Crosscutting Possibilities
Flooding the Zone
Flooding the zone might be a term the political figure Steve Bannon has used to describe how to keep the media from interrogating given policies and ideas. But it can also be useful when thinking of how filmmakers use the crosscut to create informational density, without necessarily giving the viewer enough time to incorporate all the information they expect to process.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thomson describe crosscutting as ‘‘editing that alternates shots of two or more lines of action occurring in different places, usually simultaneously.’’ (Film Art: An Introduction) Few scenes reflect this more obviously than the chase sequence, with Alfred Hitchcock saying, ‘‘the chase seems to me the final expression of the motion picture medium’’ (Hitchcock on Hitchcock), as he offers a very nuanced account of its possibilities, adding that ‘‘essentially, the chase is someone running toward a goal, often with the antiphonal motion of someone fleeing a pursuer.’’ (Hitchcock on Hitchcock) We could propose that while most chases are cross-cuts, far from all cross-cuts are chases. In the former instance, a chase sequence can be filmed with no editing at all, as we see in Children of Men, or, in a news report, where OJ Simpson escaping from the police could be viewed from a helicopter’s perspective. If the chase doesn’t always use parallel montage, equally, crosscutting can be used for events other than the chase. When Bordwell and Thompson propose that editing can be broken down into four categories: ‘‘graphics, rhythm, space, and time, then are at the service of the filmmaker through the techniques of editing’’ (Film Art: An Introduction), the chase would be an example of the spatial.
But it might fall too easily into that category, which is why Sergei Eisenstein’s much earlier insistence on five categories has its uses, and why it is only the fifth that will be of interest to us: intellectual montage. Eisenstein can be vague on this, saying, ‘‘Intellectual montage is montage not of generally physiological overtonal sounds, but of sounds and overtones of an intellectual sort, ie., conflict-juxtaposition of accompanying intellectual affects.’’ (Film Form) This moves beyond the pragmatics of dramatic organisation, and invokes the possibility of a given thought. Even in the greatest chase sequences this is unlikely to be the case, partly because no dialectical relationship develops between the images, but instead a causative narrative insistence. The scene between the train and the car in The French Connection, as Popeye Doyle tries to capture a sniper who has hopped on a train Doyle cannot catch, jumping into a car instead, is logistically brilliant.
Yet it remains throughout a spatial montage, based on making sure the viewer knows where the hero and villain are and how close or how far away Doyle is from catching him. This is not at all an intellectual montage. But what about the scene in The Godfather where the film crosscuts between Michael Corleone christening his godson, and various rival gangsters getting popped off in other parts of New York? Logistics here are secondary to thematics, as the idea becomes paramount. What Coppola conveys is more the moral demise of Michael, over the development of his business, even if the consequences of killing all the rivals will be a far greater market share of corruption. A film interested in logistics over thematics would have emphasised the business over Michael’s soul. But Coppola doesn’t lay out the details of Michael’s plan as it crosscuts to show its execution, so to speak; he shows Michael in the church as we will be inclined to think of the life of crime the child is being brought into, just as thirty years earlier Michael would have been likewise christened by his criminal dad. Coppola, of course, has talked a lot about capitalism in the context of the film, and has always shown a fascination with family that Peter Cowie makes much of in his book on the director. Cowie, speaking of the capitalist aspect, says, ‘the notion of capitalism as the paradigm for American capitalism – survival of the fittest, the ruthless annihilation of critics, and the amassing of money which in turn purchases power – emerges more and more forcefully as this and its sequel gather momentum.’’ (Coppola) Coppola gives such an idea form in the crosscutting christening/murder scene and shows murder most foul and family so close.
The crosscutting of two contrary scenes at once needn’t always result in thematic complexity. Sometimes it just pushes further dramatic intensity, and we might wonder if more recent films have learnt from the editing possibilities Coppola and other directors of his decade put into practice, but did so to retreat from meaning and foreground the adrenaline. Returning to The French Connection, we can also see how the logistically adrenalised can nevertheless take two forms: the fast and the slow, the frenetic and the calculative. In one scene, Popeye Doyle is in the subway and sees the suave, drug-dealing villain. Doyle gets a drink at an underground cafe after seeing Charnier there, and as Charnier gets on a train, Doyle does likewise. Before the train takes off, Charnier exits and puts something in the bin. Doyle then gets off the train, rushes to put the remains of his just-bought toffee apple in the bin himself, and rushes back on the tube. Just as the doors close and the train is about to take off, Charnier puts his umbrella between them and gets off once again. All the doors are now open and Doyle leaves as well, but as he exits and faces us in the foreground, Charnier has sneaked back on again in the background. This is but a brief scene, yet a great example of a calculated chase because it is based on the surreptitious over the explicit, with Doyle trying to get his man, without Charnier knowing he is trying to do so. When he puts the item in the bin as he gets off the train, he is facing away from Charnier and so doesn’t see him getting back on; this is because he doesn’t want to be noticed. He is trying to look natural and inconspicuous. Of course he has been noticed, and when the tube takes off with Charnier on board, and Doyle frustrated on the platform, Charnier gives the cop a little wave.
Some might insist this is hardly a chase sequence at all, and they might be right from a certain perspective. Some shots require no parallel montage as the space is so proximate it can rely on containing the two characters within the frame: when Doyle gets off the phone, Charnier is in the background at the cafe bar. The film cuts to Doyle ordering, and now Charnier is once more in the background from the opposite angle. The film then shows Doyle trying to locate Charnier, focusing on Doyle with Charnier absent, before we see Doyle in the foreground again, with Charnier in the background as they stand adjacent to each other on the train. Much of the scene’s brilliance comes from playing with the foreground and background rather than cutting, but this is because, while the film still works on the principle that one person wants to catch the other, one person wants to escape the other, it is closer to cat and mouse versus fox and hare. Doyle may think he is the cat who wants to catch the mouse, and in every way would seem superior physically to Charnier, who is presented as a senior (though Fernando Rey would have only been 54, while Hackman was already 41), and there is that umbrella which functions almost like the stick we find him carrying in Luis Bunuel’s Tristana, around the same time, another film where he plays a man older in age than his actual years suggest. Yet Charnier plays Popeye Doyle more, making clear he knew Doyle was after him straight away. It is a fine example of how to do a chase sequence when both characters are in the same space, and does so by minimising cutting, all the better to insist on the immediacy of the logistical within the calculative. The scene relies on brain over brawn, and Charnier wins. But it is a chase sequence as Hitchcock would define it, if we recall his claim that someone runs toward a goal and someone flees a pursuer. Fleeing might sound too active a verb, but escape Charnier undeniably does.
In the film’s most famous sequence, one of Charnier’s henchmen is on the roof and kills a woman passing by Doyle on the street. He keeps trying to get Doyle before taking off, and Doyle makes it onto the roof only to see the sniper escape. For the next ten minutes of screen time, Doyle will be chasing his man, Pierre. Once again, the villain gets on a train Doyle cannot catch, but this time Doyle tries to do so by flagging down a car. The chase becomes the antithesis of that brief moment with Charnier. It remains one of the great sequences of parallel montage, pushing further the brilliance of the earlier Bullitt, which shows Steve McQueen chasing the villain through the winding, undulating streets of San Francisco. Here, Doyle is determined to get his man by car as he negotiates the numerous hazards of New York’s urban density, taking on a man who merely glides through it on train tracks. Doyle, whether on foot or in a car, offers the sweaty frustration and exhaustion of a man who won’t give up, and perhaps especially more so because Charnier, not long before, has gotten away. Hackman is the sort of actor who can play somebody who wouldn’t only fail to get the girl; here he fails to get the main villain also. When, at the conclusion of this lengthy chase sequence, he gets to take out this secondary villain, though it doesn’t have the power of catharsis; it is no more than the alleviation of that escalating frustration. It is the opposite of a cool chase sequence exemplified by McQueen in Bullitt, and any adrenaline released is contained by a deeper deflation.
If The French Connection mastered the cross cut as fast-paced logistics, other films have either tried to outperform it in the quality of the spectacle, or wondered how to retain the logistical element without feeling obliged to emphasise the spectacular. A great example of the latter comes from John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Cosmo is a gambler who pays his debt by killing the bookie of the title, a high-ranking Triad member whom nobody else in the Italian mob would take out: Cosmo’s was a death mission, though he didn’t know it. Now everybody is out to get him, including the Italians who thought Cosmo would be immediately killed. In a great scene in an underground car park, shot mainly in darkness, Cosmo kills one mobster, and then another searches for him in the building. Though Cosmo is clearly our central character, Cassavetes focuses chiefly on the man trying to kill him, as the film minimises the crosscut, leaving us wondering where exactly Cosmo may be. As the gangster passes from space to space in near silence, so we begin to crosscut to Cosmo, who silently escapes the building in near darkness. It is the quietest of chase sequences, while The French Connection one with the sniper may well be the noisiest. Both eschew non-diegetic music (except at the end of The French Connection sequence), but William Friedkin’s film agitates our nerves with noise; Cassavetes’ keeps them on edge with only the odd echoing sound of a gunshot ricocheting, and of the most hushed of footsteps.
Cassavetes was of course a low-budget independent filmmaker, while Friedkin had a large studio behind him, and though one can do worse than see them as the two poles of logistical set-piece cinema, it is possible to do quiet on a huge budget, and noisy in a small production. Who can forget the fine sequence in Mission Impossible, where Nathan retrieves an important file while hanging from the ceiling, as the film crosscuts to his colleague valiantly trying to hold the wire? In contrast, the Dardenne Brothers shooting on a very small budget offer great chase sequences in Rosetta and The Child, often with no more than a moped and a person running away from it. The noise of the bike and the city, offers the opposite of the hallowed room Nathan occupies, and the shaft his colleague hides in. Yet whether fast or slow, low budget or high, quiet or noisy, all the sequences conform to the logistical problem of locating people in space, over the intellectual aspect of montage Eisenstein invoked.
We have noticed that The Godfather managed, within the context of what could have been a logistical montage, that it was still more clearly an intellectual one, as Michael christens his godson, well aware of events he has orchestrated elsewhere in the city. Yet the logistical is still present: the two scenes might not be directly cause and effect, as they would have been had the film crosscut between Michael ordering the hits and the hits taking place, but they aren’t arbitrary either. The scene is allusive without being categorically metaphorical, while Eisenstein’s notion proposed that any images that could contain the idea would be valid for intellectual exploration. He simply noted it was the difference between the logical and the illogical when discussing artificially produced images of montage. He proposes that when, in Battleship Potemkin, he offers shots of a woman looking aghast and then shows her glasses broken and her face bloodied, this is logical. When we see three stone lions in the same film in different positions, but edited together as if to suggest the stone lion is capable of movement, this would be illogical. Since Eisenstein believed in film as cellular, he reckoned one could put together images that generate ideas without being beholden to the pro-filmic fact that holds them. There were good reasons for this assumption. ‘‘We are seeking a definition of the whole nature, the principal style and spirit of cinema from its technical (optical) basis. We know that the phenomenon of movement in film resides in the fact that two motionless images of a moving body, following one another, blend into the appearance of motion by showing them sequentially at a required speed.’’ Ergo: ‘‘Montage is the means of unrolling an idea with the help of single shots: the ‘epic’ principle […] montage is the idea that arises from the collision of independent shots – shots even opposite to one another: the dramatic principle.’’ (Film Form)
From a certain perspective, Eisenstein is right. Film is made up of disconnected shots giving the impression of motion, yet this isn’t how the viewer perceives images. One doesn’t view them in quite the same way we see words, where we can notice how they are made up of a series of letters into words, sentences and paragraphs. In film we see whole images and have a habit of assuming they have been extracted from a filmed (pro filmic) world. Some of the experiments Eisenstein and colleagues did proposed that film could manipulate that reality (the Kuleshov effect and creative geography). Yet these created in the viewer not the reality of a single shot, but the assumption that viewers would make in their association, whether it was the impassive face of a man with cuts to objects that changed our claim about what the man was feeling, or cuts between different spaces that nevertheless leave the viewer assuming that this is still the same locale. While Eisenstein might have insisted that the shot was a cell, and thus shots could be edited radically together as a consequence, the purpose of Kuleshov’s experiments rested not on the ontology of the image, but on its potential artificiality. If experimentation leads to application, Kuleshov’s trickery proved much more influential than Eisenstein’s montage cells. We could even claim that, though both filmmakers’ work set out to prove the importance of montage, they did so antithetically. Kuleshov showed how easy it is for the filmmaker to get the viewer to believe in reality, that it can convince someone that the expression on the face changes depending on what is in the counter shot, or that, when a person walks into a building, the viewer will assume the interior will be of that building, even if it isn’t. We could call this the viewer’s verisimilitudinous susceptibility: their willingness to believe even if the truth will be contrary to that assumption. In contrast, Eisenstein wished to convince the viewer that the image could counter the readily believable, and the viewer would still believe. In other words, they would accept an image that has nothing to do with another as metaphorically convincing. But it seems this wasn’t successful, except comedically or non-diegetically. Charlie Chaplin could get away with contrasting workers going into the factory with sheep herded into a pen, as he dissolved from the latter to the former, and Jean-Luc Godard could offer what have been called non-diegetic inserts, from Christian Metz, with David Bordwell describing them as ‘‘one or more images that possess no denotative reality in the fabula [fictional] world.’’ (Narration in the Fiction Film). Such images throw us out of the story all the better to make us think about the relationship between these images. When, in Pierrot le fou, Godard shows his two leading characters leaving Paris, he offers their thoughts in voiceover and shows us images from comic books and paintings. Diegetically, he might have shown us the passing landscape ,but while Godard escapes the diegetic, he doesn’t quite fall into metaphor, as if aware that film can generate easily enough disjunction, but struggles with conjunction. If two distinct things can be drawn together on the page as we find when we say a person’s life has been dealt a hammer blow, or a person is as timid as a mouse, offer this in an editing conjunction, and it becomes comical, which is precisely what Chaplin understood when he showed the factory workers herded in like sheep.
We could say that Godard (like Alain Resnais) took Eisenstein’s film experiments in one direction; American filmmakers of the seventies took them in another. Godard realised that in a medium as literal as film, the non-diegetic insert could be used disjunctively, while New Hollywood directors saw that metaphor was still possible, and conjunctions effective, if the inserts became diegetic. This is what Sam Peckinpah understood in The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Francis Coppola in The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. At the beginning of The Wild Bunch, children look on as Peckinpah offers us close-ups of ants and scorpions. When Tom Milne says the western code the film’s characters live by ‘‘was harsh, unsentimental, and yet in its own way as innocent as the children who gather round laughing while the ants and scorpions blindly destroy each other’’, he sees that the insects can serve a metaphoric function. Yet they do so diegetically. The cowboys are in town about to cause mayhem, and pass these kids watching the scorpions and the ants. Had Peckinpah cut to a nature documentary to suggest this metaphor, it would have been non-diegetic, and potentially risible, which is exactly why Chaplin can raise a laugh when he does it, well aware that such cumbersome juxtapositions amuse us. Few will fail to see a metaphorical dimension to this moment, but it is contained within a diegetic alibi – the strenuousness of its metaphoric significance can be justified by the texture it also gives to the story it is telling. These are kids looking on at what they see as the cruelty of nature. In Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Peckinpah crosscuts between the past and the present as in the past, Billy the Kid and his gang shoot the heads off hens, and then in the present, Pat Garrett is getting killed.
Peckinpah may be saying that Pat is like a chicken deserving his fate, since as the film unfolds we see him betraying Billy. But if the crosscut works between two time periods, it isn’t that it does so strenuously as a metaphor, but that it proposes further questions about violence, the old west, and betrayal. It works on the diegetic level as one wonders what link there happens to be between this gang in the past and this man in the future, as good friends become enemies when Pat accepts the shift towards legal means. One of those attempts to remove criminal elements will be driving Billy out of the county, or killing him if he stays. Rather than saying Peckinpah insists on heavy metaphors about man’s inhumanity to man, animals’ inhumanity to animals, and man’s inhumanity to poultry, he creates instead a densely textured world of cruelty and harshness. Robin Wood reckons, ‘‘his films implicitly accept violence as a metaphysical fact, a condition of our existence, and go on from there at times equivocally to celebrate it, though the celebration is never simple or complacent, never free from an accompanying sense of horror.” (Cinema: A Critical Dictionary) Had Peckinpah presented the violence with non-diegetic conjunctions, the heaviness of statement would have been equivocal. By insisting on diegetic conjunctions, it proposes a metaphysical force without reducing it to a directorial statement.
When watching the scene in Apocalypse Now where the film crosscuts between Colonel Kurtz getting slaughtered by the man, Captain Willard, whose mission it has been to find him, and a water buffalo being decapitated, we might wonder if Coppola has followed Peckinpah’s capacity to use violence tautologically – to show violence to illustrate violence. In The Godfather, the intellectual montage doesn’t do this – it contrasts the sacredness of the church with the sacrilege of the killing, looking for counterpoint all the better to show that Michael Corleone is now completely absorbed into a world of aggression, even if he might believe he can separate home life from business. All it is likely to do is alienate the people he loves as he lies to his wife while murdering his rivals. Some might insist that Coppola has risked overkill in the water buffalo scene, and we could say this is exactly what he offers without quite claiming it as a criticism. Like Peckinpah, if for different reasons, Coppola wants to show the horror of murder and finds it analogously in the bull being slaughtered.
However, he also wants to show that we are witnessing two sacrifices at work: the bull’s slaughter is part of a ritual the locals practice, but Kurtz’s is a militaristic version of the animal, as Willard must eradicate from Vietnam the heart of darkness that has been created in it. Kurtz is that figure. Yet the scene also works within a formal paradox. For decades, Hollywood would show violence indirectly, cutting away from the deed to something more innocuous. A person would be run over, and we would hear the screech of cars and shocked expressions on people’s faces. The death would be implicit, even if the meaning was explicit. Here, Coppola all but reverses this, with the secondary detail supporting the primary detail the more violent. In classic Hollywood the film had to register an unequivocal act but would do so with visual equivocation. Coppola makes clear, of course, that Willard is killing Kurtz, but the crosscut lends to the scene a metaphysical overtone that Wood sees in Peckinpah’s work. Yet if Coppola is different from Peckinpah, it is partly because he is less inclined to view violence as a metaphysical given than as a ritualistic purging. The beast must die could be Coppola’s claim; Peckinpah’s would more likely be that the beast lurks inside us all and in a dog-eat-dog world, killing the odd dog won’t make much difference.
Nevertheless, both directors elevated editing to the condition of intellectual montage that Eisenstein proposes, and both have used diegetic over non-diegetic inserts to do so. Critics recognised that The Wild Bunch in 1969 helped take a certain type of editing further. David Weddle noted, ‘‘the gun battles at the opening and climax of the picture took parallel action, first refined by D. W. Griffith, to new and dizzying heights. It was the most creative use of montage since Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and it changed forever the way movies would be made’’ (Sight and Sound). If the broader claim that comes out of Coppola and Peckinpah’s formal brilliance isn’t quite the same, nevertheless, to reveal what that distinction happens to be (dog eat dog vs the beast must die), the use of intellectual cross-cutting proves vital.
Peckinpah was more an action director than Coppola, but both frequently used set pieces. The opening of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, the shootout near the end of The Getaway, and the siege on the mathematician’s house in Straw Dogs are all fine action sequences. The achievement rests on putting thought into the action sequence not only based on the sort of complex logistics evident in The French Connection, but on containing them within a broader idea. This is what Coppola does too, but with a less action-focused throughline, be it the christening or the water buffalo slaughter. Yet no filmmaker more than Peckinpah has absorbed action into an idea, just as few have pursued further Coppola’s insistence in taking an idea and incorporating it into action, as both have proved masters of crosscutting.
If crosscutting is often synonymous with the chase and action, taking further and rationalising Eisenstein’s propositions, others have suggested using montage to produce an idea that emphasises the meditative, even when working within what might at first seem generic material. The difference between Coppola and Peckinpah, and John Boorman and Nicolas Roeg rests on this distinction: between using the crosscut to allow action to reach the level of an idea in a set-piece, or using the crosscut to create disjunction and disorientation. When Coppola crosscuts from the christening to the shootouts, the viewer is unlikely to be disoriented on the level of time and space, while Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch might create a disorienting chaos for the characters in the bank robbery shootout, but this needn’t create a further disorientation in the viewer. Both films are in the tradition of the Eisenstein set-piece, but augmented by insisting any metaphoric aspect must be incorporated into the diegesis. In work by Boorman and Roeg, there is again no desire to create images that are non-diegetic, but the crosscut becomes more complicated because of time and space separation. At the beginning of Point Blank, there are a couple of scenes that play up this temporal/spatial perplexity. In the initial sequence, there appear to be three temporal planes. In the first, a person is lying on his back, confused; in the second, drunk at a party with a fellow drunken friend; and in the third, he is again with this friend and others involved in a robbery. In time, we will work out that the other man needs cash, Walker will be involved in the robbery, and the other man leaves him for dead after the theft. If Coppola and Peckinpah often emphasise spatial organization (no matter Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’s temporal element as the chickens are killed in the past getting crosscut to Garrett killed in the future), Boorman shows more clearly the influence of Alain Resnais over Eisenstein. Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon amour opens on a naked couple covered in a strange dust, then cuts to a sheened, tanned couple, before cutting once more to a hospital ward in Hiroshima. Again, three temporalities are invoked before we later discover how they are interconnected. Resnais’ film is not at all generic while Boorman’s insistently happens to be, and this needn’t be a criticism of the latter. It instead suggests how radical genre was becoming in late 1960s American cinema and into the 70s, as various films absorbed both Eisenstein and Resnais.
Resnais’ film explores the relationship between a French woman and a Japanese man years after WWII, and their brief affair before she returns to Europe. Its purpose is to address what constitutes witnessing and pain, and it ends irresolutely as the man wonders what she has seen of suffering. For various reasons, she may have suffered far more than he has, even if her suffering is based on guilt (she had an affair with a German soldier and was locked in a basement) and his was indirect: he wasn’t in Hiroshima when the atomic attack took place. The film has no ‘plot’. Point Blank very much does, as we find that the other man left Walker for dead, took the money and also went off with Walker’s wife. Walker wants revenge and his cash. The rest of the film will be about that motive, even if the film will continue to play with temporality. in one scene, Walker is stridently passing through the corridors of a corporate building as the film cuts to a woman in a bathroom, the same woman in a beauty salon, and Walker driving through the streets, all culminating in Walker bursting in what turns out to be his wife’s apartment. The simplest way to have filmed the sequence would have been Walker outside the beauty parlour, a cut to his wife there, and a cut to her leaving with Walker following her home. Cut to him outside the flat; her inside, and Walker then getting out of the car, going into the building and breaking down her door. It would give the film its necessary menace, but would lack the discombobulation Boorman seeks, and which the editing facilitates.
Not everyone believed these new editing strategies were much of an advancement, and Pauline Kael, while attacking Richard Lester’s Petulia, said of the style, ‘‘keep the audience jumping with cuts, juxtapose startling images, anything for effectiveness, just make it brilliant – with the director taking, apparently no responsibility for the implied connections.’’ Kael adds: “the editing style is derived from Alain Resnais, and though it’s debatable style. He uses it responsibly not just opportunistically.’’ (Going Steady) Kael elsewhere in this essay collection makes a passing and admiring reference to Point Blank, showing that even Kael could see that sometimes it works. But while Kael leans towards a rejection of the style with a few exceptions, we are more inclined to support the style with a few rejections. It allowed the crosscut to become ever more complex and absorbed cinema experiments from European film in the 1920s and 1950s, and into a Hollywood that needed rejuvenating. Yet Kael could accept some of these editing strategies, and was usually more sympathetic to those drawn from Eisenstein over Resnais, as she praised Peckinpah and Coppola, but could be dismissive of Losey, Resnais, Lester, Roeg and others she deemed more style than substance, as they used the editing possibilities to cover up potential staleness. As she said of Losey’s Harold Pinter scripted Accident: “They use a lot of craftsmanship and technique to pave the old dirt road.’’ (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) Speaking of Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Kael acknowledges the director’s brilliance but concludes, ‘‘Roeg is a chillingly chic director. Don’t Look Now is shallow in a way that I think people are looking for right now.’’ (Reeling) Kael was probably the most influential critic of her era, yet there she was, dismissing many films that have since been acknowledged as the best of their time.
Maybe Kael sees that while Coppola and Peckinpah have firmed up the Eisensteinian approach to montage by making it more concrete, close to the same time European filmmakers were instead fracturing it further. Roeg was always interested in editing as association of meaning rather than intensification of meaning. When Coppola crosscuts between Kurtz’s death and the water buffalo, the viewer is unlikely to be puzzled by the parallel montage, but when Roeg crosscuts in The Man Who Fell to Earth between a professor and his student in bed, and the title character lying on his, attended by a kindly hotel worker who sees him collapse in a lift, what does Roeg want to suggest in cutting back and forth between the two scenes? There is no narrative reason for juxtaposing them as there would be, for example, if the couple were in bed and the girl’s father or professor’s wife were coming up the stairs to the room. And it doesn’t have quite metaphoric import as we find in the scene from Apocalypse Now. Nor is it a complex version of meeting cute. Sure, in time, the professor and the title character will develop a friendship, but nothing in the sequence proposes this is likely, as we might think in a romantic comedy as it crosscuts between a girl and a guy, who we expect will soon enough get together. The editing in the Roeg film puzzles, as it fractures time and space without categorical purpose. Even when Roeg might seem to do so more logically at the beginning of Walkabout, it still carries strong associational force. Roeg shows us the father at work and the son and daughter at school before they will all take a picnic in the outback. But this description enormously impoverishes the execution, as Roeg makes much of the contrast between the urban Sydney environment, and the nature on its doorstep: he crosscuts not only between the three characters, but also the outback itself. In one shot, Roeg tracks along a brick wall before the desert comes into view, and then cuts to the father, small in the frame and in the distance, sitting on a concrete bench, amidst a grey, concrete environment. In the next shot, it shows meat in a butcher’s shop and then cuts to the Botanic Gardens as the boy passes through. The practical aspect of showing the three characters before they will meet seems insignificant next to the associations in the sequence. The story the film tells is simple: the father takes his life, and the children are left stranded until an Aboriginal boy in the walkabout of the title helps them back to civilisation. Roeg’s point is constantly to ask what this idea of the civilised world is, and whether much of it is merely commodification and industrialised exploitation. He offers it less as a statement of intent than a question of perspective. From the aboriginal point of view, the alien environment isn’t the outback but society, and each stage towards returning the boy and the girl (who is around his age) to the social world can seem a further move towards his own obsolescence. While he kills animasl with specific skill, and hunts what he needs, men from the towns and cities take out as many animals as they can. As the Aboriginal boy is about to hack into an animal he has caught and killed, a jeep passes him by, covers him in dust and continues on its way, with the men inside going on to kill numerous creatures. The boy seems to look on, but they have driven far enough away for us to wonder if this is possible. At the same time, Roeg doesn’t just cross-cut between the boy and the men; he also shows us other animals that might not be up for slaughter, but are aware of the killing that surrounds them. Roeg’s editing seems not so much metaphoric (as we find in Apocalypse Now), and certainly not spatio-temporally pragmatic (as in The French Connection), but perhaps propositional. It asks the viewer to see the oneness of the world, and rather than insisting these hunters are terrible men (though they might be), they are divisive ones – divisive in the sense that they want to carve up the world and illustrate their prowess over any sense of necessity. The Aboriginal boy has a necessary relationship with death, as an animal’s demise is his immediate sustenance. The hunters lack that necessity and destroy the world for egoistic and financial gain.
A political dimension can be extracted from Walkabout, but it seems closer to the politics of Resnais than Godard. All we mean by this is that Godard was interested in the polemical at its most complex, just as Resnais was fascinated by the political at its most nuanced. If, from this perspective, Resnais influenced Losey, Lester, Boorman and Roeg, Godard strongly impacted the Straubs, Harun Farocki, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas. Godard’s work became important to filmmakers interested in political struggle, just as Resnais’s politicised work was tamed into exploring psychology and generic expansion. This isn’t to criticise Boorman or Roeg, for example. It is only to say that the potential in Resnais’ editing could easily make its way into their work, while Godard’s assertions could prove useful for those who wanted to make colonial oppression manifest. It is where one can see a lineage from Eisenstein to Godard to the Straubs, etc. While Eisenstein wanted the non-diegetic insert as part of the suspension of disbelief, Godard insisted the purpose wasn’t to convince the viewer by lulling them into the drama, but by asking them to question the diegesis, juxtaposing images or events that wouldn’t seem necessarily to go together. When, in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Godard cuts from the central character in her kitchen looking directly at the camera and shows us paintings lying on the grass, this isn’t so very different from The Hour of the Furnaces. In Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s film, the directors offer images of colonial history as they explain how English money replaced Spanish coercion. Most of these images in The Hour of the Furnaces make immediate sense: they are drawings and images of articles from what look like the times. But there are also contemporary images of people playing golf. It seems incongruous but not irrelevant, with the directors offering a question within the generally illustrative account of the neo-colonial. While Resnais’ disjunctive editing often generated questions about time that would be picked up by Roeg and others, Godard’s disjunctions became frequently about consumerism, capitalism and colonialism, how they were all jumbled up and that film could reflect that associative exploitation.
If cinema in the 1960s and 1970s explored in different ways the type of problems 20s Soviet montage addressed and found innovative methods to explore and resolve them, it might seem that contemporary cinema lacks that invention and inquiry. This is partially true, but when we opened with Bannon’s claim about flooding the zone, modern films have often been informationally rich, even if they remain narratively more conventional than works forty and fifty years prior. Christopher Nolan is as interested in time as Resnais, but offers it without the searching question that problematises it. In his work, complexity becomes clarification, and in clarity comes convention. The three time frames (a week, a day, an hour) in Dunkirk needn’t cause anybody problems on a second viewing, and Memento is easy enough to grasp once you understand that the past moves forward in black and white, and the present backwards in colour. In other works, Nolan pushes further into the dramatic crosscut than Friedkin, and other masters of the chase sequence, by creating several moments of intense action happening simultaneously. In The Dark Knight Rises, the female central character stabs Batman and, in a twist of the knife, so to speak, reveals she is close to the villain Bane, all the while a bomb will go off in a few minutes. A cop trying to help gets stopped by the officers, unaware that the orders have changed. There is also the city’s commissioner involved, and the boss of Wayne Enterprises, while we mustn’t forget Catwoman. While The French Connection cleanly cuts between Popeye Doyle and the sniper, no matter the chaos this creates on the street, The Dark Knight Rises offers narrative strands within the crosscut so that the two major figures, Batman versus Bane, get only so much screen time as the film shows us various others involved. The Dark Knight Rises has one of the densest crosscuts, but The Dark Knight is similar, and some Bond films also, like Skyfall. Yet they all insist upon is the centrality of plot. Nothing here approaches Godard or Resnais’ approach to time and disjunction, nor even Coppola and Peckinpah’s intellectual montage that can give thematic texture to narrative event. There is logistical layering which might seem relatively new. But Nolan and others are offering complicated contemporary action films, yet risk simplifying form and theme, all the better to create constantly edifying spectacle.
Obviously, it isn’t fair to compare modern action filmmakers with the most elaborate innovators from the sixties, but what about directors like Lars von Trier, Martin Scorsese, Michael Haneke, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant, and Todd Haynes? Haneke and Bela Tarr have chiefly focused on developing the long take rather than creating new possibilities in montage, while Todd Haynes returns to the pre-sixties in Far From Heaven and Carol. This isn’t only because Haynes films in the period; he also wants to use colour and lenses that will reflect that moment. As he says, ‘‘Some of it emanates from that beautiful mid-century color photography of Saul Leiter, with its tendencies toward refracting the frame, interrupting the frame, and abstracting the frame, but also the site-specific light conditions of being inside a café looking out on the snowy streets, or through a dusty bus window.’’ (Film Comment) He draws on the mise en scene of the fifties over the montage of the sixties. Bela Tarr may work in black and white long takes, but in Satantango Tarr and his writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai offer a tango-like structure as the narrative moves forwards and backwards, offering different perspectives on events. Gus Van Sant based Elephant on a similar principle, and other films that resemble this perspectivising approach would include End of the Affair and Hilary and Jackie. These examples could be seen as decompressing the image, finding other angles that say we need to slow down and look again. In contrast, Von Trier and Scorsese have sometimes used editing to speed events up without relying on a typical montage sequence. In Nymphomania and The Wolf of Wall Street, they compress the information by showing exchanges between characters indicating a passage of time even though the content makes it look like one scene. In The Wolf of Wall Street, the central character’s shyster colleagues are hard selling on the phone, and while the exchange could have been presented as one single sell, Scorsese edits to make clear this is something they are doing over and over again; as the character starts the pitch, Scorsese cuts to the next stage of it with another customer, and so on. In Nymphomania, the leading character exchanges words with various lovers as if they are one, as the post-coital dialogue is cut together from one partner to the next. There she is in bed talking to one lover, then we cut to her with another at the kitchen table, etc., but the dialogue exchange suggests this is the same encounter, as we recognise these are several meetings strung together. Both are no doubt indebted to some of the experiments in time Resnais pursued, but more especially to Wong Kar Wai’s 2002 film In the Mood for Love. Here the director shows a dinner between its two leading characters, only for us to notice the clothes change as the film cuts back and forth, indicating this isn’t one meal but several, over some weeks. Typically, a film would show these scenes in a montage sequence, with a voice over saying the character in Nymphomania would take many lovers; that in The Wolf of Wall Street they made a fortune out of people daft enough to buy dodgy land opportunities; and that in In the Mood for Love, they fell in love over a couple of months. All three are 21st-century films offering a different approach, as the montage sequence becomes a dramatic scene. They might not quite conform to typical parallel montage, yet they all show the influence of earlier editing approaches in a new form, and in compressing what Satantango and others decompress.
Yet we might wonder that, for all the great films that have come out of the new century, how many have pushed into radically questioning editing, as so many did in the sixties and seventies? If relatively few, this is partly because many of the best recent films have adopted longer takes and thus moved toward the sort of slow cinema that decompresses not through the cut but the sequence shot. Tarr is surely better known for the length of his takes than his playing with time sequences, and Haneke, Lav Diaz, Albert Serra, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Alexander Sokurov, Abderrahmane Sissako and others have focused on lingering shots over compressed form, as if in reaction to Hollywood’s ever greater need for narrative action. We don’t often see Eisenstein, Godard or Resnais in these international works, but instead Bazin (that great theorist of the long take), Tarkovsky (and his rhythm of the shot), and Miklos Jancso (who could make a film with reputedly only thirteen shots, Sirocco). If Nolan and others have decided that the crosscut is about flooding the zone as the viewer absorbs ever greater chunks of narrative information, and may end up more overwhelmed than stimulated, then we might ask how film can find new ways to innovate with montage in a manner contrary to this intensive narrative feed. One way to think about this question as a closing gambit is to muse over how the internet itself can often seem like a crosscut, as one can easily switch from one YouTube video to another, one news article to the next. Lev Manovich noted: ‘‘before we would read a sentence of a story or a line of a poem and think of other lines, images memories. Now interactive media asks us to click on a highlighted sentence to go to another scene.’’ (The Language of New Media) If in different ways Eisenstein, Godard and Resnais wanted us to think in the cut, to see different perspectives rather than keep us in the specifics of a scene, now it is as if concentration has become so dispersed that the brain has become like a montage cell, constantly crosscutting between images and ideas and shattering focus and purpose. The long take can seem a corrective to this problem, one determined to hold on to a narrative centre rather than risking radical dispersion. When Manovich says that “the paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed,” what he means is that narrative and its consecutiveness (syntagm) give way to choice (paradigm), and constant lateral options. This might be no bad thing, as the reader or viewer can constantly get contrary perspectives, but what happens if this becomes less discernment than disintegration, less a thought taking shape than a mind unable to hold its own centre? When that master of the slow image, of the meditative shot, Werner Herzog, was asked if he agreed with Leonard Kleinrock that the computer was antithetical to deep thinking, he said: ‘‘In a way yes. But he [Kleinrock] doesn’t speak about computers. He speaks about communicating via tweets and examining the real world via applications. In that case, I would agree.’’ (Time) Others would insist this antithesis to deep thought can include numerous aspects of modern technology, and the internet is central to the problem. As Manovich proposes, it lends itself well to forms of dispersion over concentration. Does this mean film merely needs to adopt the long take, or, as Resnais, Godard and others managed to show, that montage can be a source of the most profound linkages, and not only the most dissolving of thoughts, and that cinema needs, once again, to renew montage possibilities?
© Tony McKibbin