Suspense for Real

Inverting Tensions

 Usually when thinking about the suspense sequence, we are likely to think of American film, or at least films in the Hollywood idiom. We just as easily find evidence of tension however in European cinema made on a low budget yet with more obviously human coordinates at stake. Looking at six films from Europe we can explore how the suspense sequence rests not necessarily on the quantitative immensity but often the qualitatively human. Near the end of a film that is very much using the grammar of conventional suspense, Diamonds Are Forever, both Bond and the heroine have to swap a couple of tapes and if they fail to do so it could lead to the destruction of the world. Villain Blofeld intends to destroy the nuclear capacity of China, the Soviet Union and the United States, before proposing an international auction for arms-race supremacy. A third of the way through The Child, a father who has sold his baby son for cash realises that he must repurchase the infant as his partner collapses on hearing what he has done. Will he be able to get the child back? The former sequence costs an arm and a leg with many a body maimed, blown up and shot, while in the latter the film wears its cinema povera on its sleeve as it reflects the impoverished lives of its characters. If theorists of suspense Andrew Ortony, Gerald L. Clore and Allan Collins can say, in The Cognitive Structure of Emotions, that what matters for manifestation of suspense is fear or hope in the face of uncertainty, then cinematically that can be done without great expense or with no expense spared.   

What we wish to do not a little tendentiously is differentiate cheap suspense from suspense on the cheap, to suggest that for all the money that goes into big-budget cinema sometimes the emphasis on the cash at the film’s disposal, and the special effects that can be bought at a price, result in diminishing aesthetic returns, no matter the box-office results. Working on Malificent, Sam Riley said, “They were making it up as they went along. I probably shouldn’t say that, but amazingly what they do with enormous budget films [is that] they can afford to sort of change things as it’s happening.” (Guardian) Speaking of Avengers End Game, one of the screenwriters, Christopher Markus, “admitted to an error in the film’s big battle scene.” He said that he and his co-writer “intentionally didn’t correct the moment because it was ‘too awesome not to do it’.”  Markus reckoned “The scene in question is the one that sees Captain America lift Thor's hammer, Mjölnir. When Chris Evans’s character wields the weapon, he can summon lightning with it. However, just one Marvell film before – Thor: Ragnarok – viewers are told that it isn’t the hammer that summons the lightning.” (Independent) What matters is the tension in the scenes, not even the story's logic, let alone the coherence of the characterisation. 

There is no suggestion that what we have here is suspense on the cheap. Money can cover up problems. If scenes don’t quite make sense, then make them sensational enough so that it doesn’t much matter. But what about the suspensefulness in The Child, Kes, La Collectionneuse, The Piano Teacher, Stranger by the Lake and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days? Instead of playing with suspense; we have suspense for real. One reason we offer such an ostensibly eclectic range isn’t only because they are all films made on relatively low budgets, but also that our notion of suspense can be very indeed, much broader than its affiliations with thriller or horror cinema. The Child and Kes are realist films, La Collectionneuse and The Piano Teacher, complex character studies, Stranger by the Lake a gay cruising film and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days a social conscience study set near the end of the Ceausescu regime in Romania. The examples we offer are hopelessly broad but it shows the range of film types suspense finds itself within. In our examples, characterisation is as significant as the suspense itself, that whatever formal engineering goes into the sequence, what matters too is the question of character underpinning the tension. Comparing his approach to suspense to DW Griffith’s, Hitchcock suggested that he learnt from Griffith “only the suspense of the chase. Griffith’s chase was fairly elementary. It didn’t include any mental action, any characterization.” (The First True Hitchcock: The Making of a Filmmaker) It is the combination of the formal choices made in generating suspense, and the characterisational specifics, that allow us to indicate how filmmakers needn’t rely on large sums of money to create tension. 

In The Child, Bruno has sold the titular character off to a gang of traffickers but tries buying the boy back after he tells his girlfriend; she is so shocked she collapses and he takes her to hospital. Bruno arranges a meeting with the traffickers and the film holds to Bruno’s point of view when he arrives first, enters the garage, and waits for someone to turn up with the child in the adjacent garage. A person arrives but we have no idea whether the trafficker has the child since we remain privy only to Bruno’s perspective on events. The directors, the Dardenne brothers, eschew cross-cutting all the better to generate the suspenseful. They offer a wonderful example of low-key suspense as the audience waits to see whether the boy is in the garage next door or Bruno is getting scammed by people who are hardly likely to be trustworthy in the first place. These are people who sell others' children for profit; will they play fair? As Bruno hands over the cash they paid him, as he hands over too his mobile phone, we hear the person next door leaving but we don’t hear the sound of the baby at all. Bruno waits for around thirty seconds before exiting the garage and opening the door of the adjacent one. The baby is there, but a moment afterwards, after Bruno picks the baby up, another member of the trafficking gang comes out beside him and says he still owes them money: they intended to make a profit on the child that now has been lost — Bruno must compensate. As the film continues, Bruno, who initially reckons he doesn’t want to be yet another wage slave, finds out how a life of crime is more than a full-time job; it demands an ongoing preoccupation. Gangsters are on his tail and Sonia wants nothing to do with a man who can flog their child for a few Euros. He becomes a hustling, harassed wreck while the film wishes for him slowly but very surely to see the value of responsibility. The film isn’t unsympathetic to anyone wishing to escape low-paid grind,  to the potential emptiness of a McJob. Given the choice between a life of insecure, poorly remunerated labour, or a life of crime, the latter can at least initially seem a desirable option. Jean-Pierre Dardenne reckons “If you don’t have a job, you are made to feel like an outcast from your community… Possibly in the future people will find another way to be part of the community that is not connected to work but for now that is where meaning lies. From an anthropological point of view, that is how mankind feels a sense of belonging.” (Guardian) However, if the job doesn’t pay properly, the work is precarious and the hours antisocial, why wouldn’t someone instead opt for a criminal existence? The Dardennes can see the appeal before making it clear through Bruno’s increasing sense of desperation that it isn’t much of a life - as he finds himself alienated even from this community. 

Imagine, however, if the film wasn’t chiefly about one young man’s search for his sense of self, for his need by the end of it to go to Sonia and admit how wrong he has been, but instead insisted on showing us not only Bruno in the garage but the trafficker next door too. Straightaway the film would have revealed that the son was there and might have decided to utilise suspense in other ways. We could have been made aware that the trafficker is armed but Bruno is oblivious. Depending on how tough and shocking the film wants to be, when Bruno mislays one of the notes as he hands the money over and the other man says he is short 10 euros, he could have put a bullet in the baby’s head and off we go on a revenge narrative where Bruno must avenge his son’s murder. Or, no less ‘dramatic’, if less shocking, the baby could have been killed just after Bruno picks up the child and the villain tries to take out Bruno and steal the profitable child back from his father. He has the dad’s money and will also get double that from selling the baby. But instead of killing Bruno, the child gets shot dead and once again we are off on a revenge tale. The film could become increasingly a work of cinematic mayhem, with car crashes, a final shoot-out in a bar, and the gang’s quarters up in flames, shot from a dozen different angles.

Let us not pretend that such an outcome would have been inevitable given a director’s decision to cut back and forth between the two garages. Yet how often have we seen a filmmaker instead of narrowing down the form, opening up the vista of dramatic action? Instead of implication you have escalation: instead of a scene where we wonder whether the baby is present, next door, we are all too aware that not only is the baby there but also that the trafficker has a gun. When Hitchcock talks about the suspense in the context of character, then what the Dardennes understand is that escalation would be likely to obliterate character, that not only would various villains end up being killed in ever more ingeniously violent and expensive ways, but that Bruno as a character would be taken out too: his arc towards self-understanding unimportant next to his determination to dispatch the baddies. 

Yet at the same time, there is little doubt that the film works with a high degree of tension. There is a lot at stake as Bruno must try and win Sonia back and also find a way of paying the criminals back too. Though the film doesn’t hyperbolise events, it nevertheless objectively creates a crisis even if part of the film’s subtlety resides in resolving that crisis through the subjective: through an ethical, even spiritual, comprehension rather than through a materialistic resolution. Bruno keeps trying to make amends with further misdemeanours as he involves a youngster in a theft which leads to the boy getting caught. Bruno gets into the police station and admits he is the guilty party, and the film cuts from him acknowledging his guilt to an ellipsis showing him in prison and Sonia visiting. In showing Bruno breaking down and asking Sonia's forgiveness, the film makes clear it wasn’t ever interested in suspense for its own sake, but for Bruno’s: to reveal an aspect of love that he couldn’t previously recognise. 

        However, even if the film reveals Bruno’s feelings at the conclusion, it isn’t at all interested in his subjectivity during it. In La Collectionneuse, the film’s tension comes from the very deliberate musings and reflections of central character Adrien as he holidays in the south of France. Most obviously this resides in the film’s voice-over as Adrian offers numerous reflections, but it also exists in the number of shots the film offers from Adrien’s point of view. He is often witnessing events or overhearing actions, and this usually concerns the young woman who goes to stay at the same friend’s summer house: Haydee. Whether he witnesses her lying in the arms of the friend as he passes the bedroom or later overhears Haydee speaking on the phone, Adrien is attentive to events and this is where the film’s suspense comes from. The story superficially addresses whether Adrien will or will not sleep with Haydee. Yet this isn’t the romantic drama’s concern with when, but instead with why. Adrien is in the south of France determined to practice a stoic existence that is predicated on waking early, exercise and sexual abstinence. One watches the film wondering whether he will be able to sustain his sense of lofty solitude. Haydee gets up late, lounges around and wants to party. Rather than a young woman that chance allows him to get to know, the director Eric Rohmer presents Haydee as a challenge to his parti pris. Near the end of the film, in voiceover, Adrien says, “the die is cast, the girl has proved the strongest.” They are driving back from the collector of the title. The collector has bought an expensive vase from Adrien, Haydee accidentally smashes it and, since Adrian has already been paid, and the collector is very rich, it becomes a complicit moment between Haydee and Adrien. Adrien has been talking to the collector about the disdain of the poor, telling a story about the Tarahumaras who, when in town, would beg without humility. They stop in front of houses, in profile, sovereign contempt. Successful or not they leave after a given length of time. Without a thank you.” Adrien insists he feels an affinity with such people that the rich can never know. “When I beg it is in profile.” He is a handsome, charming man in his late twenties who, the rich collector says, can afford his attitude even if he doesn’t have much when it comes to wealth. Adrien can move from one rich person’s house to another; he has plenty of personal qualities and fraternal capital - wealthy friends will lend him their home. 

The film pursues less the question of whether he will sleep with Haydee but whether his sense of solitary purpose can be sustained. As Adrien and Haydee travel back from the collector’s place to the house they have been spending the summer in, a truck blocks their way and at the same time, a couple of friends spot Haydee and ask her to join them at San Felice in Italy. While they chat, the car behind Adrien beeps its horn and Adrien manages to find a way past. Initially, he says in voice-over, he only wanted to let the car through, but instead he keeps driving, sure that now he has made the right decision and he can return to the solitude he so craves. By the end of the film, a few minutes later, restless, anxious and not a little bored, he books a flight to London. It is the film’s closing shot as Adrien sits by the patio doors in the late afternoon light, the camera a few feet away inside the room while he makes the call. It seems he has failed to live up to himself, and cannot quite tolerate his own company. Moments before making the call he returns to the house and on the balcony are two empty chairs as Rohmer manages to convey their emptiness. After all, a chair is a chair, nobody would say they bought an empty chair, so what makes a chair empty? It is not so much the chairs are empty, but that Adrien happens to be feeling so. As Sartre says, “It is obvious that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation…The world does not disclose its non-beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities.” (The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre) 

     One might say that Adrien misses Haydee and perhaps he does. Maybe he just misses having people around and the absence of others generates anguish in him. Yet as Sartre says, “the room of someone absent, the books of which he turned the pages, the objects which he touched are in themselves only books, objects, ie. full actualities. The very traces which he has left can be deciphered as traces of him only within a situation where he has already been posited as absent.” (Being and Nothingness) When Adrien compares himself to the Tarahumaras, he does so to suggest that like them he has no expectation that is stronger than his dignity. The Tarahumaras wish for money but feel no disappointment if they do not receive it, and offer no gratitude if they do. Adrien, however, does seem to acknowledge loss when he is left in the house on his own and those two chairs, rather than ‘symbolizing’ emptiness, indicate a nothingness that he believed he had conquered. He reckoned he was without expectation, and that people’s absences would not become present. But they do, and thus he must book a flight back to London. 

We needn’t exaggerate the suspense involved in the moment when Adrien sits in the jeep behind the truck and waits for Haydee. Next to the tension the same actor Patrick Bauchau was determined to generate as a Bond villain some years later trying to kill OO7 in A View to a Kill, it can appear very inconsequential indeed. But what Rohmer (who co-wrote a book on Hitchcock with Claude Chabrol in the fifties) offers is suspense at its most refined and most personalised. While we acknowledged in The Child that Bruno needed to move from the materialistic to the ethical, from reckoning that making money matters more than looking after his family, by the end of the film this is so reversed that the realisation moves him to tears. It is close to a religious conversion but only if we accept Emmanuel Levinas’s comment “…to deserve the help of God it is necessary to want to do what must be done without his help. I am not getting into that question theologically. I am describing ethics…” (Entre Nous) In La collectionneuse, it is subjectivated tension, closer to Foucault and the Ancients, with Adrien attempting to comprehend what he can be master over even if he finds he cannot finally be master over himself. “We exercise ourselves with regard to all the different representations offered by the world", Foucault says. "We exercise ourselves on them in order to define, with regard to each, in what they consist, to what extent they can act on us, whether or not we depend on them or them on us, etcetera.” (The Hermeneutics of the Subject) In stoical terms Adrian wishes for self-mastery, to arrange his subject status according to his will and discovers that though he manages to resist Haydee come the conclusion, he cannot resist returning to company and flying to London. The decidedly low-key tension rests on whether or not Adrien can be true to the notion of himself he proposes or will have to acknowledge that his will is weaker than he might wish.

Our third example is closer to The Child than to La Collectionneuse. While Adrien wishes to illustrate the control he has over the world, young Billy Casper in Kes wouldn’t even attempt to claim for himself any more freedom than a little resistance allows. He becomes attached to the kestrel of the title but the film ends tragically when the brother kills the bird. Billy was supposed to put some money on the horses for his brother but when a local expert doesn’t reckon the horses will win, Billy spends the money on fish and chips assuming his brother Jud will be none the wiser. Later when Billy is in class, Jud comes looking for him, raising his fist as he glares through the glass in the classroom door. Billy sneaks out of the room when the class is finished and evades Jud in a scene that is full of tension which recedes when Billy goes for a job interview. After, hearing from someone that the horses won and Jud would have made a tenner, Billy is no longer running away from his brother but towards his kestrel. Unable to find the bird he goes back home, accuses Jud and Jud triumphantly admits that he has killed the pet. During this extended sequence, from the moment he fails to put the bet on the horses to the moment his brother admits that he has killed the bird, director Ken Loach moves from Billy as the sought-after figure to the one doing the seeking. In the first instance, Loach leaves aside non-diegetic music and relies on the diegetic sounds of the school; in the second instance as Billy becomes more desperate so the music comes in, reflecting Billy’s increasing anxiety. Though nobody is inclined to watch Kes because of its suspense, Loach brilliantly works two perspectives on it in short succession. 

Yet the most obvious reason why Kes is unlikely to come to anybody’s mind is because it is a fine example of suspense on the cheap rather than cheap suspense. Billy throughout the film has been bullied by his brother, so it comes as no surprise when it looks like his brother wants to beat him up as he raises his fist, and we might wonder whether he is raising it because the horses came good after all. Initially, Billy fears for his own safety, but in time realises that his brother will be happy to take out the bird if he can’t take his frustrations out on Billy. This is what happens as Loach offers tension initially as Billy hides from his brother and then afterwards as he searches for the bird. However, what interests Loach more than the tension within the scene is the milieu in which Billy lives. Based on the novel by Barry Hines, and set in a small mining village in Yorkshire, the film makes clear that Billy’s emotional and employment options are limited. One reason he projects his feelings onto the bird is that there isn’t really anybody he can share them with, even if there are sympathetic characters in the film and none more so than the teacher with whom he manages to discuss how important the bird is to him. Here, Billy shows the teacher how shrewd and engaged he can be when discussing something that can pique his interest. Looming over the film is Billy’s future prospects and in a town known for its mines, a person needs to find other options if they aren’t to end up down the pit. When looking at Orwell’s comments on mining, in the context of this sad sack of barely pubescent bones, we can see that Billy has not at all the physique for going down a mine. As Orwell says, “the miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the flying trapeze or to win the Grand National…by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coalminer; the work would kill me in a few weeks.” (The Road to Wigan Pier) 

Conditions might have improved by the late sixties but nobody would cast young Billy in the role of a coal miner. To do so indicates less a vocation for the job than limited opportunities for the poor, the limited opportunity his brother accepts but who at least looks like he has the physique for it. At one moment the film crosscuts between the brother going down the pit to the morning assembly as the kids at school sing a prayer. Loach, the good socialist, knows that the kids cannot expect God to give them the good life; predestination has nothing to do with the theological. Loach says, “he’s absolutely trapped. In the film, through the story, you see a whole side to life that the world cannot afford to see, that it can’t afford to acknowledge. At the time, in the north of England, boys like Billy were needed for unskilled labour.” (Loach on Loach) There may be suspense in Billy hiding from his brother, and in failing to find the kestrel, but there is a wider absence of it in Billy’s life as Loach sees that his options are hopelessly restricted. In this sense, Loach offers contained suspense, acknowledging that any tension in the scenes that might invoke agency is going to be contained by a greater absence of it that indicates Billy’s lot. How often in conventional suspense sequences does the suspense generated possess a broader hope rather than a narrower despair? When Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint are crawling over Mt Rushmore in North by Northwest, the fret we feel is awaiting the pleasure we can expect. We want them to survive and couple up: Hitchcock understands our desire perfectly and offers formal wit in satisfying our wish — he gives us a famous match cut where Grant pulls Saint up on the cliff and the film matches it with him pulling her up to the top bunk of their compartment on the train, now a married couple. Loach insists that suspense doesn’t augment a happy ending but exacerbates the unhappiness of Billy’s existence. Jud, looking for hope in a gamble, has it dashed by Billy. Billy, looking for love and affection with the kestrel, has that destroyed when his brother kills the bird after Billy doesn’t see the point of putting money on horses that come in. 

       In the wider scheme of things, Billy is probably right: the bookies will be rigged and the occasional victory will be matched by many failures, and we may assume that Loach is on Billy’s side here by refusing to give any value to betting narratively. The importance of the bet is non-existent for Billy or the viewer and only becomes of any consequence when Jud goes after his brother. What matters to Loach isn’t the odd flutter that might make someone a few bob, and lose everybody else a chunk of their wages, but a social system that divides wealth up fairly. Gambling in this sense is the antithesis of socialism: everybody gives a little with someone getting a lot; instead of everybody giving what they can and getting what they need in a redistributive tax system. Loach has no interest in a winner-takes-all mindset and one reason why suspense in its conventional form isn’t of interest to him. It wouldn’t be enough for Billy to win, because then it would only result in another’s loss. As Loach says, “people who saw the film said to us, ‘couldn’t he get a job in a zoo?’, which misses the entire point, because if it’s not Billy who’s going to be exploited as unskilled labour, it’s going to be someone else who’s in that predicament…” (Loach on Loach)

       Loach manages to generate two different approaches to suspense  (Billy’s escape and Billy’s search) while also having little interest in cinematic tension as either an ‘empty’ device or as an ideologically full one. He doesn’t want it to generate tension for the sake of drama and neither does he want it to indicate that there ought to be winners and losers and best to make sure you are not the latter. To accept what counts is to win, undermines Loach’s socio-political ethos, which is how to create a society that doesn’t have those who succeed and those who fail but where we can have different types of successes. Speaking of viable and unviable industries, Loach reckoned “…an economy organised for everyone’s mutual benefit would properly determine what is environmentally sound and socially useful to produce…then people would work in those industries in a way that was good for them and for society in general.  People would share the pleasant and unpleasant work. And as technology developed, the benefits would spread to everybody.” (Loach on Loach) Rather than winners and losers in the employment lottery, everyone would pitch in and help out. Some may see idealism in Loach’s claims but he practises what he preaches by finding an aesthetic that at its best allows for suspense but doesn’t allow for certain assumptions to underpin it. If The Child suggests Levinas and  La Collectionneuse Foucauldian stoicism, Kes can understandably be read as Marxist: “Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.:"(Grundrisse)

In Strangers by the Lake, director Alain Guiraudie offers an idyll within terror, creating an environment that becomes ever more suspenseful even as the milieu, where the characters go each day in search of relaxation and a sexual assignation, remains tranquil. Centred on a lake in the south of France where gay men meet, the central character Franck witnesses the attractive Michel drowning a man, and later he neither contacts the police nor resists Michel’s advances. The film’s tension is both moral and sexual, drawing upon the same schematic as a noir thriller — but with a very different aesthetic and a distinctly different sexual orientation. The film noir is surely one of the most heterosexual of genres, so often involving a fall guy showing interest in a woman who knows she can lure him with her sexual appeal: high heels, lipstick, anklets, stockings and colour-coded attire vital to the semiotics of the femme fatale, whose fatal qualities prove for much of the film’s running time secondary to her allure. The genre is wonderfully metonymic and synecdochal, with the woman often literally dressed to kill. Here Michel is much more undressed to kill and in an environment where the chiaroscuro lighting is replaced by sharp sunshine and falling evening light. Noir insists on playing a guessing game in a twofold manner that shows a woman sexually attired all the better to illustrate what is on offer underneath. (Increasingly, explicitly, revealed as the noir genre changed with the times and where occasionally the femme fatale would change in front of our hero, evident most famously in Basic Instinct, where Sharon Stone is seen nude as she slips into something more comfortable for her interrogation at the police station). Noir also usually tells a story that slowly and serpentinely unravels; Stranger by the Lake very quickly introduces us not only to numerous naked bodies; even the tension in the film rests less on Franck trying to work out what Michel has done than on deciding what to do, well aware that Michel is a murderer. 

     The suspense of not-knowing becomes the tension of knowing all too well as Guiraudie doesn’t just invoke and reject the tropes of noir. He also invokes and rejects a central theme of Hitchcock’s work we have earlier alluded to in reference to the book by Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. They recognised in Hitchcock’s cinema a preoccupation with what they called transference of guilt, those moments where a character realises that someone they are close to happens to be guilty of a crime they are implicated in as long as they remain silent — from the niece in Shadow of a Doubt to the wife in Notorious. However, usually in Hitchcock’s work, the realisation leads to narrative and morality dovetailing —as the niece distances herself from her Uncle Charlie, and the wife reveals to others that her husband is a Nazi. In Stranger by the Lake, Franck hardly knows Michel at all when he witnesses him drowning someone. They have met briefly before when Franck sits next to him, both naked on the beach, but then Michel goes off with another man. In the drowning sequence, the film cuts from a long shot of Franck looking out at two men frolicking in the water while Guiraudie holds the shot for a couple of minutes as Michel manages to drown the other man, swim to the beach, get dressed and leave. At the end of the shot it returns to Franck now hiding in the bushes so that Michel won’t see him. The film offers no music in the sequence to indicate the magnitude of the deed, no close-ups to suggest the terror of the man’s demise. Throughout the sequence, Guiraudie retains the tranquillity of form that incorporates the horror in the action. Nobody watching the shower sequence in Psycho is in any doubt that something terrible is taking place, just as nobody watching A Shadow of a Doubt is unaware that the niece is beginning to see through her uncle. The form suggests the horror; it doesn’t remain aloof from it.

Guiraudie however wishes to indicate that the environment isn’t secondary to the drama but that the drama becomes a permeating influence on the lakeside idyll. This gives to the film a terrifying tranquillity that owes a little to Chabrol’s sedate dramas of terror; none more so than Le boucher, with a schoolteacher falling for a man she increasingly realises is the murderer in a village in the Massif Central region of France. Chabrol insists throughout in retaining the village atmosphere rather than a thriller atmosphere, seeing the importance of locale as a way of making more horrible the murders that take place. Guiraudie sees too that what matters is a permeable rather than specific atmosphere; one that doesn’t announce genre but instead renounces it, seeing in the generic a collapsing of locale into the type of film it happens to be: horror, thriller, western etc. If Guiraudie had wished to film the murder Franck witnesses generically, he may have utilised a soundtrack with strings and drums quietly coming in initially, building as the audience realises that a man is being murdered, and discordant afterwards as the audience is made aware that now Franck is implicated in another man’s death unless he reports it. 

       Instead, life goes on, the atmosphere remains relaxed as Franck embarks on an affair with Michel. Here Guiraudie insists on taking the suspense sequence and removing many of the accoutrements of that tension (like non-diegetic music and close-ups) and instead allows it to pervade the film as a quizzical suspense. When Franck and Michel are making love we may wonder if and when Michel will kill him, but this won’t be due to a filmic device hinting that it is about to happen — a cut to a knife or to a stone; a sudden use of non-diegetic music. It will rest on our knowledge that Michel has murdered a man before. We might even wonder if Franck can live with his impending death if he feels he receives love in the present, turning the audience’s fear for his life into Franck’s low-key death wish as the possibility of Eros and Thanatos conjoin. Like Loach, but for very different reasons, and with a very different aesthetic, Guiraudie eschews the devices of suspense all the better to generate a greater sense of tension within and beyond his characters’ lives. Instead of non-diegetic music, we hear the sound of crickets, the breeze and sometimes a strong wind blowing against the bushes. There will be more murders before the end of the film, with Franck both fearing for his life and feeling perhaps that he has cost the lives of others by remaining complicit with Michel. But anyone watching the film for the suspense it generates rather than the sustained tension it insists upon will be disappointed. 

Better to see the film as a work that manages to take cruising culture and permeate it with a murderous menace without arriving at the hyperbole of its most famous precursor — William Friedkin’s brilliantly crude Cruising. By adopting not only Chabrol’s often calm environments but Rohmer’s vacationing ones, where Rohmer’s characters are usually holidaying somewhere quiet, like an isolated house in the South of France in La Collectionneuse, or a spot on Lake Annecy in Claire’s Knee, Guiraudie moves environmentally as far from New York’s club scene as one can imagine while arriving at the same homicidal result. The terror resides in the film’s serene use of location and Franck’s passive approach to the killings. The film’s conclusion shows a fade to increasing darkness as the night encroaches and Franck calls out Michel’s name, even though Michel has killed the gentle middle-aged man Franck has befriended. What has happened to Michel we don’t know: has he run away, taken his life or is he about to take Franck’s? The unease goes beyond the story as the increasing darkness makes it hard to discern for a moment whether we are watching the night obliterating anything we can see or watching the end of the film; only the closing credits begin to inform us. The film is a work of disquiet that can be seen to take the Rohmersque idyll and turning it inside out, or as a murder film that works an equally insistent reversal.

        What we nevertheless wish to make clear is that the films we are focusing upon are not contrary works, taking the suspense devices mastered by filmmakers so versed in genre, like Hitchcock, and generating fresh perspectives merely by inversion. It is as if what matters isn’t murder but community, yet of a particular kind. As Guiraudie says: “It was important for me to question the very notion of community. Do a dozen guys who have a common interest—namely nude sun-tanning on a beach and having sex in the nearby woods—make up a community?” (Bomb) The film isn’t at all a whodunnit but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interested in the tension that comes from having a murderer in one’s midst. Yet what counts more is to show that this is the most makeshift of communities, one predicated on Eros that remains relatively indifferent to Thanos when orgasms are what count. Little deaths take precedence over large deaths as we might wonder if, in a different milieu, Franck would have appeared so indifferent to his survival. As the director says: “This behavior is very much associated with the gay community, but I have the feeling that this consumerist relationship to sex really comes from the ’70s and ’80s. It’s what we eventually made of sexual liberation: a society where you have to orgasm as much as possible, consume sex, and that’s that—end of story.” (Bomb) What he explores isn’t exclusive to the gay community; it is part of a broader relationship with consumer society and Guiraudie uses the lake as a microcosm of that self-centredness. 

             Hitchcock himself may have been a master of suspense and happy to discuss in numerous interviews exactly how he generated it. But he also always knew that empty suspense wasn’t enough, and gave as an extreme example of it someone who allows in the auditorium the pillars to all but fall on the audience before revealing that it was a trick as the pillars are suspended in mid-air. Hitchcock noted that this certainly would scare an audience but the director felt that such devices created a sense of unfair fear in the audience: “because the public's basic feeling of security was undermined.” (Hitchcock on Hitchcock) But what if other filmmakers feel that while like Hitchcock they believe such a trick is unfair, they reckon it is less because the viewer’s basic feeling of security has been called into question; more that nothing has been learned from such a trick? In this sense, certain directors might reckon too that numerous devices film adopts are equally unjustified even if the viewer is left sure of their safety. Perhaps they are too sure of their general safety even if they are, at the same time, scared locally. Hitchcock acknowledges that the trick with the pillars calls into question the viewer’s general safety rather than their local emotions, if we see the local emotion as the affect produced while watching the film. The pillar broke with that affect to generate general ones beyond the film experience. However, we might say that the problem with the pillar isn’t just that it is a cheap trick to create a categorical scare without any aesthetic intention, because it was beyond the aesthetic experience, but that it was too literal a use of the general over the local. 

      Looking at Michael Haneke’s work, we can see what often interests the director is a local, diegetic fear that expands into a general tension that goes beyond the diegesis without falling into the gimmick. This often comes in questioning the form, forcing the viewer to wonder what happens within the story and beyond it — as we find in the rewound footage in both Funny Games and Hidden. We think we are watching the footage of the film only to find it is footage within the film. Yet this is just one of the ways Haneke insists on invoking a general rather than a local response. Yet what interests us is the director's The Piano Teacher, and the scene where the title character Erika takes revenge on an innocent pupil who happened to be momentarily flirting with the young man Erika is in love with. There is nothing that asks us to call into question the status of the image as such, but there is plenty which asks us to call into question the suspense generated. In superficial terms, what Haneke offers is the delineating of an overreaction. Erika spots Walter attentive to the other pupil and Erika reckons she needs to teach girl a lesson that has nothing directly to do with the piano, even if it will stop the girl from playing it for a long time. As Walter and the girl perform, Erika goes downstairs into the cloakroom and from the moment she enters it to the moment she follows through on her action, the camera doesn’t flinch: Haneke offers a single-take shot of a woman’s decision to destroy someone’s career. First Erika passes through one of the cloakroom aisles before sitting with her back to the camera and we watch the tension in her shoulders while wondering what might be going through her mind. In time she gets up, finds a glass on the table, takes a scarf from another pupil’s jacket pocket, puts the glass wrapped in the scarf on the ground, and stamps on it. She takes the broken glass wrapped in the scarf and empties it into the girl’s coat pocket, puts the scarf up elsewhere and goes back upstairs: a job well done. 

         There is no non-diegetic music or voice-over indicating what Erika is thinking or what we ought to be thinking, nonsense in which the film chooses to distance us from the deed or insist upon a perspective on it. One way in which a filmmaker stays within the cinematic safety Hitchcock invokes is by making clear the nature of a villainous act. It is local rather than general because it invokes villainy but doesn’t provoke a question around it. When Sergio Leone shows us Angel Eyes taking out a limping father and then an old man ill in bed in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the slow-burn tension rests on the clear understanding the viewer has that Angel Eye's defining aspect is his villainy. To say the same of Erika would be both to simplify the film and to simplify her thinking. Haneke shows that putting the glass into the girl’s coat pocket is a motivated act but it seems finally more inexplicable than evil, and at the same time unexplainable because it isn’t evil. Haneke asks us to comprehend a character whose purpose isn’t to be either villainous or pragmatic but innocent and dogmatic. When Angel Eyes kills he does so for simple reasons and even explains why: he always likes to finish the job he has been paid for. He is given five hundred to kill the maimed dad and the maimed dad gives him a thousand to kill the old man. But while the dad gives him a thousand hoping to save his own life, Angel Eyes kills him because he has been paid for the job, and kills the old man because he has been paid for that one too. His pragmatic approach to making money contains within it an evil that indicates he isn’t likely to save someone and make a thousand when he can kill both and make 1500. 

Erika however isn’t pragmatic at all and one notices this early in the film when her mother talks to her about making sure Schubert remains her area of expertise. When Erika indicates a girl she is teaching has a surprising affinity with Schubert, her mother says “Schubert’s your department. Don’t forget”. Erika says it isn’t her mother’s business and gets exasperated when the mother insists that she must be careful her students don’t surpass her. The very girl the mother and Erika discuss is none other than the girl whose hand she destroys. But it would be a stretch to insist that she puts the glass in the coat pocket for evil and pragmatic reasons. It instead appears chiefly to concern her dogmatic desire for Walter which contains an innocent notion of love that she seems never to have experienced. There is nothing worldly in her actions as there is nothing but worldliness in Angel Eyes’s. Angel Eyes knows exactly what he does and why he does it, a lucid evil as opposed to Erika’s opaque malevolence. There is no doubt that Erika’s actions are terrible but they are also incomprehensible, as though the help required wouldn’t be that of a priest where the evil person acknowledges their sins, but an analyst, who might be able to comprehend an aspect of Erika’s behaviour. In the type of suspense generated out of the worldliness of an Angel Eyes, a film can remain within the realm of the local, rather than the general, if we accept that the local asks us to comprehend the nature of an action within the limits the diegesis offers us. It would be unlikely that anyone watching Angel Eyes later in the film torturing the character of Tuco will be wondering what is behind the action. Angel Eyes wants to get information out of him about the whereabouts of $200,000 dollars in Confederate gold. In Haneke’s film, the scene in the cloakroom lacks that self-contained quality because the director wants something of the falling pillar — but without the cheapest of cheap suspense. 

We might ask why and Haneke said, in an interview in 2003, that he wished to take “the family as the germinating cell for all conflicts…leaving the viewer to draw its own conclusions.” Haneke adds, “the cinema has tended to offer closure on such topics and send people home rather comforted and pacified. My objective is to unsettle the viewer and to take away any consolation or self-satisfaction.” (Cineaste) Catherine Wheatley reads it through the psychoanalytic: “The film creates a space for feminine psychology to take centre stage. Indeed, in some respects, La Pianiste seems like an introduction to the theories of Freud and Lacan, as is displayed with particular clarity in the relationship between Erika and her mother. In many ways, Erika remains a child, having failed to enter into the symbolic order. Her mother embodies the phallic Lacanian pre-Oedipal mother, simultaneously adored and feared by the child because of the child’s dependence on her and closeness to her body.” (Studies in French Cinema) One needn’t agree with Wheatley, and one might have a problem with Haneke’s insistence that films usually leave viewers self-satisfied — and his claim that he is the man to counter that. However, what we can say is that The Piano Teacher demands an interpretation of Erika’s behaviour that Angel Eye’s behaviour does not. There need be no other reason than the one he gives for the action he insists upon. It is entirely probable that he had a miserable childhood but that needn't concern us. What isn’t on the screen isn’t of great import; what isn’t on the screen in The Piano Teacher leads us to speculate about Erika’s character. Haneke doesn’t want to shock us with the trick of a falling pillar but he does ask us to think beyond the immediacy of the diegesis, to muse over Erika’s motivations behind visiting a porn booth, slitting her labia, or insisting that Walter obey her sadomasochistic demands. When the film concludes that doesn’t mean the speculation ends. Indeed, perhaps it is only just beginning. When characters harm themselves or sacrifice themselves usually we know why. In 127 Hours the central character slowly severs his arm, it is because he needs to extricate it from a boulder that has trapped it; in Armageddon, Bruce Willis sacrifices his life to save the world. The films needn’t ask the viewer to question the motives of the characters; the motivation is clear. 

        The suspense in the cloakroom sequence in The Piano Teacher is all the more suspenseful because it plays up the obscure rather than the obvious; the viewer’s need to think about what is happening rather than generating a position of agency within the scene. Imagine if it were directed very differently. The film is about a gifted pianist who wants to take out the competition. She has already maimed the hands of most of her rivals but there is one left. A beautiful and talented pianist of pure heart who loves a sympathetic young man. The woman goes downstairs and our hero, suspicious, notices after the performance that she is nowhere to be seen, but neither is the heroine. He tries to reach the basement before his betrothed goes to get her jacket and the film cross-cuts between the hero going down the stairs and the heroine going for her coat. Will she put her hand in the pocket but, no, just before she does so the hero yells at her to stop and sure enough there is broken glass. They then hear the villainess leaving through a side door and our hero chases after her. And so on.  All the ambiguity of the scene in The Piano Teacher is drained out and cheap suspense put in its place. There is nothing to speculate over once the film is finished: a horrible pianist out of spite and jealousy takes out numerous rivals before getting caught. The film might prove to be much more sophisticated than that, but let us assume its purpose is neverthelessto keep the viewer in a state of incremental suspense but with no greater tension beyond the immediate story. It might not be so cheap as to give the impression of a falling pillar but, epistemologically, is it that much more advanced? Haneke’s work suggests that what matters isn’t playing fair with the audience but playing unfairly for a greater purpose: to make us more aware of the tension that exists in our lives and within people we might know (or wish not to know), rather than generically. What we have is general suspense rather than local, generic suspense. 

       Our final example comes from the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Two-thirds of the way through the film, set during the Ceausescu years, Otilia has helped her friend get an illegal abortion, the friend is alone in a hotel room on the other side of town while Otilia visits her boyfriend’s parents for a birthday celebration. She hasn’t met the parents before, Otilia is from a less educated background than the boyfriend’s family, and a situation which in most circumstances would be fraught is especially so as Otilia worries about her friend possibly haemorrhaging over at the hotel. From the moment Otilia leaves her friend, until she returns, the film stays at all times with Otilia, first on a tram, then walking to the flat, and then entering the apartment. Otilia is in a hurry throughout but the film isn’t as it includes transition shots another work trying to register her haste would have formalised. Instead of cutting from Otilla leaving the hotel to arriving at the apartment, we see Otilia at the reception desk, a shot of a couple of trams, Otilia sitting on the tram, the tram continuing on its way after she gets off, and her walking towards the house, then showing her at the door. In suspense terms this could be seen as a dereliction of duty but for the director Cristian Mungiu it exacerbates the suspense within another feeling altogether: frustration. 

        Most suspense scenes incorporate an aspect of the frustrated and indeed Aaron Smuts suggests they are closely interconnected as he explores suspense and frustration in film. Smuts says “the desire-frustration theory of suspense holds that the frustration of a strong desire to affect the outcome of an imminent event is necessary and sufficient for suspense. In order to feel suspense one must care about an outcome — that is, one must have a strong desire to make it turn out the way one wants.”  ('The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense’) If this is so, nevertheless in most instances suspense is greater than frustration: the point of the frustration is to augment the suspense, to create obstacles that delay the hero or heroine’s wish to complete a task. Whether it happens to be to escape a villain, stop a bomb going off or arrive at an important date, any frustration is secondary to the suspense itself. In a standard work of suspense cinema, Blown Away, Jeff Bridges tries to stop his friends turning a key that will result in a bomb going off. Over several minutes we watch him trying to fight his way through various police officers and security officials before failing to stop the explosion. Bridges’s aims are frustrated but the form doesn’t reflect that frustration even if it adopts slow motion to illustrate the hindrances. 

There are no shots that are extraneous to the suspense because director Stephen Hopkins knows that suspense is what matters. Mungiu knows what matters is frustration not because he isn’t interested in suspense but because the film has explored, throughout, modes of frustration —as Otilia and her friend slowly persuade the abortionist to go ahead with the operation even if the abortion is illegal and the length of the pregnancy thus quite far gone. These ‘extra’ shots in the sequence when Otilla leaves her friend alone don’t add much to the suspense but they do augment the frustration. This becomes all the more pronounced when Otilia arrives at the flat and there is a lengthy shot where Otilia is patronised when she isn’t ignored: after telling everyone gathered that her father is a soldier and her mother retired, someone refers to simple people often knowing more than the educated. Their chatter appears all the more irrelevant because of the relevance elsewhere. Yet Mungiu doesn’t remove this chatter since it isn’t chiefly the suspense that interests him. 

The Romania he explores is not one of aggressive suspense but of bureaucratic frustration and backhanders, quid pro quo where the communist notion of fraternity is instead often practised as selfish greed or human indifference. At the beginning, we see characters haggling over black market items. In another scene, Otilia talks to the receptionist at the hotel about a room that should have been booked but the receptionist says she has no record of it while suggesting that just about everything else interests her more than trying to attend to Otilia’s situation. The receptionist practices power not as abuse, especially, but as dull hindrance, as just another example of petty bureaucratic spite. 

Describing Otilia and the period setting of the film, Mungiu says, “it was not mimetic, it was a way of suggesting through narrative things, a special way of shooting her and utilizing sound. It’s a way of rendering her subjectivity. Everything we put in the film in terms of style was to show the inner state of mind of this main character. The film is not about what happened: It’s about what could have happened – if the abortionist doesn’t show up; if the policed do show up. It’s a film about Otilia’s fears.” (IndieWire) Yet what makes 4 Months… impressive is that the film is very objective in its subjectivity. There is no non-diegetic music to register Otilia’s feelings, no emphasis on point-of-view shots to show what she happens to be focusing on, no insert shots to bring out the tension. Yet in other ways, it can feel very subjective indeed as the receptionist who can’t be bothered becomes an obstacle of Kafkan proportions, while the parents and their friends can seem crass partly because Otilia has serious priorities that trivialise their talk. Otilia’s place in the narrative is central but it can seem as though she is peripheral to the mise en scene. The film is constantly willing to lose her within the frame, whether leaving the hotel and buying a pack of black market cigarettes, or asking for directions. Rather than cutting to closeups, the film often holds to the long shot, with the surrounding space as present within the frame as Otilia. In such shots she might represent around 1/24th of the frame; in a typical suspense film such a fractional position will likely only be the case if something emphasises the risk involved: a character small against a rock face they are determined to avoid falling off; the size of their boat as they try and avoid crashing into a cruise liner. Though there are of course closeups in the film, it is partly this fractionality which gives Mingiu the objectivity he talks about. It also however gives the film its frustration more than its suspense: that Otilia is negotiating constantly a world greater than her will.

     Yet suspense there is otherwise why include it in an essay on suspense sequences? However, what we have been seeking is suspense always containing a dimension greater than the ‘empty’ tension the sequence generates. One reason Hitchcock is so influential is because his cinema articulates brilliantly empty suspense even if the films are often great because he manages to fill that suspense with a significance that makes them thematically rich rather than just technically astute. Nevertheless, the brilliance is there and can be utilised easily by numerous filmmakers who have nothing to explore but possess a technique they have mastered.  When Hitchcock famously differentiates between suspense and terror, forewarning and surprise, he does so suggesting the two ways in which a husband can discover his wife having an affair. In one, the husband returns as the film crosscuts between the wife and lover in bed and the husband going up the stairs and we wonder if he will catch the couple in mid-coitus. In the other, the husband opens the door and the wife and lover are surprised, or, if the film has been following only the husband, the husband is surprised. Hitchcock can offer the viewer partial knowledge and hence shock, or full knowledge and thus suspense. As Hitchcock says, speaking of his preference for the latter. “If the audience does know, if they have been told all the secrets that the characters do not know, they'll work like the devil for you because they know what fate is facing the poor actors. That is what is known as ‘playing God.’ That is suspense.” (Hitchcock on Hitchcock)

Hitchcock's distinction between suspense and shock can work in many variations but things start to get interesting when a filmmaker doesn’t take the formula and repeats it; they find variations to it that mean at least ostensibly it doesn’t resemble Hitchcock at all. Some of the filmmakers we have discussed have taken shock and suspense and viewed them less as separate categories; more capable of dissolution. Hitchcock wasn’t unaware of this dissolution but he was wary of it, feeling that the scene where the young boy unawares carrying the bomb in Sabotage getting blown up was unfair. The audience knew the film can contained the bomb and the boy did not, so there was something especially cruel in his death because it wasn’t strictly a surprise. It suggested the audience was implicated in the deed since they knew what he was carrying. It was a shock but it was also forewarned shock, suggesting a sadism Hitchcock thought was cruel to the audience. 

In some of the examples we give the dissolution lies in slowing the image down so that suspense needn’t be based on foreknowledge but on apprehension. It is common enough for horror cinema to use this device but rarely to extend it. Frequently a horror film will show a character walking down a corridor and the suspense is evident only to emphasise the shock when it comes. Sometimes it is a false shock — a broom falls out of a cupboard, a picture falls off a wall — all the better to deliver a proper shock a little later when the villain appears. But the point is the shock, not the suspense. The tension generated is for the shock that we expect. If the filmmaker doesn’t provide the shock, then the scene is missing something. This shock might be generated out of a malign or benign atmosphere but the shock is what matters. In both Carrie and Friday the 13th, there are moments which suggest all is well as the music is soft and creamy before a hand comes out of the grave in the former instance and a body comes out of the water in the latter. It can also be there in tense scenes like the dinner sequence before John Hurt’s stomach bursts open in Alien, or the skull in the hull in Jaws. 

There is no crosscutting in the sequence in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days so we don’t know what Otilia will find when she leaves the party and returns to her friend at the hotel. We are left fearing the worst but there is no sense that the film is obliged to show us the worst. It doesn’t feel at all like the film has been unfair in revealing that the friend is fine. In The Child, Bruno could have discovered the child dead but he doesn’t, and there is no sense again that the film has played a trick on us by denying us the shock as it eschews crosscutting. In each instance, it would seem silly to propose that, because the film hasn’t crosscut, it has either eschewed suspense or that it ought to feel obliged to deliver a shock. If Hitchcock’s formula can be played with, well or badly, with Jaws and Alien very good examples of taking the Hitchcockian capacity to shock without aping him, yet neither deviating from his tenets, some of the films addressed here deviate far enough from the formula to indicate hardly the Hitchcockian at all, while undeniably generating a high degree of suspense. 

     We can conclude by saying there is formulaic suspense and unformulaic suspense and that we know we are in the formulaic not because the film is bad, nor even because the film offers cheap suspense rather than suspense on the cheap, but that we can still see the formula at work, however well executed. It isn’t to denigrate Jaws or Alien to say that Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott have mastered a formula. But it does seem to be making a category error to suggest that the Dardennes and Mingiu have done likewise, even if there is suspense aplenty. To prove that suspense is there, one needs only show students the scene in the garage in The Child and stop the clip the moment before Bruno lifts up the door in the adjacent garage to find out if the child is safe. The students very much want to know if the baby is safely there or not as they acknowledge the amount of suspense that happens to be in the sequence. Hardly any money has been expended in such a scene and the same is evident in the ones from all the films we have looked at. None demands car chases, big-budget special effects or graphic make-up effects. They have all found a way out of the formulaic and done so partly because, though the suspense is in each instance evident, it doesn’t need to be augmented (hence so often the budget exacerbates the formula in a more commercial work without radically altering it) but contained. 

      What matters in most of the films is the tension generated to further the theme rather than to augment the effect, so that while in each instance the filmmaker wants us to know what will happen next, the danger the characters happen to be in, what crisis they are going through, this will often be to delineate character or comment on society. What it loses in budgetary augmentation it gains in another arena. What this means, in conclusion, is that while it is clear that, in one way or another, the filmmakers here have been influenced by Hitchcock and Hollywood, it might be equally useful if there was a reverse influence too; that mainstream cinema could learn from the suspense utilised in such low-budget works. Alain Guiraudie says: “I wasn’t thinking about Hitchcock when I made the film. But Hitchcock has been a source of inspiration for so many people, and I’ve seen many Hitchcock films, so there’s probably some of that in it.” (Edge Media Network) Shadow of a Doubt was on the list of favourite films by the Dardennes brothers. (NoFilmsShool) Mungiu’s favourite films include Modern Times and Blood Simple. (‘Cristian Mungiu’s Closet Picks’), while of course Rohmer and Chabrol co-wrote a book on Hitchcock. Even that ostensibly most austere of European auteurs, Haneke, has said: “When I saw Hitchcock’s Psycho for the first time, I was fascinated by the shower scene. And I had to go see the movie 50 times in the cinema to understand how the scene worked.” (Uniavisen.com) We might wish on occasion for Hollywood filmmakers to spend as much time attending to international films. When many of them did — in 1970s work by Coppola, Scorsese, Altman and Penn, in what became New Hollywood — the films were replenished. It might be time for another replenishment. 

© Tony McKibbin