6

Image Is Everything

IT’S ALL WELL AND GOOD to talk about these building blocks—shots, scenes, sequences—that constitute the framework on which we hang a movie. Very important, those. Couldn’t make or understand films without them. They’re what we view when we watch one; they’re how we process information. They’re just not what we see. And they’re not what we remember. For that, we need to think in slightly different units. The things that really register with us, that stay with us long after we leave the movie, are images. Some we never forget.

Examples? How long do you have?

Okay, here are three, taken at something less than random: a cowboy carrying a saddle and twirling a Winchester by its oversize lever, a naked woman cringing and screaming in the shower, and a gigantic furnace consuming a child’s sled. If you ever saw these three films, you already know that the names are John Wayne (as the Ringo Kid), Janet Leigh (as Marion Crane), and Rosebud (as itself), in Stagecoach (1939), Psycho (1960), and Citizen Kane (1941). Great movies, all three. They’re tremendously well directed and acted and shot. Different genres, to be sure—a Western, a thriller, and a character study—with different aims, but the thing they have in common is that they leave us with unforgettable images, and not just the three I’ve singled out.

Here’s one viewers can’t shake, no matter how hard they try: it’s an eye, perfectly still. Actually, there are two eyes, staring up from under a bowler hat as if they’re maybe seeing as much of the brim as of the camera into which they are ostensibly gazing. But the one—his right—commands the attention; it’s mascaraed and fitted with false lashes long enough to do a B-movie starlet proud. And this is on a guy. In 1971, when the movie came out, that wasn’t normal. In truth, I don’t know when in human history having long, false lashes on just one eye would be the norm. Turns out, it’s okay: he’s not normal, either. Not by a long chalk. At the moment, as it happens, he’s drugged. That would explain the stillness. How Malcolm McDowell could keep his eye so still is a question for the ages, but it is a remarkable shot. For this is, of course, the opening image of A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel from nine years before. What we discover from that image, what we know just eight or nine seconds into the movie, is that this is creepy and unsettling.

When the camera pulls back to reveal first Alex, the owner of the disturbing eye, and then his “droogs,” as he calls his gang members, it is no less creepy. They’re dressed all in white, aside from the bowlers, complete with codpieces, which remind us, along with the rather baroque insults Alex delivers, that there is for all its modernity a highly Elizabethan aspect to the novel (and therefore the film). Since Burgess was, in his student days, an Elizabethan scholar who would go on to write biographical novels about Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, this interest of his is hardly surprising. Whether Kubrick was respecting that element of his source fiction or merely got lucky, I cannot say, but it definitely works.

Figure 5. A very alarming start: Malcolm McDowell as Alex. Clockwork Orange, Warner Bros.

Images can work on multiple levels simply as images. Remember those scenes in Lawrence of Arabia when Sherif Ali outfits Lawrence in blazing white robes and again when we see him striding along the top of the train after the Arabs dynamite the tracks? What do they tell us about the man and his current environment? In the first, Peter O’Toole mugs not for the camera but for himself; his chief concern is with how he appears in this new uniform. On one hand, the scene gives us an image: Lawrence transformed. That one is pretty straightforward. At the same time, we see not only that image but another: Lawrence captivated by this new image of himself. That meaning is cemented by his use of the brilliantly polished knife blade as a mirror. We can be excused for understanding that scene in terms of excessive self-regard, a failing of which Lawrence is certainly guilty. Even so, if we stop there we miss a key aspect of that concern with his image. What matters, aside from personal gratification, is how he will appear to others, both those he leads and those he opposes, or with whom he must contend. While no words are spoken, Lawrence knows that he can’t appear ridiculous or inept in his new threads. For someone who has been careless about his British Army uniform, he cares almost too much about his appearance in the desert robes. The payoff for this scene, then, comes later, with his striding over the top of the train—or rather, his shadow striding over the shadow of the train, for that is what the camera captures. Lawrence has been desperate not merely to be accepted but to become one of them. And here he does, gliding across the train roof to the cheers and shouts of his victorious followers: shadows have no race.

Here’s one you’ve seen somewhere. A big movie star is on the decline, a young one on the rise. At some point, we will be shown posters of each of them; in fact, the story will be told through those posters, one of them becoming more prominent (bigger billboards, greater frequency). But there’s another shot we’re certain to see: the former star’s poster in the street, in the gutter, trampled underfoot. I witnessed it most recently in The Artist, the retro-silent movie about the movies. George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) has had the misfortune to have his self-produced, self-directed, self-funded new silent film open on the same evening as Peppy Miller’s new talkie, Beauty Spot (a particularly tough blow, since George gave her the beauty spot that becomes her trademark). George’s image gets a double slam here. First, he arrives home to find the final goodbye note, informing him he has two weeks to clear out, from his wife—on the back of one of his publicity stills. Then, after Peppy (Bérénice Bejo) comes out to try to make amends for some inadvertently rude comments from the night before and to say she likes his film, we cut to the exterior of the two theaters and to feet walking. All over his rain-soaked poster. Yes, we’ve seen it a thousand times. And yes, it still works. A filmmaker has to be careful about how he uses it, but the image even at this late date retains its visual power. That is why, of course, images become clichés: because they do hold the power to convey a meaning. And because they become clichés, they have to be reinvented from time to time.

The Artist is filled with marvelous images, as befits a black-and-white silent film, but another that stands out is George’s battle with his own shadow. Immediately before he burns his cache of his movies—and accidentally his apartment, when all that acetate stock flares out of control—the last movie he has been watching ends, leaving him with a blank screen. When he stands in front of it and sees his shadow, he berates it for his own shortcomings, and it exits the screen in more of a slow burn than a huff, leaving George in the odd position of casting no shadow. We can do much with that image. He’s already dead inside; he has allowed himself to become hollow or invisible; he is estranged from his own true self, or his true self from his image; this is an apt metaphor for his current status in Hollywood, among other possibilities. Do with it what you will, the image cries out to us for interpretation, for understanding it in the larger context, which is what the best images do.

The time has come, alas, to define perhaps the squishiest word in literary or cinematic criticism: image. So what’s wrong with image? Only that it can mean almost anything, which is to say that it means almost nothing. The more or less standard definition comes from around 1948, compliments of British poet C. Day-Lewis (father of actor Daniel, of whom you may have heard): an image is a picture in words. Most of us can live with that most of the time. In practice, however, an image can be anything from a picture of a thing to something more like an idea, very nearly a theme, so amorphous may it be, all the way to symbol or metaphor, whose company images often keep, although no self-respecting image should actually go so far as to be a symbol, at least not without announcing its intentions. Worse still, in film, that “picture in words” bit has no meaning, since movies are made up of what? Pictures. So it’s a picture made of pictures. How not helpful is that? After all, every single frame of a movie is an image, right? That’s 120 minutes times 60 seconds times 24 frames: 172,800 images, although, admittedly, there are quite a lot of duplicates in there. The brain spins. So if image is going to mean anything for our purposes, we need to shift the definition a bit. Let’s say that, rather than a picture made of pictures, an image is a picture that imprints itself firmly in the mind. And what makes that picture take hold? Typically, some piece of information beyond itself, not merely the visuals themselves but a suggestion or hint or allegation. Of course, the image must be striking in itself; without that, it isn’t likely to take hold. But if it is really going to stick, it needs to carry some secondary meaning beyond its mere stickiness. In our Lawrence example, the vivid picture is of him holding up that polished dagger. The extended meaning—his fascination with his own image, the image he has been cultivating and which is now completed by his new threads—gives that picture significance and weight with viewers. How much weight we choose to give it, and of what sort—is this an instance of narcissism or of wonder at his transformation or of some newfound power—will be for each viewer to decide. But I would guess that, if we stop and think about it, nearly everyone would recognize that moment as containing some meaning beyond the mere visual data.

Images can be static or moving. Since these are motion pictures, the latter is often the case. Lawrence’s shadow striding along the top of the train’s shadow would be an instance of the latter. Indeed, static images, or at least those that are consciously static, can come across as hokey or forced. For example, John Ford’s use in Stagecoach of the one-shot of various characters, the Ringo Kid, Gatewood, the pinch-faced League of Decency lady, strikes us as contrived, the more so with each repetition of the device, a serious misstep in a movie that does so much right. On the other hand, that frozen moment at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they dive out into sepia forever amid a hail of bullets strikes us as completely natural and organic, however sad. More common than either of these techniques is the still picture amid ongoing action, when a character stops for a moment or the camera cuts to something unmoving amid the bustle. Reaction shots would be one such example, when the camera cuts to a character to show how he or she takes in whatever action or message has just been conveyed. The Thin Man movies of the thirties can almost be described as one long reaction shot; either Nick (William Powell) or Nora (Myrna Loy) Charles, our hard-drinking, fast-talking wealthy sleuths, is forever striking a pose in reaction to whatever quip or insult the other has just delivered. Characters needn’t mug for the camera quite as much as Nick and Nora do for something to be a reaction shot; often, the characters are acting for the benefit of one another, while Powell and Loy are acting for the cameras. Does that distinction make sense? Nor are they the only people in the movie whose reactions are caught on film. At the end of each movie, Nick (the professional detective) convenes a gathering of all the suspects, police, and interested parties. Nick’s technique in these inquisitions is to assert some fact about the murders and then, seemingly (although not really) at random, call out the name of a suspect. Their reactions, surprise, shock, real or feigned outrage, often deliver more information than any statement they might make.

Who Shot the Image?

So how does image differ from our earlier term, shot? Does it differ at all? Ah, this is where things get tricky. By definition, cinematic images grow out of shots; indeed, every one of those 172,800 frames has the potential to grow up to be an image. Not all of them do. The vast majority of shots whiz by the vast majority of eyeballs as mere conveyors of information. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, we would be exhausted if every shot were an arresting image. It’s the “arresting” part that distinguishes the two, something that makes us pause, makes us remember, makes us invest that particular shot with greater meaning than the majority of its brethren.

I recently heard director Ang Lee speaking about movies in 3-D ultimately supplanting 2-D films, something he once doubted but now takes as a given. The occasion was an interview about his 2012 adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. The film makes considerable use of not only the third dimension but also computer-generated imagery (CGI), which is the only safe way to put a human in a lifeboat with a tiger. I hope he is incorrect, since I am one of those people who are treated badly by the 3-D experience, and in fact I opted for Pi in the traditional two dimensions. What matters most, however, isn’t the number of dimensions but the clout of the images. On that basis, Life of Pi is a powerhouse. Repeatedly, Lee gives us images of Pi’s isolation: the lifeboat itself, of course; the raft he builds to keep himself away from the tiger, named Richard Parker; the island he finds devoid of animal life except for the meerkats who climb to safety each night when the island becomes carnivorous; even the spectacular display of glowing jellyfish, who serve chiefly to emphasize Pi’s aloneness. Other directors have tried the lifeboat before as emblems of isolation and puniness; often, however, as with Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), the boat serves as the container of a small community rather than as a vessel of solitude. And because Pi (Suraj Sharma) spends nearly the entire movie in the lifeboat, it becomes an ever-starker signifier of his solitude, his vulnerability, and his fragile hold on life. Everything is, by powers of magnitude, bigger, stronger, more dangerous than he is.

Up till now, we have been discussing images in isolation, but of course they never really exist in isolation. Rather, they combine with other images to form a dialogue. This happens in all literature, as when the writer in Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” dying from an infection in his leg on the plains below the mountain, imagines a plane carrying him to the snowy summit. The contrast between the heat of the lowlands and the corruption of his blood on the one hand and the purity and cold and whiteness of the mountaintop on the other gives the two images combined a power neither could have on its own. Contrastive images work very nicely on celluloid (or digits—we really must invent new terms), too. An example everyone remembers, even if they haven’t seen the movie, is from Titanic (1997). Consider its two most famous shots, first, Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) holding Rose DeWitt (Kate Winslet) in the prow of the great ship, and second, Jack supporting Rose on a piece of flotsam only big enough for one, assuring her that she will die an old lady, warm in bed. Or if you prefer, the shot when she discovers that he has succumbed to the cold. Together those two images mark the alpha and omega of their relationship, the first signifying that Rose can trust Jack—and with more than merely her security in a scary-but-exhilarating spot, the second that her trust in him has been borne out by the self-sacrifice on her behalf. They are the more piquant because each contains the other. In that first shot, so full of life and promise, a sense of doom hangs over it because we bring it with us: saddled with the history of the voyage, we know this story can’t end well, however much we may wish otherwise. The second recalls the first: Jack’s confidence, his support of her, his complete investment in her well-being. Of course Jack would die to let her live; we’ve known it all along. Neither image, compelling as both are on their own, is as powerful without the other.

Another way images can and often do combine, though, is through accretion. Similar images are added to one another until they form a pattern. In a sense, it is a single image type that finds expression in numerous instances, rather like the “conceit” of seventeenth-century poetry. There, a single dominating image would organize and shape the meaning of a poem. John Donne, for instance, in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” uses the conceit of a compass—the kind for drawing circles, not for finding true north—to reassure his love of his return. You, he says, need not sorrow over my departure because you are the fixed foot of a compass of which I am the free foot, so no matter how far out I range, you will always be the center of my transit, and I will be inevitably drawn back to you. A cynic might notice that this is both a lovely promise and a permission given by oneself to permit one to rove widely, but we’ll let that pass for now. The conceit, or controlling figure, comes and goes in poetry, which like most other human endeavors is a fashion industry.

That mastering image or metaphor can also be employed in film, but with necessary differences. A poem may last a few lines or a few pages; a Hollywood movie for two hours or more. You can only hit the viewer with it so often before bruising begins. So how do these recurring images build up to something like a conceit or maybe a trope? Let’s take an example from a movie everyone knows, or thinks he knows. I’ll bet five whole cents there’s something you’ve never observed about Casablanca (1942): the closed-door trope. Don’t panic at a new word: a trope is a figurative element, usually linguistic, although not in this case—a metaphor, a simile, an image—that is repeated through some portion of the text of a work or across multiple works. In our instance, you will note, the figure, or image, is visual rather than language-based. That makes sense, since the visual image, as we have discussed, is the language of film. Nevertheless, the repetition functions in the same manner as a trope does in a short story or novel: to emphasize. That is, as the image is repeated, it drums something into the audience—readers, or in this case, viewers—that will enhance an effect, underscore a theme, highlight some important element. What that effect is, we’ll come back to shortly. For now, just consider the variety of ways characters are impeded, excluded, caught, trapped:

•   the paddy wagon used in initial roundup of suspects;

•   while watching the Lisbon plane land, the hopefuls are framed by arches, and behind those, closed doors;

•   the door to Rick’s American Café, which is open or closed, locked or unlocked, to various people at various times throughout the film;

•   the door to the gambling room, which is used several times, especially to keep out the official from Deutsche Bank;

•   the door to Rick’s office—he invites Victor Laszlo and, somewhat later, Captain Renault in, although Ilsa gains admittance without Rick’s knowledge or approval, just as she works her way, against his will, back into his heart;

•   in the room, a safe Rick opens in front of Renault;

•   the cash cage in the gambling room;

•   in his desperate attempt to escape the gendarmes, Ugarte (Peter Lorre) pulls the gambling door shut, and as they burst out of the room, he shoots two of them;

•   Rick hides the letters of transit in the upright piano, the lid of which is another door;

•   earlier than her appearance in his room, Ilsa comes into the darkened bar and closes the door behind her;

•   Rick admits and bars people as he pleases;

•   when Rick and Victor Laszlo speak in his office, the door is closed; he denies the letters of transit to Laszlo but agrees to use them to take Ilsa away;

•   a Chinese screen in the bar that hides the entrance to the kitchen; it’s nearly always visible;

•   Rick opens the door to his room slightly and peers out to see Carl, the maître d’, and Laszlo, fresh from a narrow escape at a meeting of the Resistance;

•   in the final sequence, just before they head for the airport, he admits Renault, then Ilsa and Victor, to the café; the fog is another sort of door;

•   Renault’s office also has a famous door, behind which he grants exit visas in exchange for monetary or sexual bribes.

You may at this point object that any movie about bars and illegal gambling will inevitably involve a certain number of doors. Okay, then explain this:

•   In Paris, the views are longer; even inside a hotel room, the window is open to the empty sky, the crowd on the dance floor seems to recede into the distance; Rick and Ilsa are at a sidewalk café when they hear of the Germans’ approach; when the announcement is made that the Germans will enter the city forthwith, the lovers are in a café in which there are windows, which admit light and air. In the entire sequence, there is not a single door.

The entire flashback sequence, until the train-in-the-rain-with-heartbreak final scene, is wide open and sunny. In Casablanca, even when it’s sunny, it’s dark. Doors and windows, even the air itself, seem to be closed, determined to keep the inhabitants in and the light and air out.

Do you have to see all those doors opening and closing in order to enjoy the film? You’ve seen it, right? But not seen anything special about the doors? Well, there you go. And here we get to the difference between viewing and reading a movie. When you watch the film, you see Rick keeping someone out of a room and you intuit that he’s hiding something or protecting something, or you watch as he closes a door to tell another character a detail not divulged to anyone else—often because we’re told as much visually and/or verbally—and on you go. We know from our vast experience in reading stories and watching films and television programs that doors hide things. The hiding can be comic, suspenseful, or tragic, and the same door can, in different situations, fulfill different functions. But when we go from merely watching the action to reading it, we actively engage the material to better understand it. We know, if we consider the matter, that the door that opens just slightly will mean something different in, say, Psycho and an episode of Scooby-Doo. Yes, there’s a surprise coming, but the nature of it will be very different. After all, comedy and tragedy are merely two sides of the same mask. Reading this movie, or any movie, like reading a book, is largely a matter of taking the time to notice what’s going on: what sorts of devices are being used, what elements of visual or auditory language are being employed and in what ways, what items get repeated, how shots are framed, and so on. I would argue that reading movies proves to be the harder task since they roll relentlessly forward, twenty-four frames to the second, with no pauses for reflection. If you stop to analyze what just happened, you miss what’s happening now. To seriously read a film, then, requires multiple viewings. The first one takes care of the plot and gets the surprises out of the way; each subsequent one reveals more details that we might have missed previously. And we miss a lot. At least I do. I hope I’m not insulting you by generalizing from my experience.

At the end of the film, Rick closes one metaphorical door, sending Ilsa on her way with Laszlo, and opens another, with Renault. In truth, he has been playing with those imaginary doors for some time, admitting Laszlo, Ilsa, and Renault into different rooms, in which they are given different explanations. He tells Ilsa that she can stay with him and he will let Laszlo fly to freedom, while telling Laszlo that he will take Ilsa away to safety, and then telling Renault that he can arrest the two fugitives, thereby scoring points with his Nazi masters. Only when they are all at the runway does he throw open the doors and permit them all to read the same text, sending Ilsa and Laszlo off to continue their work while, after shooting Major Strasser, walking into his own uncertain future in league with Renault. Could the movie get there without all those opening and closing doors, all those gatekeepers and traps and cages? Yes, probably. But it wouldn’t resonate the way it does, wouldn’t build up the same constellation of meaning, wouldn’t be Casablanca.

Your Casablanca Ain’t Like Mine

So you never noticed the doors and barriers in Casablanca? Big deal. In a very informal survey of friends and colleagues, including someone who teaches the film, no one else did, either. Oh, some of them knew they were there, but no one had really considered their function. But almost everyone who is a serious consumer of cinema (a couple weren’t) had noticed other elements that I hadn’t. The point isn’t that you must see what I see but that we all notice different elements of the film. And a lot of that noticing comes not so much from the film itself as from what we bring to it. What I’m offering you here, merely as an example, is a fairly idiosyncratic reading of the film. I’m the guy, after all, who in his senior seminar on Charles Dickens wrote a paper on escape themes in Our Mutual Friend, who when teaching James Joyce’s Dubliners tries to point out to students all the instances of railings, barriers, turnstiles, and other impediments as emblems of the personal and social frustrations in the stories. So that’s my bias going in. You have them, too, I’m sure. Feel free to use them. Trust your instincts, which are right more often than not.

Casablanca isn’t the only movie you can do this with, of course. Not every film will reward the search for aggregated imagery, but many will. I suspect that it would be a fairly easy matter to write a paper on the use of shadows in Lawrence of Arabia, maybe even of shadows of Lawrence himself. Or, since I also mentioned it earlier, reflections and other images of the self in The Artist. It’s a movie about image, after all, about the way the world sees actors and indeed, how they see themselves. There are some key shots of actual mirrors, as well as a highly polished bar in which George sees himself while drowning his sorrows, and in which characters from his current movie, a flop, come to visit him like Scrooge’s ghosts. And don’t get me started on images of flight, escape, and adventure in Up or we’ll be here all night, and I’m sure neither of us wants that.