Introduction: French Scenes

 

 

ALREADY, SINCE THIS WAS WRITTEN (1986) there have been some amazing technical advances in film.

If I were in the stunt persons’ union, I’d be running scared (this is barely touched on in the story). I envision that guild, ten years from now, as just another featherbed outfit, like locomotive firemen; there, maybe, in some advisory capacity or other, with no members ever jumping off a burning building or crashing a car, or doing anything, except pushing a few buttons, or nodding their heads yes or no. (That their families will sleep lots better is just an added union benefit.)

The story was cutting-edge, in its way, when it was written. Some of it even now has been surpassed; there are lots more technical wonders to come. (That many computer-generated images are in ads, TV, and film where they’re not needed is just one of those byproducts of technology—they can do it, so they do—“Oooh. Neat!”)

No more junkets to the Barbados for supermodels, no more small-town location shooting, no more delays due to weather or the fargin’ sun being in the wrong place for the shot. No more waiting, an astounding idea in filmmaking—more than half the time shooting a movie is nothing happening. Call it up—hey! Presto! (Sort of like Méliès in reverse, isn’t it?) There you are in Faulkner’s bedroom at Rowan Oak with the plot outline of A Fable written across three walls; there you are Gump-like being slapped by Patton; there you are whenever and wherever you want to be, wherever and whenever you want to shoot.

Such is the future: maybe. What I wanted to say here is that anytime new stuff comes along, it’s almost like a geologic discontinuity, a Cretaceous/Cenozoic divide. There’s movies before A Trip to the Moon (1902) and after; Birth of A Nation (1915); The Jazz Singer (1927); Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939, the year they got Technicolor right); Citizen Kane (1941); Bwana Devil (1952) and The Robe (1953) for 3-D and Cinemascope; movies before Hiroshima, Mon Amour and The 400 Blows (both 1959), and after.

All these films were important, either technically, or narratively in terms of film grammar; movies could no longer be made like they had been before them, or if so, only at the filmmaker’s peril. Whatever one felt about them, they couldn’t be ignored, Birth of A Nation is about editing, not its politics (Tom Oakheart = the KKK). The Jazz Singer stopped movies cold for about three years (the whole grammar of film was there by 1925; confronted with sound and a stationary microphone, the movies forgot everything they’d learned in the first thirty-two years of filmmaking. Don’t take my word for it, go see Murnau’s Sunrise [also 1927]. Movies didn’t move and tell stories like that again until about 1932 . . .). Citizen Kane is just, well, Citizen Kane. Nothing had ever looked that way before or told a story like that. Bwana Devil and The Robe (art they’re not) in their fight against the One-Eyed Living-Room Monster taught directors you couldn’t 1.) ignore the depth of field, front to back, of what the camera sees; 2.) ignore the left and right sides of the screen, which all but the best filmmakers had always done. The movie screen went from being a sheet on the wall to being a moving box in the air.

The Frenchies reshuffled the ol’ narrative deck as effectively as Griffith and Welles had done, in an even more with-it way. Why show a guy getting out of bed, cleaning up, going downtown, standing on a corner with a newspaper till the armored car pulls up at the bank, then show him folding his newspaper, walking across the street, and, five minutes into the movie, an insert shot of him reaching into his pocket, pulling out a gun on the security guard? Blip guy in bed blip guy brushes teeth blip corner with newspaper blip dead guard on ground, scattered moneybags, newspaper lying in street blip Jean-Louis Tritingnant driving an Alfa Romeo on the road above Monaco, forty-nine seconds into film!

The pace of life and perception was changing; they saw it first. (It’s accelerated even more, here forty years on, but now people are just quicker to be dumber.) They knew we knew how movies worked, there in the audience. They just showed us the good stuff; we filled in the boring parts. (Except for Godard, who reversed the process, but which still shows he knew what he was doing. . . .)

So—this story looks forward, to the wonders that might come, at the same time it’s looking back at the last time somebody shook the place up.

And no matter what technologies come, it’s still going to take somebody doing something new with it, or using it just right (for example, the use of the Steadicam: Kubrick’s The Shining vs. the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona. Don’t make me decide) to tell the story. Miracle technology is just another (this time Kubrick: the distal end of an antelope bone blip HAL) tool—once you see it and go “Oooh. Neat!” it damn well’d better do something. (Star Wars just sits there on the screen for the first while, until Harrison Ford puts the pedal to the metal and the Falcon goes into hyperdrive—the audience has waited eighty-two years for that two seconds; after that the spectators are merely a painted audience in a painted auditorium; they can be told any story.)

Come with me, then, on a two-way voyage. Janus-like, I wanted to look both ways at once.