Reading questions due Wed. 9/19 by 8pm
This week's readings, from the course reader:
Bordwell, “Principles of Narration” (14pp)
Keathley, “Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes” (24pp)
Post your responses in the comments field by 8pm Wednesday night, Sept. 12. Don't forget to suggest a scene for viewing in class.
1) Sum up one key idea of EACH reading.
2) Describe EACH author’s method of analysis. (See below for details)
3) Every reading provides a critical tool we’ll try out on the film under discussion. So, suggest one scene from THE SEARCHERS for us to look at in class. Explain how and why ONE (1) of these readings might be helpful or interesting to use when analyzing that scene. What questions do you think it might help answer, or what discoveries did it help you make as you watched and read? Be very specific.
Question 2, on method, will take some thought. Consider the following:
* What aspects of the film experience is this author interested in, and why? Some examples might include: style (if so, what aspects of it?), the filmmaker’s personal biography or politics, the film’s social or historical context, intertextuality (a film’s connection with other films and images), character psychology, casting and the star system, viewers’ identification with characters, viewers’ physical experiences or psychological processes, viewers’ social background and/or identity, viewing context (films in theaters vs. dvds at home), and others.
* What kind of examples does this author use to support his or her argument? What counts as “evidence” for this author?
* What schools of thought or scholarly practice inform this author’s approach? (e.g., literary studies? psychology? filmmaking experience? history? autobiography? art history? Surrealist distraction?) The answer may not always be stated in the reading itself; in those cases, ask yourself, what other kind of writing does this sound like? What other types of writers might be interested in the same issues or examples this person uses? This also may require a quick “Google” search, to find out what this writer’s background is.
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Christina Freiberg: The Searchers Blog #2
In continuation of last week, David Bordwell continues with the psychological behavior of the viewer. In the chapter, Principles of Narration, he takes a more structural approach to film, then relates the structure to viewer’s psychological process (i.e. consciousness) to comprehend the narrative. In the beginning of the chapter, he immediately jumps into the two factors that comprise a narration: syuzhet and style. Since the syuzhet creates a fabula: the viewer’s conscious creating a “chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events occurring within a given duration and a spatial field.” (Brodwell, 49) The fabula helps establish the syuzhet, a word that translates into plot, and is the actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula (Bordwell, 50). Both help the viewer to sort the images into a linear fashion through the series of information processes. Finally, he discusses style, which are the cinematic devices (i.e. genre), that interacts with the syuzhet. It is a technical approach and claims to be independent from the syuzhet/fabula relationship. The stylistic devices, whether noticed consciously or sub-consciously, inform the viewer of the film’s history, theory, tone, genre, etc....
Christian Keathley,, author of Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes, cites five films and how they conjure up psychological triggers of recollection within the viewer. Whether he discusses hidden Surrealist attributes as read in his analysis of Judy’s lips from Rebel Without a Cause or recollection of memories from Bonnie and Clyde, he describes how certain styles and narrative structures invoke psychological meaning. Another professor of film history and theory, this time from Middlebury College in Vermont, he is well known for his criticism, and Keathley’s most recent work is about the cinephilia, a movie buff who will repeatedly watch movies over and over to find/understand the director’s motives and other quirks most viewers will not anticipate the first time upon viewing. In one selection, relating to The Searchers, he goes into how the cinephilia, sometimes in vain, searches for something, often repeating and reviewing until their hypothesis about the movie is confirmed or not. In his analysis of The Searchers, he discusses about Marty’s cavalier qualities. Keathley notices a continuous motion with Marty’s relationship throughout the movie, especially involving a horse. Whether accidental or not, there seems to be an absence. Sometimes a scene could be cut out or just an improvisation occurrence, but whatever the case, the cinephilic searches to find the motives behind the action, looking throughout the film to see repeating patterns in order to find the modus operandi.
Concluding with a scene from The Searchers, one scene that relates the cinephilic’s urge to re-view a scene over again is when Ethan, after seeing Debbie as Scar’s squaw, gives up his search to abandon Debbie and go home. To him, Debbie is ruined; she has become another wife to the Comanche chief. Marty, on the other hand, argues with Ethan, seeing past her life as a squaw. Marty and Debbie, as seen in the beginning of the movie, have a unique bond that ties them together. Both are standouts within the family, and are drawn to each other because of the personality traits. It seems, at first, the viewer would want to take Marty’s side: after five years of following the tribe and coming so close, one would want to fight to get her back. Ethan, on the other hand, is a traveling tumbleweed without a home. Every search is basically how he lives. After the viewer re-watches the scene, they start to understand Ethan and why he would want to quit. He sees Debbie’s lifestyle and assumes she is brainwashed. Marty, still young, argues against his choice because it is her sister and his only surviving relative. To him, the search is not in vain and the five years of traveling are not over until Debbie comes home.
In chapter 4, Bordwell describes a formal structure for understanding and deconstructing film narrative. Syuhzet (the arrangement and presentation of events) and style (the film’s systematic use of cinematic devices) eventually combine into the “imaginary construct we create” as the completed fabula or story. This skeletal framework provides the student of film with a methodology for analyzing and developing technique and meaning in the movies of the past, present and future.
One of the things I find most interesting about Bordwell’s cognitive and structural approach to film viewing is his description of how syuhzet and style work to manipulate viewer cognition in order to create a particular experience. In “Rear Window,” syuhzet and style provide the raw material for the viewer’s interim conclusions about events – some of those tactics put us on the right track and others delay an eventual solution. Classical cinema moves the viewer like a pawn in an effort to keep them engaged, interested and entertained. We infer things from the scenes that appear on the screen – that combine syuhzet and style – to reach conclusions about the overall fabula.
Quoting Bordwell directly, “Depending on how the syuhzet presents the fibula, there will be particularly spectatorial effects. Armed with the notion of different narrative principles and the concept of the syuhzet’s distortion of fabula information, we can begin to account for the concrete narrational work of any film.” Hitchcock withholds certain information in “Rear Window” and maintains mystery, partial understanding and suspense. Ford does the same with “The Searchers” as we seek to understand Ethan’s history, motivation and plans.
Utilization of these tools to manipulate the viewer into a satisfying experience is a tremendous craft, exemplified by Ford and Hitchcock, and breaking that process down in great films delivers a huge toolbox for future filmmakers. If we can’t see what they are doing, we can’t learn from their example. Perhaps that’s even why the Tarantino’s of the world are successful – see it, understand it, and copy it.
Obviously, Bordwell’s conclusions in chapter 4 support his overall theory of cognition and the viewer’s active role in creating film narrative. Given the history of the debate in the academic world of film theory, almost all of his work to date seems aimed at establishing a comprehensive answer to those arguing for an alternative and often more political cinematic perspective. He almost seems to be saying, take that!
In Christian Keatley’s “Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes,” he utilizes a scene from “The Searchers” to help describe an important quality of great cinema. To quote Keatley directly, “But beyond what is planned and intentional – both he formal and dramatic elements of the scene – there is always the accidental, the unintentional, no matter how minute or how momentary, that gives a scene a certain exceptional quality, a certain life.” This often-ineffable measure of style impacted Keatley immensely in the Martin/Ethan/horse scene from “The Searchers,” and it impacts all viewers in infinite ways throughout the history of motion pictures.
This certain quality described by Keatley is also probably why so many great directors cared so profoundly about their cast of characters. John Wayne could create those moments with a look or a movement and enrich a movie immeasurably for both the director and the viewer. Keatley is also right to point out that this quality can be about anything in a scene – from the quality of sound, to a dance with a horse, to the framing of a shot – and create magic in the process. While this quality probably fits within Bordwell’s definition of style, it is often subjective and difficult to pin down. Much like the Supreme Court’s view of obscenity, however, we seem to know it – or feel it – when we see it. Keatley describes particular scenes as evidence and argues for a kind of universality despite the subjective nature of his analysis.
Absent Keatley’s biography, he writes about film from the position of someone who loves the cinema. I do not know his academic background, credentials or prejudices – but he writes like someone who is unafraid to maintain his affection for the material he studies. His love of movies informs his topic and conclusions in virtually every paragraph of this essay.
In the world of formal analysis and deconstruction of film, it is refreshing to focus in on the mysterious elements that can combine to make the experience of a motion picture a revelation or even mystical experience for the viewer. Keatley’s obsession about his scene in “The Searchers” is a reminder of why people love movies – leaving the dark of a theater, completely moved by an experienced and absorbed in the feelings of an imaginary world. Break it down, as we will, there will always remain something mysterious and mystical about the experience.
I have two examples of scenes from “The Searchers” that I consider fine examples of both Keatley’s “exceptional something” and Bordwell’s combination of syuhzet and style. The first scene, which we’ve looked at before, is the scene where the Reverend/Captain, Ethan, and Martha exit from the kitchen. Ward Bond’s face in particular is worth a very close look, as is the communion that passes between Ethan and Martha. These are more than just markers or hints, they are uniquely powerful moments that move us as viewers. Another different kind of example is the visually stunning composition of the rider – Harry Carey, Jr. I believe – framed next to the giant mesa as he alerts the others to the fallen cattle. Ford said that he’s always been good at composition, and this scene delivers it in spades. Beyond composition, it is a powerful representation of Keatley’s thesis. The effect is something that probably cannot be quantified or identified by a specific directorial intent, but this “exceptional something” is created from the camera position, Monument Valley mise en scene, the actors movement and accompanying sound, and something mysterious about the relationship of these parts to our overall story.
We continue with Bordwell’s psychological inquiry into the structure of film and the story line, by breaking down the story, or fibula, and looking for “causal or spatial or temporal links”. Bordwell chooses, in this chapter, to get down directly to the sources of the film’s structure. He gives us a picture of a story, a fibula, and then branches of that base to pay attention to the syuzhet (plot) and the style. He states that these two properties function properly, or sometimes improperly, to give the viewer the overall meaning of the story (fabula). The syuzhet is the “actual arrangement and presentation of the story in the film”. This syuzhet is the funnel that combines the story and the events of the film into a comprehendible fabula. The style is the all important, but always forgotten, mise-en-scene; camera movement, edits, background and everything else under that heading. These two functions allow the viewer to understand the film logically, temporally and spatially. Without these guidelines the viewer would be lost and would not understand the fabula.
The summation of his entire point for the chapter could be his definition of narration “the process of whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula.” With this definition he continued us down a path on how we can interrupt the viewer’s construction and throw them a “curve-ball”. Gaps are used when the movie wants to suspend the understanding of the viewer in order to add mystery or suspense. These gaps can be anything the syuzhet encompasses, however Bordwell talked on the most often used gap; the temporal gap. Gaps, Bordwell states are”the clearest cues for the viewer to act upon, since they evoke the entire process of schema formation and hypothesis testing.” This bit of information is an excellent tool to understand and utilize in one of your personal films. The breaking down of the fabula to the syuzhet and style allows a storyteller to create a focused path that the viewer can follow. True mastery of the narrative is a complex undertaking.
The “Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes” was just a fun read, I consider myself a Cinephiliac, friends call me a nerd but oh well, and reading these five examples of a person telling me their intimate moment with a part of a film was a bonding experience. The five anecdotes of these five writers were an intimate opening of their movie experience. The first anecdote concerns the scene where Martin Pawley runs after Ethan when they attack scars camp and try to rescue Debbie. Martin, thinking Ethan wishes to kill Debbie, runs after Ethan, who is on his horse and tries to jump onto the horse. In that movement Marty seems to “float” next to Ethan and then is hit onto the ground in a violent wave of dust and horse hooves. This scene for this author captured a moment for them where they have an intimate connection to the film that they are watching and it triggers other extraneous memories which add to the feeling of nostalgia or euphoria for them. We all have our own personal movie moments, where we can sit and watch it over and over again, until we have goose bumps. Recognizing these scenes in our personal life can help us understand a certain universal pattern of the scene. If we stop and think during our scene of euphoria, what made us feel this, be it style or syuzhet, we can begin to understand the reason people have a personal connection to our film.
Also talked about, are the redeming properties of a single scene in a film. A person can have no connection to a film at any level until they see a scene that allows a connection to come through. These connections are purely arbitrary to each different viewer. These can not always be recreated or understood, or dissected.
From the two readings, one scene continued to poke through in my mind as one I would like to watch again. The scene is when Ethan, Marty and Brad go searching for the girls and they come to a narrow pass. Ethan tells the other two to go around and he will follow in the pass. Next scene we see Ethan coming out of the pass bewildered and confounded to himself. This is a use of a gap that Bordwell talks about.
In this chapter of Bordwell's writing he is talking mainly about the fabula and the syuzhet. First of all, I think they should of thought of better names for these words, because they are really weird, and I think they could of found ones that more resmebled their meanings. The fabula is "the imaginary construct we create." What I got from this is that it is basicly the story we create during and after we see a film. Events may not be related but while viewing a film a viewer tries to piece everything together and make sense of everything. A film that comes to mind for me when the viewer makes sense of things as it goes and especially making sense of the events after the initial viewing is Pulp Fiction. Once again he is really interested in what is subconsciously going on with the viewer. The syuzhet is "the actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula in the film." This is just saying the order of the events that happen in the film. To use Pulp Fiction again, the order the events are shown are not the order that the events actually happen. Even though they may not be put in the order they happen, the viewer is able to find clues and create hypothesis that help them figure out what is going on.
Keathley wrote about five short stories that had to do with connections and things she related to certain events in a film. The one that stuck out to me the most was The Swing of the Key. I havent seen most of the films she talked about but I found it really interesting that such a little event could possible help the viewer figure out the movies if they even noticed the little detail. In the case of the film "Laura" there is a few seconds where there is no talking, music, or motion besides the character swinging a key like a pendulum. Later in the film when the main character is looking for the murder weapon he realizes that it is hidden in a clock. The pendulum motion earlier with the key signals to the viewer to think of a clock and in every scene in the apartment there is a noticable clock ticking. I find it amazing that there are such little details in film that the viewer can notice unconsciously, and not even realize they notice it until after the film. In "The Searchers" I noticed the indian blankets, but didn't really think about them until we discussed them in class. After someone mentioned them I was like, I knew something was weird about them, I just didn't think about it enough.
The scene I would like to look at again, is when Martin's girl (I cant think of her name) is reading the letter she gets from Martin and then Charlie starts to sing to her. I think this is a good example of what Bordwell is talking about with the viewer unconsciously knowing whats going on. When Charlie starts to sing the viewer knows that the girl isn't going to wait for Martin, but at the same time the viewer knows Martin and the girl are supposed to be together so they know something is going to happen that they will still end up together. When the wedding scene comes up, the viewer is neither surprised when the girl is marrying charlie, and not surprised when Martin comes at just the right time to stop it.
The Searchers Blog 2
In chapter 4, Principles Of Narration, the author talks about the different psycologicial puzzle pieces needed to tell a story of some kind of cohesion. Systems and excess branch off into different areas of the story telling process. The best kinds of storys have to trust the viewer to connect the dots and meld the story in their own head, based on certain shot structures or framing, and must interpret the actions of the characters within the narration in order to justify or sustain what you are supposed to think about that persons actions and personality traits. The part that I most enjoyed about the reading was the topic of style, since I’ve never really thought about how style is critically used in good storytelling. What it says is, basically, there is a straight to the point way to tell a story, and this is good, but, with the most skillful storytellers, they use their imagination to conceive genious ways to tell you what a straight forward approach does except with that extra life. Style, though, should never be used to substitute a good story, and your film will suffer if you fail to learn that.
In the next reading, Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes, I liked how the author related feelings to films and scenes the way we would think of music. A movie isn’t just made up of one song, and if it is it isn’t a very good movie, but more like a bunch of interrelated songs that create a beautiful opus of sight and sound. He also talked about his need to watch certain scenes over and over again because of how they were presented and how they made him feel when he watched them, like his favorite song of the whole grand thing. I think this is what really draws people to film or to be a musician. When you see something that you really think is beautiful and affects you, then it becomes the thing you want to encompass and to wrap your life around. The ability to affect other people with your images and change the way they see is the ultimate glory, I think, of being a filmmaker or artist.
In his article, "Principles of Narration", David Bordwell examines the psychological process of analysis in regard to the structure of a story. He closely looks at syuzhet and fabula, both of which are crucial to the viewer's understanding of how to analyze the contents of a film. Bordwell explains the basics of fabula when he writes, "the fabula embodies the action as a chronological cause-and-effect chain of events occuring within a givin duration" (Bordwell 30). In relation to the fabula is the syuzhet, which he claims allows a way for the viewer to analyze each aspect of a film so that it is one, full story. These basic concepts are the outlying ideas of his article, and he brings them together by choosing style as a method of analysis. Bordwell explains that style is a means to fuse the fabula and syuzhet together. He claims that due to the style in which a scene is constructed, the assumptions and inferences one makes regarding the fabula are reconstructed and make sense of the syuzhet.
Christian Keathley's article, "Five Cinephilliac Anecodtes", he discusses the act of watching and re-watching, which has come to be known as cinephile. using examples from five different films, Keathley examines the importance of re-watching in cinema for the purpose of drawing new conclusions, making new analyses, and re-thinking certain concepts and ideas in regard to films.
One scene in particular, in which the contents pertain to the ideas discussed by Keathley, is when Ethan and Martha share a few brief moments of forbidden affection just before Ethan leaves. We have already looked at this scene, but it may be helpful to see once more for viewers to draw their own conclusions about that relationship.
In "Principles of Narration," Bordwell gives us a framework of cognitive principles with which to understand and discuss the construction of a narrative in the viewers mind. He illustrates, a bit wordily, how "syuzhet," and style, through varying degrees of communicativeness, self-consciousness, and direct knowledge are employed to create a "fabula" in the mind of the viewer.
Using this technical framework, Bordwell gives us a cogent set of tools to answer questions centered on why we do or do not develop a fabula which is coherent with the intentions of the director.
Of particular interest in regards to "The Searchers," is this idea of redundancy that is employed in developing Ethan as a character that eventually leads to narrative restriction that seems all the more rational.
Beginning with the discovery of the slaughtered bulls in the valley, the syzhet begins to establish Ethan's believability as a necessary and primary leader.
Up to this point, Ethan is not necessarily the most respectable of characters. His past is questionable. He is mysteriously bitter. And he poses a threat to the family structure he has come out of the wilderness to.
When he suggests splitting the groups to search for the missing cattle, his authority is questionable, as is illustrated by his exchanges with the preacher. The derisive use of "prodigal son" in reference to Ethan limits the idea that he should be in charge of anything.
However, when they come upon the bulls, Ethan takes the lead and becomes the knowledgeable and correct leader. Proving his suspicions about the involvement of hostile forces. This is repeated again on the ride home when we find Marty without a horse and Mose admonishes him to listen to Ethan, so that finally when he strikes Marty at the entrance to the smokehouse, as a viewer, Ethan's rightness is already closing on unquestionable. He is indispensable to the crisis at hand.
The pattern of this one element occurs over and over again, and leads us to a wonderful narrative tension where Marty is always wrong and Ethan is always right, so that the is some possibility of Ethan's rightness in insisting on killing Debbie, as well as a equal but believable release when he decides not to. After all, Uncle Ethan is never wrong, as many parts of the syuzhet reveals to us over and over again.
In Keathly's "Cinephiliac Anecodtes" we are asked to approach film from an entirely different, and still cognitively connected, angle.
Keathly clearly is employing the methods of a writer in his approach to film, documenting a very personal response to film criticism and theory as a teaching tool.
One of the key points of the article is the proper use of a film loving anecdote to express a theory or exposit a criticism. It is interesting to me as it reminds us that criticism and theory is most specifically about people watching movies and that without cinephiliac anecdotes other methods of film studies cannot complete the picture of our relationship to film viewing.
This article is not so much about the specific aspects of film experience that are of interest to the author as it is a document, self-reflexively anecdotal, of the use of cinephiliac anecdotes to teach film theory and history. As such, the anecdotes are the evidence of their own usefulness.
In David Bordwell’s article, “The Principles of Narration,” one could say that Bordwell provides a great introductory essay on how the film relates, by describing the three main parts, the fabula, the syuzhet and the style of the film. He uses these parts to describe the break-down process of a narrative film. When reading Bordwell’s essay, one could say that he focuses on “how film form and style function in relation to narrational strategies,” mainly because he states it in the first paragraph (49). Bordwell illustrates how the fabula, or story, is usually put into effect once the viewer establishes certain connections between events. The author chooses such films as Rear Window to show how Jeffery actually assumes the fabula when connecting all of the mysterious actions of his neighbor, Mr. Thorwald. Moreover, Bordwell continues to elaborate on how the fabula is connected to the syuzhet, or the plot. The syuzhet is known as the “actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula in the film” and is related back to the fabula in the article (50). Bordwell also introduces the style of a film (the camera shots, the lighting, the sound, etc), the self-consciousness, and the communicativeness that is presented. This article is definitely presented as a psychological and structural basis for a narrative film. “The Principles of Narration” use examples of films, mostly Rear Window to show how a film is usually put together, how things correlate and why they do.
“Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes,” by Christian Keathley, look into five interesting factors that interested him and caught his eye when watching that particular film. He also describes how cinematic errors, a viewer’s background, or improvisation may make or break a film. To begin with, Keathley focuses on the style of the film, The Searchers. Keathley explains how much he loves the sequence with Martin falling off Ethan’s horse towards the end of the film and then relates it back to the beginning, when we first meet Martin in the doorframe. As we looked over in class, these two sequences were shot similarly because it adds to the character’s development. It may say quite a bit about Martin’s character. The author then goes on to talk about the viewers’ different experiences of films, by sharing a story of his incidents when seeing the film, Bonnie and Clyde. Another interesting aspect that Keathley illustrates is the reference to “community errors” and how they can sometimes be a blessing to the film. He explores an extra in the film Shadow of a Doubt and talks about how the mistake of the extra appearing and disappearing foreshadowed what was to happen in the film and strangely, what was to happen to the extra’s career (Keathley described his vampire-like facial expressions and features and states that later the actor went on to play a vampire). Overall, I would say that Keathley’s article is mainly influenced by his filmmaking and film watching experiences, especially since he uses a lot of examples from films and relates them to his own life and to other films.
The one section of “Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes” that caught my attention was “The Boy on the Corner.” When he described the awkward shot of the boy looking over main character’s shoulder, giving a “curiously severe expression on his face,” I could not but help think of the scene when Martha takes Ethan’s coat and puts it away for him. Keathley described how this shot sparked his curiosity of why the boy is smiling and what he is smiling at. Apparently in the film, Shadow of a Doubt, the next shot does not show what the boy is looking at off screen. The article states that “the camera’s ability to ‘give’ focus of the screen to any player at any moment, also means that films tend to favor reactions” (162). This got me thinking about the scene of Martha putting away the coat, every time I watch the film; I feel as if the shot of Martha entering the bedroom and putting away the coat is too long. I know that it displays a sense of the Martha-Ethan relationship, in her wanting to carefully put away his coat, but I feel as if the reaction shot is with Ethan and Aaron in the kitchen, although this shot takes a long time to come around. This always interested me; I mean, why the long shot?
Boardwell’s Principles of Narration is a thoroughly organized essay that explains the structure and construction of Narration in film and in relation to the viewer. Boardwell writes, “Narration is the process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula.” He uses alternative terminology but translates it as fabula meaning story, and syuzhet meaning plot. The later half of Boardwell’s essay goes into detail as to several tactics of plot construction. He cites several films to help exemplify different areas which aid in the comprehension of a film such as, schema (registered associations and familiarizations we make) gaps (stretches of time that leave you confused and out of the loop), retardation (when the plot postpones revealing certain items of story information), redundancy (when information, objects or events appear multiple times to help emphasize something), and exposition (the amount of story information in a given scene). “In any narrative text in any medium, the plot controls the amount and the degree of pertinence of the information we receive. The plot creates various sorts of gaps in our construction of the story; it also combines information according to principles of retardation and redundancy.” What’s interesting about these properties or areas of comprehension is that even though they appear to be complexly interrelated, they are innately used and obeyed when we watch film.
Keathley’s essay entitled “Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes” uses detailed film experiences to illustrate several cinematic elements of appreciation. He begins by discussing a concept called panoramic perception born out of the video boom when VCR’s became popular. As soon as people could control the means of how, when and where they watched their movies, the film could be broken up into parts and examined more carefully at anyone’s own pace simply by replaying it again from any segment desired. This allowed anyone to become a casual film analyzer. Keathley describes a very specific moment of imagery in which the character Martin in The Searchers leaps at Ethan’s horse during the climax of the film. “Martin seems momentarily to slow down, his right leg bending gracefully at the knee” … “This moment, this action, is for me the most beautiful in the entire film.” Only with the power of the VCR and “user control” could this moment be caught again and again and as thoroughly invested in as Keathley. Other elements discussed in this essay were film’s affect on memory/emotions, off screen space, improvisation and reference to external symbolism all of which were explained exceptionally within a well-cited film sequence for each. Today films are even more lucratively viewed with personal media players and streaming video over the Internet. The landscape for the presentation of this media is dramatically different since Keathley’s time and will continue to become even more apparent in the next two or three years.
The scene I’d like to select from The Searchers is when Ethan and Martin continue their hunt for Debbie at a Calvary camp stationed in the snow on the edge of Native American soil. They speak to a general and get word that a white girl may have been killed and the bodies lay inside their stationed cabins. As Ethan looks over the bodies there is an overall feeling of how the whites treated the Native Americans poorly. We see them corral and beat various people in between the coverage of Ethan and Martin even though it has very little to directly influence the characters. John Ford never dived heavily into this background material but rather hints at it. This kind of information regulation is labeled by Boardwell as concentrated exposition in which lots of information may be presented around the story but not fully necessary to explain. In this moment of the film there is a lot being said about the country’s conditions but the film’s plot focuses attention to the matter at hand which is Ethan and Martin’s quest.
In summation of one key point from both David Bordwell’s “Principals of Narration” and Christian Keathley “Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes,” I first would like to touch upon Bordwell’s exploration of “concentrated” and distributed” exposition, and their relation to syuzhet and fabula. In reference to Meir Sternberg’s work on retardation patterns and their perceptual and cognitive consequences in film, Bordwell argues that: “Concentrated and preliminary exposition supplies a strong primacy effect, solid grounds for confident hypotheses formation. Distributed and delayed exposition,” conversely he suggests, “encourages curiosity about prior events and can lead to a suspension of strong or absolute hypotheses” (37). In other words, syuzhet fragmentation and its distribution throughout a fabula lend spectators the power to produce conscious narrative structures via their own prototype, template, and procedural schemata. Whereas a spectator’s “concentrated exposition” works with their values and expectations engendered from the narrative elements have been supplied to them thus far, providing them with the groundwork necessary to surmise a film’s logical (?) conclusion.
Similarly in “Five Cinephillac Anecdotes, Christian Keathley looks to his own personal experiences of viewing a film to assay this question of boundaries with regard to appreciation of film aesthetics. The starkest contextualization made by Keathley is his own personal experience with Arthur Penn’s film “Bonnie and Clyde.” With regard to the film’s final and most bloody shootout between Bonnie, Clyde, and their pursuers, Keathley notes that: “…I have waited for this moment with anticipation, and with dread” (158). Indeed, Clyde’s shoulder exploding apart from a shotgun blast and his perpendicular movement from the ambulatory car he is driving has left two indelible marks on Keathley: 1) a profoundly visceral identification with Clyde’s assumed physical anguish from the wound; 2) the entire film’s ancillary position as a mode of unearthing Keathley’s personal memories of his brother’s friend Cathy consoling him during the film’s climatic orgy of violence as a child, a person who would unfortunately died two weeks later.
Keathley’s notations in “Five Cinephiliac Anecdotes” on a film’s overall effectiveness in reproducing collective memories for its spectators are manifold, but for the purposes of brevity I would like to momentarily highlight the general idea of sanitizing the representation of death and violence, and the inherent problems associated with such a decision. One submits themselves to a rather pernicious fallacy if seeking out representations of death and violence that would somehow be sublime or, as Pauline Kael put it in defense of “Bonnie and Clyde,” discrete or tasteful (Keathley 158). To depict death or violence “discreetly” or “tastefully” is to more than likely efface its morbidity and consequences, to marginalize or discount either’s reality, and to reanimate either as a tolerable event, or worse, as “entertainment.” Concerning one of his specific cinephiliac approach to film, Keathly looks to Andre Bazin’s essay “Death Every Afternoon,” where Bazin submits that: “Death is surely one of those rare events that justifies the term, so beloved of Claude Mauriac, cinematic specificity. Art of time, cinema has the exorbitant privilege of repeating, a privilege common to all mechanical arts, but one that it can use with infinitely greater potential…the cinema only attains and constructs its aesthetics time based on lived time…” (qtd. in Keathley, 158). Bazin therefore finds cinematic time to be the most effective mode of rediscovering, analyzing, and reinterpreting lived time since the convention of cinema allow one to more or less “pause” time. Thus, one’s interpretation of a film aggrandizes with one’s physical age, their lived experiences, in a word, their lived schematics in reference to Bordwell’s theory of the viewer’s activity.
With regarding to death, violence and its depiction in John Ford’s film “The Searchers,” I would suggest that we revisit, but not limit ourselves to, Ford’s modernist approach in representing the genocidal mentality of contemporary American in 1868, and how such a mentality is reflected by means of his shot sequences and narrative exposition. For instance, Ford utilizes medium-long shots of Comanche civilians being herded into a concentration camp by U.S. Cavalry soldiers when Ethan and Marty arrive at a military outpost. One can imagine the subsequent horror to unfold during such conditions of a concentrated confinement of such a large number of people, those that to be sure are considered less than desirable. Yet before getting into details about Ford’s shot sequences here, it is necessary to first look back to a crucial, prior sequence when Ethan and Marty arrive at a decimated Comanche village.
Wading through thick drifts of snow, Ethan and Marty come upon a village which contains slaughtered Comanche civilians. Ethan’s apathy is apparent towards the murder, but Marty still must confront him with the moral question at hand: “what did them soldiers have to go and kill her for?” (01:12:11). Moving forward to the sequence of the Comanche civilians being led into captivity by the cavalry, Ford cuts from women and child stumbling single-file into captivity to a medium shot of two Comanche elders (significantly both characters are ornamented in traditional clothing and paint, and both actors playing them are visibly of Native American decent). Ford subsequently cuts from the two men back to the civilians being led into captivity, for strategic reasons that remain unknown to the spectator, and the sequence becomes one of representational ambiguity, not spectacle, when commenting on the genocidal mentality of contemporary Americans. While the film does not level clear distinctions of such murder on the surface, I believe that this scene, together with the one that precedes it, warrants a sustained look in class tomorrow.
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