least semi-analytically long before I started reviewing them, without ever imagining that that made me any different than most of my fellow audience members.

If you really care about motion pictures as a popular art form, I don’t see how you can’t be taken with the technique involved in pulling off a great sequence, whether it consists of a crop duster dive-bombing Cary Grant or Al Pacino noticing his hands don’t shake when he should be rattled as hell in “The Godfather.”

The trick, if you want to call it that, is to allow your mind to receive what you’re watching on two simultaneous levels— just because I’m noticing a particularly graceful camera move, or a brilliantly framed shot, it doesn’t mean I’ve taken my head out of the narrative, any more than appreciating the craft of a sharply devised paragraph removes me from the joy of reading a great novel.

Effective, inventive, elegant use of film grammar is part of why I want to sit down to watch a movie in the first place, although my taste in what does and doesn’t work has shifted considerably over the years. As I’ve gotten older, I seem to have dialed down my predilection for directors who don’t know when to quit.

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Far be it for me to badmouth pre-1980 Martin Scorsese. “Mean Streets,” "Taxi Driver", and “Raging Bull” remain three of my favorite movies, and that won’t change before I die. But, please— mix yourself a drink and pull up a chair while I badmouth post-1990 Martin Scorsese.

If you’re familiar enough with the three pictures I listed - they’re in the order that they were released - it’s easy to see a transformation in Scorsese’s guiding perspective as a film stylist. Whereas “Mean Streets” (probably my favorite of the three these days) is shot almost cinema vérité, with a wacky nod here and there to the French New Wave, “Taxi Driver” is often presented as a despairing, oddly sensual sidewalk hallucination. But with “Raging Bull,” Scorsese amps things up until what you’re watching is part static John Cassavetes argument clinic and part Luis Bunuel dream sequence. The movie either just sits there or flows like magma, depending on the desired effect.

Perhaps Scorsese’s greatest accomplishment with “Raging Bull,” and nobody ever seems to mention it, is that he makes two completely oppositional approaches to visual storytelling work with one another. It’s quite a trick, and the sign of somebody who is deeply connected to his own artistic impulses.

Scorsese’s pre-1980s pictures are so terrific because he pulled emotion and spiritual depth out their screenplays through audacious yet sensibly applied visual styles. The unearthliness of those fight scenes in “Raging Bull” makes complete sense, although Scorsese’s personal worldview is the only thing that could have dictated their being filmed that way. That’s why he’ll go down as one of the genuine visionaries of commercial cinema.

However, outside of “Goodfellas,” which is a tad superficial compared to those other iconic works while still being a blast to watch, Scorsese now seems to have lost his perspective on what really serves a scene, opting instead for a series of trademark visual tics and music cues that simply make people notice Martin Scorsese is directing another movie.

Scorsese mostly plays to the cheap seats nowadays, and when he doesn’t, with lush Oscar-bait pictures like “The Age of Innocence” and “Kundun,” he moves so far in the other direction he practically dehydrates his pulp impulses and makes you feel like you’re watching a homework assignment.

Not everything has been a travesty since “Goodfellas,” of course, but much of it has been— in my book, “Cape Fear”’s shrieking and Bible-thumping scrapes the bottom, with “Bringing Out the Dead”’s phony Upper West Side apocalypse running a close second. By now, Scorsese seems to move his camera and edit his sequences to keep himself from getting bored, and that’s not the same thing as doing what’s needed to serve the text.

Tracking shots for the sake of tracking shots and titled camera angles that reveal absolutely nothing except that the camera has been tilted are a damn sight removed from the fight scenes in “Raging Bull,” and I’ll be stunned if Scorsese ever pulls himself back from the brink. Even his so-called “gritty” pictures now appear to be vacuum sealed, lest they get corrupted by something resembling real artistic passion.

Thank God for film preservation.

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I’m glad I finally got around to mentioning tracking shots, because the power of choreographed long takes is one of the things I planned to focus on when I started writing this article. Whereas, when I was younger, I was enamored of directors who zoom and zip and jump and cut, nowadays something about my middle-aged psychology responds far more positively to extended takes that allow a scene to unfold unbroken by a needlessly tinkering filmmaker.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again— I’d just as soon watch two characters argue in a kitchen than have a character turn a slow-motion back flip and shoot a lightning bolt out of his ass. You don’t have to get very fancy to shoot a kitchen argument, but you still have to have a sense of rhythm and an idea where to place a camera to expose the heart of the scene.

I want to ponder the highs and lows of human experience when I view a motion picture, and I want to feel a connection with the people on the screen. It’s what I hope to get out of a movie, but there aren’t all that many these days that concern themselves with such things. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m completely averse to fluid, imaginative camera movement. I’ll accept a great extended take any day of the week, if it contains legitimate reason for being.

Woody Allen has long been a master of letting scenes play out almost as if they’re taking place onstage, with the significant caveat that he moves characters into medium shots and close-ups while the actors wander around the room, which allows the frame to evolve and elevate emotional impact when needed.

Note that Allen will often let actors walk out of the frame altogether, knowing that, sooner or later, they’ll show up again to deliver the most important bits of dialogue. That way, he gives the performers the opportunity to really experience a scene rather than forcing them to feed it out over and over again to a variety of camera set-ups.

Say what you want to about Allen’s truly mind-boggling collapse as a screenwriter, even his shitty movies – and there are too many to name at this point - regularly contain solid performances. I think his use of long takes is one of the reasons for that.

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Easily the most famous and most discussed long take in movie history is the opening shot of Orson Welles’ 1958 film noir exercise, "Touch of Evil". Welles introduces key characters as well as the sleazy border town they inhabit in one massive camera sweep that was initially pissed on by the producers, who chose, against Welles’ wishes, to insert the credits as well as Henry Mancini-penned rhumba music over it.

The shot you’re about to watch, however, is from the re-configured version of the picture that was released long after Welles’ death. Note how the music changes, rises, and falls as the audience passes various nightclubs and bar jukeboxes. Note also how utterly idiotic Charlton Heston looks while attempting to play a suave Mexican.

Do you see what I mean? If you’re not the type of viewer who takes the time to notice how a sequence is constructed, you’re not throwing a wrench into your viewing experience by trying to do so. That’s one goddamned creative piece of filmmaking, and there’s a certain exhilaration in recognizing that fact while it unfolds.

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I received literally hundreds of letters from CNN readers accusing me of thinking too much about movies, rather than simply “enjoying” them, which is so stupid a concept I rarely bothered to reply. However, since I probably haven’t convinced everyone reading this that you can draw real excitement out of noticing something like an extended single take with no cutaways to other shots, I’m closing with the following short film by the French director, Claude Lelouch— “C'était un Rendezvous” (English translation, “It’s a Date.”)

A lot of rumors still exist about how Lelouch managed to do this without killing anybody, and Lelouch isn’t talking. But we’re not worried about that right now. Just buckle up and enjoy an early morning, hair-raising ride through the streets of 1970s Paris. And play it LOUD, if at all possible. Since we’re discussing which filmmaking elements give a scene its impact, you should note that the shifting gears and roaring engine are at least half the fun in “C'était un Rendezvous.”

Again, let me stress that no escargot venders were harmed in the completion of this shot.

Paul Tatara